Table of Contents
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Hotlists 2008
Crime Fiction - embedded
Seeing Stars
Lists of (mostly) hardcover books which received at least one starred review (indicating a work of unusual merit) from the following review sources: Booklist , Publisher's Weekly (PW), Kirkus and Library Journal (LJ).
The review journal assigns the star.
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Stellar All Stars
The Fault Tree by Louise Ure
Judas Horse by April Smith
The Importance of Music to Girls by Lavinia Greenlaw
Bonk by Mary Roach
A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam
Overbooked specializes in providing timely information about fiction (all genres) and readable nonfiction. Overbooked has been online since 1994. Overbooked is a work in progress . . .
Starred Reviews
Fiction Stars of 2001
April 2, 2008
January
- June 2001
Titles are listed by approximate date of publication, then alphabetically by author. Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine - unless otherwise noted. A
indicates an Overbooked Jump for Joy book.
June
- Yokota
Officers Club
Author: Bird, Sarah
Publisher: Knopf $ 23 ISBN: 037541214x Date: 2001
LJ
In this gutsy new novel from the author of Virgin of the Rodeo, ex-military brat Bernadette "Bernie" Root speaks. She has never really noticed what a peculiar bunch of nomads her Air Force family is, and upon their return to Japan, she discovers a terrible secret.
Updated 6/13/01 - Ghost of a Smile
Author: Boehm, Deborah Bolivar
Publisher: Kodansha $ 25 ISBN: 4770025319 Date: 2001LJ
Updated 2/20/01 - Love's Death
Author: Boogaard, Oscar Van Den
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux $ 20 ISBN: 0374185859 Date: 2001Kirkus
A beautifully taut novel about the transforming power of love and death. - Publisher marketing.
Updated 4/20/01 - The Stone Garden: The
Epic Life of Billy the Kid
Author: Brooks, Bill
Publisher: Forge $ 23.95 ISBN: 0312875088 Date: 2001Booklist
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Western Stars | Biograpical Fiction
Updated 6/20/01 - A Mulligan
for Bobby Jobe
Author: Cullen, Robert
Publisher: HarperCollins $ 26 ISBN: 0060185546 Date: 2001Kirkus
Hilarious and heartwarming, Cullen's novel is an unforgettable tale in which the most humbling of sports--golf--illuminates the human capacity for both heartbreak and joy. As a blind man sets out to win the PGA Championship, lessons will be learned about the true meaning of "vision" in competition, friendship, and love.
Suggested Reading: Sports Stars
Updated 4/20/01 - Slammerkin
Author: Donoghue, Emma
Publisher: Harcourt $ 24 ISBN: 0151006725 Date: 2001KirkusPW
Inspired by a teenage girl who murdered her mistress in 1763 because she "longed for fine clothes", Slammerkin is the bestselling classic story of a lower-class Roxana, a female Tom Jones.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Biographical Fiction
Updated 5/17/01 - The Cold Six
Thousand
Author: Ellroy, James
Publisher: Knopf $ 25.95 ISBN: 0679403922 Date: 2001PWKirkus
Wayne Tedrow Jr., a young Vegas cop, arrives in Dallas after the Kennedy assassination with a loathsome job to do. He's got $6,000 in cash and no idea that he is about to plunge into a cover-up conspiracy and a hellish five-year ride through the private underbelly of public policy.
Suggested Reading: Conspiracy Theory
Updated 5/17/01 - A Small Town
Marriage
Author: Colombi, Lamarchesa
Publisher: Northwestern $ 15.95 (trade paper) ISBN: 0810118416 Date: 2001Booklist
Updated 8/1/01 - The Master
Executioner
Author: Estleman, Loren D.
Publisher: Forge $ 23.95 ISBN: 0312869703 Date: 2001KirkusPW
Ordinary people do not understand hangman Oscar Stone or his motives. For more than a quarter of a century he has been a man peerless in his craft, the master executioner. One day a single piece of knowledge brings Oscar to a moment of devastating truth, and for the first time, he knows himself.
Suggested Reading: Western Stars | Historical Fiction Stars
Updated 6/13/01 - The Ten Thousand: A Novel
of Ancient Greece
Author: Ford, Michael Curtis
Publisher: Thomas Dunne (St Martins) $ 24.95 ISBN: 0312269463 Date: 2001LJ
In the spring of 400 B.C., ten thousand battered Greek soldiers stagger out of the frozen mountains of Armenia into a small Hellenic trading post on the eastern Black Sea. Their stunning tale of survival is the source of this epic debut in the tradition of Gates of Fire.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Ancient Greece
Updated 5/23/01 - The Flight
of the Maidens
Author: Gardam, Jane
Publisher: Carroll & Graf $ 25 ISBN: 0786708794 Date: 2001KirkusPW
The Flight of the Maidens is an award-winning novelist's captivating look at postwar England and a summer that changes the lives of three schoolgirls on the brink of womanhood and a new world.
Updated 7/16/01 - Angelica's Grotto
Author: Hoban, Russell
Publisher: Carrol & Graf $25 ISBN: 0786708786 Date: 2001Kirkus
This darkly comic novel confronts Harold Klein, now in his infirm seventies, with a strange malady--the loss of his "inner voice"--and introduces him to the steamy world of Internet sex.
Suggested Reading: Black Humor Stars
Updated 4/6/01 - Yonder
Stands Your Orphan
Author: Hannah, Barry
Publisher: Atlantic $ 24 ISBN: 0871138115 Date: 2001KirkusPW
In Yonder Stands Your Orphan, denizens of a lake community near Vicksburg are beset by madness, murder, and sin in the form of one Man Mortimer, a creature of the casinos who resembles dead country singer Conway Twitty.
Updated 6/21/01 - Clerical Errors
Author: Isler, Alan
Publisher: Scribner $ 24 ISBN: 0743210603 Date: 2001LJKirkusPW
From the award winning author of The Prince of West End Avenue comes an irreverent tale of a formerly Jewish--and now decidedly errant--Catholic priest.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | Humorous Fiction | Shakespearean Stars
Updated 6/8/01 - Honeymooners: A Cautionary
Tale
Author: Kinder, Chuck
Publisher: Farrar Straus $ 24 ISBN: 0374172587 Date: 2001KirkusPWLJ
Kinder's book is a rueful, comi-tragic juggernaut of two couples who have spent the best years of their lives raising bad judgment to an art.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | Humorous Fiction
Updated 6/13/01 - Jewlery Talks: A Novel
Thesis
Author: Klein, Richard
Publisher: Pantheon $ 25 ISBN: 0679441980 Date: 2001Kirkus
A fictional thesis, obsessively rewritten by its author, the transgendered and recently deceased Abby Zinzo, is devoted to the significance of jewelry. Zinzo is consumed by putting it on and taking it off, while transfixed by those who wear it.
Updated 5/4/01 - The
Children of Pithiviers
Author: Kohler, Sheila
Publisher: Zoland $ 21 ISBN: 1581950322 Date: 2001LJ
Updated 4/3/01 - Death in Rome
Author: Koeppen, Wolfgang
Publisher: Norton $ 12.95 (trade paper) ISBN: 0393321940 Date: 2001PW
Mirroring the social and political upheaval following the fall of Nazism, Koeppen offers the story of four members of a German family reunited by chance in the decaying beauty of postwar Rome.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
Updated 6/4/01 - Hot House
Author: Koeppen, Wolfgang
Publisher: Norton $ 23.95 ISBN: 0393049027 Date: 2001Kirkus
Harrowing, moody, and supremely powerful, The Hothouse, first published in 1953, stands among the finest novels written in postwar Germany. Largely unrecognized beyond Germany during his lifetime, Koeppen sought to make sense of German life amid the vast political and social reconstruction of the war-ravaged nation.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | World Wars Stars
Updated 5/4/01 - The Heart is
Deceitful Above All Things
Author: LeRoy, J.T.
Publisher: Bloomsbury $ 23.95 ISBN: 1582341532 Date: 2001PW
Updated 6/13/01 - Thinks
Author: Lodge, David
Publisher: Viking $ 24.95 ISBN: 0670899844 Date: 2001PW
Lodge offers a wonderful and witty take on love and life in the English midlands, a male midlife crisis novel of sorts which also chews over in a playful and never pedantic way such topics as knowledge, the self, the interpretation of the world, the nature of thinking, the modern novel, and the fundamental human need for narrative.
Updated 6/4/01 - Juniper
Tree Burning
Author: Long, Goldberry M.
Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 25 ISBN: 0743202031 Date: 2001LJPW
This debut novel captures the unadulterated legacy of the 1960s counter-culture as it is lived three decades later by the flower children's children.
Suggested Reading: Debuts
Updated 5/29/01 - Songcatcher
Author: McCrumb, Sharyn
Publisher: Dutton $ 24.95 ISBN: 0525944885 Date: 2001Booklist
A song, passed down through the generations, carries a family's descendants through the settling of the American frontier, the Civil War, the coming of the railroads and into modern times, providing both solace in the present and a link to the past.
Suggested Reading: Music Stars
Updated 6/4/01 - Schooling
Author: McGowan, Heather
Publisher: Doubleday $ 24.95 ISBN: 0385501382 Date: 2001Booklist
Catrine Evans, a young American, is sent to an English boarding school after her mother dies of cancer. Memories of Isabelle, the best friend she left behind in Maine, give way to dreams haunted by images of an accidental death she believes they caused before she left for England.
Suggested Reading: School Days
Updated 6/4/01 - Grand Ambitions
Author: Michaels, Lisa
Publisher: Norton $ 23.95 ISBN: 0393050475 Date: 2001LJ
A first novel about love, adventure, and one couple's reckless daring. A pair of young newlyweds sets out to run the rapids of the Grand Canyon in a homemade boat. A month later they vanished without a trace.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Debuts
Updated 5/23/01 - Hard Bottom
Author: Michelsen, G.F.
Publisher: U of New England $ 24.95 ISBN: 1584650818 Date: 2001Booklist
Updated 5/17/01 - Best Friends
Author: Moody, Martha
Publisher: Riverhead $ 25.95 ISBN: 1573221880 Date: 2001PW
An unlikely friendship between two women that spans two decades drives this unforgettable first novel. Martha Moody is pitch-perfect in her depiction of the subtle shifts of emotion and perspective that occur as people--and friendships--mature.
Suggested Reading: Debuts
Updated 5/29/01 - Life After Death
Author: Muske-Dukes, Carol
Publisher: Random $ 23.95 ISBN: 0375505156 Date: 2001PWBooklist
Life After Death is the seriocomic journey of a woman who must work through her husband's death--and reappearances--to find out who he really was, who she really is, and whether she can reclaim her own life.
Suggested Reading: Ghosts
Updated 6/4/01 - Towns Without
Rivers
Author: Parker, Michael
Publisher: Morrow $ 25 ISBN: 0380978601 Date: 2001KirkusPW
Revisiting the small North Carolina town of his first novel, Hello Down There, Parker introduces a proud woman struggling to extricate herself from the haunted landscape of the past.
Updated 6/8/01 - Gunman's Rhapsody
Author: Parker, Robert B.
Publisher: Putnam $ 22.95 ISBN: 0399147624 Date: 2001Kirkus
This muscular yet sensitive take on the story of Wyatt Earp, the legendary late-19th-century lawman, is filled with all the danger and uncertainty of the Old West and set against the backdrop of his real-life romance with showgirl Josie Marcus. A novel of the Old West, imagined as only Robert B. Parker can.
Suggested Reading: Western Stars | Historical Fiction Stars | Biographical Fiction
Updated 4/20/01 - Bel Canto
Author: Patchett, Ann
Publisher: HarperCollins $ 25 ISBN: 0060188731 Date: 2001Kirkus
From the bestselling author of The Magician's Assistant comes a marvelous novel of love, opera, and terrorism set in South America. Two couples, complete opposites, fall in love; sexual identities become confused; and a horrific imprisonment is transformed into an unexpected heaven on earth.
Suggested Reading: Reading Group Stars | Music & Fiction | Terrorism
Updated 4/20/01 - The Wind Done Gone
Author: Randall, Alice
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin $ 23 ISBN: 061810450x Date: 2001Kirkus
In a brilliant act of literary invention, Randall revisits the world of Gone With the Wind from an African-American point of view as Scarlett's mulatto half-sister--beautiful and brown--gets to tell "her" story.
Suggested Reading: African American Stars | Books About Books
Updated 4/27/01 - Fox River
Author: Richards, Emilie
Publisher: Mira $ 6.99 (paper) ISBN: 1551668068 Date: 2001PW
Julia Warwick grew up in a world where foxhunting and Thoroughbreds are passions. But Christian Carver, a talented horse trainer, awakens the artist--and passions--within Julia. When Christian is convicted of murder, Julia suddenly loses her sight. Though blindness darkens her world, it opens Julia's eyes to hidden truths.
Suggested Reading: Romance Stars
Updated 4/19/01 - Georgia Under
Water: Stories
Author: Sellers, Heather
Publisher: Sarabande $ 13.95 (trade paper) ISBN:1889330566 Date: 2001PW
Updated 5/4/01 - White Swan,
Black Swan
Author: Sharp, Adrienne
Publisher: Random $ 21.95 ISBN: 0375504206 Date: 2001Booklist
An assured fiction debut that finds in the rarefied world of ballet a metaphor for yearning, ambition and desire. Each bittersweet story plants the reader amid a cast of dancers and choreographers who struggle to find in the rigorous discipline and beauty of ballet a counterbalance to the chaos of unscripted life.
Suggested Reading: Debuts | Ballet Stars
Updated 6/20/01 - Night Crossing
Author: Snyder, Don J.
Publisher: Knopf $ 24 ISBN: 0375409068 Date: 2001LJ
Betrayed by her husband and pregnant, Nora Andrews returns to Northern Ireland to decide what to do. She is there when a bomb goes off--one of the worst incidents in the history of the Irish troubles--and instinctively Nora gives comfort to a wounded British soldier. What begins as an innocent gesture, however, quickly involves her in someone else's nightmare, his life in her hands.
Updated 3/23/01 - Twelve Fingers
Author: Soares, Jo
Publisher: Pantheon $ 23 ISBN: 0375408932 Date: 2001LJ
A burlesque smorgasbord of the international high-jinks follows a hapless, 12-fingered, would-be assassin who lurches from Sarajevo to Paris to Hollywood to Chicago to Rio, leaving high-stakes chaos in his wake.
Updated 6/25/01 - In the City of Shy Hunters
Author: Spanbauer, Tom
Publisher: Grove $ 26 ISBN: 0802116914 Date: 2001Booklist
When William Parker moves from Jackson Hole to Manhattan in 1983, he becomes wrapped up in one of the most unforgettable romances in recent literature: a love affair with a volatile, six-foot-five African-American drag queen named Rose.
Suggested Reading: AIDS
Updated 6/20/01 - Half
Moon and Empty Stars
Author: Spence, Gerry
Publisher: Scribner $ 27 ISBN: 0743202767 Date: 2001PW
From the author of bestselling How to Argue and Win Every Time comes a new classic about two Native American brothers torn apart--a legal thriller, a love story, and a visionary work that examines deeply the values of life and death.
Suggested Reading: Legal Stars
Updated 5/29/01 - The Children's War
Author: Stroyar, J.N.
Publisher: Atria $ 29.95 ISBN: 0743470393 Date: 2001Kirkus
In a searingly authentic vision of what could have been, The Children's War is an epic modern-day thriller of a Europe ruled by Nazis and of the men and women determined to defeat them. "Great historical detail, fascinating premise, and nonstop suspense".--Nelson DeMille.
Suggested Reading: Alternative History Stars
Updated 9.9.04 - All the Finest
Girls
Author: Styron, Alexandria
Publisher: Little Brown $ 23.95 ISBN: 0316890804 Date: 2001LJ
Addy Abraham was practically a feral child, untamable and wild--until a new babysitter gave her a haven from her parents' battles. But when Louise dies, it startles Addy out of the trance that has become her adult life.
Updated 4/3/01 - The Death
of Sweet Mister
Author: Woodrell, Daniel
Publisher: Putnam $ 23.95 ISBN: 0399147519 Date: 2001BooklistPW
A southern gothic tale of the events that tear at a dysfunctional family when a slick stranger comes to visit.
Updated 5/17/01
May
- The Marriage Lesson
Author: Alexander, Victoria
Publisher: Avon $ 5.99 (paper) ISBN: 0380818205 Date: 2001PW
Lady Marianne Shelton pens a scandalous book based on the exploits of real life nobleman, Thomas Effington. Now Thomas is going to teach the forward country miss a lesson in love she's never going to forget.
Suggested Reading: Romance Stars
Updated 3/7/01 - I Don't
Want to Got to Jail
Author: Breslin, Jimmy
Publisher: Little Brown $ 24.95 ISBN:0316118451 Date: 2001Kirkus
Pulitzer Prize winner Breslin is at the top of his form with this comic, wry novel about the downfall of a modern mob family, a new spin on a tale he learned from a life "lived on the streets".
Updated 3/19/01 - Strange Fire
Author: Bukiet, Melvin Jules
Publisher: Norton $ 24.95 ISBN: 0393049388 Date: 2001Booklist
Blind, fatherless, homosexual, speechwriter Nathan Kazakov has enough problems before his left ear is obliterated by a bullet meant for his employer, the prime minister of Israel. Nathan begins an investigation that leads him into a web of messianic orthodox settlers, Arab terrorists, and the Israeli secret service. Told by the blind hero as he staggers through Jerusalem, Strange Fire is a compelling, darkly comic tour de force.
Updated 4/26/01 - Carry
Me Across the Water
Author: Canin, Ethan
Publisher: Random $ 23.95 ISBN: 0679456791 Date: 2001KirkusPW
A young boy escapes Nazi Germany and goes on to build a fortune, a family, and life on his own terms in America. At the defining moments that reveal character and shape fate, August's instincts are determinative in a way that illuminates how lives unfold at the deepest levels. This is a brilliant, suspenseful, surprising novel by one of America's finest writers.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | World Wars Stars
Updated 4/26/01 - Layer Cake
Author: Connolly, J.J.
Publisher: Duck $ 15.95 (trade paper) ISBN: 0715630180 Date: 2001PW
A gripping and original story of one young gangster's attempt to leave the corruption behind him, Layer Cake refers to the layers or levels he has to go as he painstakingly plots his own escape. - Publisher Marketing.
Updated 5/10/01 - Sharpe's Trafalgar
Author: Cornwell, Bernard
Publisher: HarperCollins $ 25 ISBN: 0060194251 Date: 2001PWLJ
This number one international bestseller sends Richard Sharpe into a breathtaking sea chase and a savage battle off Cape Trafalgar in 1805.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Sea Stories | Trafalgar
Updated 4/20/01 - Fast Women
Author: Crusie, Jennifer
Publisher: St Martin's $ 24.95 ISBN: 0312252617 Date: 2001Kirkus
Nell Dysart brings calamity to her job at a detective agency, but even her boss has to admit that no matter how much he hates the confusion she's brought into his life, Nell shares his passion for making things right. It's not long before they share another passion--one they can't ignore--even in the face of distractions like adultery, blackmail, arson, murder, and really bad business cards.
Suggested Reading: Romance Stars
Updated 3/19/01 - The Muse Asylum
Author: Czuchlewski, David
Publisher: Putnam $ 23.95 ISBN: 0399147454 Date: 2001KirkusPW
In this breath-snatching first novel of love, madness and artistic identity, a young genius's obsession with a reclusive writer consumes those around him, as they begin to learn the dark truths that lurk beneath the surface of the relationship.
Suggested Reading: Debuts
Updated 4/6/01 - No
One Thinks of Greenland
Author: Griesemer, John
Publisher: Picador $ 24 ISBN: 0312274572 Date: 2001Booklist
Forced to join the military due to a mysterious past, young corporal Rudy Spruance is sent to a top-secret military hospital in Greenland and slowly uncovers the awful secret behind the portion of the base dubbed "The Wing".
Updated 3/13/01 - Staircase
of a Thousand Steps
Author: Hamilton, Masha
Publisher: Blue Hen $ 23.95 ISBN:039914725x Date: 2001Kirkus
In a remote desert village of storytellers and seers, the accidental revelation of long-held secrets, including a forbidden love affair, unravels a young girl's world.
Updated 4/6/01 - Five
Quarters of the Orange
Author: Harris, Joanne
Publisher: Morrow $ 25 ISBN: 0060198133 Date: 2001BooklistLJ
From the bestselling author of Chocolat comes a sensual literary concoction of tragedy, secrets, and the relationship between a daughter and her mother. Returning to the small Loire village of her childhood to run a cafe, Franboise Dartigen soon finds that hidden among her mother's recipes are clues that will lead her to the truth of long ago.
Suggested Reading: Cooked Books
Updated 4/3/01 - Big as Life: Three Tales
for Spring
Author: Howard, Maureen
Publisher: Viking $ 23.95 ISBN: 067089978x Date: 2001Booklist
The second book in a series, Howard presents three tales of moral resonance and magical enchantment--"Children with Matches, The Magdalene", and "Big As Life".
Updated 4/26/01 - Black Oxen
Author: Knox, Elizabeth
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux $ 25 ISBN: 0374114056 Date: 2001Kirkus
Black Oxen is the story of Carme Risk's pursuit of her beautiful and not quite human father through two worlds and three changes of identity full of romantic intrigue, machete murders, battles, and bacchanals.
Updated 6/4/01 - The Rich Part of
Life
Author: Kokoris, Jim
Publisher: St Martins $ 24.95 ISBN: 0312274793 Date: 2001PW
After Teddy loses his mother to a car accident, his father plays the lottery, with his wife's old numbers, and wins $190 million, immediately transforming their lives forever. For the first time, the family must learn what "the rich part of life" really is.
Updated 4/18/01 - Come
Up and See Me Sometime: Stories
Author: Krouse, Erika
Publisher: Scribner $ 22 ISBN: 0743202449 Date: 2001KirkusPW
Each of the 13 stories in this collection is underscored by the brassy spirit of Mae West. Come Up and See Me Sometime is a thought-provoking rant, surprising readers with mirror images of the fears, foibles, and facades of their own lives.
Updated 5/10/01 - Bad Girl Creek
Author: Mapson, Jo-Ann
Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 24 ISBN: 0743202562 Date: 2001Kirkus
From the bestselling author of Hank & Chloe comes a bittersweet, deeply moving story of four misplaced women who unite to run a flower farm, heal their hearts, and understand the depth and necessity of friendship.
Updated 2/21/01 - The Gospel of Judas
Author: Mawer, Simon
Publisher: Little Brown $ 24.95 ISBN: 0316097500 Date: 2001Kirkus
An ambitious literary suspense novel sets history's most crucial question--the authenticity of the Gospels--against a modern day story of belief, espionage, and sexual awakening. The Gospel of Judas is the story of a priest brought to Jerusalem to decipher an ancient scroll--one that tells a very different story of Christ's crucifixion.
Suggested Reading: If You Like The Da Vinci Code Booklist
Updated 4/20/01 - The Salt
of Broken Tears
Author: Meehan, Michael
Publisher: Arcade $ 24.95 ISBN: 1559705671 Date: 2001LJ
Updated 4/3/01 - In
Cuba I Was a German Shepherd
Author: Menendez, Ana
Publisher: Grove $ 23 ISBN:0802116884 Date: 2001Booklist
This debut collection of tales about Cuban immigrants attempting to make new lives in America is presented by a Pushcart Prize winner, touching on themes of the hopes and disappointments of post-revolutionary Castro Cuba, cultural ties that bind family, and more.
Suggested Reading: Latino/Latina Stars | Debuts | Cuba
Updated 4/26/01 - Kit's Law
Author: Morrissey, Donna
Publisher: Mariner $ 13 (trade paper) ISBN: 0618109277 Date: 2001PWKirkusBooklist
Kit Pitman lives with her unstable mother in a cottage on the outer banks of Newfoundland. Her life is compounded by the mystery that surrounds her illegitimate birth. Morrissey depicts the way the lines between mother and daughter, although blurred, are deeply felt. Kit's Law marks the debut of a new talent.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | Debuts
Updated 4/19/01 - The Good
People of New York
Author: Nissen, Thisbe
Publisher: Knopf $ 23 ISBN: 06705411453 Date: 2001Booklist
In this luminous first novel from a gifted writer, Roz Rosenzweig experiences a love so fierce for her infant daughter that it might crowd out everything else in her life, including her marriage.
Suggested Reading: Debuts
Updated 4/26/01 - Choke
Author: Palahnuik, Chuck
Publisher: Doubleday $ 24.95 ISBN: 0385501560 Date: 2001LJ
From the author of Fight Club comes a powerful and hilarious novel about love and strife between mothers and sons, the addictive power of sex, the terrors of aging, the ugly truth about historical theme parks, and much else.
Updated 5/24/01 - The Carpenter's
Pencil
Author: Rivas, Manuel
Publisher: Overlook $ 24.95 ISBN: 1585671452 Date: 2001Kirkus
Set in the dark days of the Spanish Civil War, this story charts the linked destinies of a doctor, his assistant and an unnamed painter who carries a carpenter's pencil.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
Updated 3/19/01 - Firefly Beach
Author: Rice, Luanne
Publisher: Bantam $ 6.50 (paper) ISBN:0553575538 Date: 2001PW
Three sisters gather at their childhood home, thinking they've put the past behind them. Caroline Renwick and Joe Connor were pen pals as children--until the teenaged Joe learned the truth of his father's death. After years of silence, Caroline still feels a connection, but she wonders if Joe holds the key to her family's healing--or it's destruction.
Updated 4/18/01 - All We Know
of Heaven
Author: Rougeau, Remy
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin $ 23 ISBN: 0618094997 Date: 2001Booklist
Updated 5/17/01 - Empire Falls
Author: Russo, Richard
Publisher: Knopf $ 25.95 ISBN: 0679432477 Date: 2001KirkusPWBooklist
Richard Russo, author of The Risk Pool and Nobody's Fool, takes readers back to the small-town, blue-collar heart of the country. - Publisher marketing.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | Reading Group Stars
Updated 4/20/01 - The Dark Room
Author: Seiffert, Rachel
Publisher: Pantheon $ 24 ISBN: 0375421041Date: 2001KirkusLJ
A debut work of major importance, this novel retells the history of 20th-century Germany through the experiences of three ordinary Germans before, during and after World War II.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | World Wars Stars | Debuts
Updated 5/10/01 - Hotel Honolulu
Author: Theroux, Paul
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin $ 26 ISBN: 0618095012 Date: 2001BooklistLJ
Like the Canterbury pilgrims, every guest in the 88-room Hotel Honolulu has come in search of something and everyone has a story. In this unforgettable novel, Theroux reveals a funny, languid, louche floating world, island style--the essence of Hawaii as it has never been depicted.
Suggested Reading: Humorous Fiction
Updated 3/23/01 - Back
When We Were Grownups
Author: Tyler, Anne
Publisher: Knopf $ 25 ISBN: 0375412530 Date: 2001KirkusPW
At 53, Rebecca Davitch--mistress of the Open Arms, a crumbling 19th-century row house in Baltimore where giving parties is the family business--suddenly asks herself whether she has turned into the wrong person. But can she really recover the woman she has left behind?
Updated 3/19/01 - The
Miracle Life of Edgar Mint
Author: Udall, Brady
Publisher: Norton $ 24.95 ISBN: 0393020363 Date: 2001KirkusPW
Half Apache and "mostly orphaned", Edgar's trials begin on an Arizona reservation at the age of seven when the mailman's jeep accidentally runs over his head. Through it all, readers will root for this irresistible innocent who never truly loses heart, and whose quest for the mailman leads him to an unexpected home.
Suggested Reading: Reading Group Stars | Picaresque Stars
Updated 5/29/01 - Good in Bed
Author: Weiner, Jennifer
Publisher: Pocket $ 24.95 ISBN: 0743418166 Date: 2001KirkusPW
The day pop-culture journalist Cannie Shapiro reads her ex-boyfriends' published story about their sex life is the day her life changes. Embarking on a journey through her past she confronts her ex, deals with her lesbian mother and sifts through the answer to how she got where she is--single, angry and exposed.
Suggested Reading: Chicklit Stars | Humorous Fiction
Updated 4/6/01 - Glue
Author: Welsh, Irvine
Publisher: Norton $ 15 (trade paper) ISBN: 03933221574 Date: 2001PW
The new novel by the author of the cult bestseller Trainspotting delivers the story of four boys growing up in Edinburgh, and about the loyalties, the experiences--and the secrets--that hold them together into their 30s.
Updated 3/23/01 - John Henry Days
Author: Whitehead, Colson
Publisher: Doubleday $ 24.95 ISBN: 0385498195 Date: 2001KirkusPWBooklist
From the author of The Intuitionist comes a retelling of the legend of John Henry that sweeps across generations and cultures in a stunning, hilarious, and unsettling portrait of American society.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | African American Stars | Legendary Characters
Updated 4/26/01 - The Collected
Stories of Richard Yates
Author: Yates, Richard
Publisher: Holt $ 28 ISBN: 0805066934 Date: 2001PW
Yates's short fiction is collected in a single volume, featuring the stories of his classic works "Eleven Kinds of Loneliness" and "Liars in Love", plus nine new stories.
Updated 3/1/01 - Visible Spirits
Author: Yarbrough, Steve
Publisher: Knopf $ 23 ISBN: 0375411593 Date: 2001PW
In Loring, Mississippi, circa 1902, the tenure of a black postmistress is compromised by the prodigal son of a once proud planting family. So when President Roosevelt intervenes, this local, even personal dispute inevitably erupts, fueled by all the dark, brutal memories of slavery, war, and emancipation.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
Updated 4/26/01
April
- The Love Artist
Author: Alison, Jane
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux $ 23 ISBN: 0374231796 Date: 2001Kirkus
A darkly brilliant first novel that imagines a missing chapter in the life of Ovid, the most popular author of his day. Why do only two lines survive of his play Medea, reputedly his most passionate work? Between the known details of the poet's life and these enigmas, Alison has interpolated a haunting drama of passion and psychological manipulation.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Poets | Debuts
Updated 1/19/01 - The Hero's Walk
Author: Badami, Anita Rau
Publisher: Algonquin $ 23.95 ISBN: 1565123123 Date: 2001PW
Steeped in the colors, customs and sensuality of India The Hero's Walk is a moving story of a family and the potential for heroism in the small acts of ordinary people.
Suggested Reading: Stars of India
Updated 3/7/01 - Beloved Stranger
Author: Boylan, Clare
Publisher: Counterpoint $ 25 ISBN: 1582430969 Date: 2001Kirkus
What happens when madness shatters a marriage? An acclaimed Irish novelist explores this question in a comic take on King Lear. After 50 years of marriage in a Dublin suburb, Dick and Lily Butler enjoy a "safe" life of compromise. Then one night their balanced world is upended forever, when Lily wakes to find Dick under the bed, holding a shotgun, convinced there's an intruder in the house.
Updated 1/31/01 - To the Hermitage
Author: Bradbury, Malcolm
Publisher: Overlook $ 27.95 ISBN: 1585671312 Date: 2001LJ
Bradbury brilliantly recreates the climate of the 18th century and Diderot's journey to Russia to "enlighten" Catherine the Great. And the Diderot Project itself becomes a quest to recapture a lost world and illuminate our own.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
Updated 4/3/01 - Pages for You
Author: Brownrigg, Sylvia
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux $ 22 ISBN: 0374228590 Date: 2001PW
In a diner, Flannery Jansen catches sight of a graduate student reading. Flannery, a 17-year-old, is shocked by her own desire to follow this beauty. A bittersweet, sentimental education, Pages for You confirms Sylvia Brownrigg as "one of the most exuberantly agile minds among younger American writers" --Dan Cryer, Newsday
Updated 2/15/01 - The Devil's Oasis
Author: Bull, Bartle
Publisher: Carroll & Graf $ 25 ISBN: 0786708441 Date: 2001PW
The master storyteller and author of A Cafe on the Nile presents a new tale of swaggering adventure, romance, and espionage set in war-torn North Africa. There, against the massive force of Rommel's Afrika Korps, a young English hussar named Wellington Rider fights beside the French Foreign Legion.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | World Wars Stars | Action & Adventure | Egyptian Stars
Updated 2/21/01 - Honeymoon and Other Stories
Author: Canty, Kevin
Publisher: Doubleday $ 21 ISBN: 0385491611 Date: 2001Kirkus
Canty's masterful collection about reckless love reveals the hidden longings and quirky needs of both men and women with sensitivity and humor. The author brings his strengths as a stylist and acute observer to these ten stories that explore unlikely alliances and unconventional expressions of love.
Updated 3/5/01 - Loving
Pedro Infante
Author: Chavez, Denise
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux $ 24 ISBN: 0374184114 Date: 2001PW
Teresina Avila is a divorced, thirty-something Chicana working in Cabritoville, New Mexico. Her lover will never leave his wife and ties Tere's heart in knots. Her diversions center around her best friend, Irma, and her membership in the Pedro Infante Fan Club. A hilarious and heartrending story about the fictions women weave to justify loving the wrong mate, this novel confirms Denise Chavez's reputation as one of our most engaging novelists.
Suggested Reading: Latino/Latina Stars
Updated 3/23/01 - The
Unknown Errors of Our Lives
Author: Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee
Publisher: Doubleday $ 23.95 ISBN: 038549727x Date: 2001Booklist
From the bestselling author of The Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart comes a collection of moving stories about family, culture, and the seduction of memory.
Suggested Reading: Stars of India
Updated 3/13/01 - Blake's Therapy
Author: Dorfman, Ariel
Publisher: Seven Stories $ 21.95 ISBN: 1583220704 Date: 2001Booklist
Updated 5/17/01 - Peppered Moth
Author: Drabble, Margaret
Publisher: Harcourt $ 25 ISBN: 0151005214 Date: 2001Booklist
When Faro Gaulden visits Breaseborough, a mining town in South Yorkshire, she wonders what her life would have been like had her grandmother not left there as a young girl. As she soon learns, the past has a way of reasserting itself, not unlike the peppered moth that was once thought to be near extinction but is now enjoying a sudden unexplained resurgence.
Updated 2/28/01 - The
Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
Author: Erdrich, Louise
Publisher: HarperCollins $ 26 ISBN: 0060187271 Date: 2001PWKirkusBooklist
From the bestselling author of Tracks comes a dramatic sequel--a story of suspect miracles, tests of faith, and the corrosive and redemptive power of secrecy. Over the years, Father Damian has seen the reservation through its most severe crises, yet he is more than a heroic priest. He has lived with and served the Objibwa people as a man of the cloth, and also as a woman. However, where does fact end and reality begin?
Suggested Reading: All Stars
Updated 2/28/01 - The
Brutal Language of Love: Stories
Author: Erian, Alicia
Publisher: Villard $ 21.95 ISBN: 0375504788 Date: 2001PW
Updated 2/8/01 - The Language
of Goodbye
Author: Fischer, Maribeth
Publisher: Dutton $ 23.95 ISBN: 0525945709 Date: 2001Booklist
Annie and Will have left their marriages to be together, but their future is fraught with complications. Both left pieces of themselves behind: Annie's husband she's known since childhood, and Will's five-year-old daughter. Starting a new marriage in a new country has its costs.
Updated 1/24/01 - Mouthing the
Words
Author: Gibb, Camilla
Publisher: Carroll 7 Graf $ 22 ISBN: 0786708522 Date: 2001PW
In the tradition of The Bell Jar and Girl, Interrupted, the story of Thelma is told, beginning when she is six-years-old in a dysfunctional family and following her from England to Canada, then back to England where she studies law at Oxford. Throughout, Thelma is always on the look-out for potential new parents as she lives in the skewed world of her own imagination.
Updated 3/29/01 - The
House of Sight and Shadow
Author: Griffin, Nicholas
Publisher: Villard $ 23.95 ISBN: 0375504729 Date: 2001PW
Early 18th-century London is still recovering from the ravages of plague and fire. Sir Edmund Calcraft, an eminent and notorious anatomist, and Joseph Bendix, his ambitious young student, are drawn into a dark game with the growing criminal underworld. In gallows, madhouses, and in anatomical laboratories, the two men engage in a competition involving both head and heart.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
Updated 3/14/01 - Field Guide
Author: Gross, Gwendoline
Publisher: Henry Holt $ 23 ISBN: 0805064923 Date: 2001Kirkus
Updated 1/31/01 - A River Out of
Eden
Author: Hockenberry, John
Publisher: Doubleday $ 24.95 ISBN: 0385494254 Date: 2001Kirkus
Francine Smoholla is a Chinook Indian and U.S. government marine biologist fighting to save salmon threatened by the dams that supply Washington's hydroelectric power. When power company workers and forest service employees start turning up dead with elaborate native harpoons in their backs, suspicion quickly falls on the Chinook. And as heavy rains threaten the dams and old hatreds reignite, a long foretold Indian prophecy of apocalypse looms ever closer.
Updated 2/21/01 - Afterimage
Author: Humphreys, Helen
Publisher: Metropolitan $ 23 ISBN: 0805066667 Date: 2001Booklist
When Annie Phelan arrives at the Dashells' Victorian England farm to work as a maid, she finds the master dreaming of explorations, and the mistress struggling with the new technology of photography for her art. Drawn into a fateful love triangle, Annie nearly loses herself until disaster reveals her power over the Dashells' work and hearts.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
Updated 3/13/01 - Indiscretion
Author: Ivory, Judith
Publisher: Avon $ 6.50 (paper) ISBN: 0380812967 Date: 2001PW
When her coach crashes on the treacherous Dartmoor, the sheltered Lady Lydia Bedford-Brown is stranded with wealthy Texas cowboy, Sam J. Cody. Being marooned on the English moor causes Cody to miss his own wedding to an unforgiving bride. But Liddy starts to reveal her hidden passions and courageous spirit that dare Sam to pursue even further what his heart desperately desires.
Suggested Reading: Romance Stars
Updated 2/21/01 - In
the Company of Angels
Author: Kelby, N.M.
Publisher: Hyperion $21 ISBN:0786866667 Date: 2001PW
A compelling novel of dark miracles and angelic visitation, set in a Nazi-occupied Belgian town that is scented by chocolate. A young French Jew girl is saved by Belgian nuns after a bomb kills her grandmother. Then the miracles begin. In a town haunted by memories of the past and the desperation of the present, the miraculous is hard to recognize.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | World Wars Stars | Questions of Faith
Updated 2/21/01 - A Few Corrections
Author: Leithauser, Brad
Publisher: Knopf $ 24 ISBN: 0375411496 Date: 2001Kirkus
This clever, humorous novel opens with the obituary of Wesley Sultan, a respectable, Midwestern businessman, riddled with errors. The book's narrator corrects the errors, piling correction upon correction until the original has been so altered it reveals Wesley lived a far more tangled and ambiguous life.
Suggested Reading: Humorous Fiction
Updated 2/21/01 - Yellow
Author: Lee, Don
Publisher: Norton $ 22.95 ISBN: 0393025624 Date: 2001PWBooklist
Superb, unpredictable stories capture Asian-American lives with mordant with and unsentimental sympathy. A literary descendant of Dubliners and Winesburg, Ohio, Don Lee's Yellow is set in the fictional California coastal town of Rosarita Bay, whose inhabitants face not only fears of being ethnically "yellow" but also the universal terrors of love, failure, and abandonment.
Suggested Reading: Asian American Stars
Updated 4/20/01 - This is Not a
Novel
Author: Markson, David
Publisher: Counterpoint $ 15 ISBN: 1582431337 Date: 2001PWKirkus
This may not be a novel, but it is a highly inventive work that drifts between fiction, non-fiction and psychological memoir. After what seems to be a circuitous route with characters, stories, quotes and anecdotes, the real meaning lies in the journey, not the destination.
Suggested Reading: Books about Books
Updated 3/14/01 - The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon
Author: Meidav, Edie
Publisher: Houghton $ 25 ISBN: 0618013660 Date: 2001PW
Meidav explores the tragedy of colonialism in an epic first novel of stirring intensity. It's 1936, the world is sliding into war, and Henry Fyre Gould has left behind the salons and sheepish spiritualists of New York City for the British Colony of Ceylon. Expecting to win the people's hearts, Henry instead begins to slowly unravel on a hallucinatory journey through madness and ultimately to salvation.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
Updated 2/8/01 - Taps
Author: Morris, Willie
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin $ 26 ISBN: 0618098593 Date: 2001PW
The final work by one of America's most celebrated authors. Called upon to play "Taps" at the funeral of a hometown boy killed early in the Korean War, 16-year-old Swayze Barksdale Swayze soon paces his life by these all-too-frequent funerals, where his horn sounds the tragic note of the times.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
2/21/01 - Sputnik Sweetheart
Author: Murakami, Haruki
Publisher: Knopf $ 23 ISBN: 0375411690 Date: 2001KirkusBooklist
A male college student falls in love with a woman who, over the years, guides him in her travels, and then disappears without trace. Assisting in the search, he goes home to Japan, where he finally achieves a true understanding of his beloved.
Updated 2/21/01 - Fixer Chao
Author: Ong, Han
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux $ 24.95 ISBN: 0374155755 Date: 2001LJKirkus
A novel about love, revenge, art, and Feng Shui, as a Filipino street hustler assumes the persona of Master Chao, a revered Feng Shui practitioner from Hong Kong. Distorting the Eastern concept of Feng Shui to accommodate Western demands, he peddles his peculiar brand of holistic philosophy among New York City's elite. Fixer Chao raises questions of race and privilege, character and identity, and of what it means to be Asian at the turn of the 21st century.
Updated 2/20/01 - The Gardens of
Kyoto
Author: Walbert, Kate
Publisher: Scribner $ 24 ISBN: 0684869489 Date: 2001LJ
In a mesmerizing debut novel of romance and grief, a woman looks back on her coming of age in the long shadow of World War II and tells about the death of her favorite cousin, Randall, at Iwo Jima. When Ellen receives a package containing Randall's diary and a book called The Gardens of Kyoto, her bond to him is cemented and the mysteries of his short life starts to unravel.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | World Wars Stars
Updated 1/29/01 - I, Roger Williams:
A Fragment of an Autobiograpy
Author: Settle, Mary Lee
Publisher: Norton $ 24.95 ISBN: 0393049051 Date: 2001Booklist
Banished by his fellow colonists in the dead of winter, Roger Williams endured years of exile among the Narragansett Indians and narrates this tumultuous tale in the peaceful last years of his life. In this panorama of war and love, the reader finds the freedom of conscience is an idea worth dying for.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Biographical Fiction
Updated 4/20/01 - The Right Hand
of Sleep
Author: Wray, John
Publisher: Knopf $ 24 ISBN: 0375406514 Date: 2001PWKirkus
Oskar Voxlauer, a teenage deserter from the Austro-Hungarian army in the World War I, returns to his birthplace after almost 20 years' exile in Communist Ukraine and faces the ghosts of his past including his fathers suicide and a love he can't forget.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | World Wars Stars
Updated 3/5/01
March
- Scarlet Feather
Author: Binchy, Maeve
Publisher: Dutton $ 25.95 ISBN: 0525945938 Date: 2001PW
Written by Maeve Binchy at her very best, Scarlet Feather is a novel capturing one year in the life of Tom Feather and Cathy Scarlet, cooking school friends who have formed Scarlet Feather, a catering company that is taking Dublin by storm. While some things go according to plan and their hard work begins to pay off, this is a year of heartaches and triumphs, disappointments and joys, loves and losses.
Suggested Reading: Cooked Books
Updated 1/18/01 - Troublemaker
and Other Saints
Author: Chiu, Christina
Publisher: Putnam $ 23.95 ISBN: 0399147152 Date: 2001PWKirkus
Old and young, East and West, humor and pain collide in this debut novel as the life of one character weaves into that of another, and then another, bringing unlikely figures face to face, strengthening and illuminating each other in surprising ways.
Suggested Reading: Asian American Stars | Debuts
Updated 2/21/01 - The Raven Mocker
Author: Coldsmith, Don
Publisher: U of Oklahoma $ 22.95 ISBN: 0806133163 Date: 2001Booklist
Snakewater, the oldest Cherokee in her village, flees when she is accused of being the Raven Mocker, a feared creature of legend who steals the life-years of those who die young to ensure his own immortality. Her path takes her across the Mississippi to a surprising confrontation at the Elk-dog People's annual Sun Dance.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Western Stars
Updated 3/13/01 - Mr. Mee
Author: Crumey, Andrew
Publisher: Picador $ 25 ISBN: 0312268033 Date: 2001PW
Updated 1/26/01 - Death of
a River Guide
Author: Flanagan, Richard
Publisher: Grove $ 24 ISBN: 0802116825 Date: 2001KirkusLJ
Beneath a waterfall on a remote Tasmanian mountain river, Aljaz Cosini, river guide, is drowning. Beset by visions at once horrible and fabulous, he relives not just his own life but that of his family and forebears. Winner of the 1995 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for First Fiction and the South Australian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction.
Updated 1/31/01 - Do Try to Speak as
We Do: The Diary of an American Au Pair
Author: Ford, Marjorie Leet
Publisher: St Martins $ 23.95 ISBN: 0312268661 Date: 2001LJ
This entertaining novel tells the story of Melissa, a young American woman who thinks her "perfect" job of being an au pair to an upper middle class English family will include tennis parties and tea on the lawn. Instead, she finds backbreaking duties, an employer impossible to please, and a polite but freezing undercurrent of anti-Americanism among the family's friends and relatives.
Updated 1/31/01 - Kissing
the Virgin's Mouth
Author: Gershten, Donna M.
Publisher: HarperCollins $ 23 ISBN: 0060185678 Date: 2001Kirkus
Gershten pens a stunning debut novel and the first winner of Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for a work of socially or politically engaged fiction. Magda climbs from the poor barrio of a Mexican town to American affluence, from wide-eyed childhood to worldly courtesan life, from full-blooded youth to oncoming blindness in middle age.
Suggested Reading: Debuts
Updated 1/19/01 - Paradise Park
Author: Goodman, Allegra
Publisher: Dial $ 24.95 ISBN: 0385334168 Date: 2001KirkusPWLJ
Bestselling author and National Book Award finalist Goodman follows Kaaterskill Falls with a sparkling new tale featuring one of the most endearing, exasperating, indomitable heroines in modern fiction. With an open heart, a soul on fire, and her meager possessions, Sharon Spiegelman begins a hilarious 20-year quest for enlightenment. But each time she believes she has struck spiritual gold she comes up empty when her irrepressible self shines through.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | Humorous Fiction
Updated 1/31/01 - Snow
Mountain Passage
Author: Houston, James Stewart
Publisher: Knopf $ 24 ISBN: 0375411038 Date: 2001KirkusPW
From the author of Farewell to Manzanar comes a powerful retelling of the Donner story through the eyes of one member of the party and his eight-year-old daughter. Snow Mountain Passage is an extraordinary tale of pride and redemption, of the sheer endurance and bravery required in the creation of a new country, and of the thrilling early days of California.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Western Stars
Updated 3/14/01 - Lick Creek
Author: Kessler, Brad
Publisher: Scribner $ 24 ISBN: 0743201604 Date: 2001PWKirkus
Set in a remote mining county in West Virginia during the 1920s, this highly praised debut novel lyrically portrays the effects of the electrification of America on the landscape and the community, and on one woman's heart.
Updated 1/17/01 - Grimm's
Last Fairy Tale
Author: Middleton, Haydn
Publisher: St. Martins $ 23.95 ISBN: 0312272901 Date: 2001Kirkus
This compelling historical novel recreates the life story of literature's most famous brothers and could almost be a fairytale itself with its changes of fortune, tests of duty and honor, lost loves, and twisted family relationships. As Auguste, a niece, attempts to learn an old family secret, classic fairytales are retold, and the mysterious German woods forever haunt in the background.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Folk and Fairy Tales
Updated 1/19/01 - Faithless: Tales of Transgression
Author: Oates, Joyce Carol
Publisher: Ecco $ 27 ISBN: 0060182525 Date: 2001PW
The author of the critically acclaimed Blonde and modern master of the short story delivers a brilliant new collection of 24 pieces of short fiction.
Updated 1/26/01 - Monstruary
Author: Rios, Julian
Publisher: Knopf $ 25 ISBN: 0375408231 Date: 2001Kirkus
The new novel by the author of the acclaimed Loves That Bind is a sensual exploration of art, literature, and the darker side of the human heart. - publisher marketing.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
Updated 1/31/01 - Secret Love
Author: Schneider, Bart
Publisher: Viking $ 25.95 ISBN: 0670894923 Date: 2001Booklist
Set in San Francisco in the mid 1960s, this double love story is populated with vivid characters steeped in the atmosphere of the social revolution involving race relations, politics, and civil rights.
Updated 2/28/01 - America's Children
Author: Thackara, James
Publisher: Overlook $ 26.95 ISBN: 1585671118 Date: 2001
Booklist
Thackara's debut novel, published in the U.S. for the first time, explores the enigmatic J. Robert Oppenheimer and chronicles the birth of the nuclear age in America.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Atomic Age Stars
Updated 3/13/01 - Martyr's Crossing
Author: Wilentz, Amy
Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 23 ISBN: 0684854368 Date: 2001BooklistKirkus
One rainy night in Jerusalem, in the midst of a wave of devastating terror attacks, Lieutenant Ari Doron is ordered to refuse passage to a young mother and her sick child. The boy's death leads to riots and Doron finds himself caught up in a political war, protected and then scapegoated by a cynical Israeli intelligence colonel and pursued by a Palestinian intent on revenge.
Updated 1/31/01
February
- Fire in Beulah
Author: Askew, Rilla
Publisher: Viking $ 25.95 ISBN: 0670888435 Date: 2001LJ
Set in the tense days of the Oklahoma oil rush of the 1920s, Althea Whiteside and her enigmatic black maid, Graceful, are caught in the relentless currents of family and violence. Their stories unfold against a backdrop of fear, hate, and lynchings that climax in the Tulsa race riot of 1921, during which the city's prosperous black section is burned to the ground.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
Updated 1/29/01 - Eclipse
Author: Banville, John
Publisher: Knopf $23 ISBN: 0375411291Date: 2001PW Booklist
In his first novel since The Untouchable, Banville gives us the intensely emotional story of a man discovering for the first time who he has been and what he is becoming. Alexander Cleave, a famous and suddenly failing actor, has retreated to his empty childhood home in hopes that, hidden from his audience, he might finally stop performing and simply be. But the house is unexpectedly populated: by memories, apparitions, and the unsettling presence of the caretaker.
Updated 2/7/00 - The Weight
of All Things
Author: Benitez, Sandra
Publisher: Hyperion $ 22.95 ISBN: 0786863994 Date: 2001PW LJ
The last time young Nicholas saw his mother, she was hit by gunfire in a crowded plaza while attending the funeral of a martyred archbishop in war-torn El Salvador. Watching her body dragged away with other victims, Nicholas believes his mother is alive, and vows to find her. Thus begins the young boy's harrowing journey through his war-ravaged country.
Suggested Reading: Latino/Latina Stars | El Salvador
Updated 1/17/01 - Greetings
from the Golden State
Author: Brenner, Leslie
Publisher: Holt $ 23 ISBN: 0805065644 Date: 2001PW
Born in Southern California in the brightly cast shadow of the Cold War, Andrew Kelbow grows up in an average American family--average until Andrew's father leaves his mother under a cherry tree in the Mohave desert. How the remaining Kelbows survive this rift is a study in diversions, both illicit and ordinary, and over the course of 30 years Andrew must discover for himself the true definition of the happy family. - Publisher Marketing.
Updated 12/7/00 - Observatory
Mansions
Author: Carey, Edward
Publisher: Crown $ 23 ISBN: 0609606808 Date: 2001PW KirkusBooklist
Why does this novel's narrator, who practices the art of stillness and touches nothing without the protection of white gloves, who collects useless articles only because their owners have loved them, come to seem, not odd, but supremely human and much like us? Edward Carey has written a neo-Gothic classic of truly startling originality that John Fowles called "easily the most brilliant new fiction I've seen this year".
Suggested Reading: All Stars
Updated 1/24/01 - Body Artist
Author: Delillo, Don
Publisher: Scribner $ 22 ISBN: 074320395x Date: 2001
Booklist Kirkus PW
From the award-winning, bestselling author of White Noise and Underworld comes a spare, seductive, novel about marriage, loneliness, and the nature of creativity. Widow Lauren Hardke encounters a strange man possessed of knowledge of her life, and accompanies him on an extraordinary exploration of time, love, and human perception.
Suggested Reading: All Stars
Updated 11/15/00 - Little
Boys Come From the Stars
Author: Dongala, Emmanuel Boundzeki
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux $ 22 ISBN: 0374184968 Date: 2001Kirkus
Matapari is an African child of the '90s, growing up in a world of the Internet, satellite TV, and where dictators remake themselves as democrats overnight. His uncle is a stooge for the dictator; his father is a recluse obsessed with proving that blacks played key roles in history. Dongala uses the viewpoint of a child to show up the world of adults, and how one perseveres in a corrupt and violent society.
Updated 1/31/01 - A Spell of Winter
Author: Dunmore, Helen
Publisher: Atlantic $ 24 ISBN: 0871137828 Date: 2001PW
Catherine and her brother, Rob, do not know why they have been abandoned by their parents. In the house of their grandfather, "the man from nowhere", they forge a passionate refuge for themselves against the terror of family secrets, and while the world outside moves to the brink of war, their sibling love becomes fraught with dangers. But as Catherine fights free of the past, the spell of winter that has held her in its grasp begins to break. Winner of England's prestigious Orange Prize for best fiction by a woman.
Updated 1/18/01 - Cause Celeb
Author: Fielding, Helen
Publisher: Viking $ 24.95 ISBN: 0670894508 Date: 2001PW
Fielding's highly acclaimed first novel brings all the insight and charm of the Bridget Jones novels to a brilliantly witty, thought-provoking take on today's woman and today's world. Deftly skewering celebrity fundraising, Cause Celeb is the story of a disillusioned young woman who escapes London to run a refugee camp in the African desert. When disaster strikes, she brings her former media savvy to the fore to organize a star-studded emergency appeal.
Updated 12/7/00 - Meteor
in the Madhouse
Author: Forrest, Leon
Publisher: Northwestern $ 26.95 ISBN: 0810151146 Date: 2001Booklist
Updated 3/6/01 - Rising Sun: Being the True
Account of the Voyage of the Great Ship of That Name, the Author's Adventures
in the Wastes of the New World . . .
Author: Galbraith, Douglas
Publisher: Atlantic $ 25 ISBN: 087113781x Date: 2001Kirkus
In 1698, five vessels led by the flagship Rising Sun embarked on a perilous voyage for what is now Panama, where the passengers intended to found a colony at Darien. With them went the hopes and fortunes of the nation of Scotland, which sought to build an overseas empire so that it could compete on the world stage with England. Galbraith's debut novel is the story of this mission and its tragic outcome, as recorded by the ship's superintendent of cargoes, Roderick Mackenzie.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Sea Stories | Debuts
Updated 12/5/00 - The Glass Palace
Author: Ghosh, Amitav
Publisher: Broadway $ 24.95 ISBN: 0375501487 Date: 2001
Kirkus
A poor boy lifted on the tides of political and social chaos to create an empire in the Burmese teak forests, Rajkumar cannot forget the girl he befriended during the British invasion of 1885 when soldiers forced the royal family into exile from the glass palace. Rajkumar then saw the woman whose love would shape his life, and later, as a rich man, he goes in search of her.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Burma
Updated 11/29/00 - Swimming
Toward the Ocean
Author: Glickfeld, Carole L.
Publisher: Knopf $ 24 ISBN: 0374408924 Date: 2001Kirkus
From the author of the Flannery O'Connor Award-winning collection Useful Gifts comes a sharp and tender debut novel chronicling the boisterous life and loves of a Russian Jewish immigrant family in 1950s New York City.
Updated 12/5/00 - A Painted House
Author: Grisham, John
Publisher: Doubleday $ 27.95 ISBN: 038550120x Date: 2001PWLJ
Inspired by the author's own childhood in rural Arkansas, this moving story follows one boy's journey from innocence to experience. Luke Chandler, 7, lives in the cotton fields with his parents and grandparents in a little house that's never been painted. During the harvest, he sees and hears things no child could possibly be prepared for and finds himself keeping secrets that not only threaten the crop but will change the lives of the Chandlers forever.
Updated 1/18/01 - Student of
Weather
Author: Hay, Elizabeth
Publisher: Counterpoint $ 24 ISBN: 158243123x Date: 2001
Booklist PW Kirkus
On the prairie of Dust Bowl Canada, two sisters fall down the same well, and the well is named Maurice Dove. Spanning 30 years, this brilliant first novel is a Canadian bestseller about the rivalry between Lucinda and Norma-Joyce and the stranger who changes both of their lives forever.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | Debuts | Stormy Weather
Updated 12/7/00 - Speaking
with the Angel
Author: Hornby, Nick (ed)
Publisher: Riverhead $ 12 (trade paper) ISBN: 1573228583 Date: 2001PW
In an exciting snapshot of the best edgy literary fiction today, the author of High Fidelity presents the anthology of the year: stories by Helen Fielding, Melissa Bank, Roddy Doyle, Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith, and others.
Updated 2/21/01 - Kinship Theory
Author: Kaplan, Hester
Publisher: Little, Brown $ 24.95 ISBN: 0316482110 Date: 2001
PW
Maggie Crown, 47, divorced, and a scientist, agrees to to bear a child for her daughter, and through gestational surrogacy, is soon carrying a baby that is "hers to love, but never to keep". As Maggie's relationship with her daughter is thrown into new and often painful focus with this understanding, she begins to question her decision, her choices in life, and herself as a good mother.
Updated 10/13/00 - Confessions of a Shopaholic
Author: Kinsella, Sophie
Publisher: Delta $ 11.95 ISBN: 0385334582 Date: 2001LJ
Updated 9.20.05 - Elvis and Nixon
Author: Lowry, Jonathan
Publisher: Crown $ 22.95 ISBN: 0609608185 Date: 2001Kirkus
Equal parts documentary, myth, and hallucination, Elvis and Nixon is a fictional two-week road trip through one of the most bizarre and untethered eras in America's history, presided over by two of its greatest icons.
Suggested Reading: Alternative History Stars | Elvis | Nixon
Updated 1/18/01 - Island: The Complete Stories
Author: MacLeod, Alistair
Publisher: Norton $ 25.95 ISBN: 0393050351 Date: 2001PWKirkus
The stories in Island tell about death, family ties and the pull of traditions transplanted from Scotland to the harsh New World. Sixteen spare, evocative masterworks: men and women acting out their own peculiar mortality against the unforgiving landscape of cape Breton Island.
Updated 12/18/00 - My Dream of You
Author: O'Faolain, Nuala
Publisher: Riverhead $ 25.95 ISBN: 1573221775 Date: 2001Booklist
When a travel writer realizes the painful cost of her refugee existence, she returns to Ireland to investigate the true story of a scandalous affair between the wife of an English landlord and an Irish servant during the latter years of the famine. The greatly anticipated first novel by the author of the bestselling Are You Somebody? is a love story within a love story and a historical novel within a contemporary one. This grand debut tells of parallel lives, 150 years apart, driven by a hunger for passionate love.
Suggested Reading: Debuts
Updated 12/7/00 - After You'd Gone
Author: O'Farrell, Maggie
Publisher: Viking $ 24.95 ISBN: 0670894486 Date: 2001LJ
Alice Raikes lies in a coma in Scotland after an accident that may or may not have been a suicide attempt. With her life hanging in the balance, Alice's family gathers. As they wait, argue, and remember, long-buried tensions rise. Alice, meanwhile, slides between different levels of consciousness, recalling her past and a recent love affair.
Suggested Reading: Debuts
Updated 1/31/01 - Here's to You,
Jesusa!
Author: Poniatowska, Elena
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux $ 24 ISBN: 0374168199 Date: 2001PW Booklist
This sensitive retelling of the life of Jesusa Palancares de Aguilar, a Mexican girl whose life is one of tragedy, violence, and servitude that lead to her long history of run-ins with the police. This classic of Mexican literature, reprinted 28 times since its original publication in 1969, is now printed in an English edition.
Suggested Reading: Latino/Latina Stars
Updated 2/7/01 - Goats
Author: Poirier, Mark
Publisher: Miramax $ 22 ISBN: 0786866802 Date: 2001
Booklist
Fourteen-year-old Ellis is getting ready to leave the Southwest for a boarding school in the East. This means leaving behind Tucson, his mother, and the only real father figure he has ever known, Goat Man. - Publisher's marketing.
Updated 11/22/00 - The Cloud Sketcher
Author: Rayner, Richard
Publisher: HarperCollins $ 25 ISBN: 0060196343 Date: 2001
PW LJ
From the ice fields of rural Finland to the ruthless world of New York real estate speculation in 1928, The Cloud Sketcher traces the life of Esko Vaananen, a young architect who dreams of building skyscrapers and winning the love of a beautiful Russian aristocrat.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
Updated 1/17/01 - Aiding and
Abetting
Author: Spark, Muriel
Publisher: Doubleday $ 21 ISBN: 0385501536 Date: 2001PW
One of the greatest living British novelists is back with her most wickedly amusing and subversive novel in years, a savagely witty tale of murder and escape, based on the notorious real-lfe case of Lord Lucan. - from the Advance Reading Copy.
Updated 11/15/00 - Bonesetter's
Daughter
Author: Tan, Amy
Publisher: Putnam $ 25.95 ISBN: 0399146431 Date: 2001
PW Booklist Kirkus
Set in contemporary San Francisco and in a Chinese village where Peking Man is unearthed, The Bonesetter's Daughter is an excavation of the human spirit: the past, its deepest wounds, its most profound hopes. This is the story of LuLing Young, who searches for the name of her mother, the daughter of the famous Bonesetter from the Mouth of the Mountain. The story conjures the pain of broken dreams, the power of myths, and the strength of love that enables us to recover in memory what we have lost in grief.
Suggested Reading: Asian American Stars | All Stars
Updated 12/18/00 - A Dream of Wolves
Author: White, Michael C.
Publisher: Cliff St $ 23 ISBN: 0060194324 Date: 2001PWBooklist
Transplanted Yankee Doc Stuart Jordan has spent nearly 30 years in Hubbard County, North Carolina, dedicating his life to helping the people of the Blue Ridge Mountains. One night he is called to the scene of a brutal murder. Little does he know his fate will change.
Updated 1/24/01 - Father
of the Four Passages
Author: Yamanaka, Lois-Ann
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux $ 24 ISBN: 0374153876 Date: 2001
PW KirkusBooklist
Sonia Kurisu, a streetwise young mother, struggles to raise her child, Sonny Boy, as she seeks to come to terms with the three children she aborted. Set in Hawaii and Las Vegas, this haunting novel about fathers, forgiveness, spirituality, and solace is Yamanaka's most ambitious work to date.
Suggested Reading: All Stars
Updated 12/7/00
January
- Whatever
Happened to Dulce Viega
Author: Abreu, Caio Fernando
Publisher: U of Texas $ 15.95 (trade paper) ISBN: 0292705018 Date: 2001Booklist
Updated 2/7/01 - Gob's Grief
Author: Adrian, Chris
Publisher: Broadway $ 24.95 ISBN: 0767902815 Date: 2001
KirkusLJ
In 1863, 11-year-old Tomo Woodhill runs off to fight in the Civil War, during which he takes a bullet in the eye and dies. His brother, Gob, grows up in a state of grief. As an adult studying to be a doctor in New York City, he has an idea to build a machine that might bring Tomo--indeed, all the war dead--back to life.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Civil War Stars | Debuts
Updated 11/29/00 - All Shook Up
Author: Anderson, Susan
Publisher: Avon $ 6.99 (paper) ISBN: 0380807149 Date: 2001PW
When an unexpected inheritance brings J.D. Carver to Star Lake Lodge, the sexy, street-wise man expects trouble. But though he thinks the warmly welcoming Lawrence clan must be working some sort of angle, a tiny part of him longs for their home-and-hearth life -- and the rest of him desires beautiful, former bad-girl and clearly off-limits Dru.
Suggested Reading: Romance Stars
Updated 12/14/00 - The Hiding Place
Author: Azzopardi, Trezza
Publisher: Atlantic $ 24 ISBN: 0871138158 Date: 2001
Kirkus Library Journal PW
Set in a Maltese immigrant community in Cardiff Wales, The Hiding Place is the story of Frankie Gauci, his wife Mary, their six daughters, and about Frankie's betrayal, gambling away his family's livelihood and eventually the family itself. A young British novelist bursts onto the international literary scene with this iridescent first novel.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | Debuts
Updated 11/15/00 - In
Beautiful Disguises
Author: Balasubramanyam, Rajeev
Publisher: Bloomsbury $ 14.95 (paper) ISBN: 1582341273 Date: 2001LJ
In this wildly original debut, a 16-year-old Indian girl flees an arranged marriage and runs away to New Delhi to work as a maid. There she falls in with the misfit members of her new household; but even as she embraces this brave new world, she realizes she can't run forever.
Suggested Reading: Debuts
Updated 3/23/01 - Perfect Recall
Author: Beattie, Ann
Publisher: Scribner $ 24 ISBN: 0743211693 Date: 2001
PW Kirkus LJ
This new collection of short stories, by the recipient of the 2000 Pen/Bernard Malamud Award for lifetime achievem