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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
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Starred Reviews
Fiction Stars of 1998
April 2, 2008
January - June
A list 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). Titles are listed by approximate date of publication, then alphabetically by author. Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine - unless otherwise noted.
Aindicates an Overbooked Jump for Joy book.
June
- Where
the Sea Used To Be
Author: Bass, Rick
Publisher: Houghton List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0395770157 Date: 1998
LJPWKirkus
LJ Best First Novel
This first full-length novel by the author of the Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness and the Book of Yaak tells the story of a struggle between a father and daughter for the souls of two men - his proteges, her lovers.
Suggested Reading: All Stars - The Night Season
Author: Bausch, Richard
Publisher: Harper/Flamingo List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0060187352 Date: 1998PW
After the untimely death of her husband, a young mother discovers that he had entered into a secret alliance with a group of very dangerous men in an effort to save his business. - The
Oxford Book of English Short Stories
Author: Byatt, A. S. (editor)
Publisher: Oxford List Price: $ 30 ISBN: 0192142380 Date: 1998LJ - Excalibur: A Novel of Arthur
(Warlord Chronicles #3)
Author: Cornwell, Bernard
Publisher: St. Martins List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0312185758 Date: 1998PWBooklist
The Winter King and Enemy of God established Bernard Cornwell as the writer capable of taking the beloved King Arthur legend and making it fresh and new for our time. In this riveting final volume of Cornwell's trilogy, Arthur and his warriors must face their Saxon enemies - now allied with Arthur's betrayer Lancelot - for the throne of all Britain.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars. Also - Jack Whyte's Camulod series: Skystone, Singing Sword, and Eagle's Brood. - The Black Brook
Author: Drury, Tom
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0395701945 Date: 1998Booklist
"It was a dry, dusty summer day in New Hampshire. Paul and Mary Emmons were having lunch in a diner called Happy's when Mary happened to notice a dog in a car in the parking lot with his head turned upside down." Thus begins the strange and captivating saga of Paul Nash, a.k.a. Paul Emmons, a fallen accountant whose inadvisable return to New England, the region of his crimes, sets the stage for this darkly comic novel of love, death, guilt, redemption, and the various forms of clam chowder. More than a dog's head gets turned upside down in the course of Paul's transatlantic misadventures. Through it all Paul strives to find and accomplish his mission in life, and myriad characters contrive to tell their stories -- of unkept promises, nightmarish evenings, identities lost and found. - Publisher Marketing. - Your Blue-Eyed Boy
Author: Dunmore, Helen
Publisher: Little Brown List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0316197386 Date: 1998PW
From the acclaimed author of Talking to the Dead comes a haunting new novel about a woman and her inescapable past. As a judge whose husband is on the verge of personal bankruptcy and breakdown struggles to shield her two sons from rising tensions at home, a letter threatens to destroy her public life. - Blues for Hannah
Author: Farrington, Tim
Publisher: Crown List Price: $ 21 ISBN: 0609602810 Date: 1998LJ
Struggling to keep his marriage to his college sweetheart afloat, Jeremiah Mason receives a call that turns his whole world upside-down: Hannah, a beautiful, rebellious blues singer - and his former love - has been killed in a car crash.
Suggested Reading: Music & Fiction - Bridget Jones's Diary
Author: Fielding, Helen
Publisher: Viking List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0670880728 Date: 1998PWKirkusBooklist
LJ Best First Novel, Booklist Notable First Novel, NYTBR Notable List
This laugh-out-loud chronicle charts a year in the life of Bridget Jones, a single thirty-something on a permanent doomed quest for self-improvement. Caught between her Singleton friends, who are all convinced they will end up dying alone and found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian, and the Smug Marrieds, whose dinner parties offer ever new opportunities for humiliation, Bridget struggles to keep her life on an even keel (or at least afloat). - From the Advance Uncorrected Proofs.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | Chicklit Stars - Vast Emotions and Imperfect Thoughts
Author: Fonesca, Ruben
Publisher: Ecco List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0880015837 Date: 1998Kirkus
A grieving film director in Rio - the nameless narrator - is visited by a Carnival dancer who leaves him with a box full of precious gems. A few days later, the dancer is dead, a man in a raincoat lurks outside the director's door, and a mysterious German producer surfaces with an irresistible offer: to make a film based on a story by the director's favorite author, the great Russian writer Isaac Babel. From this elemental framework the adventure begins. - Publisher Marketing
NYTBR Notable list - W.9 & Other Stories
Author: Gebler, Carlo
Publisher: Marion Boyars List Price: $ 25.95 ISBN: 0714530352 Date: 1998LJ
The characters depicted in this volume lead lives which are quintessentially modern; lonely, rootless and uncertain. These are not, however, stories of complaint or lament or melancholy. On the contrary, they illuminate and celebrate the courage and joy that are to be found flourishing in the most unlikely corners of human existence.
An essential primer for the way we live today, W9 and Other Stories spans the entire globe as each story gently shifts the reader's attention from one location to the next. A good number of them are situated in the author's native Ireland, where possessing a keen sense of place has a special significance all of its own. - Publisher Marketing.
- On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon
Author: Gibbons, Kaye
Publisher: Putnam List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0399142991 Date: 1998Booklist
NYTBR Notable List
The author of Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman does it again with a powerful new novel that invites readers to experience a long-gone South, through the life of Emma Garnet, a fascinating woman who lived from 1842 to 1900.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - The Undiscovered Country
Author: Gillison, Samantha
Publisher: Grove List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0802116272 Date: 1998PW
Set in the lush rain forests of Papua, New Guinea, this deeply evocative first novel is both a haunting family saga and a remarkable rendering of a clash of cultures. - Marchlands
Author: Kuban, Karla
Publisher: Scribner List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0684831651 Date: 1998PWBooklist
Fifteen-year-old Sophie Baer lives on a sprawling sheep ranch in Wyoming and is obsessed, despite the warnings of her mother, with finding her father and discovering why he left 11 years before. After a frighteningly violent reunion, Sophie seeks refuge and illumination from her grandmother. - I Know This Much Is True...
Author: Lamb, Wally
Publisher: Reganbooks List Price: $ 28.50 ISBN: 0060391626 Date: 1998PW
PW Best Books, NYTBR Notable List
The most eagerly awaited novel of 1998 - by the #1 bestselling the author of She's Come Undone. A contemporary retelling of an ancient Hindu myth, I Know This Much Is True begins as the nation limps toward the millennium, examining the past century of boom and bust and the ways in which history affects an individual family.
Suggested Reading: Twins - Final Vinyl Days and Other Stories
Author: McCorkle, Jill
Publisher: Algonquin List Price: $ 18.95 ISBN: 1565122046 Date: 1998LJKirkusPW
NYTBR Notable List
McCorkle's "stories plunge into her characters' souls and mine the truths about them they themselves can't admit and can't help revealing" (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Suggested Reading: All Stars - Mrs. Einstein
Author: McGrail, Anna
Publisher: Norton List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0393046117 Date: 1998KirkusLJ
When Albert Einstein was a young man, his wife-to-be gave birth to a daughter, Lieserl, whom they soon gave up for adoption. Beyond this, all knowledge of her is lost to history. A tour-de-force of the literary imagination, this novel of breathtaking audacity constructs Lieserl's fierce quest for revenge.
Suggested Reading: Alternative History Stars - The Treatment
Author: Menaker, Daniel
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0679422064 Date: 1998PWBooklist
NYTBR Notable List
Emotionally paralyzed by a case of the vapors, a young English teacher embarks on a course of psychoanalysis with a bodybuilding Cuban-Catholic Freudian whose tactics are worthy of the Spanish Inquisition, in this brilliantly conceived and sexy first novel.
Suggested Reading: Medical Fiction - The World in Pieces
Author: Midwood, Bart
Publisher: Permanent List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 1579620086 Date: 1998Kirkus
Just as a bit of sky joins the rooftop in a jigsaw puzzle, so does each piece of this novel join together. Literally out of the box, the pieces come: diaries, letters, stories, and then stories within stories - about a poet in Vienna, a French sailor on the Atlantic, an immigrant family in Argentina, and Italian stonemason, and a mad painter in Israel - until in the end a picture emerges and, as a result, the mystery of a tragic murder is solved. - The World I Made for Her
Author: Moran, Thomas
Publisher: Putnam List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 1573220841 Date: 1998KirkusBooklist
James Blatchley breathes and eats through tubes, slipping in and out of a coma. Nuala is the Irish immigrant nurse who coaxes him toward survival. The odd synergy of their relationship serves both as his link to reality and his inspiration to fantasy, in this hypnotic story by the author of The Man in the Box.
Suggested Reading: Medical Fiction reading list - My Heart Laid Bare
Author: Oates, Joyce Carol
Publisher: Dutton List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0525944427 Date: 1998PWKirkus
NYTBR Notable List
Bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates has created a wholly original story and a compelling new concept in American history in this sweeping chronicle of the fortunes and misfortunes of a family of enterprising and ingenious confidence artists. - A World Away
Author: O'Nan, Stewart
Publisher: Holt List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0805057749 Date: 1998PW
NYTBR Notable List, PW Best Books List
Set at a remote beachfront cottage in the Hamptons one summer during World War II, this rich, romantic story follows the fortunes of the Langer family, whose eldest son is missing in action in the Pacific theater.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - My Year of Meats
Author: Ozeki, Ruth
Publisher: Viking List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0670879045 Date: 1998PWKirkus
Jane Takagi-Little lands a job producing a Japanese television show, sponsored by an organization promoting the export of U.S. meats, and takes her crew on the road in search of all-American wives cooking all-American meat.
Suggested Reading: Asian American Stars - Ghost Country
Author: Paretsky, Sara
Publisher: Delacorte List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0385299338 Date: 1998Booklist
In the shadowy streets below Chicago's Loop, among the poor and downtrodden, a homeless woman believes that the blood of the Virgin Mary is seeping through a crack in a concrete wall. Ghost Country tells what happens in the lives of three people, after a mysterious woman appears at the wall during a thunderstorm.
Suggested Reading: Questions of Faith - London Holiday
Author: Peck, Richard
Publisher: Viking List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0670873683 Date: 1998PW
A wry, engaging novel of three women's midlife escape into the charming bustle of London - a stylish read scented with a dreamy touch of armchair travel.
Suggested Reading: Best of Friends by Joanna Trollope. - Freedomland
Author: Price, Richard
Publisher: Broadway List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0767900243 Date: 1998PWLJBooklist
NYTBR Notable List, Booklist Editors' Choice, PW Best Books List
The bestselling author of Clockers tells his most compelling and emotionally charged story yet, in the tale of an injured woman who claims that a carjacker has kidnapped her son, and the shrewd police officer and ambitious young reporter who smell a hoax.
Suggested Reading: All Stars - The Odd Sea
Author: Reiken, Frederick
Publisher: Harcourt List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 0151003602 Date: 1998BooklistKirkus
Booklist Notable First Novel, LJ Best First Novel
His brother is missing, and Philip, in his attempts to locate Ethan physically, finds himself trying to discover just who his older brother really was.
Suggested Reading: The Odyssey - This Is My Daughter
Author: Robinson, Roxana
Publisher: Random List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0679439013 Date: 1998PWLJ
NYTBR Notable List
After Peter and Emma, refugees from troubled first marriages, decide to blend their families, the opposing needs of parents and children cause tensions. - The Way I Found Her
Author: Tremain, Rose
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 0374286663 Date: 1998PWLJKirkusBooklist
NYTBR Notable List, PW Best Books List
A 13-year-old boy, spending the summer in Paris while his mother translates the latest medieval romance by an exotic Russian emigre novelist, finds himself falling victim to the enigmatic lady's charms.
Suggested Reading: All Stars - The Best of Friends
Author: Trollope, Joanna
Publisher: Viking List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0670897738 Date: 1998LJ
Gina returns to Laurence, her best friend since their teens but never her lover, for comfort when her marriage begins to fall apart - and sends both of their marriages to the brink of betrayal, in this rich and complex story by the author of The Choir.
Suggested Reading: London Holiday by Richard Peck.
May
- Galilee
Author: Barker, Clive
Publisher: Harpercollins List Price: $ 26 ISBN: 0060179473 Date: 1998PW
As wealthy as the Rockefellers, as glamorous as the Kennedys, the Geary family has been a powerful American presence since the Civil War. But behind their facade lies sinister secrets. - Radiance: Ten Stories
Author: Clayton, John Jacob
Publisher: Ohio St Pr List Price: $ 12.95 (trade paper) ISBN: 0814207804 Date: 1998PW - The Mermaids Singing
Author: Carey, Lisa
Publisher: Bard/Avon List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 0380976749 Date: 1998LJ
This stunning debut novel - rich with Celtic imagery and unforgettable characters - explores three generations of contemporary Irish-American mothers and daughters, in a story that vividly depicts truths universal to all families.
Suggested Reading: Debuts - Hullaballo in the Guava Orchard
Author: Desai, Kiran
Publisher: Atlantic List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0871137119 Date: 1998KirkusLJ
NYTBR Notable List, LJ Best First Novel
Kiran Desai offers a wryly hilarious and poignant story of life, love, and family relationships, simultaneously capturing the vivid culture of the Indian subcontinent and the universal intricacies of human experience.
Suggested Reading: Asian American Stars - The Aztec Love God
Author: Diaz, Tony
Publisher: Fc2/Black Ice List Price: $ 12.95 (trd pbk) ISBN: 1573660361 Date: 1998LJ
The Aztec Love God is a dark comedy about Tiofilio Duarte's climb to obscurity. Originally, young Tio wanted to perfect the comic role of the Aztec Love God, his ideal persona. Along the way he meets Jester, an older Caucasian comedian who makes Tio an offer he'd like to refuse. Jester offers Tio an opportunity to join his act. The only condition is that he, Tio, has to perform Latino stereotypes. Tio has to decide if he is going to take the blank check for easy thoughts or develop The Aztec Love God on his own. - Publisher Marketing.
- Secrets
Author: Farah, Nuruddin
Publisher: Little Brown List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 1559704276 Date: 1998Kirkus
Set against the backdrop of the civil war in Somalia, Secrets is a stunning, revelatory novel by Somali writer Nuruddin Farah, the author of several acknowledged classics of modern African fiction. Teeming with myth and metaphor, Secrets goes deep into the culture and mind-set of a continent and reveals a world that is a stimulating mix of the exotic and the familiar. Farah writes in English and is called a true master of the language. - Switcheroo
Author: Goldsmith, Olivia
Publisher: Harpercollins List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0060175680 Date: 1998Kirkus
Every wife wants to be treated like a mistress. Every mistress wants to become a wife. The switch is on when a look alike wife and mistress decide to trade places and see if the grass is greener on the other side, in this hilarious tale from the bestselling author of The First Wives Club. - Power
Author: Hogan, Linda
Publisher: Norton List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0393046362 Date: 1998Booklist
One of our best Native American writers, author of Solar Storms, presents a mythical, far-reaching masterpiece about a young girl at the crossroads, who must defend her place in the world. - About A Boy
Author: Hornby, Nick
Publisher: Putnam List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 1573220876 Date: 1998Kirkus
NYTBR Notable List
From the highly acclaimed author of the cult fiction hit High Fidelity, comes a funny, contemporary novel about sex, manliness, and fatherhood. Will doesn't want any children. He wonders why it bothers people that he lives so happily alone in his fashionable, Lego-free apartment, where no kid has ever thrown up on the rug. And then Will meets Angie...
Suggested Reading: Humorous Fiction - A Widow for One Year
Author: Irving, John
Publisher: Random List Price: $ 27.95 ISBN: 0375501371 Date: 1998PWBooklist
NYTBR Notable List
Twenty years after The World According to Garp, Irving gives readers a new novel about a family marked by tragedy and the "difficult" women who survive. Both ribald and erotic, A Widow for One Year is also a brilliant, multi-layered novel about the passage of time and the relentlessness of grief. - Deadville
Author: Jones, Robert F.
Publisher: Dunne List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 031285642 Date: 1998Booklist
The seventh novel by the acclaimed author of Buffalo Runners. 1833: Two young brothers strike out on a perilous journey into the untamed West, where Indians still reign as masters of the land. In search of riches, they instead find brutal hardship and heart-pounding adventure.
Suggested Reading: Western Stars - Leaving Small's Hotel
Author: Kraft, Eric
Publisher: Picador List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0312186894 Date: 1998Kirkus
Small's Hotel is where Peter and his wife have spent their lives, hosting visitors while Peter works on his memoirs. But as Peter nears 50, guests grow harder to come by, and soon the future of the hotel, and of every gift Peter dreams of giving his wife, are in jeopardy. - Defiance
Author: Maso, Carole
Publisher: Dutton List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0525943072 Date: 1998PW
In the incandescent, erotically charged prose for which she is known, Maso probes the depths of the female psyche to tell the story of a child prodigy who grows up to become a professor of physics at Harvard - a lonely, defiant women sentenced to die in the electric chair for the murder of two male students. - Cities of the Plain (Border Triology V.3)
Author: McCarthy, Cormac
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0679423907 Date: 1998PWBooklist
NYTBR Notable List, Booklist Editors' Choice
In this magnificent novel, the National Book Award-winning author of All the Pretty Horses fashions a darkly beautiful elegy for the American frontier. The setting is New Mexico in 1952, where ranch hands John Grady Cole and Billy Parham become ensnared in events resonating with the violence and inevitability of classic tragedy. - After Dunkirk
Author: McGraw, Milena
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0395868858 Date: 1998LJBooklist
At the threshold of World War II, Wayne Luthie leads the Wonders, an inexperienced British flight squadron playing at war form a safe distance. But soon the fighting draws near. Grace Paley hailed as "memorable and remarkable" this extraordinary debut novel, resonant with the passion and themes of The English Patient and Saving Private Ryan.
Suggested Reading: Debuts | World War Stars - The Knife Thrower
Author: Millhauser, Steven
Publisher: Crown List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0609600702 Date: 1998PWKirkusBooklist
NYTBR Notable List
"The most innovative, wistful, sexy, and dryly comic American writer of our time" (Washington Post Book World) returns with an eclectic yet unmistakably Millhauser collection of stories, his first book since the publication of his Pulitzer prize-winning novel, Martin Dressler.
Suggested Reading: All Stars - Now It's Time to Say Goodbye
Author: Peck, Dale
Publisher: Farrar List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0374222711 Date: 1998BooklistLJ
The introduction of two disillusioned New Yorkers into a community divided by race triggers a brutal string of events, all linked to dark secrets of long ago. - The Pact: A Love Story
Author: Picoult, Jodi
Publisher: Morrow List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0688158129 Date: 1998Booklist
From an acclaimed author comes a riveting, timely, and terrifying novel of friendship, loyalty, lifelong love - and teenage suicide. When a 17-year-old girl dies from a gunshot wound to the head, her boyfriend, who swears they had a suicide pact, is tried for murder.
Suggested Reading: Too Cool by Duff Brenna. - Loves That Bind
Author: Rios, Julian
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0375400583 Date: 1998KirkusBooklist
NYTBR Notable List, Booklist Editors' Choice
An intensely erotic and shamelessly literary adventure, written by one of Spain's most distinguished novelists. Emil, abandoned by the woman he loves, resolves to wander London in search of his fugitive lover and write to her concerning all his conquests before her: 26 letters about 26 women, each bearing an uncanny resemblance to a famous heroine of literature.
Suggested Reading: Casanova in Love by Andrew Miller and The Anatomist by Frederico Andahazi. - Impossible Saints
Author: Roberts, Michele
Publisher: Ecco List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0880015977 Date: 1998PW
In this wily, fantastic, and splendidly entertaining novel, inspired in part by the writings of Saint Theresa, questions of incest, sanctity, and a woman's proper place overlap and merge in an intricate web of stories. - Rings of Saturn
Author: Sebald, W.G.
Publisher: New Directions List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0811213781 Date: 1998Kirkus
NYTBR Notable List
A fictional account of a walking tour through England's East Anglia, Sebald's home for more than twenty years, The Rings of Saturn explores Britain's pastoral and imperial past. Its ten strange and beautiful chapters, with their curious archive of photographs, consider dreams and reality. - The Willow Tree
Author: Selby, Hubert
Publisher: Marion Boyers List Price: $ 25.95 ISBN: 0714530247 Date: 1998Booklist
Booklist Editors' Choice
Bobby is young and black - still in high school but old beyond his years. His daddy upped and left years ago, and his mother can barely cope with life in the run-down corner of New York where they struggle to survive. The best thing in Bobby's life is Maria, a Hispanic girl from down the street. They love each other and have big plans for the summer that lies ahead of them, after school is out. They get jumped by a vicious Hispanic street gang in the South Bronx. With Bobby savagely beaten and Maria lying in hospital waiting for skin grafts to cover her badly burned face, The Willow Tree takes the reader on a volcanically powerful trip through the lives of America's dispossessed inner-city dwellers. Into this bleak and smouldering hinterland, however, comes a small but vital note of love and compassion as Bobby struggles angrily with his own sense of loss and his desperate need for revenge.An outstandingly gifted voice in modern American literature, Selby has created in The Willow Tree a luminescent statement on the nature of human grace and the need for forgiveness. - Publisher Marketing. - The Pilot's Wife
Author: Shreve, Anita
Publisher: Little, Brown List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0316789089 Date: 1998PW
Gripping new fiction from the author of The Weight of Water. Kathryn Lyons' life turns to chaos when her pilot husband is killed in a plane crash. As she struggles with her grief, Kathryn faces shocking revelations about the secrets a man can keep and the actions a women is willing to take. - Lost Lake: Stories
Author: Slouka, Mark
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 21 ISBN: 0375402152 Date: 1998PW
NYTBR Notable List
In 12 muscular, equisitely written fishing stories linked by character and setting, Slouka captures the way a place can inhabit a people, and proves himself a new master of the short form. - Damascus Gate
Author: Stone, Robert
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin List Price: $ 26 ISBN: 0395665698 Date: 1998PWBooklistLJ
National Book Award Finalist, NYTBR Notable List, Booklist Editors' Choice, PW Best Books List
Set in Jerusalem, where violence, ecstasy, heresy, and salvation are all to be found, the latest novel by the author of Outerbridge Reach is simultaneously the story of a man's search for truth - or some version of it - and the story of a city where sanity is casually traded for faith. Christopher Lucas's investigation of religious lunatics who have fallen victim to "Jerusalem Syndrome" leads him to a series of colorful characters - and places him at the center of the world's next flashpoint.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | Terrorism - Midsummer Night
Author: Timm, Uwe
Publisher: New Directions List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0811213722 Date: 1998PW
The narrator of Timm's story is a writer who simply can't get started on his next book. So he accepts a commission to write an article about potatoes. He has some interest in the subject because of an uncle who could, remarkably, from taste alone, differentiate one species of potato from another. Since it turns out that one of the authorities on the subject worked in East Berlin, our hero takes off to do some research. Rushing between the East and West sectors of the now-united city the narrator becomes involved in a series of madcap adventures: odd, sometimes threatening encounters with all sorts of people, and strange entanglements. - Publisher Marketing. - A Patchwork Planet
Author: Tyler, Anne
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0375402056x Date: 1998PWKirkus
NYTBR Notable List
There is no one like Anne Tyler. With her sharp, funny, tender perceptions about how human beings navigate in a puzzling world, Tyler's novels keep readers enthralled from start to finish. Now, in A Patchwork Planet, her 14th novel, Tyler tells the story of a terrible loser trying to get his life in order, who encounters all the usual - and some unexpected - pitfalls along the way. - The Lake Dreams the Sky: A Love Story
Author: Wolfe, Swain
Publisher: Cliff Street List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 006174129 Date: 1998Kirkus
A departure from his critically acclaimed fable The Woman Who Lives In the Earth, Wolfe's second novel offers a sensuous and haunting love story set in the post WWII era, concerning a waitress and a drifter, whose defiance of society's unwritten rules turns them into outcasts.
Suggested Reading: The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks and The Firebird by Janice Graham.
April
- River Angel
Author: Ansay, A. Mannette
Publisher: Morrow List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0688152430 Date: 1998LJ
NYTBR Notable List
With acute insight and great compassion, A. Manette Ansay captures the inner life of a town and its residents struggling to forge a new identity in the face of a rapidly changing world. The result is a novel of transcendental beauty, an extraordinary portrait of the human soul's longing for grace. - The Coast of Good Intentions
Author: Byers, Michael
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin List Price: $ 12 (trade paper) ISBN: 0395891701 Date: 1998PWBooklist
NYTBR Notable List, Booklist Editors' Choice
This dazzling debut collection from a Seattle native features stories evocatively set along the Northwest coast, stories of quiet but astonishing lives. Psychologically complex and glowing with warmth, these rich stories recall Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver.
Suggested Reading: Debuts - The Archivist
Author: Cooley, Martha
Publisher: Little Brown List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0316158720 Date: 1998PWKirkus
NYTBR Notable List, Booklist Notable First Novel, LJ Best First Novel, PW Best Books List
In the masterful tradition of A.S. Byatt's Possession, a rich and thoughtful debut novel about passion and loss woven against a backdrop of poetry and the secret correspondence between T.S. Eliot and Emily Hale.
Suggested Reading: Debuts - Quarantine
Author: Crace, Jim
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0374239622 Date: 1998KirkusPW
NYTBR Notable List, PW Best Books List
The brilliantly imagined story of Christ's forty days in the wilderness - a tale of three men, a woman, and a curious wanderer whose peculiar fate is transformed into legend - Quarantine is a work at once timeless - and timely- a parable for the ages. Short-listed for England's Booker Award.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - The Priest Fainted
Author: Davidson, Catherine Temma
Publisher: Holt List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0805055398 Date: 1998LJ
NYTBR Notable List
Davidson blends memories, Greek myths, recipes, and family gossip to uncover a hidden history, which is the story of one woman's year in Greece as it crosses and doubles back over the lives of her mother and grandmother. - In the Beginning
Author: Dunne, Catherine
Publisher: Trafalgar List Price: $ 17.95 (paper) ISBN: 0224044265 Date: 1998LJ - The Antelope Wife
Author: Erdrich, Louise
Publisher: HarperFlamingo List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0060187623 Date: 1998PWBooklist
NYTBR Notable List
Originally an important hunting ground for the Ojibwa, Minneapolis draws many Native people from nearby reservations, who infuse the city with a strong and ongoing Native presence as well as a potent indigenous past. The Antelope Wife brings to life the people who live in or around this Midwestern city. - Service of Clouds
Author: Falconer, Delia
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0374261059 Date: 1998
Kirkus
In 1907, in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, Eureka Jones, a young pharmacist's assistant with "historical eyes", falls in love with Harry Phillips, a man from elsewhere who photographs clouds and the shadows they cast on the land. Australian writer Delia Falconer's first novel tells the story of their romance, which unfolds in a small town of colorful eccentrics.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - Black Ajax
Author: Fraser, George MacDonald
Publisher: Carroll & Graf List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0786705531 Date: 1998PW
Dazzling new fiction by the creator of Flashman. Bringing historical fact spiritedly to life, Black Ajax tells the powerful, rollicking, and moving tale of Tom Molineaux, a freed slave from New Orleans, who becomes Regency England's greatest boxing contender.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - Summer at Gaglow
Author: Freud, Esther
Publisher: Norton List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0880015853 Date: 1998LJ
NYTBR Notable List
Alternating between an actress's present-day existence and her grandmother's childhood during the First World War, Summer at Gaglow unites four generations of an extraordinary family across the vast reaches of silence, place, loss, and time. - Making History
Author: Fry, Stephen
Publisher: Random List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0679459553 Date: 1998Booklist
An extravagantly imaginative, funny, and troubling supposition, Making History is based on a deceptively simple premise: What if Hitler had never been born? The most ambitious work yet by British actor/writer Stephen Fry.
Suggested Reading: Humorous Fiction | Alternative History Stars - Sultry Moon
Author: Giardinelli, Mempo
Publisher: Latin American Literary Review List Price: $ 13.95 (trade paper) ISBN: 0935480927 Date: 1998Booklist
Topping Argentina's bestseller list for 27 weeks and winner of Mexico's National Book Award, translated into eight languages, Sultry Moon is a gripping, fast-paced thriller, wherein the protagonist returns from France to the prospect of a brilliant career. But his life takes an unexpected turn, and he becomes a violent monster, living out the paranoid psychology of a criminal on the run. - Publisher Marketing. - Flutie
Author: Glancy, Diane
Publisher: Moyer Bell List Price: $ 18.95 ISBN: 1559212128 Date: 1998Booklist
There is a little brick house in an isolated valley in deepest Wales. To this idyllic retreat come Eloise and Simon, a young couple escaping the city. Eloise has led the way, inspired by the teachings of her muse, Moonbird, who holds that Mother Nature looks with benign concern upon her human children and sees to their well-being. At first all is well for Eloise and Simon and their cat M'sieu. Eloise spends her days sewing old-fashioned night dresses and petticoats which she sells to an exclusive shop in town; Simon does woodworking and odd jobs for the nearby farmers. The garden, the woods, the hills, the silence are all as Moonbird had promised. Or almost. For one day, four men, incongruously dressed in city suits and street shoes and carrying briefcases, walk up the country lane to the little house, and things begin to happen. Uncanny, inexplicable things. Things even Eloise's mother, Clare, and Clare's best friend, Miriam, who arrive from London, can't make heads or tails of. The two older women bicker and fuss, trying to decipher the younger woman's increasingly strange behavior. And then Eloise returns from a walk in the woods with a baby in her arms... - Publisher Marketing.
- Kalimantaan
Author: Godshalk, C.S.
Publisher: Holt/Wood List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0805055339 Date: 1998PWBooklist
NYTBR Notable List, PW Best Books List, Booklist Notable First Novel
One hundred and fifty years ago, a young Englishman founded a private raj on the coast of Borneo. The world that resulted eventually encompassed a territory the size of England - its campaign paid for in human heads. Kalimantaan is the story of Victorian social mores superimposed on one of the most violent cultures on Earth and a remarkable tribe of fugitives, missionaries, and romantics drawn to this remote outpost.
Suggested Reading: Debuts | Historical Fiction Stars
Suggested Reading: The English Passengers by Matthew Kneale. - An Ocean in Iowa
Author: Hedges, Peter
Publisher: Hyperion List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 078686404 Date: 1998PW
In his second novel, the acclaimed author of What's Eating Gilbert Grape? returns to the heartland for his setting - this time suburban Iowa, 1969. Scotty Ocean is turning seven, and has announced that this will be his year. And, after his mother abandons the family, it does turn out to be Scotty's year, as he attempts astonishing things to get her to come back. - Tidewater Blood
Author: Hoffman, William
Publisher: Algonquin List Price: $ 21.95 ISBN: 1565121872 Date: 1998PW
Set in Virginia in the 1980's, Tidewater Blood opens at the annual LeBlanc family celebration. But this year's celebration goes off with more of a bang than the rich and pretentious LeBlancs had counted on. Just as the party is set to begin, the front of the mansion house explodes. Now Charley, the LeBlanc family black sheep, finds himself looking for a killer. - The Page Turner
Author: Leavitt, David
Publisher: Houghton List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 039575285x Date: 1998LJ
In his first novel since While England Sleeps, David Leaavitt movingly and provocatively explores the relationship between a gifted musician an his young protege. By turns comic and heartbreaking, shrewd, and intimate, The Page Turner testifies not only to the tenancity of the human spirit but to the resiliency of the human heart. - Girl in Landscape
Author: Lethem, Jonathan
Publisher: Doubleday List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0385485182 Date: 1998KirkusPW
Fourteen-year-old Pella flees a post-apocalyptic Brooklyn for the frontier of a recently discovered planet. Girl in Landscape is a daring exploration of the violent nature of sexual awakening, a meditation on language and perception, and a homage to the great American tradition of the western - a genre-blowing, mind-blowing tale. - 1916: A Novel of the Irish Rebellion
Author: Llywelyn, Morgan
Publisher: Forge List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 031286101x Date: 1998PW
The Easter Rising of 1916 was a major turning point in Irish history. Peopled by patriots and poets, fueled by a common cause, and played out in the historic streets of Dublin, it is a story everyone knows and no one will ever forget. Now Morgan Llywelyn offers a stirring and powerful novel set against the backdrop of this life-changing event.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - The Cockfighter
Author: Manley, Frank
Publisher: Coffeehouse List Price: $ 19.95 ISBN: 156689073x Date: 1998KirkusPWLJ
In this exquisite debut novel, Manley presents an integral part of the rural American experience where the human spirit, young as it may be, prevails against seemingly overwhelming odds. At the age of 13, Sonny's father, presents him with his own rooster, causing Sonny to make one of the biggest decisions of his young life - one that will change him forever.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | Debuts | Noir - Jacob's Ladder: A Story of Virginia During the War
Author: McCaig, Donald
Publisher: Norton List Price: $ 25.95 ISBN: 039304629x Date: 1998PWLJ
A novel that resonates with the bitter glory and deep human shame of the Confederacy. Against the epic canvas of the Civil War, the people, black and white, of one Virginia plantation fulfill their unforgettable destinies.
Suggested Reading: Civil War Fiction | Virginia Stars - This Side of Brightness
Author: McCann, Colum
Publisher: Holt/Metropolitan List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0805054418 Date: 1998PWBooklist
NYTBR Notable List, Booklist Editors' Choice
In the early years of the century, Nathan Walker leaves his native Georgia for New York City and the most dangerous job in America - as a sandhog, burrowing beneath the East River, digging the tunnel that will carry trains from Brooklyn to Manhattan.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - The Men of Brewster Place
Author: Naylor, Gloria
Publisher: Hyperion List Price: $22.95 ISBN: 0786864214 Date: 1998PW
In a brilliant new novel, American Book Award winner Gloria Naylor revisits the neighborhood that first brought her the respect and affection of readers everywhere. The Men of Brewster Place explores the lives of seven men, and gives readers new insight into the original women characters first met in the bestselling 1982 novel, The Women of Brewster Place.
Suggested Reading: African American Stars - Salvation and Other Disasters
Author: Navakovich, Josip
Publisher: Graywolf List Price: $ 12.95 (trade paperback) ISBN: 1555972713 Date: 1998LJ
An award-winning writer presents a collection of haunting and darkly comic stories set in the former Yugoslavia. Croatian-born Josip Novakovich combines his own village wit and urban sophistication to his stories--some fabulist and absurd, some filled with grim energy and nightmarish situations. As Kirkus has said, it "should be a source of some national pride, that Novakovich is now an American writer". - Tivolem
Author: Rangel-Ribeiro, Victor
Publisher: Milkweed List Price: $ ? ISBN: 1571310193 Date: 1998LJ
Booklist Notable First Novel
Filled with rich, tantalizing detail, gentle humor, and ghosts of a country both international and personal, this warm, sweeping portrait of a small village in a Portuguese colony in India in the 1930's transports readers to a magical place and time gone forever. - Requiem for Harlem
Author: Roth, Henry
Publisher: St. Martin's List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0312169808 Date: 1998BooklistKirkus
Completed months before Henry Roth's death, Mercy of a Rude Stream has, since the publication of Volume I in 1994, become a literary event of epic dimensions. Here, in Requiem for Harlem, Roth continues the story of Ira Stigman, a senior at City College, who has fallen in love with his patron and New York University professor of poetry, Edith Welles. Unable to break the ties with either his greenhorn parents or his cousin in Harlem with whom he is sexually involved, Ira decides to get out of Harlem. - Blue Bossa
Author: Schneider, Bart
Publisher: Viking List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 067087695x Date: 1998BooklistPW
Booklist Notable First Novel, LJ Best First Novel
A haunting debut novel inspired by music and the life of legendary trumpeter Chet Baker. In 1970's San Francisco, Ronnie Reboulet, a charming but emotionally distant man, struggles to make a life free of drugs and outside the music business. With the help of his wife and daughter, Ronnie attempts a comeback that will have readers rooting for him every step of the way.
Suggested Reading: Music & Fiction | Debuts - The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton
Author: Smiley, Jane
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 26 ISBN: 0679450742 Date: 1998PWBooklistLJ
NYTBR Notable List, PW Best Books List
Four years after her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres, and two years after her hilarious novel of Academe, Moo, the brilliantly protean Jane Smiley once again demonstrates the variety and range of her talent. In her new books Smiley gives readers the wonderfully observed memoirs of a woman who marries an abolitionist from New England and with him settles in Kansas in the fateful year of 1855 to help ensure that the territory will enter the Union as a free state.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | All Stars - Roverandom
Author: Tolkien, J.R.R.
Publisher: Houghton List Price: $ 17 ISBN: 0395898714 Date: 1998LJ
A major event for fantasy lovers everywhere - a previously unpublished book-length romp by the author of The Hobbit. In 1925, while on vacation on the Yorkshire coast, Tolkien's four-year-old son Michael loses his favorite toy, a little lead dog. To console and distract him, his father improvises a story - the tale of Rover, a real dog magically transformed into a toy, who has fantastic adventures while searching for the wizard who wronged him. - The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto
Author: Vargas Llosa, Mario
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux List Price: $ ? ISBN: 0374223270 Date: 1998LJKirkus
NYTBR Notable List, LJ Best Books List
Set in Lima, the novel tells of a love triangle whose participants may be the fictional creations of Don Rigoberto. With his usual sly assurance, Vargos Llosa keeps the reader guessing which episodes are real and which issue from the Don's imagination. - The Story of My Disappearance
Author: Watkins, Paul
Publisher: Picador List Price: $ 21 ISBN: 0312179952 Date: 1998PW
This atmospheric, utterly gripping new novel by one of America's most acclaimed younger authors tells a suspenseful story of one man's struggle to protect his life, his past, and the secrets of the woman he loves. Off the coast of New England, two exiles must find the strength to satisfy the impossible demands of men who claim to own them. - Ripley Bogle
Author: Wilson, Robert McLiam
Publisher: Arcade List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 1559704241 Date: 1998PW
Ripley Bogle, a self-proclaimed bum and Irish expatriate from Belfast, is a Cambridge dropout who wanders the streets of London, treating the reader to the ruminations of his teeming, romping imagination. How could anyone of Bogle's prodigious intelligence and powers of perception end up in vagabondage? - Medea
Author: Wolfe, Christa
Publisher: Doubleday List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0385490607 Date: 1998Booklist
March
- Cavedweller
Author: Allison, Dorothy
Publisher: Dutton List Price: $24.95 ISBN: 0525941673 Date: 1998PWKirkusBooklistLJ
NYTBR Notable List
From the bestselling author of Bastard Out of Carolina comes a novel of the lives of four women and redemption of the human heart. Ten years ago, Delia Byrd left her home in Georgia for Los Angeles, leaving behind the husband who abused her and abandoning her two daughters, one an infant. Now, as she heads back to Georgia to make a deal with the man to whom she has paid such a high price, Delia's past uncoils into the present with a ferocity that will test her very being.
Suggested Reading: All Stars - Cloudsplitter
Author: Banks, Russell
Publisher: Harper Flamingo List Price: $ 27.50 ISBN: 0060994606 Date: 1998PWLJ
NYTBR Editors' Choice, PW Best Books List, Booklist Editors' Choice
This brilliant recounting of the events surrounding John Brown's legendary raid on the armory at Harper's Ferry is a masterpiece of modern American storytelling that will be remembered as the crowning achievement of Banks' celebrated career.
Suggested Reading: Civil War Fiction - Solibo Magnificent
Author: Chamoiseau, Patrick
Publisher: Pantheon List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0679432361 Date: 1998PWKirkus
NYTBR Notable List
Chamoiseau's grand and intriguing riff on the police procedural, Solibro Maginifcent represents another masterpiece by the author of the award-winning Texaco. It's carnival time at Fort-de-France, Martinique. Before an enraptured public, the great teller of tales, Solibro Magnificent, is felled, seemingly choked by his own words. Is it autostrangulation or murder? - The House of Sleep
Author: Coe, Jonathan
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0375400931 Date: 1998PW
NYTBR Notable List
Following The Winshaw Legacy - Coe's ecstatically received American debut novel - comes this beguiling, hilarious entertainment, a moving (if gender-bending) romance. Sarah is a narcoleptic, and her inability to distinguish between dreams and waking reality gives rise to many misunderstandings - one of which will change Robert's life forever, as he attempts to win her love. - The Volunteer
Author: Coleman, Carter
Publisher: Warner List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0446522031 Date: 1998LJ
After numerous infidelities and a messy break-up, a burnt-out attorney joins the Peace Corps to reform and redeem himself. He finds peace in the serene plains and mountains of Tanzania, teaching villagers to fish - until he becomes attached to one of his young charges who's about to undergo a barbaric ritual to please her fiance. - Whistle
Author: Daugharty, Janice
Publisher: Harper Flamingo List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 0060175516 Date: 1998PW
Just out of prison after serving time on a drug charge, Roper Rackard comes across a woman's body while mowing the tall grass at the far end of his new boss's property, and although he is innocent of her death, Roper panics.Terrified that he will be charged with murdering a white woman and sent back to jail, he decides to hide the body where it won't be found. As days and then weeks pass, and the search for the missing woman continues, Roper begins to doubt himself. Did he do the right thing? Why didn't he call for help? Will anybody believe he is innocent and, most important, how can he possibly come forward now? - Publisher Marketing. - The Dower House
Author: Davis-Goff, Annabel
Publisher: St Martin's List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0312170289 Date: 1998PW
NYTBR Notable List
Molly Hassard grows up in the dower house, built to accommodate a series of Hassard widows displaced by the death of their husbands and the marriages of their sons. Molly, an upper-middle class orphan in an Ireland emerging from the post-war years, soon learns that coming of age means not mearly growing up but finding her place between the romance of tradition and the allure of the new. - The Next Step in the Dance
Author: Gautreaux, Tim
Publisher: Picador List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0312181434 Date: 1998Kirkus
Booklist Notable First Novel
The author of Same Place, Same Things explores the powerful bonds of marriage and tradition. Paul Thibodeaux is a handsome young man married to Colette, the most beautiful woman in the small Louisiana town where they grew up. When Colette wants more from lfe and sets off for California, Paul follows there and back and works to salvage their lives. - Saints and Villains
Author: Giardina, Denise
Publisher: Norton List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0393045714 Date: 1998PWKirkus
An astonishing novel in the tradition of Schindler's List, Saints and Villains dramatizes the painful dilemma of acting morally in a time of great evil through the fictional recreation of the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This emblematic figure risked his life - and finally lost it- through his participation in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - Shadows of a Childhood: A Novel of War and Friendship
Author: Gille, Elisabeth
Publisher: New Press List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 1565843886 Date: 1998PWLJ
Two young Jewish girls are hidden in a Bordeaux convent to escape the Nazi roundup. After the war, one girl resumes a normal life, while the other searches for answers about their parents' disappearance.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - Spending
Author: Gordon, Mary
Publisher: Scribner List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 06784839458 Date: 1998LJPW
NYTBR Notable List
An erotic and highly intelligent new novel about women, art, sex, and money by the acclaimed author of Final Payments. When a middle-aged, moderately successful painter becomes the lover of a wealthy commodities broker who volunteers to be her muse - and then the man subsequently loses his fortune - the tale of their trek back to power makes for a witty and provocative tale. - The Short History of a Prince
Author: Hamilton, Jane
Publisher: Random List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0679457550 Date: 1998PWBooklistLJKirkus
PW Best Books List, Booklist Editors' Choice
In her first publication since her Oprah Book Club appearance for The Book of Ruth, the bestselling author of A Map of the World returns with a tour-de-force - an unforgettable story that tells of the way a family - and a son's place in it - can change overnight.
Suggested Reading: All Stars - The Last Voyage
Author: Hanley, James
Publisher: Harvill (FSG) List Price: $ 16 (trade paperback) ISBN: 1860463169 Date: 1998PW
Short Stories. - Oyster
Author: Hospital, Janet Turner
Publisher: Norton List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0393046184 Date: 1998PWKirkusLJBooklist
NYTBR Notable List, PW Best Books List
"One of the best female novelists currently writing in English" (The Observer, London) offers a brilliant novel which evokes the holocaust of Waco, but is also about the destructive power of greed, the racism of rural Australia, and the nature of good and evil.
Suggested Reading: All Stars - The Last Paradise
Author: Houston, James D.
Publisher: Univ of Oklahoma List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0806130334 Date: 1998Booklist
Resonating with ancient themes of quest and transformation, The Last Paradise follows Travis Doyle, a Vietnam veteran working as an insurance claims adjuster, from California to Hawai'i. Doyle is dispatched to investigate fire damage to outbuildings, equipment, and vehicles at a geothermal drilling site located in volcanic lava fields believed by the local inhabitants to be the home of Pele, the fire goddess. - The Dragon Can't Dance
Author: Lovelace, Earl
Publisher: Persea List Price: $24 ISBN:0892552344 Date: 1998Booklist
Carnival takes on social and political importance in this recognized classic. The people of the shantytown Calvary Hill, usually invisible to the rest of society, join the throng and flaunt their neighborhood personas in masquerade during Carnival. Aldrick, the dashing "king of the Hill, " becomes a glorious, dancing dragon; his lovely Sylvia, a princess; Fisheye, rebel idealist, a fierce steel band contestant; and Philo, Calypso songwriter, a star. Then a business sponsors Fisheye's band, Philo gets a hit song, and Sylvia leaves the Hill with a prosperous older man. For Aldrick, it will take one more masquerade -- this time, involving guns and hostages -- before the illusion of power becomes reality. - Publisher Marketing. - Mendel's Dwarf
Author: Mawer, Simon
Publisher: Harmony List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0609601067 Date: 1998PWLJBooklistKirkus
NYTBR Notable List
In the tradition of A Prayer for Owen Meany, this riveting , thought-provoking book takes readers into the brave new world of genetic science, as seen through the eyes and heart of a man who knows that his own particular strain of humanity will have no place within it.
Suggested Reading: All Stars - Tempest Rising
Author: McKinney-Whetstone, Diane
Publisher: Morrow List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0688149944 Date: 1998LJ
Set in west Philadelphia in the early 1960's, Tempest Rising tells the story of three sisters, Bliss, Victoria, and Shern, budding adolescents raised in a world of privilege among upper-class blacks. But their lives quickly unravel when their father's lucrative business collapses.
Suggested Reading: African American Stars - Goodnight, Nebraska
Author: McNeal, Tom
Publisher: Random List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 067945733x Date: 1998LJBooklist
LJ Best First Novel, Booklist Notable First Novel
A stunning debut novel, Goodnight, Nebraska tells the story of a Midwest town as alive as life itself. Into this crossroads comes a young man whose mysterious past not even the most imaginative of Goodnight's citizens could have guessed. Woven throughout his story are a dozen intense and interlocking tales - all as absorbing and unique as any in Winesburg, Ohio or The Spoon River Anthology.
Suggested Reading: Debuts - The Most Wanted
Author: Mitchard, Jacquelyn
Publisher: Viking List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0670878847 Date: 1998Booklist
The incandescent new novel by the acclaimed author of The Deep End of the Ocean bursts to life with the bright light of a forest fire--in the story of a reckless love that breaks all the rules. When 14-year-old Arley Mowbray falls in love and secretly marries an outlaw, public-aid lawyer Annie Singer--whose own careful life is catapulted into change the moment she meets the girl--becomes first her advocate, and then the closest thing to a mother that Arley has ever known. - Turtle Belly
Author: Monture, Joel
Publisher: Univ of Oklahoma List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0806130105 Date: 1998LJ
Sam, hero of Turtle Belly, is a mixed blood with skin the color of a turtle's belly. Joel Monture describes Sam's struggle to form an identity that combines his violent father's white world and his mother's traditional Mohawk culture. - Weird Women, Wired Women
Author: Reed, Kit
Publisher: Wesleyan Univ List Price: $ 40 (hardback) ISBN: 0819522546 Date: 1998
List Price; $16.95 (paperback) ISBN: 0819522554KirkusLJ
Kit Reed has been delighting and terrifying readers for over 30 years with her darkly comic fiction. "Her writing is a treasure house of gems", writes Washington Post Book World. This collection of short stories, drawn from a lifetime's work, shows Reed at the top of her form. First published in venues ranging from The Missouri Review to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, these 20 stories deal with women's lives and feminist issues from the kitchen sink and pink dishmop era through the warlike years of the women's movement to the uneasy accommodation of the present. - Publisher Marketing. - Pandora: New Tales of the Vampires
Author: Rice, Anne
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 19.95 ISBN: 0375401598 Date: 1998Kirkus
The creator of Vampire Lestat, the Mayfair witches, and the fantastic worlds they inhabit, now gives readers the first in a series of novels linked together by the fledgling vampire David Talbot, who has set out to become a chronicler. Two-thousand-year-old Pandora is the child of the Millennia, the first vampire ever made by the great Marius. When David meets Pandora, he persuades her to write the story of her life. - Children of God
Author: Russell, Mary Doria
Publisher: Villard List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 067945635x Date: 1998LJ
From the acclaimed author of The Sparrow comes an imaginative novel featuring Father Emilio Sandoz and his quest for the secret of God's immortal plan. - Karoo
Author: Tesich, Steve
Publisher: Harcourt Brace List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0151002959 Date: 1998PWKirkusLJ
NYTBR Notable List
Saul Karoo is a successful Hollywood script doctor, a fixer of flawed film. The unnecessary scenes that he has effortlessly cut form other people's screenplays seems to threaten his own life. But Karoo is the ultimate fixer and must find an emotional and intellectual solution to the problems of his own life.
Suggested Reading: Hollywood Stars | All Stars - Love Ruins Everything
Author: Tulchinsky, Karen X.
Publisher: Press Gang List Price: $ 14.95 (trade paper) ISBN: 0889740828 Date: 1998Booklist
In a delightful romp through love and heartbreak, family relations, and the politics of AIDS, award-winning author Karen X. Tulchinsky writes with the indelible art of finding "the laugh in every tear." - Publisher Marketing. - Empire of the Ants
Author: Werber, Bernard
Publisher: Bantam List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0553096133 Date: 1998PW
When Jonathan Wells inherits his uncle's Paris apartment, it comes with a stern warning : "Never go down into the cellar!" But when the family dog bounds down the basement steps, he has no choice but to follow. Soon he too disappears - as do his wife, son and various would-be rescuers. Meanwhile, in a nearby park, a young female ant sets out to learn about the strange new weapon that has been killing her sisters - and uncovers the eerie secret of Jonathan's cellar. - The Good Children
Author: Wilhelm, Kate
Publisher: St Martin's List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0312179146 Date: 1998LJBooklist
From one of contemporary fiction's best-loved writers comes the amazing story of the McNair family, who recently settled into a great new home in Oregon. But when tragedy strikes the family suddenly, the four McNair children discover just how many secrets the house can hold and just how far they'll go to keep the family together. - A Scientific Romance
Author: Wright, Ronald
Publisher: Picador List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 03121817288 Date: 1998PW
In the tradition of The Handmaid's Tale comes a brilliantly imagined debut novel of love, plague, and one man's journey into the next millennium. "Unforgettable...few writers have imagined the future with such compelling and tragic urgency." - Maclean's.
Suggested Reading: Debuts
February
- The Iron Tracks
Author: Applefeld, Aharon
Publisher: Schocken List Price: $ 21 ISBN: 0805241582 Date: 1998PWKirkus
Since his release from a concentration camp 40 years earlier, Erwin Siegelbaum has been riding the trains of postwar Austria, searching for the Nazi officer who murdered his parents. - In the Garden of Iden: A Novel of the Company
Author: Baker, Kage
Publisher: Harcourt Brace List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0151002991 Date: 1998Kirkus
In the 24th century, the Company preserves works of arts and extinct forms of life. It recruits orphans from the past, renders them all but immortal, and trains them to serve the Company. Mendoza is sent to Elizabethan England to collect samples from the garden of Sir Walter Iden. Her quest is jeopardized by Nicholas Harpole, who stirs unfamiliar emotions within her about her future--with a man she will long outlive. - Riven Rock
Author: Boyle, T. Coraghessan
Publisher: Viking List Price: $24.95 ISBN: 0670878812 Date: 1998BooklistKirkusLJ
NYTBR Notable List
In his most fully realized and compassionate novel to date, T.C. Boyle transforms two characters straight out of history into rich, mythic creations whose tortured love and epic story is intimate enough to break our hearts. Wed to Stanley McCormick, a schizophrenic sexual maniac, Katherine Dexter struggles to cure him while he is locked up in his Santa Barbara mansion and forbidden the mere sight of a woman- above all, his wife.
Suggested Reading: All Stars - Singing in the Comeback Choir
Author: Campbell, Bebe Moore
Publisher: Putnam Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0399142983 Date: 1998Booklist
Bebe Moore Campbell, acclaimed as one of the "most important African-American writers of this century" ("Washington Post Book World"), now presents an unforgettable tale about second chances. Successful Los Angeles TV producer Maxine McCoy faces a whole new set of challenges when she learns she must return to her home in a working-class neighborhood of Philadelphia to care for the grandmother who had reared her.
Suggested Reading: African American Stars - Jack Maggs
Author: Carey, Peter
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0679440089 Date: 1998PWBooklistLJ
NYTBR Notable List. LJ Best Books, PW Best Books
From the prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda comes a novel of Dickensian London - filled with mystery, science, and passion. After he is deported to Australia for stealing, Jack Maggs returns to London, under threat of execution, where he inveigles his way into a handsome household and is quickly embroiled in various emotional entanglements.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - Bringing Out the Dead
Author: Connelly, Joe
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0375400400 Date: 1998Booklist
LJ Best First Novel, NYTBR Notable List
The basis for a film by Martin Scorsese and Paul Scrader, this is a riveting, emotionally supercharged novel by an author who spent nine years as a NYC EMS medic.
Suggested Reading: Medical Fiction | Debuts - Eccentric Neighborhoods
Author: Ferre, Rosario
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0374146381 Date: 1998PWKirkusLJ
This brilliantly imagined memoir by the author of The House on the Lagoon tells the story of Elvira Vernet, a young woman who must come to terms with her dead mother - before she can understand her father, a man caught up in the event as Puerto Rico is transformed into a spearhead of the Caribbean.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | Latino/Latina Stars - Unicorn's Blood
Author: Finney, Patricia
Publisher: St Martin's Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0312182015 Date: 1998LJ
From the author of Firedrake's Eye comes a masterpiece of voice, historical detail, and psychological insight to rival Peter Ackroyd and A.S. Byatt. Narrated by a defrocked nun, a poignant victim of Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, Unicorn's Blood tells of the existence of a secret diary kept by Queen Elizabeth I as a young princess.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - Black Glass: Short Fictions
Author: Fowler, Karen Joy
Publisher: Henry Holt Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0805055576 Date: 1998KirkusLJ
Carry Nation is on the loose again, breaking up discos, smashing topless bars, preaching clean living to men more intent on boose and babes. And what of Tonto, ever-faithful companion of the Lone Ranger, turning 40 without so much as a birthday call from the masked man. In these and 13 other short fictions, Fowler once again demonstrates the imaginative virtuosity that is fast winning her critical acclaim. - Inheritance
Author: Ganesan, Indira
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 0679434429 Date: 1998Booklist
"A lithe and sinuous storyteller . . . Ganesan, like Arundhati Roy and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, is part of a glorious flowering of contemporary Indian literature."
--Donna Seaman, Booklist
Suggested Reading: Stars of India
- People of the Mist
Author: Gear, Kathleen & W. Michael
Publisher: Tor/Forge List Price: $ 26.95 ISBN: 031285854x Date: 1998Booklist - The Tooth Fairy
Author: Joyce, Graham
Publisher: St. Martin's List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 031286261x Date: 1998BooklistPW
Best Novel - British Fantasy Award 1997, PW Best Books List
The award-winning author of Requiem returns with a blackly comic, disturbingly erotic tale of an ordinary boy named Sam - and the unearthly being only he can see. Is she real - or is she just a figment of his turbulent imaginations? All Sam knows, as he grows from childhood to adolescence, is that she is never very far away. - Two Guys from Verona: A Novel of Suburbia
Author: Kaplan, James
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0871137046 Date: 1998BooklistKirkus
NYTBR Notable List
At their 25th high school reunion, Will and Joe, fortyish friends since the second grade, find that their lives will change in ways neither has ever dreamed of - one facing death, the other facing life for the first time. A lucid, trenchantly funny novel by the author of Pearl's Progress.
Suggested Reading: Humorous Fiction - Cubra Libre
Author: Leonard, Elmore
Publisher: Delacorte $ 28.95 ISBN: 0385323832 Date: 1998PWKirkusLJ
Set in Cuba just before the Spanish-American War, Elmore Leonard's latest novel is filled with high adventure, history, romance, and, of course, nefarious undertakings. Circumstance, nonchalance, and a remarkable streak of bad luck have turned Ben Tyler from cowboy to bank robber to convict, without ever changing his genial disposition. On yet another crooked attempt to return to the straight and narrow, Tyler finds himself in Havana agreeing to complete a series of deals that will completely turn his luck around.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | All Stars - Loving Chloe
Mapson, Jo-Ann
Publisher: HarperCollins $ 24 ISBN: 0060172177 Date: 1998PWLJ
Set in the spectacular mountains of Arizona, this eagerly awaited sequel to Jo-Ann Mapson's beloved Hank and Chloe features an unexpected love triangle seasoned with earthy humor and sexual magnetism. Pregnant with Hank Oliver's child, Chloe Morgan arrives on his doorstep and sets into motion a series of incredible, life-changing events. - Nixon/Carver: A Novel
Author: Maxwell, Mark
Publisher: St Martin's List Price: $ 19.95 ISBN: 0312181469 Date: 1998KirkusLJ
Richard Nixon and Raymond Carver are walking on a California beach when they meet in this imaginative novel that creates a fictional friendship between the ex-president and the short story writer.
Suggested Reading: Nixon - Enduring Love
Author: McEwan, Ian
Publisher: Doubleday Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0385491123 Date: 1998PWLJKirkus
NYTBR Notable List, LJ Best Books, PW Best Books
The bestselling author of The Innocent once again spins a tale of life intruded upon - and discovers profound truths about the nature of love and the power of forgiveness. After he is involved in a rescue effort when a hot-air balloon takes off with a small child trapped in the gondola, Joe Rose finds himself part of a living nightmare of suspicion and obsession - and ultimately and assassination attempt.
Suggested Reading: All Stars - Paradise
Author: Morrison, Toni
Publisher: Random List Price: $25 ISBN: 0679433740 Date: 1998BooklistPWKirkusLJ
NYTBR Notable List
Morrison's eagerly awaited new novel - her first since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 - is extraordinary for its breathtaking drive, stylistic panache, and enlivening moral gravitas. Spanning the time from the Reconstruction to the 1970's, this powerful work deftly manipulates past, present and future as it reveals the interior lives of the citizens of a fictional, all-black town called Paradise.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | African American Stars - Nobody's Girl
Author: Nelson, Antonya
Publisher: Scribner List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 0684839326 Date: 1998Booklist
NYTBR Notable List
The award-winning author of Talking in Bed - a New York Times Notable Book of 1996 - presents a bouyant and evocative new novel about the mysteries of life in a small New Mexico town. Birdy Stone spends her days trying to get her students to appreciate the beauty of literature and her nights getting high with Jesus, her fay colleague and confidant. But the desulatory quality of Birdy's life is interrupted when she is asked by a middle-aged widow to edit the woman's rambling memoir. - The Life of Insects: A Novel
Author: Pelevin, Victor
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 0374186251 Date: 1998KirkusBooklist
A comic, Kafkaesque satire of contemporary Russia, written by one of the most promising young writers in Europe. A trio of investors--one American and two Russians--are discussing business prospects in the Crimea, when they suddenly find they have morphed into insects. - The Last Valentine
Author: Pratt, James Michael
Publisher: St. Martin's List Price: $ 21.95 ISBN: 0312181213 Date: 1998Booklist
Television reporter Susan Allison looks for the perfect story of true love, but doubts its existence. Neil Thomas wants to share his parents' bittersweet love story with the world. In 1944, Caroline Thomas said goodbye to her husband, a Navy pilot sent to the Pacific. For 50 years, she waited for him--until a miracle happened, and she received his last valentine. In the present, Susan and Neil meet. Can Neil's parents' story bring them together? - Black and Blue
Author: Quindlen, Anna
Publisher: Random List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0375500510 Date: 1998PWKirkus
A stunning novel about a marriage that begins in passion and becomes violent, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and author of Thinking Out Loud. After she runs away from her abusive husband, Fran Benedetto lives in fear of discovery, yet also with increasing confidence, freedom, and hope, as she struggles to create a new life for herself and her son. - Barney Polan's Game: A Novel of the 1951 Basketball Scandals
Author: Rosen, Charlie
Publisher: Seven Stories List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 1888363568 Date: 1998PW NYTBR Notable List
One of America's foremost basketball novelists takes on the legendary point-shaving scandals of early 1950's college basketball. The book is based in fact but tells the story from a human perspective, weighing the issues of character and morality as only a novel can. - Lady Moses
Author: Roy, Lucinda
Publisher: Harper Flamingo List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 006018244x Date: 1998PWLJBooklist
LJ Best First Novel
One of today's most exciting African-American literary voices makes her fiction debut in this captivating novel. The daughter of a black African writer and a white British actress, Jacinta Moses encounters prejudice all her life. But is only when her own daughter, Lady is born with a physical disability that Jacinta is able to rise above her pain and find true happiness.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | African American Stars | Debuts - 33 Moments of Happiness
Author: Schulze, Ingo
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 037540029x Date: 1998PW
An enchanting fabulously bizarre, and intriguing book of short stories by a prize-winning new German writer. Each episode in this dazzling debut collection captures the spark in some tiny detail of everyday life in contemporary St Petersburg and fans it into a story that flares with comedy, surreal passion, heartbreaking indifference and mad Russian excess. - A Four-Sided Bed
Author: Searle, Elizabeth
Publisher: Graywolf List Price: $ 14.95 (trade paperback) ISBN: 1555972659 Date: 1998Booklist
LJ Best First Novel
The characters in this bold and compassionate novel by Elizabeth Searle find themselves in uncharted territory as they explore what is possible within the sexual boundaries of friendship, love, and identity. As the Los Angeles Times has said previously about Elizabeth Searle, she sets out to "test the limits of the sensible, the approved, even the sexually possible." With this debut novel she creates a sexy, four-sided love story unique to our times in which gender is constantly redefined. - Publisher Marketing
Suggested Reading: Debuts
- Caucasia
Author: Senna, Danzy
Publisher: Riverhead/Putnam List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 1573220914 Date: 1998Booklist
Booklist Notable First Novel, LJ Best Books List
A sensitive coming-of-age bestseller about two sisters divided by politics and race at the beginning of the 1970s.
Suggested Reading: Debuts - Waiting for the Healer
Author: Sweeney, Eamonn
Publisher: Picador List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0312182066 Date: 1998PWKirkus
Paul Kelly has escaped his home in Ireland, and is the manager of a successful pub in southeast London. But his life has become a constant drunken binge as he struggles with the tragedy of his wife's death and the responsibility of bringing up their daughter alone. When Paul's brother is murdered, he is forced to return to the town where he grew up and to confront the legacy of his past. - Fog Hheart
Author: Tessier, Thomas
Publisher: St. Martin's List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0312180985 Date: 1998LJ
Two couples, both skeptical and desperate, are drawn together by a medium named Oona, a fragile, beautiful young woman who knows things no other living person should know. Can she lead them to important truths, or will they be trapped in the tightening web of terror and death? An International Horror Guild Best Novel.
PW Best Books List - The Monkey Suit
Author: Troutt, David Dante
Publisher: New Press List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 1565843266 Date: 1998Booklist
Short stories on African Americans and the law in the tradition of Derrick Bell and Richard Wright.
Suggested Reading: African American Stars - Groundwork
Author: Welch, Robert
Publisher: Blackstaff List Price: $19.95 (paper) ISBN: 0856406082 Date: 1998Booklist