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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 1997
April 2, 2008
January - June
Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine.
A 
indicates a Overbooked Jump for Joy book.
June
- God's Fires
Anthony, Patricia
Publisher: Ace Books List Price: $22.95 ISBN: 0441004075 Date: 1997
KirkusPublishers Weekly
PW Best Books '97 Washington Post Book World
In Portugal, during the Inquisition, a spaceship crash lands. Three creatures emerge from the ship and are captured and imprisoned by the Jesuits. Are they angels or devils? Should they be worshipped or burned at the stake? All of society is divided in this unforgettable novel that asks what we should do in the face of the truly unknown. - A Crime in the Neighborhood
Berne, Suzanne
Publisher: Algonquin List Price: $18.95 ISBN: 1565121651 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
NYTBR Editor's Choice
L.A. Times Book Award - First Fiction Finalist
In 1973, it seems to 10-year-old Marsha that everyone she knows is committing crimes: her father and Aunt Ida are having an affair, her teenage brother and sister are smoking and shoplifting; even the President of the United States is acting like a crook. But when a body of a neighbor boy - someone Marsha knows - is found in the woods behind the shopping mall, she focuses her sights more sharply than ever on the neighborhood comings and goings. - Terminal Velocity
Boyd, Blanche McCrary
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $23 ISBN: 0679430083 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyBooklist
The author of the widely acclaimed The Revolution of Little Girls now drives deep into the heart of the revolution itself, from the unique vantage point of the radical feminist underground in the days of rage. Seemingly by accident and nearly overnight, a young, happily married editor for a small Boston press finds herself in communal California with a new name and a newfound set of preferences and politics. - Lady of Avalon
Bradley, Marion Zimmer
Publisher: Viking List Price: $24.95 ISBN: 0670857831 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
The eagerly awaited link between Marion Zimmer Bradley's spectacular The Forest House and her blockbuster bestseller The Mists of Avalon, this book spans the creation of Avalon itself and foreshadows the birth of King Arthur. Spellbinding, dynamically plotted, rich in ritual, character, and turbulence of Roman Britain, Lady of Avalon is sure to win the hearts of Bradley's avid fans and of spiritual seekers everywhere. - The Tree of Red Stars
Bridal, Tessa
Publisher: Milkweed List Price: $21.95 ISBN: 1571310134 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyKirkus
Romance, coming-of-age, and political intrigue blend to create an evocative description of Uruguay's transition from democracy to a CIA-backed military dictatorship. Tessa Bridal's debut novel provides readers with a vivid, unforgettable journey through a time and a world that is closer than we realize. - Nazareth Hill
Campbell, Ramsey
Publisher: Tor List Price: $23.95 ISBN: 0312863446 Date: 1997Library JournalPublishers Weekly
From one of the world's most celebrated authors of psychological horror comes a novel that chronicles the deteriorating relationship between a teenage girl and her father. Moving into a former mental institution that has been converted into an apartment house, a worried father soon realizes he's made a bad decision, especially when his daughter begins to "hear things" in the halls. - Exiles: Three Short Novels
Caputo, Philip
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $25 ISBN: 0679450386 Date: 1997KirkusLibrary Journal
NYTBR NOTABLE
The universal experience of not belonging in a place or situation - psychic exile, so to speak - unites three short novels in this powerful collection. A young man falls in with an upper-crust couple who lavish him with attention and with unexpected dilemmas; a beguiling but troublesome stranger washes ashore into the thick of a struggle for a tiny island's very identity; and a squad of misfits plunges into the jungle in search of the body of their mess sergeant, who has been abducted by a tiger. - Heat Lightning
Cohen, Leah Hager
Publisher: Avon List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 0380974681 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyKirkus
Set in a small town in upstate New York, this luminous novel about one remarkable summer in the lives of two young, orphaned sisters traces the unraveling of the mythology which the girls create to explain the untimely death of their parents. - Meeting the Minotaur
Dawson, Carol
Publisher: Algonquin List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 156121260 Date: 1997Kirkus
Taylor Deeds is a freak. A geek. A bastard. With exuberant irony and brilliant wit, Carol Dawson unfolds the story of this reluctant hero whose soul harks back to the days of Hercules, Jason and Medea, but who finds himself in a world of beach resorts, illegal aliens, drug smugglers, and international intrigue. - Almost No Memory
Davis, Lydia
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux List Price: $20 ISBN: 0374102813 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
Philosophical inquiry, examinations of language, and involuted domestic disputes are the focus of Lydia Davis's inventive collection of short fiction, Almost No Memory. In each of these stories, Davis reveals an empathic, sometimes shattering understanding of human relationships. - The Lady Who Liked Clean Restrooms
Donleavy, J.P.
Publisher: St Martins List Price: $18.95 ISBN: 0312155638 Date: 1997Kirkus
This modern-day fairy tale - in which a woman in a state of deep depression after a recent divorce is driven to find the finest ladies' rooms in Manhattan - is Donleavy at his best: witty, biting, decidedly scatological, eccentrically punctuated, and laugh-out-loud funny.
Suggested Reading: Fractured Fairy and Folk Tales - Distress
Egan, Greg
Publisher: HarperPrism List Price: $21 ISBN: 0061052647 Date: 1997
Publishers
Weekly
In his latest novel, the author of Permutation City and Quarantine creates a fragmented futuristic world where technology and bio-engineering threaten humanity's very existence. The year is 2055, and the world's only hope for survival lies in Violet Mosasa's development of a final Theory of Everything. But whether it will lead to the total destruction of Life As We Know It or the complete remaking of the Universe may be a risk to dangerous to take.
Suggested Reading: Dystopian Stars - Don't Erase Me
Ferrell, Carolyn
Houghton Mifflin List Price: $20 ISBN: 0394713277 Date: 1997Booklist Publishers
Weekly
ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD FOR FIRST FICTION - L.A. TIMES
Ferrell's remarkable stories show young people on the verge of being erased from society--but determined to endure. "Each story is a song, the voice tuned to perfection"--Tobias Wolff. - Cold Mountain
Frazier, Charles
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly List Price: $23 ISBN: 0871136791 Date: 1997Library Journal
National Book Award WINNER
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS NOMINEE
PW BEST BOOK
NYTRB NOTABLE
BOOKLIST EDITORS CHOICE
ALA RUSA NOTABLE BOOK
A magnificent love story in the tradition of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Based on true stories passed down from the author's great-great-grandfather, Cold Mountain is set at the end of the Civil War and tells the tale of a wounded soldier and his perilous journey home from the front. - She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me
Gold, Herbert
Publisher: St Martins List Price: $21.95 ISBN: 0312156537 Date: 1997Kirkus
From the acclaimed and bestselling author of Fathers and Salt comes a stirring novel about love and identity set in present-day San Francisco - where leftover hippies and beatniks, speculators , millionaires, and wannabes, artists, reformers, overwhelmed cops, and old Californians compete for shrinking space. - Mister Sandman
Gowdy, Barbara
Publisher: Steerforth List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 1883642337 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
PW Best Books '97
One of the most audacious and talked-about novels of the season, Mister Sandman is set in Toronto in the mid-1950s and concerns the Canary family: their immoderate passions and eccentricities and their secret lives. - The Driftless Zone: Or A Novel Concerning the Outmigration from
Small Cities
Harsch, Rick
Publisher: Steerforth List Price: $ 21 ISBN: 1883642329 Date: 1997Library Journal
The Driftless Zone achieves a relentless and compelling integrity through its various narrative voices. It is aptly titled in that its greatest heights are achieved in the portrayal of setting and psyche. This is a novel that captures the life of the small-town Midwestern night -- the 24-hour gas-and-cigarette shops, strip restaurant chains, flophouse apartments...an ambitious work and an auspicious debut" (Hungry Mind Review). - Bacon Fancier: Four Tales
Isler, Alan
Publisher: Viking List Price: $21.95 ISBN: 0670874078 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyKirkusLibrary Journal
The author of The Prince of West End Avenue - winner of the National Jewish Book Award - makes his Viking debut with this collection of four tales set in successive centuries and linked by a common theme, the Jewish experience in the Gentile world.
Suggested Reading: All Stars - The Falling Boy
Long, David
Publisher: Scribner List Price: $22 ISBN: 0684800349 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly Library
Journal
Fulfilling the extraordinary promise of his lavishly praised short story collection, Blue Spruce, David Long's debut novel is a lush, resonant work that examines marriage from a man's perspective. Set in a small town in Montana in the 1960's, The Falling Boy charts the inner life of a young construction worker who, as he weds one sister, finds himself falling in love with her sibling. - The Sunday Macaroni Club
Lopez, Steve
Publisher: Harcourt Brace List Price: $24 ISBN: 0151002649 Date: 1997
Kirkus
In the new novel from the award-winning author of Third and Indiana, decency and democracy stage a fight to the finish in a scathingly funny and suspenseful tale of greed and corruption. When an Assistant District Attorney is told by her boss to nail the Sunday Macaroni Club, five remnants of an old political machine led by a former U.S. Senator with a fraud conviction, the stage is set for a carnival of ambition and self-preservation. - Some Men Are Lookers
Mordden, Ethan
Publisher: St Martins List Price: $23.95 ISBN: 031215560x Date: 1997
Publishers
Weekly
In the 1980's. Ethan Mordden's acclaimed "Buddies" trilogy explored the network of supportive friendships that underlay the facade of partying in Manhattan's sex-and-beauty cult. Now, Mordden returns to his best-loved characters in this eagerly awaited fourth volume in the cycle. Blending the comic, the sexy, and the touching, Mordden presents a view of gay culture that is at once idealistic and realistic. - Leave it to Me
Mukherjee, Bharati
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $23 ISBN: 0679434275 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
NYTBR NOTABLE
Debby DeMartino, in her early 20's, adopted as a toddler, is determined to find her biological parents. Her mother was a California flower child, her father a murderer now serving a life sentence in an Asian prison. All Debbie has of them is a literally haunting past, but now she wants revenge. So she heads for San Francisco, living the life of her newly named persona Devi Dee, she senses that she may have inherited more than she imagined.
Suggested Reading: Stars of India - A Book of Memories
Nadas, Peter
Publisher: Farrar List Price: $30 ISBN: 0374115435 Date: 1997Library JournalKirkusPublishers Weekly
PW Best Books of '97
NYTBR Notable
Washington Post Book World
This extraordinary magnum opus seems at first to be a confessional autobiography novel in the grand manner, claiming and extending the legacy of Proust and Mann. However, made up of three first-person narratives, this book is clearly more: a brilliant psychological novel that comes to terms with ghosts, corpses, and repressed nightmares of Europe's recent past.
Suggested Reading: All Stars - The Puttermesser Papers
Ozick, Cynthia
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $23 ISBN: 0679454764 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyKirkusBooklistLibrary Journal
National Book Award Finalist PW Best Books of '97
NYTBR Editor's Choice
Booklist Editors Choice
Yearning for a life of the mind, Ruth Puttermesser finds herself mired in the lowest circles of city bureaucracy. Her love life hopeless, her fantasies more influential than wan reality, she neverthe less turns out to be the best mayor New York City has ever elected. Soon enough, though, paradise gained becomes lost, and - even for a wistful visionary like Puttermesser - the problem of disappointment remains unresolved.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | Picaresque Stars - The Chin Kiss King
Veciana-Suarez, Ana
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux List Price: $24 ISBN: 0374121303 Date: 1997Kirkus
The lives of three generations of Cuban-American women sharing a home in Miami are chronicled in this engaging first novel--a testimony to the resilient spirit of women and a haunting meditation on the meaning of faith and the power of love to redeem and transform. - Four Decades: New and Selected Stories
Weaver, Gordon
Publisher: Univ of Missouri List Price: $18.95 ISBN: 0826211135 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
Beginning with his first published story, "When Times Sit In, " vivid, authentic characters enliven this collection. "Getting Serious" follows the life of a man who spends his summers in upstate Wisconsin, goes off to war and college, and then gets married. After losing his job and family, he retreats to his summer home to take inventory: "My wife and I never talked about our failing marriage, because it was too serious and depressing a topic and because, I suppose, we thought our failure would heal itself if we left it undisturbed long enough." Selected as a Best American Short Story in 1980, "Hog's Heart" is the poignant tale of a celebrated college football coach who, without medical evidence, is convinced he is dying. Keenly aware of his fragile state, Hog sees each day as possibly his last. Ironically, when Hog feels his team has the momentum to finally upset the legendary Crimson Tide of Alabama, death presents itself. The title character, Pease, in "The Good Man of Stillwater, Oklahoma, " believes something is coming but that he is the only one in town who can feel it. The long rains, the toad on his doorstep, swarms of locusts, drought, and nits are all signs that "It" is happening. "I cannot sleep because it is happening, and I begin to think I understand why. This should make me very afraid, but I tell myself I am a good man, no harm will come to me." His obsession ultimately costs him his job and his family. Three previously uncollected stories continue Weaver's theme of loss: of a friend to mental illness, of a successful life, of a student in a traffic accident.
- Publisher Marketing - Little Masters
Wilkins, Damien
Publisher: Holt List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0805049517 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
In his latest novel, one of New Zealand's most acclaimed writers follows the overlapping paths of two young New Zealanders who are drawn together across continents and through various nationalities other than their own. The narrative progresses in the manner of a thoroughly absorbing relay motivated by the acts of giving and receiving. - My Life, Starring Dara Falcon
Beattie, Ann
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $24 ISBN: 0679455027 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
NYTBR Editor's Choice
Dara Falcon is brilliant, manipulative, a pathological liar. The novel's narrator, Jean Warner, is perfect prey for her. Suddenly, Jean's life, her marriage - her idea of herself - are dramatically wrenched out of their seemingly comfortable, if unexamined, balance. And in the process, one of Ann Beattie's urgent themes - the sometimes subtle and sometimes startling difference between how things look and how things are- is compellingly explored. - The Actual
Bellow, Saul
Publisher: Viking List Price: $17.95 ISBN: 0670860751 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyLibrary JournalKirkus
NYTBR Editor's Choice
A new work of uncompromising purity by a Nobel Laureate. Chicagoan Harry Trellman, the narrator of this novella, has made his money and has now become a "first-class noticer". Rich, old Sigmund Adeltsky finds this out when he invites Trellman to one of his salons, notices Trellman noticing all Adeltksy's "commonplace" characters, and engages him to join the Adeltsky "Brain Trust".
Suggested Reading: All Stars - Idle Curiousity
Bergland, Martha
Publisher: Greywolf List Price: $22.95 ISBN: 1555972578 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
A tiny old man dressed in a red-and-white-striped bathrobe stands outside the white clapboard hotel that for ninety years housed the transients of Half Moon. A former farmer, and ex-husband of two very different women, Ed Check surveys the land that used to be his. He thinks about his daughters: the one who stays close to home and who "keeps what she thinks and feels so deep inside her that it's too far from her face to have any effect"; the one who has come home without her husband and is falling for the new optometrist in town, Nelson Alvin (rhymes with ball peen). But how could he know that his youngest daughter, whom he hasn't seen since she was a small child, is currently on her way to delivering him his biggest surprise. She is working her way down a list of "musts" before she can call him: "wait for bruise to clear up / let roots grow out, cut off blond / get two outfits and a suitcase". As lives unravel around him, Ed's age-old practice of looking out for his own is put to the test and earns him a pacemaker. To everyone's surprise however, family ties prove to be longer, and stronger, than expected. Despite their status as "grown-ups" Ed finds his daughters need him now more than ever.
- Publisher Marketing - In the Slammer with Carol Smith
Calisher, Hortense
Publisher: Marion Boyers List Price: $24.95 ISBN: 0714530204 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyBooklist
One afternoon in the early seventies Carol is sent out for Chinese food, and, while she is away, the explosive device which her revolutionary student friends are busy constructing, accidentally goes off, causing enormous damage. Her friends get away - she is incarcerated. Twenty years later, she has a small, unfurnished flat in New York, a fridge stocked only with the pills supplied by her social worker and an irresistible urge to slip away and live somewhere unencumbered by memories, names and all of her other false possessions. When she finally discovers that even her social worker is taking pills in an attempt to cope with life, Carol gathers a few essential belongings into her backpack and sets off to sleep rough on the city's streets again. Turning away from her dependence on drugs, Carol finds that memories, histories and responsibilities slowly return to her. In the Slammer with Carol Smith is a tough, hip novel by one of America's most outstanding living authors. It has the steady rhythms of the street as well as the haltings and hesitations experienced by the strong yet vulnerable Carol as she rediscovers herself. In fits and starts, the wild terrain of a life spent wandering under distant, unknown stars is mapped out. Carol's journey is both a rediscovery of emotional hiding-places and a search for the path that leads back into a world of normality without illusions and of sanity devoid of compromise. - Publisher Marketing
- The Hotel Eden
Carlson, Ron
Publisher: Norton List Price: $23 ISBN: 0393040682 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
NYTBR Notable
These dozen stories by a master of idiosyncrasy visit a world where wit has heft, charm has shadow, and human beings act out all the complicated nuances of love. In the title story a young man waits, thinking the Hotel Eden is a permanent domicile. In the last story an ancient lover's lane mystery is solved. As for the in-between storiesreaders, be prepared to be amused, moved, disturbed. - The Jade Peony
Choy, Wayson
Publisher: Picador List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 0312155565 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyKirkus
ALA RUSA Notable
In this award-winning novel, three children come of age in an immigrant Chinese family living in Vancouver during the early 1940s. Side by side, the family survives hardships and heartbreaks with grit and humor, discovers this new land, and never forgets their common
Suggested Reading: Asian American Stars - Tallgrass
Coldsmith, Don
Publisher: Bantam List Price: $23.95 ISBN: 0553106325 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
The bestselling author of the beloved Spanish Bit Saga weaves a monumental adventure set in the Plains country, crossroads of a continent, gateway to the American West. This is the saga of warriors, priests, trappers, traders, explorers, schemers, and pioneers who come alive in these pages.
Suggested Reading: Western Stars - Pandaemonium
Epstein, Leslie
Publisher: St Martins List Price: $24.95 ISBN: 0312156227 Date: 1997Library Journal
NYTBR Notable
The definitive novel of Hollywood in its most glamorous era, Pandaemonium is an epic that examines the roots of film and its relation to the dark forces of the imagination. Narrated by the ever-wise Peter Lorre, the books assembles a huge cast of Hollywood types who converge on Pandaemonium, a Nevada ghost town, at the onset of World War II.
Suggested Reading: Hollywood & Film Stars - Portrait of the Walrus by a Young Artist
Foos, Laurie
Publisher: Coffeehouse List Price: $19.95 ISBN: 1566890578 Date: 1997Kirkus
At the height of his art career, tormented Morton Fisk seals himself in the basement in nothing but briefs to sculpt enigmatic "Men with Chainsaw" figurines. Now Morton is dead of dehydration, and his daughter Frances is honoring his memory by seeking her own artistic muse. Transforming the bizarre into the sublime, author Laurie Foos has created a highly original satire. - The Aguero Sisters
Garcia, Christina
Publisher: 0679450904 List Price: $24 ISBN: 0679450904 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyLibrary JournalKirkus
NYTBR Notable
ALA RUSA Notable
The widely anticipated new novel by the author of Dreaming in Cuban. Estranged for more than 30 years, the Aguero sisters, one living in Havana, one in New York City, struggle over their recollections of a dark and hidden family past, as they move unknowingly toward a reunion in Miami.
Suggested Reading: Latino/Latina Stars | All Stars - The Memoirs of Cleopatra
George, Margaret
Publisher: St Martins List Price: $ 27.95 ISBN: 0312154305 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
The world-renowned author of The Autobiography of Henry VIII and Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles turns from Renaissance Britain to ancient Egypt and a mesmerizing story of ambition and power - the tale of Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile.
Suggested Reading: Egyptian Stars - Snow in August
Hamill, Pete
Publisher: Little, Brown List Price: $23.95 ISBN: 0316340944 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
Booklist Editors Choice
Brooklyn, 1947: The war veterans have come home, Jackie Robinson is about to become a Dodger, and, in one close-knit working class neighborhood, an 11-year-old Irish Catholic boy has just made friends with a lonely rabbi from Prague. A wonderfully evocative, deeply affecting fable for our times, Snow in August tells the story of this unlikely friendship. - Echo House
Just, Ward Date: 1997
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin List Price: $25 ISBN: 0395856973 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyBooklistKirkus
National Book Award Finalist
PW Best Books of '97
Washington Post Bookworld
Booklist Editors Choice
An epic chronicle of American political fortunes. Ward Just's twelfth novel is his masterpiece, realized through the minds and pulses of men and women who strive to save the nation - or themselves. Echo House takes readers through a maze of furtive power alliances and misalliances, involving two dozen characters from one Washington, D.C. family, over nine decades of history.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | Political Fiction - The Gospel According to the Son
Mailer, Norman
Publisher: Random House List Price: $21 ISBN: 0679457836 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
The story of Jesus and the gospels in the words of Jesus, written by bestselling, Pulitizer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer - responsible for such critically acclaimed works as The Naked and the Dead and The Executioner's Song. - In the Palm of Darkness
Montero, Mayra
Publisher: HarperCollins List Price: $21 ISBN: 0060187034 Date: 1997Booklist
In the Palm of Darkness tells the story of American herpetologist Victor Griggs and Haitian guide Thierry Adrien, who are searching for an amphibian known as the blood frog in the mountains of violence-torn Haiti. The rich and tragic tale of Thierry's family, his life and loves, and his curious destiny, forms a backdrop for the obsessive search of the two men from different cultures and opens a window onto another way of understanding the world. - Down By the River
O'Brien, Edna
Publisher: Farrar, Straus, Giroux List Price: $23 ISBN: 0374143277 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyBooklistLibrary Journal
NYTBR Notable
Booklist Editors Choice
Set in her native Ireland, Edna O'Brien's newest novel explores the dark and tortured aspects of family ties. In Down by the River, O'Brien is at the peak of her narrative powers. Her gift for describing the emotional conflict is at its most searing and poetic, as her prose churns the heart with its potent rhythms.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | Irish Stars - The Passion Dream Book
Otto, Whitney
Publisher: HarperCollins List Price: $22 ISBN: 0060178248 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyBooklist
An imaginative mix of fact and fiction, the newest novel by the author of How to Make an American Quilt travels from the Italian Renaisance to the early years of the 20th century following the stories -and histories- of three women, two of whom are artists, as they endure the conflicting passions of love and work. - Benjamin's Crossing
Parini, Jay
Publisher: Holt List Price: $23 ISBN: 0805031804 Date: 1997Library JournalBooklistPublishers Weekly
NYTBR Notable
Achieving almost cult status in the academic world within the past three decades, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is considered one of the most important intellectuals of this century. Recreating Benjamin's life from his precocious youth in Berlin to his final hours in a Pyrenees village after fleeing the Nazi invasion of Paris, Parini crafts not only a lyrical novel of ideas but a gripping adventure story as well.
Suggested Reading: All Stars - The Wishbones
Perrotta, Tom
Publisher: Putnam List Price: $21.95 ISBN: 0399142673 Date: 1997Library JournalKirkus
NYTBR Notable
ALA Rusa Notable
In The Wishbones, Perrota's characters are nineties adults still clinging to their seventies dreams. This debut novel is a laugh-out-loud confessional about people who might be too old to rock-n-roll but who can't imagine stopping.
Sugggested Reading List: Humorous Fiction - Amistad
Pesci, David
Publisher: Marlowe List Price: $22.95 ISBN:156924748x Date: 1997Booklist
This riveting historical novel is based on one of the nation's first civil rights struggles, the rebellion of slaves aboard the Amistad in 1839. Fifty-three Africans who are taken as slaves struggle against terrible odds to regain their freedom and return to Africa. Film Rights to Dreamworks SKG - Spielberg, director.
Suggested Reading: African American Stars - The Nature of Blood
Phillips, Caryl
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0679454705 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
NYTBR Notable
A German Jewish girl whose life is destroyed by the atrocities of World War II... her uncle, who undermines the sureties of his own life in order to fight for Israeli statehood... the Jews of a 15th century Italian ghetto... Othello, newly arrived in Venice... a young Ethiopian Jewish woman resettled in Israel. These are the extraordinary people who inhabit Caryl Phillips' elequent and moving new novel, and whose stories are connected by circumstance, spirit, and blood across the centuries.
Suggested Reading: African American Stars - Eve's Apple
Rosen, Jonathan
Publisher: Random List Price: $24 ISBN: 0679448160 Date: 1997Booklist
This poignant story of a vulnerable young woman, her lover, and the devastating disease that both unites and threatens to destroy them offers and raw and unsentimental journey into the dark world of hunger and denial. Eve's Apple is an unforgettable first novel, an intricate meditation on the nature of hunger - for food, for knowledge, and for love. - American Pastoral
Roth, Philip
Houghton List price: $26 ISBN: 0395860210 Date: 1997Library JournalPublishers WeeklyKirkus
Pulitzer Prize Winner
PW Best Books of '97
NYTBR Editor's Choice
National Book Critics Circle Nominee
LJ Best Books
Written with deep understanding, with enormous power and scope, and great storytelling energy, Philip Roth's newest novel focuses on the longing for an ordinary life. A legendary high school athlete, coming of age in thriving , triumphant postwar America, loses everything he loves when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960's.
Suggested Reading: All Stars - The God of Small Things
Roy, Arundhati,
Publisher: Random List Price: $23 ISBN: 0679457313 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyLibrary JournalBooklistKirkus
Booker Prize Winner
PW Best Books of '97
NYTBR Notable
Booklist Editors Choice
L.A. Times First Fiction Finalist
LJ Best Books
Set mainly in Kerala, India, in 1969, it is the story of Rahel and her twin brother, Estha, who learn that their whole world can change in a single day, that love and life can be lost in a moment. Armed with only the invisible protection of children, they seek to craft a childhood for themselves amid the wreckage that constitutes their family.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | Stars of India - The History of the Seige of Lisbon: A Novel
Saramago, Jose
Publisher: Harcourt Brace List Price: $24 ISBN: 015100238x Date: 1997Kirkus
NYTBR Notable
When a Portuguese proofreader rewrites history by changing a word in a text, he unexpectedly wins the heart of his supervisor, Maria Sara, who encourages him to fabricate more in the grand style of a historical romance. Around this seemingly minor episode, Jose Saramago, "Portugal's great fabulist" ("Los Angeles Times") constructs one of his most ambitious, sweeping novels to date, a magical tale of love, memory, and the revision of things past. - Blood and Milk
Solwitz, Sharon
Publisher: Sarabande List Price: $21.95 ISBN: 1889330019 Date: 1997Booklist
Social and political contradictions, the transcendence of personal histories, and hierarchies of victimhood are the themes explored here, mainly by women in their 30s who feel immobilized by a conviction that everyone else is more certain about things than they themselves are....An admirably ambitious collection". -- Kirkus Reviews - Publisher Marketing - Bear and His Daughter: Stories
Stone, Robert
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin List Price: $24 ISBN: 0395636523 Date: 1997Kirkus
NYTBR Notable
The award-winning author of Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise, and Outerbridge Reach presents stories that "combine action and philosophical rumination with a deftness matching Graham Greene's" ( Saturday Review). Written between 1969 and the present, they explore, as powerfully and accurately as his novels, our common troubled condition and the humanity that unites us. - The Story of the Night
Toibin, Colm
Publisher: Holt List Price: $25 ISBN: 0805052119 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyKirkusLibrary Journal
NYTBR Notable
It is Argentina in the time of the generals, Richard Garay lives alone with his mother, hiding his sexuality from her and the world. Stifled by a job he despises, he is willing to take chances, both sexual and professional. The Falkland War enables him to discard the Britishness he has inherited from this mother, and the arrival of two American diplomats offers him new hope and the prospect of making his fortune. Richard tells his picturesque story with a mixture of confessional guilt and awestruck wonder.
Suggested Reading: All Stars - West of Venus
Troy, Judy
Publisher: Random List Price: $23 ISBN: 0679451536 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyKirkus
NYTBR Notable
A funny and poignant love story, woven into the fabric of life in a small Kansas town, about a waitress and a state trooper who have to find themselves before they can find each other. Filled with convincing characters and details of small-town life, this novel has the charm and humor of Fannie Flagg's Fried Green Tomatoes. - Mrs. Hornstein
Wagman, Frederica
Publisher: Holt List Price: $ ISBN: 0805049568 Date: 1997Library Journal
This timeless and magical novel, filled with wisdom about women's lives, begins when our heroine, as a young woman, meets her future mother-in-law, the eponymous Mrs. Hornstien, and concludes many years later as she first encounters her own future daughter-in-law. In between, Wagman tells a mesmerizing story of family, of passing generations, of love and striving, and of grief, loss, and renewal. - Soul Kiss
Youngblood, Shay
Publisher: Riverhead List Price: $21 ISBN: 1573220639 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
African-American playwright Shay Youngblood presents the story of an uncommon coming-of-age, set in rural Georgia in 1968. After a difficult beginning, seven-year-old Mariah Kin Santos and the aunts with whom she's been left form a strangely harmonious threesome. But Mariah still dreams of her mother's return and of the far-off father she has never known.
Suggested Reading: African American Stars - Milton in America
Ackroyd, Peter
Publisher: Doubleday List Price: $22.95 ISBN: 0385477082 Date: 1997 Date: 1997BooklistLibrary Journal
Booklist Editors Choice
John Milton, aging, blind, fleeing the restoration of English monarchy, comes to New England where he soon becomes the leader of the Puritans. Ackroyd has crafted an enjoyable novel that entertains while raising provocative questions - this time about America's founding myths.
Suggested Reading: Poets | Alternative History Stars - Blessed is the Fruit
Antoni, Robert
Pubisher: Holt List Price: $25 ISBN: 0805049258 Date: 1997Booklist
Lilla is the white mistress of a once grand but now now rotting colonial mansion and Vel, her black servant. The two West Indian women, both 33 years of age, have lived in the same house for 10 years, but it is not until Lilla rescues Vel from a near-fatal abortion attempt, that the two really get to know each other. Young Trinidadian author Robert Antoni weaves a brightly colored tapestry of life in the Caribbeana remarkable tale of family, myth, religionand language. - Human Croquet
Atkinson, Kate
Publisher: Picador List Price: $24 ISBN: 0312155506 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
NYTBR Editor's Choice
From the author of the Whitbread Book of the Year, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, comes a magical and funny novel about family, fairy tales, and time. Set in England in the mid-1960's, Human Croquet tells the story of the Fairfaxes, once a grand family, now reduced to being local grocers - a family as disintigrated as their ancestral home, Fairfax Manor. - The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War
Bahr, Howard
Publisher: Nautical and Aviation List Price: $24.95 ISBN: 187785350X Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
One of the most riveting Civil War novels since Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels, this powerful book tells the story of a young Confederate rifleman who comes under the care of a young Southern woman who, even in the midst of battle and defeat, manages to find ways to express her love.
Suggested Reading: Civil War Stars - Lava
Ball, Pamela
Publisher: Norton List price: $21 ISBN: 0393040240 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
A haunting tale of obsessive love, Lava is a magical novel set on the Big Island of Hawaii. When a bizarre incident brings back her estranged husband after five years of his living with another woman, Kinau is overtaken by a wave of passion and her colorful life becomes even more dramatic. - Joy School
Berg, Elizabeth
Publisher: Random List price: $19 ISBN: 0679449434 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
In this superb novel by the bestselling author of The Pull of the Moon and Talk Before Sleep, a young woman's experience with the intensity and pain of first love leads her to understand that sorrow an be a school for learning joy. - Midwives
Bojahlian, Chris
Publisher: Random House List Price: $25 ISBN: 0517703963 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
PW Best Books of '97
A talented midwife is arrested for murder when she saves a baby by performing a Caesarean section once she believes the mother has died - only to have her assistant insist later that the woman was still very much alive. Told in the mesmerizing voice of the midwife's daughter, Midwives depicts the aftermath of the tragedy. - American Owned Love
Boswell, Robert
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $24 ISBN: 0679432515 Date: 1997Kirkus
In his most extraordinary novel yet, the author of the acclaimed Mystery Ride and Crooked Hearts casts an expert net around a group of disparate people - in the form of a powder keg community he invents for them to live in - and pulls it tighter and tighter, eliciting unforgettable behavior from the all. - Senora Rodriguez and Other Worlds
Cerda, Martha
Publisher: Duke University List Price: $35 hdbk/ $12 pbk ISBN: 0822318865 (hdbk)00882318903 (pbk) Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
A bestselling writer widely celebrated in her native Mexico, Martha Cerda defines her own turn along the path of Latin American magical realism. In this novel the feminine, the practical, and the earthy blend with the fantastic and phantasmagoric. Tragedy and playfulness, sophistication and naivete mingle. What is at once a comedy of manners, a delightful collection of loosely related anecdotes, stories, sketches, and epiphanies, is also an artful entree into several literary and philosophical questions -- the relationship between language and reality and the power of one to create and alter the other; the link between chaos and different forms of organization that pass for order.This heady mixture -- complex, irreverent, and surreal -- will enchant American readers and introduce them to the local charms and universal appeal of aremarkable Mexican author. - Publisher Marketing
- Swordfish
Claus, Hugo
Publisher: Dufour List Price: $27.95 ISBN: 0720609852 Date: 1997Kirkus
The Swordfish is ostensibly the story of a summer moment in the lives, fantasies, and sensibilities of Martin, a seven year-old boy, his single mother, and the village headmaster. A senseless murder is committed and it affects Martin most of all. His fertile imagination inspires him to identify with the swordfish, as well as Clint Eastwood and Jesus Christ. With a masterfully light touch, Claus brings his readers into contact with the perplexing matters of loss, truth, religion, desire, and passion. Chosen for the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works. - Publisher Marketing - Reading in the Dark
Deane, Seamus
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $23 ISBN: 0394574400 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyLibrary JournalKirkus
PW Best Books of '97
NYTBR Notable
L.A. Times Book Award Finalist
LJ Best Books
ALA RUSA Notable
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this mesmerizing story of childhood set amidst the violence of Northern Ireland in the 1940's and 1950's is breathtakingly sad, but vibrant and unforgettable. Haunted by a truth he both wants and does not want to uncover, the boy narrator of this novel listens and watches as the world of legend surrounding him reveals its transfixing reality, unfolding secrets like a collection of folktales.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | Irish Stars - Billy Gashade
Estleman, Loren D.
Publisher: Forge List Price: $23.95 ISBN: 031285997x Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
Loren D. Estleman pulls out all the stops in this ambitious novel, taking the reader on a grand tour through the west, and introducing colorful characters along the way. Billy Gashade, a traveling piano player, crosses paths with the likes of Oscar Wilde, Calamity Jane, "Billy the Kid", and John Wesley Hardin.
Suggested Reading: Western Stars - The Blue Flower
Fitzgerald, Penelope
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin List Price: $ 12 (trade paperback) ISBN: 0395859972Date: 1997PWKirkus
PW Best Books of '97
NYTBR Editor's Choice
National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee
LJ Best Books
The Blue Flower touches with a sweet absurd humour on the illogicality of love and the irrationality of genius. Set at the end of the eighteenth century it tells the story of the young and brilliant Fritz von Hardenberg, a graduate of the Universities of Jena, Leipzig and Wittenberg. The passionate and idealistic Fritz needs his father's permission to announce his engagement to his "heart's heart', the embodiment of all his yearnings, twelve-year-old Sophie von Kuhn. It is a betrothal which amuses, astounds and disturbs his family and friends. How can it be so? - Bad Vibes
Fuguet, Alberto
Publisher: St Martins List Price: $22.95 ISBN: 0312151598 Date: 1997Kirkus
A Latin American Catcher in the Rye - set amidst the political turmoil of the 1980's in Santiago, Chile. Living in an atmosphere of existential malaise caused by the wretched excess and moral decay he sees all around him, teenager Matias finds his basic trust in what is constant starting to come undone.
Suggested Reading: Latino Stars - House of Illusions
Gedge, Pauline
Publisher: Moyer Bell, List Price: $22.95 ISBN: 1559212004 Date: 1997Kirkus
Pauline Gedge's historical novels set in ancient Egypt have found millions of fans around the world. This book is the fifth in that illustrious line and is the sequel to House of Dreams, in which Thu, a peasant girl cultivated to become the Pharaoh's favorite concubine, is made the scapegoat for a murderous plot against him - and banished to her village, Aswat.
Suggested Reading: Egyptian Stars - Let Me Be the One
Harvor, Elisabeth
Publisher: Harpercollins List Price: $18 ISBN: 000224554x Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
Glowing, fresh, ironic, unforgettable, Elisabeth Harvor's stories introduce us to people who are trying to explore, often unwittingly, personal themes of existence and identity. Although the words "let me be the one" are never spoken by any of the characters, they are the words that are deeply felt. In particular moments of joy or upheaval, the silent voices speak to us with passion and wit, longing and desperation. - Exquisite Corpse
Irwin, Robert
Publisher: Pantheon List Price: $23 ISBN: 067944274x Date: 1997
Publishers
Weekly
NYTBR Notable
Caspar is a mildly promising surrealist painter living in 1930s London, who secretly longs for the ordinary. He meets Caroline who seems ordinary enough until she vanishes. Caspar's obsessive quest to find her leads him into a more surreal landscape than any he could imagine. The dazzling interplay of fiction and fact-within-fiction is at the heart of this wondrous work of imagination from one of the most intriguing writers at work today. - Snake
Jennings, Kate
Publisher: Norton List Price: $19 ISBN: 0880015381 Date: 1997Library Journal
NYTBR Notable
An award-winning Australian writer makes her American debut in a stunning novel as lean and hypnotic as its title. Against the hard landscape of postwar Australia, loyal-hearted Rex cherishes his wife Irene; but Irene, filled with feminine anger and unspecified desires, despises Rex. A book about people who rarely examine their lives, about thwarted desires and broken dreams, SNAKE literally catapults the reader to its stark climax. - Crooked Little Heart
Lamott, Anne
Publisher: Pantheon List Price: $24 ISBN: 0679435212 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyBooklist
With the same brilliant combination of humor and warmth that marked Operating Instructions and Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott now gives readers an exuberant, richly absorbing portrait of a family for whom the joys and sorrows of every day life are magnified under the glare of the unexpected. - Fall On Your Knees
MacDonald, Ann-Marie
Publisher: Simon & Schuster List Price: $23 ISBN: 0684833204 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
By turns dark and hilariously funny, this stunning fiction debut by an award-winning writer and actor takes readers on a mystically charged journey spanning five generations of one family's sin, guilt and redemption - a narrative feast of racial strife, miracles, terrible secrets, and a passionate, enduring love.
Suggested Reading: Debuts - Lovesick
Mastretta, Angeles
Publisher: Riverhead List Price: $22 ISBN: 1573220620 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
With an assured hand and a crystalline touch reminiscent of the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, Angeles Mastretta presents the vivid portrait of a woman both fragile and bold, who enters the new century shedding the bonds and prejudices of previous generations.
Suggested Reading: Latino & Latina Stars - The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn
Maxwell, Robin
Publisher: Arcade List Price: $23.95 ISBN: 155970375X Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
"Entertainment Weekly" has written of this novel, "History doesn't come any more fascinating--or lurid--than the wife-felling of Henry VIII". Robin Maxwell recreates the story of the doomed second wife of Great Harry, telling an exuberant and bawdy tale of lust, betrayal, love, and murder. - Ingenious Pain
Miller, Andrew
Publisher: Harcourt Brace List Price: $24 ISBN: 0151002584 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
NYTBR Notable
A dazzling first novel set in 18th-century England and Russia, about the rise, fall and redemption of a man born without the capacity to feel pain. In a wonderfully evocative and exciting style, Andrew Miller takes us through Europe at the time of enlightment, vividly portraying the life of a cold, insensate man as he discovers love, and eventually, compassion. - Purple America
Moody, Rick
Publisher: Little Brown List price: $22.95 ISBN: 0316979254 Date: 1997Library JournalPublishers WeeklyBooklist
PW Best Books of '97
NYTBR Notable
Booklist Editors Choice
In this tour-de-force literary triumph, the bestselling author of The Ice Storm offers a masterly novel in the tradition of Updike and Roth. Over the course of a single incendiary night, a young man, his mother, and his stepfather discover the profound connections between the forces that bind both family and the society in which famililial love is played out.
Suggested Reading: All Stars - Renaissance Moon
Nevins, Linda
Publisher: St Martin's List Price: $22.95 ISBN: 0312152000 Date: 1997Library Journal
An electrifying novel of a goddess cult in America - by the author of Commonwealth Avenue. When the legends that has shaped her view of the world erupt and spill over into her personal life, a woman with an obsession for Italian Renaissance paintings becomes a bloodthirsty pagan whose newfound attitude colors her interpretation of Christian art. - Normal: Stories
Nevai, Lucia
Publisher: Alqonquin List Price: $16.95 ISBN: 1565121589 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
Each of the wonderfully daring stories in this collection rings true. Over and over, Nevai's characters - from an urbane ex-hippie in Manhattan to a disabled war veteran in rural Louisiana- miss in their attempts to connect with the people they love most. But, in the midst of all these missed connections, something remarkable (and often very funny) happens. - The New Life
Pamuk, Orhan
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux List price: $24 ISBN: 0374221294 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyKirkus
The simple act of reading a book uproots Orhan Pamuk's student protagonist from his old identity and into a world of hypnotic text and endlessly ramifying conspiracies. Within days he falls in love with the elusive Janan; witnesses an attempted assassination; and forsakes his family to become a wanderer across the Turkish steppes as he seeks out "the new life" promised by the book--while outracing the almost certain death that pursues its readers. - Mason and Dixon
Pynchon, Thomas Date: 1997
Holt List Price: $ 27.50 ISBN: 0805037586Publishers WeeklyBooklist
PW Best Books of '97
NYTBR Editor's Choice
Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that has come to be known as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here the National Book Award -winning author of Gravity's Rainbow imagines their story in an updated 18th century novel featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, and major caffeine abuse. - Dog King
Ransmayr, Christopher
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $24 ISBN: 0679450572 Date: 1997Kirkus
World War II has ended and the Allies have punished Germany by forcing it to revert to a preindustrial age. When three people in the village of Moor make a courageous bid to escape, their flight turns into an extraordinarily gripping feat of suspense. - Every Day: A Novel
Richards, Elizabeth
Publisher: Pocket Books List Price: $22 ISBN: 0671001558 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyKirkus
A love story for and about real adults, Every Day touches the same chords as did Sleepless in Seattle and The Bridges of Madison County. It has been 14 years since Leigh Adelman saw Fowler. Now he's back, disturbing the sanctity of Leigh's happy home life. Honest, moving, and utterly authentic, Every Day is a story about testing the boundaries of love - and living with its often messy consequences. - Promised Lands
Rogers, Jane
Publisher: Overlook List Price: $24.95 ISBN: 0879517530 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
While researching a failed 18th-century Utopian settlement, an embittered history professor with Utopian ideas for transforming his school draws parallels between history and his own life. In the meantime, his wife has her own Utopian ideas wherein their handicapped son would become mankind's savior. A sublimely engrossing novel about idealism and exile. - Little Miss Strange: A Novel
Rose, Joanna
Publisher: Algonquin Books List Price: $19.95 ISBN: 1565121546 Date: 1997Kirkus
Sarajean, a child of the 70's, begins her story in a free-love, first-names-only, hippie commune in Denver. Little Miss Strange achieves its beauty - and its power - by way of details that offer an unfiltered view of an exotic counterculture as experienced by a child as she becomes a woman. And it is through the accrual of those details that the reader finds - along with Sarajean - satisfaction in the truth of the secrets hidden from her until the very last page. - Reality and Dreams
Spark, Muriel
Publisher: Houghton List price: $23 ISBN: 0395838118 Date: 1997Library JournalKirkus
NYTBR Notable
Muriel Spark's witty and pungent 20th novel draws upon her rich experience turning reality into ficiton and fiction into film. When film director Tom Richards takes a fall from a crane, he drops into a chaos that ends in violence.
Suggested Reading: Hollywood & Film Stars - Part of the Furniture
Wesley, Mary
Publisher: Viking List Price: $22.95 ISBN: 067087632 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyLibrary Journal
Seventeen-year-old Juno Marlowe is caught in a London air raid where she is sheltered overnight by an ailing stranger. Juno is launched by the stranger's sudden death - and the letter he charges her to deliver to his father - on a defiant journey through the blacked-out English countryside to his eccentric but nuturing family. - Blu's Hanging
Yamanaka, Lois-Ann
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux List Price: $22 ISBN: 0374114994 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
ALA RUSA Notable
The Pushcart Prize-winning author of Wild Meat and Bully Burgers now tells the bittersweet story of a ragtag family of orphans reeling from the death of their mother, trying to stay together in the face of almost insurmountable odds.
Suggested Reading: Asian American Stars - Carson Valley
Barich, Bill
Publisher: Pantheon List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0679442103 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyKirkus
A richly drawn novel of love, loss and redemption by the author of Big Dreams. Since 1893, the Torello clan has owned 100 vineyard acres in Carson Valley, California, but the traditions tying them to the land are now in flux. Returning to her family home, Anna Torelli is filled with an emotional awakening as she embarks upon an affair of the heart.
Suggested Reading: Drink Up Stars - Foundation's Fear
Benford, Gregory
Publisher: Harper Prism List Price: $23 ISBN: 0061052434 Date: 1997KirkusBooklistPublishers Weekly
Authorized by the estate of the late Isaac Asimov, one of the most popular science fiction series of all time continues. Hari Seldon has been nominated First Minister by Emperor Cleon. But the appointment complicates Hari's simple life and draws him into the debate over whether or not robot's have souls. FOUNDATION'S FEAR is the first of three new novels written by the brightest stars in contemporary science fictioncombining rousing adventure, intellectual debate and ingenious possibilities.
Suggested Reading: All Stars - Pay or Play
Boorstin, Jon
Publisher: Carroll & Graf List Price: $22 ISBN: 0786703598 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
Pay or Play is a wickedly funny satire of the Hollywood film industry and its peculiar marriage of vision and ambition that breeds great accomplishment -- and humiliating catastrophe. - The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest : A Silicon Valley
Novel
Bronson, Po
Random House List Price: 23.00 ISBN: 0679456996 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyBooklist
With brilliant insight into the culture of work, love marketing, and money in Silicon Valley, the bestselling author of The Bombardiers has written the ultimate novel about entrepeneurs in the world of high tech: Ironmen who risk it all to develop a product, start a company, and take it public. - Girls: A Novel
Busch, Frederick
Publisher: Harmony Books List Price: $23 ISBN: 0517704552 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyKirkus
PW Best Books of '97
NYTBR Notable
In the unrelentingly cold winter of upstate New York, Jack and Fanny are trying to come to terms with the death of their young daughter. When a 14-year-old disappears from her family's home, Jack finds a new purpose in life. Finding "this" child could be his salvation. - Jackson
Byrd, Max
Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell List Price: $23.95 ISBN: 055309632x Date: 1997Kirkus
In his critically acclaimed novel Jefferson, Byrd revealed the private life of one of American history's most beloved and elusive figures. Now, in the magnificant tradition of Gore Vidal's Lincoln and Burr, he capture the essense of Andrew Jackson, one of the nation's most feared and admired leaders.
Suggested Reading: New Orleans | Biographical Fiction - Love and Longing in Bombay: Stories
Chandra, Vikram Date: 1997
Publisher: Little Brown List Price: $21.95 ISBN: 0316133078Publishers WeeklyKirkus
NYTBR Notable
A brilliant collection of interconnected stories set in contemporary India, from the acclaimed author of Red Earth and Pouring Rain.
Suggested Reading: Stars of India - Monkey King
Chao, Patricia
Publisher: Harpercollins List Price: $24 ISBN: 006018681x Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
In the tradition of The Joy Luck Club, this profoundly moving first novel transports readers into the vibrant and sometimes harrowing world of a Chinese-American family, as a young woman explores the past in order to come to terms with her hidden demons.
Suggested Reading: Asian American Stars - What Girls Learn
Cook, Karin
Publisher: Pantheon List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0679448284 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
A radiant debut novel, What Girls Learn takes readers on an intimate and haunting journey into the landscape of girlhood and the complex terrain of the family. Wise, bittersweet, and above all intensly human,this astonishingly powerful novel enchants readers with its humor and insight.
Suggested Reading: Debuts | Breast Cancer - The Mistress of Spices
Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee
Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell List Price: $22.95 ISBN: 038548237x Date: 1997Booklist
Hard on the heels of the extraordinary success of her debut colleciton of short stores, Arranged Marriage, comes Divakanruni's first novel, a hypnotizing tale of joy and sorrow and the magic powers of one special woman.
Suggested Reading: Stars of India - When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth
Eberstadt, Fernanda
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $25 ISBN: 0679445145 Date: 1997KirkusBooklist
NYTBR Notable
From the author of Low Tide and His Devils comes a brilliant novel about the high-flying New York art world of the late 1980s. When a brash young artist enters the lives of a couple of well-to-do patrons of the arts, the excessiveness of everything begins to threaten what is most dear to them. - Assassin's Quest
Hobb, Robin
Publisher: Bantam Spectra List Price: $22.95 ISBN: 0553106406 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyKirkus
Possessing the scope and vision of Assassin's Apprentice and Royal Assassin, the first two books in Robin Hobb's debut trilogy, here is the final and perhaps the most satisfying volume of this unique epic adventure. - The Roaring Girl: Stories
Hollingshead, Greg
Publisher: Putnam List Price: $21.95 ISBN: 0399142223 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyKirkus
Populated by genuine, sincere people who feel out of step in their worlds, who try desperately to connect with their families and peers, and whose interactions are startling and comical, moving and pathetic, these compelling tales are by turns amusing and disturbing, but always compassionate and wise. - The Three Arched Bridge
Kadare, Ismail
Publisher: Arcade List Price: $21.95 ISBN: 1559703687 Date: 1997Kirkus
In 1377, on the frontier between the crumbling Byzantine empire and the advancing Ottoman Turks, a mysterious work crew begins to construct a three-arched bridge, despite warnings of war. A superbly realized work of historical fiction and at once a Kafkaesque parable of the barbarism currently sweeping its author's Albanian homeland. - Love and Houses
Leimbach, Marti
Publisher: Simon & Schuster List Price: $21 ISBN: 068483670x Date: 1997Kirkus
From the bestselling author of Dying Young comes an irresistible treasure of a novel. After ten years of marriage, Andy and Meg have just bought their dream house and are expecting their first child. But the picture-perfect bliss is shattered when, nine weeks away from the birth, Andy walks away from it all. - As She Climbed Across the Table
Lethem, Jonathan
Publisher: Doubleday List price: $22.95 ISBN: 0385485174 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
A stunning novel of the physics of love by the critically acclaimed author of Gun, with Occaisonal Music and Amnesia Moon. When Alice Coombs, a physicist working on the creation of a void in the universe - dubbed "Lack" - falls out of love with Philip Engstrand and in love with Lack, Philip's desperate struggle to win her back makes for a very unusual love triangle. - Salt
Lovelace, Earl
Publisher: Persea List Price: $22.95 ISBN: 0892552263 Date: 1997Booklist
Winner of the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize, this rich and masterly novel follows the progress of a national liberation campaign of sorts -- a welcoming of the diverse population of Trinidad to the New World nearly one hundred years after Emancipation. Afford George, a teacher turned politician, and Bango Durity, a worker-activist, lead the way. Salt is narrated in lyrical voices, "in a generous, torrential prose that seems to hold every complexity -- of history, of ethnicity, of reason and magic alike -- within its rushing energy" (New York Times Book Review). - An Army of Angels: A Novel of Joan of Arc
Marcantel, Pamela
Publisher: St Martins List Price: $24.95 ISBN: 0312151030x Date: 1997Kirkus
Here, in dramatic, richly imagined detail, is the full story of the peasant Jhanette, who at age 13 is visited by St. Michel and told she will be known to history as Jehanne the Main, the girl who saves Fance from the English. " A wonderous tapestry" - C. Brian Kelly, editor emeritus of Military History. - A Face at the Window
McFarland, Dennis
Broadway Books List Price: 25.00 ISBN: 0553066943 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
NYTBR Notable
The author of two highly acclaimed novels - School for the Blind and The Music Room - now delivers a fascinating story of a haunted man's spiritual awakening - a novel that is by turns comic, terrifying and tragic. - Fugitive Pieces
Michaels, Anne
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $23 ISBN: 067945439x Date: 1997BooklistPublishers WeeklyKirkus
PW Best Books '97
NYTBR Notable
A stunning debut novel from an award-winning poet. Jakob Beer, traumatically orphaned as a young child during WWII, learns, over his lifetime, the power of language to destroy, to omit, to obliterate, but also to restore and to conjure, witness and tell as he comes to understand and experience the extent of what was lost to him and what is possible for him to regain.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | Debuts - The Bell-Witch: An American Haunting
Monahan, Brent
Publisher: St Martins List Price: $20.95 ISBN: 031215061x Date: 1997Kirkus
The fantastic story of the only documented case in American history when a spirit actually killed a man, this book recounts the Bell Witch's entire story in exacting, horrifying, fascinating detail. Illustrated with line drawings from the period, this book is a wonderfully macabre and atnospheric tale. - Once a Hero
Moon, Elizabeth
Publisher: Baen List Price: $21 ISBN: 0671877690 Date: 1997Kirkus
From the author of the popular "Heris Serrano" series. Esme just wants a secure berth and to live out her life in peace. Instead she finds herself in the middle of a space battle and a senior surviving officer in a mutiny against a traitorous captain. Suddenly she's the youngest, lowest-ranking member of Fleet to ever win a major battle... and she can't help being a hero. - Literature or Life: A Novel
Semprum, Jorge
Publisher: Viking List Price: $24.95 ISBN: 0670872881 Date: 1997Kirkus
Jorge Semprun was just 20 when he was arrested for activities with the French Resistance and sent ot Buchenwald. This profound contribution ot Holocaust literature offers a deeply personal account of his time in the concentration camp, the years before and after, and his painful attempts to write this book. - Mount Misery
Shem, Samuel
Publisher: Fawcett List price: $24 ISBN: 0449911187 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
Samuel Shem, the pseudonym for a physician whose experiences at Harvard Medical School and Boston's Beth Israel Hospital were the inspiration for the classic black comedy House of God, returns to the same subject in his brilliant new novel set in a psychiatric hospital.
Suggested Reading: Medical Fiction - A Parisian from Kansas
Tapon, Phillippe
Publisher: Dutton List Price: $23.95 ISBN: 0525942394 Date: 1997BooklistKirkus
Booklist Editors Choice
Remarkably assured, accomplished, and spell-binding, this engaging story-within-a-story tells of the friendship between two Americans in Paris: the disaffected, world-weary HIV- positive Darren; and Phillipe, the sensitive, poetic young man who agrees to write Darren's novel. - Van Gogh's Bad Cafe : A Love Story
Tuten, Frederic
William Morrow & Co List Price: 20.00 ISBN: 0688151345 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
The highly acclaimed author of Tintin in the New World has written an incandescent, intense-as-a-painting fantasy/romance about the last days of Vincent Van Gogh and his obsessive love affair with an opium-addicted 19-year-old photographer - featuring a time trip to and from Alphabet City, New York in the 1990's. Color illustrations throughout. - The Black Sun
Williamson, Jack
Publisher: Tor List Price: $23.95 ISBN: 0312859376 Date: 1997Kirkus
In the near future, humankind's Project Starseed uses quantum-wave technology to send colonists to distant star systems. What they discover contains a startling, world-shattering revelation, inspiring a spine-tingling wonder in the endless possiblities of the universe. - Gut Symmetries
Winterson, Jeanette
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $22 ISBN:067945756 Date: 1997Kirkus
Hailed in the Washington Post as "one of our most important writers in English", Jeanette Winterson has firmly established her reputation as an extraordinarily daring and original novelist. In Gut Symmetries, lives and universes run parallel in a complex contemporary love story set in New York and Liverpool. - Leaning Towards Infinity
Woolfe, Sue
Publisher: Faber List Price: $24.95 ISBN: 0571199054 Date: 1997Kirkus
Woolfe's sensual and powerfully moving meditation on the relationship between mothers and daughters explores, prods, and picks at the force of genius--and the actions of genius--equally casting a searchlight around the dark world of mothering. "A rich, character-driven novel with an interesting story".--"St. Louis Post Dispatch".
- Spirits of the Ordinary: A Novel of Casas Grandes
Alcala, Kathleen
Publisher: Chronicle Books List Price: $22.95 ISBN: 0811814475 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
A spectacular tapestry of folklore, spirituality, and constantly shifting landscapes that follows three generations of the Carabajal family, this enchanting and original first novel will appeal to readers of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses and Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate. - The Hundred Brothers
Antrim, Donald
Publisher: Crown List Price: $21 ISBN: 0517703106 Date: 1997Kirkus
A comic novel by the critically acclaimed author of Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World. Doug and 98 of his 99 brothers (George has run off with embezzled funds and a girl named Jane) gather in the huge family library for dinner, drinking, and some late-night football. Throughout the evening, the chaos grows into a complex web of conflicting memories, hurt feelings, rivalries, alliances, and shared awareness. - Lives of the Monster Dogs
Bakis, Kirsten
Publisher: Farrar Strasu & Giroux List Price: $23 ISBN: 0374189870 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyLJ
NYTBR Editor's Choice
Here is a first novel like no other: a spellbinding tale that both creates its own fully realized world perspective and provides an incisive look at the ways that humans and animals resemble each other. A group of elegant monster dogs in top hats, tails, and bustle skirts become instant celebrities when they come to New York in 2008. Refugees from a town whose residents had been utterly isolated for a hundred years, the dogs retain the nineteenth-century Germanic culture of the humans who created them. They are wealthy and glamorous and seem to lead charmed lives - but they find adjusting to the modern world difficult, and when a young woman, Cleo Pira, befriends them, she discovers that a strange, incurable illness threatens them all with extinction. When the dogs construct their dream home, a fantastic castle on the Lower East Side, and barricade themselves inside, Cleo finds herself one of the few human witnesses to a mad, lavish party that may prove to be the final act in the drama of the lives of the monster dogs. - Publisher Marketing - Naming the New World : A Novel
Baker, Calvin
St Martins Pr (Trade) List Price: 18.95 ISBN: 0312151780 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
This multigenerational saga is epic in both scale and style, declaimed by a chorus of voices, inter-related by ancestry and Baker's tautly lyrical storytelling, that each rise out of the river of the African-American experience and then give way to the next, commenting on each other and coming together to form an unforgettable portrait of a people's passage to a new world. - Altered States
Brookner, Anita
Random House List Price: 23.00 ISBN: 0679449736 Date: 1997Kirkus
NYTBR Editor's Choice
The author of Hotel du Lac explores the conflicting needs of men and women - and the lack of understanding that divides them. Following the remarriage of his mother, Alan reluctanlty becomes engaged to fragile, needy Angela. When Sarah, the object of a previous, destructive affair, reenters his life, Alan embarks on an act of betrayal, the tragic consequences of which will change his life forever. - Texaco
Chamoiseau, Patrick
Publisher: Pantheon List Price: $27 ISBN: 0679432353 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyKirkus
PW Best Books of '97
NYTBR Notable
Winner of France's Prix Goncourt, this funny, passionate, and in exhaustively inventive novel is nothing less than a mythic history of the author's native Martinique and its Creole language and culture. "(Chamoiseau's) prose (is) Rabelaisian: erudite, vulgar, stupendously energetic . . . driven by an African beat".--"The New York Times Book Review". - Briar Rose
Coover, Robert
Grove/Atlantic List Price: 18.00 ISBN: 0802115918 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
NYTBR Notable
Briar Rose tells of a prince trapped in the briars, a sleeping beauty who cannot awaken and who dreams of a succession of kissing princes, as old spell-casting fairy who inhabits the princess's dreams regales her with legends of other sleeping beauties, and trying to imagine the nature of human desire.
Suggested Reading: Folk and Fairy Tales - The Beach
Garland, Alex
Publisher: Putnam List Price: $23.95 ISBN: 1573220485 Date: 1997Kirkus
In this unforgettable novel of innocence and horror, a hand-drawn map and rumors of Eden lead a young traveler in Thailand off the backpacker trail in search of a virgin landscape. "Garland...captures the secondhand yearnings of a generation actively seeking out genuine experience. . . The Beach sneaks up on you like the second tab of acid you took when you mistakenly thought the first one hadn't kicked in" (Douglas Ruskoff, author of Media Virus).
Suggested Reading: Thai Stars - The Ordinary Seaman
Goldman, Francisco
Atlantic Monthly Pr List Price: 22.00 ISBN: 0871136716 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyBooklistKirkus
PW Best Books of '97
L.A. Times Book Award Finalist
After learning that the ship on which he is to serve is a wreck, sitting idle with no plumbing or electricity, a 19-year-old Nicaraguan immigrant works up the courage to escape into Brooklyn and begin a new life.
Suggested Reading: Latino/Latina Stars | All Stars - The View from Here
Jackson, Brian Keith
Publisher: Pocket List Price: $22 ISBN: 0671568957 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
BCALA First Novelist Award Winner
In the tradition of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, this heartwrenching novel of black family life in the rural South surges with raw emotional power and deeply felt truth. Against a backdrop of casual prejudice and commonplace poverty, a gentle, hardworking wife and mother faces a challenge that could destroy the family she's fought so hard to keep together.
Suggested Reading: African American Stars - Asylum
McGrath, Patrick
Publisher: Random House List Price: $22 ISBN: 0679452281 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyKirkus
NYTBR Notable
The inimitable Patrick McGrath is back--with a dazzling story of sexual obsession and psychological suspense. The lonely wife of a staid and unimaginative forensic psychiatrist finds herself passionately drawn to a brilliant sculptor accused of murdering his wife. - Sanctuary: A Tale of Life in the Woods
Monette, Paul/ Schorr, David (Ilt)
Scribner List Price: 17.00 ISBN: 0684832860 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
This final, finely wrought work by the National Book Award-winning author of Becoming a Man presents a powerful human message. In the omnious, intolerant domain of the Great Horned Owl, the love between a fox and a rabbit is doubly condemned, for they are both female and of different species. Line drawings. - A Booke of Days: A Novel of the Crusades
Rivele, Stephen J.
Publisher: Carroll & Graf List Price: $22.95 ISBN: 786703482 Date: 1997Kirkus
A soaring epic of the Holy Land and the human heart, A Booke of Days is the captivating story of young French nobleman, Roger, Duke of Lunel, who departs from his home in Provence in the 11th century to join forces that will attempt to recapture Jerusalem from its Turkish occupiers.
Suggested Reading: Crusades - Only Twice I've Wished for Heaven
Trice, Dawn Turner
Crown Pub List Price: 23.00 ISBN: 0517704285 Date: 1997Kirkus
BCALA Honor Book
This brilliantly crafted, vibrant debut novel tells a story of friendship, betrayal, and the loss of childhood innocence. Even though her family has been chosen to "move on up" to Lakeland, a upscale part of Chicago for professional blacks, 11-yr-old Tempestt Saville is drawn to the world outside the fence, populated by colorful, often dangerous characters.
Suggested Reading: African American Stars - A Spanish Lover
Trollope, Joanna
Random House List Price: 22.00 ISBN: 0679425861 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyKirkus
A #1 bestseller in Britain, this passionate yet compellingly realistic novel is Trollope's most commercial to date. After a lifetime of not measuring up to her perfect twin sister, Lizzie, Frances decides to start playing by different rules. She takes a married lover, a Spanish Catholic who will neverleave his wife, and - much to everyone's surprise - becomes the envy of Lizzie. - Yo : A Novel
Alvarez, Julia
Algonquin Books List Price: 18.95 ISBN: 1565121570 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyKirkus
ALA RUSA Notable
Sexually magnetic and thrice married, obsessed by human circumstances and relationships, Yolanda Garcia has managed to put herself at the center of many lives. Told from the viewpoint of one of the family and friends first tangled in her web and now frozen in the spotlight her literary fame has generated, Yo! delivers delicious insight into the very nature of artistic creation and the material from which it is built.
Suggested Reading: Latino/Latina Stars | Humorous Fiction - The Error of Our Ways : A Novel
Carkeet, David
Henry Holt & Co List Price: 25.00 ISBN: 0805045023 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyKirkus
NYTBR Notable
For Ben Hudnut, life has been good, but Ben is about to become a modern-day suburban Job. A casual affair that ended a decade ago is returns to haunt him; his business is on the verge of bankruptcy, and his eldest daughter may be involved with one of her high-school teachers. Enter Jeremy cook, fellow sufferer and determined linguist, and what follows is a rich, literary comedy of errors. - Class Trip : A Novel
Carrere, Emmanuel
Henry Holt & Co List Price: 19.95 ISBN: 0805046941 Date: 1997Publishers Weekly
In Class Trip, little Nicolas embarks on an ill-fated overnight excursion. Prone to lurid imaginings of kidnappings and organ thefts, Nicolas watches his fantasies grow horrifyingly real when a local child disappears. Nicolas takes it upon himself to investigate, fearlessly playing detective -- until he uncovers the devastating truth. Dramatic, taut with intensity, Carrere's depictions of the terrifying anxieties and shifting realities of modern life are marvels of concentrated emotion. - Publisher Marketing - The Reconstruction
Casper, Claudia
St Martins Pr (Trade) List Price: 22.95 ISBN: 0312151993 Date: 1997Publishers WeeklyKirkus
Claudia Casper takes readers on an emotional journey that is at once tumultous, hilarious, and haunting with the story of Margaret, a scupltor, who is hired by a museum to build a life-sized model of "Lucy", mankind's ancestral link to the primate world. In doing so, she is forced to explore fundamental questions about evolution, the human condition and her own troubled and perplexing life. - In the Deep Midwinter
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