New Fiction for May 19
May 19, 2010 – 7:39 AMSolar: A novel, Ian McEwan
PR6063.C4 S65 2010
When Nobel prize-winning physicist Michael Beard’s personal and professional lives begin to intersect in unexpected ways, an opportunity presents itself in the guise of an invitation to travel to New Mexico. Here is a chance for him to extricate himself from his marital problems, reinvigorate his career, and very possibly save the world from environmental disaster.
On the Backstretch, W. C. Bamberger
PS3552.A4732 O5 2009
Set in 1930s England, this short novel tells the tale of the prison stay of Gulley Jimson, the William Blake-spouting artist and anti-hero who directly addresses the reader through Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth. In Cary’s novel Jimson tells his friends (and readers) almost nothing of his months behind bars, and seems the same man he was before being sent away. On the Backstretch uses threads and hints from Cary’s novel to propose that while Jimson remained an artist, a schemer and a reluctant advocate for his fellow man even behind bars, that he was indeed changed by his experience, and in telling this part of his history he gulls his readers into forming a unique and disturbing bond. On the Backstretch stands as a work in its own right, but those familiar with Cary’s novel will read both in a different light.
Next: A novel, James Hynes
PS3558.Y55 N49 2010
One Man, one day, and a novel bursting with drama, comedy, and humanity. Kevin Quinn is a standard-variety American male: middle-aged, liberal-leaning, self-centered, emotionally damaged, generally determined to avoid both pain and responsibility. As his relationship with his girlfriend approaches a turning point, and his career seems increasingly pointless, he decides to secretly fly to a job interview in Austin, Texas. Aboard the plane, Kevin is simultaneously attracted to the young woman in the seat next to him and panicked by a new wave of terrorism in Europe and the UK. He lands safely with neuroses intact and full of hope that the job, the expansive city, and the girl from the plane might yet be his chance for reinvention. His next eight hours make up this novel, a tour-de-force of mordant humor, brilliant observation, and page-turning storytelling.
Safe from the Neighbors, Steve Yarbrough
PS3575.A717 S34 2010
A high school history teacher looks into his own past and begins to discover secrets from his childhood in Mississippi during the 1960s, secrets that he didn’t know existed and connect him to the violence of the Civil Rights movement.
The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers: A novel, Thomas Mullen
PS3613.U447 M36 2010
Late one night in August 1934, following a yearlong spree of bank robberies across the Midwest, the Firefly Brothers are forced into a police shootout and die . . . for the first time.
In award-winning author Thomas Mullen’s evocative new novel, the highly anticipated follow-up to his acclaimed debut, The Last Town on Earth, we follow the Depression-era adventures of Jason and Whit Fireson—bank robbers known as the Firefly Brothers by the press, the authorities, and an adoring public that worships their acts as heroic counterpunches thrown at a broken system.Now it appears they have at last met their end in a hail of bullets. Jason and Whit’s lovers—Darcy, a wealthy socialite, and Veronica, a hardened survivor—struggle between grief and an unyielding belief that the Firesons have survived. While they and the Firesons’ stunned mother and straight-arrow third son wade through conflicting police reports and press accounts, wild rumors spread that the bandits are still at large. Through it all, the Firefly Brothers remain as charismatic, unflappable, and as mythical as the American Dream itself, racing to find the women they love and make sense of a world in which all has come unmoored.
Complete with kidnappings and gangsters, heiresses and speakeasies, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers is an imaginative and spirited saga about what happens when you are hopelessly outgunned—and a masterly tale of hardship, redemption, and love that transcends death.
Second Engagement, Susan Nkwentie Nde
PR9372.9.N32 S43 2009
Second Engagement is an enthralling tale of triangular love and the quest for fulfillment. Framed around Gabby and Lizzy, the narrative unravels the secrets surrounding relationships of love. Susan Nde explores the pleasures and tensions of how two individuals in love handle the obstacles on their path to being together. In an exceptionally lucid and graceful style, she weaves an enduring tapestry of great human interest, from divergent dreams, which converge at the point of acceptance and tolerance.
The Immigrant, Manju Kapur
PR9499.3.K283 I44 2009
With her debut, Difficult Daughters, Manju Kapur gained a wide following for her airy tales woven around the lives of middle-class Indian women. The Immigrant follows Nina, a college lecturer from Delhi, as she enters her 30s in want of a husband. Before long, Nina’s mother has found the right man: an Indian-born dentist living in Canada. Marriage follows, with the inevitable first-night complications, and the couple begin a life together in Nova Scotia. Arranged relationships have long been a staple in Indian women’s writing; the connubial trials of feminism and sexual dysfunction less so. In Kapur’s fourth novel, the difficulties of assimilating to a new society are as nothing compared to the frictions of married life.
Self’s Murder, Bernhard Schlink; translated from the German by Peter Constantine
PT2680.L54 S4513 2009
The successful film adaptation of Schlink’s The Reader should give a boost to his third mystery to feature agi
ng German PI Gerhard Self (after 2007′s Self’s Deception). On his way home to Mannheim during a snow storm, Schlink helps a stranded driver, Bertram Welker, who on learning Self’s profession offers him a job. A partner in the region’s oldest private bank, Welker is writing its history and asks Self to identify a silent partner in the bank. What appears to be a straightforward assignment becomes a double murder inquiry once Self comes to doubt Welker’s account of how his wife perished in a hiking accident the year before and the bank’s unofficial archivist dies in a suspicious car crash after handing Self a briefcase full of money. Crisp prose and some well-handled plot complications, which include the emergence of a man claiming to be Self’s son, will keep readers turning the pages.
The seventy-something private investigator Gerhard Self is hired to track down a mysterious silent bank partner, a case which eventually leads him to eastern Germany and some of the most dangerous villians he has ever met.
