Peachy Reads

It had been awhile since I’d read Sue Grafton and picking up a book with P.I. Kinsey Millhone was like reacquainting oneself with an old friend. It’s so reassuring to revisit wonderful characters such as benevolent landlord and retired baker Henry and pushy Hungarian restauranteur Rosie. Kinsey’s self-deprecation, sense of humor, and often mildly misanthropic tendencies make her a memorable and enduring personality in the realm of detective fiction. Oh, and she's a smart cookie. Plus the fact that she is in a timewarp circa 1988 makes reading the alphabet mysteries a bit of a nostalgia trip as well. I never thought Grafton would reach the end of the alphabet, but the strength and freshness of the plot of U is for Undertow is proof that this series should easily make it to Z and perhaps beyond. Note 1-3-2011 My reunion with Kinsey was so wonderful, I picked up T is for Trespass and found it an even more compelling read. And you don't have to read these in order!

The Double Comfort Safari Club is number 12 in a series that shows no signs of losing steam. This installment again illustrates that the cases of the No. One Ladies Detective Agency’s number one detective Precious Ramotswe have less to do with sleuthing, mystery and intrigue and more to do with the vagaries of human nature. The occasional observations about life are wonderful in their own right, never mind the plot that takes the reader along with Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi to a Botswanan Safari Park. Here are two quotes that I marked (electronically in my borrowed library e-copy on my Nook) that I thought were worth coming back to: p 9 That was the way the world was; it was composed of a few almost perfect people (ourselves); then there were a good many people who generally did their best but were not all that perfect (our friends and colleagues); and finally, there were a few rather nasty ones (our enemies and opponents). Most people fell into that middle group-- those who did th...

Henning Mankell does not disappoint in this installment in the Kurt Wallander detective series. While some books in the series seem overdominated by psycho-serial killers, this one has a more credible plot. An inflatable liferaft with two dead bodies floats onto a Swedish beach near Ystad and the case takes Wallander to Latvia. It is 1992, so this Baltic nation is just emerging from its submission under the Soviet mantel that enveloped it since the end of World War II. The politics of police work in Riga are ticklish—there is corruption and intrigue between nationalists and Soviet sympathizers. Wallander gets fully involved and very nearly loses his life in the process. A fascinating insight into the history and turmoil of a nation coming into its own and a darn entertaining read.

I must say I really have enjoyed reading David Nicholls, first with One Day , then A Question of Attraction , and now finishing up with The Understudy . They're all light reading-- no Tolstoy or Joyce here-- but if you're looking for a laugh and an entertaining diversion, you won't be disappointed. In this novel he follows the life of actor Stephen C. McQueen (no, not that Steve McQueen), the understudy to movie heartthrob Josh Harper, who is doing a turn in a one-man play on Shaftesbury Avenue in London's West End. Stephen is literally waiting in the wings for his big break, weary of reprising the role of Sammy the Singing Squirrel to make ends meet, but the leading man is never ill, so Stephen never gets his chance to take center stage. His life off-stage is what really is the main interest here, and when it begins to intersect with his stage life things start to get interesting. Stephen makes a Faustian bargain with Josh Harper, which involves his American wife (who...

Pippi Longstocking meets Miss Marple in the character of precocious 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, the youngest of three daughters in a once well-to-do family in early 1950s rural England. This first mystery in an intended series finds Flavia beating the local police inspector at his own game in solving the mystery surrounding the murder of an old school mate of her father's in their back garden (in the cucumber patch no less). Clues include a bird indigenous to Norway, a rare stamp, and a bit of flaky pie crust. This nostalgic and innocent whodunnit will have you at the edge of your seat by its suspenseful climax. I can see BBC/PBS picking up on the popularity of this charming mystery. The second in the series has already been published and the third is soon to follow. And by the way, here's a great library quote from Flavia on page 50: "... it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No ...

This is a totally character-driven plot set in one of London’s most colorful neighborhoods, Portobello Road in Notting Hill. Different levels of obsession define the various characters who populate this short novel—a man with a seemingly harmless addictive personality, a reformed criminal who writes relationship advice for a newsletter in his fringe church, his nephew who is obsessed with impressing his girlfriend, and a psychologically fragile man whose near-death experience brought an imagined companion back with him from the other side. The neighborhood and the characters provide all the interest in this novel. Great for armchair travelers. You’ll think you’re on Portobello Road. Click here for some pics of Portobello Road .

I recently finished three novels by authors whose other titles I've enjoyed recently. The Fifth Woman / Henning Mankell Another installment in the Swedish police detective Kurt Wallander series. Another psycho killer. Who could imagine they’d be so thick on the ground in bucolic southern Sweden? The strength of this series is not just the original crime storylines but the humanity of Kurt himself. Check out the BBC-produced TV series with Kenneth Branagh in the title role. Incendiary / Chris Cleave This novel takes the form of an extended letter to Osama bin Laden by a bereaved Eastend woman. She’s writing to him to share her pain in having lost both her husband and her four-year-old boy in an Al Quaeda orchestrated terrorist attack at a football match. Her letter reveals the story of how events unfolded. She is not blameless in the way she leads her life, but her honest narrative and sense of humor and irony put an interesting twist on the story. Things get a little apocal...

This novel would make a great book club choice since it is absolutely overflowing with issues-- a clash of values and expectations between the West and the Developing World (formerly known as the First and Third Worlds). Little Bee, an illegal asylum seeker in England makes her way to a British couple whose paths tragically crossed with hers while they were on holiday on a beach in strife-torn Nigeria. Without giving anything away, her arrival on their doorstep in Kingston-on-Thames sets certain events in motion that have calamitous results and cause more than one moral dilemma. I enjoyed the originality of Little Bee , however, it was almost a bit too telescopically written for my liking-- it seemed more like a screenplay for a movie, the scenes being so short, almost isolated, and so packed full of meaning. There were just SO many moments pregnant with significance, like pictures of iconic scenes in a ten-day-ten-country European vacation slide show jumping from slide to slide-- it...

Funny man David Sedaris tries something new with this collection of tales populated by a cast of trailer-trash animals. Ian Falconer (of Olivia fame to children's librarians) provides the whimsical illustrations for these cautionary tales inspired by Aesop. I heard David Sedaris present a couple selections from this collection at a recent performance and I think it works better as a readaloud (preferably in his voice), or maybe try the audio version read by him and some other celebrities. The tales were just so dark (it is a dog-eat-dog world in the animal kingdom after all)-- a couple stories featuring animals getting their eyes pecked out, others getting brained, and snakes swallowing mice as cute as Stuart Little. The subtitle of the British edition is "a wicked bestiary," which I think is a more accurate reflection of the content. I was waiting for big laughs, and while Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk was clever and amusing, the belly laughs that usually accompany Sedari...

I saw the documentary film of this project on Netflix Instantview the other day and was fascinated by it, so I downloaded the book No Imapact Man to my Nook (thus saving paper, but not electricity-- which is better?). Beavan tries to pull a Thoreau and get back to basics-- not in a remote woodland cabin, but in the middle of energy-guzzling, trash mountain-producing Manhattan. During the course of the year his family shunned elevators, paper napkins, disposable cups (disposable anything, really) electricity, and any motor-driven transport. The goal was to make no environmental impact for an entire year. His effort wasn’t perfect, but it certainly was thought-provoking. His wife is the perfect foil to his gravitas, and makes his sermonizing tolerable in both the film and the book. In the end, each of us could benefit by implementing even a small portion of what Beavan suggests. No Impact Man offers much food for thought (though only of the vegetarian, organic, locavore variety)....

Click here to check for availability at AFPLS I saw the movie before I read the book, which I almost never do, but so be it. The eBook was available from the library, so I downloaded it to my Nook. It was an impulse, but it was also free. This is why I bought the Nook and not the Kindle. This is how libraries work, and hopefully will work in the future. Reading books should not have to cost excessive amounts of money. Anyway, Julie & Julia is the book that the blogging part of the movie is based on, the Amy Adams storyline (an actress, in my humble opinion, who is about as perfect as they come). I really enjoyed the movie (which I rewatched after finishing Julie & Julia ), but I also enjoyed the book, but in a different way. Of course everyone knows how Nora Ephron used Julia Child’s memoir My Life in France to serve as the grist for the Meryl Streep (another perfect actress) half of the movie. Julie & Julia provides the structure for both stories. Even the book has short...

Star Island / Carl Hiaasen Click here for availability at AFPLS Get ready for another wild and crazy romp through south Florida, where the characters are always larger than life, and in spite of the plunging real estate market, developers still stomp on the environment. Cherry Pye (real name Cheryl Bunterman) is a pop diva like a bad-Britney who doesn’t have a lot of talent or brains. As she parties her way to oblivion, her parents employ a body double to keep up appearances. A particularly obsessive paparazzo stalks Cherry Pye, and in the ensuing confusion of who is the starlet and who is the double, there is a lot of keystone cops mayhem. Hiaasen’s characters are caricatures, always over-the-top, but also somehow believable. The narrative line of Star Island , which is big on satire, lurches around a bit and I’m not sure the environmental theme ever really meshes with the bad pop star storyline, but it’s a fun read nonetheless. This was the first full book I read as an eBook on my N...

The Burning Land / Bernard Cornwell Click here to check for availability at AFPLS The 9th century was an unsettled time in Britain. Alfred the Great was trying to keep the English speaking inhabitants unified in one kingdom, while the Danes were essentially trying to make Britain an outpost of Viking Scandinavia. We meet up with Uhtred in this fifth installment of Bernard Cornwell's historical adventure series Saxon Tales as he continues to somewhat reluctantly honor his oath to Alfred, while nurturing his true desire is to lead an army against his uncle and reclaim his ancestral home. There is lots of historically-based battle action here, as in previous books there are many sharp blades, axes, and in one clever siege innovative use of beehives and sailcloth. Uhtred experiences triumph on the battlefield (and a near miss) but disappointment and sorrow on the homefront. We’ll have to wait until another installment in the series to see if he can be Lord of Babbenberg in more than...

Solar / Ian McEwan Click here to check for availability at AFPLS . Michael Beard is a Nobel-Laureate in physics who peaked far too soon. It seems he used up all his genius early in life and this novel follows him as he tries to parlay his Nobel honor, and no further innovative work or thinking, into a lifelong career. He can’t give physics too much attention since he is caught up in his own self-absorption, can’t seem to stay faithful or married (five marriages and counting), and has no self-discipline when it comes to eating and exercise, or anything else for that matter. To stay afloat he becomes involved in several unscrupulous actions, including concealing a suspicious death, framing an innocent man for it, and stealing the poor dead man’s intellectual property. This novel has moments of greatness, but it is much too plodding, too preachy, too satirical, and too scientific in places, and the characters (other than Michael Beard) are just too flat. I love Ian McEwan, but I didn’t f...

The Virgin Suicides / Jeffrey Eugenides Click here to check for availability at AFPLS The title reveals the ending, so there is no surprise, but that is not to say there is no suspense. The Virgin Suicides recounts the story of the Lisbon sisters and the tragic gradual unraveling of their well-structured existence in suburban Detroit of the 1970s. Fate leads inevitably towards the final chapter of the book, which is also the final chapter of their short lives. Cecelia is the first to go (by self-defenestration) and her sudden death seems to set a chain of events in motion that eventually brings all her sisters with her (there is even speculation that Cecelia’s suicide released a contagion that infected her siblings). The story is told in the voice of the neighborhood boys who shared the same street and the same school with the Lisbon girls, secretly admiring them, mostly from afar, in life as well as after death. The identities of the boys remain somewhat mysterious to the reader, ...

Remarkable Creatures / Tracy Chevalier Click here to check for availability at AFPLS The best-selling author of Girl with a Pearl Earring brings us the story of Mary Anning, an early nineteenth century amateur paleontologist and discoverer of fossils. From her base in Lyme Regis in what is now known as Southern England’s Jurassic Coast, Mary Anning discovered amazingly complete fossilized skeletons of ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and prehistoric fish. Because she uncovered fossilized impressions of “monsters” of which people understood very little (this was years before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species or much understanding of geologic eras and extinctions), her discoveries challenged the prevailing view of God’s creation and plan, and caused her to be regarded with suspicion. (Fast forward 200 years to certain school districts in the US.) Mary Anning’s story is all the more remarkable because she was an unschooled woman from the lower class operating in a field dominated by educa...

One Day / David Nicholls Dexter and Emma, (known to each other as “Dex” and “Em”), nearly experience a romantic entanglement on the day of graduation from university in Edinburgh in 1988. Nearly, because it doesn’t quite happen. The remarkable premise of this book is that it follows their relationship for only one day during the next twenty years as their life paths drift apart and then reconnect, all the while holding on to that initial infatuation that seemed to make them soulmates. Every chapter meets up with Dex and Em on July 15th, charting the sometimes surprising, and often humorous courses of their lives. Dex is a bit narcissistic and self-destructive; Emma a little lacking in confidence and drive. But they seem to bring out the best in each other and depend on each other’s support to get through life’s tough patches. This book out-Nick-Hornbys Nick Hornby. It’s authentic, it’s funny, it’s frequently dramatic, but never boring. I smell a movie coming.

White Tiger / Aravind Adiga Click here to check for for availability at AFPLS Balram Halwai, a.k.a. the “White Tiger,” was born in the “Darkness” of India where inherited caste assignments condemn men and women to a lifetime of abject poverty and servitude. Starting first as a hired driver to a more privileged caste, Balram aspires to be part of the New India, where outsourced call-centers, foreign technology subsidiaries, and start-ups signal the new economic clout of the subcontinent within the global economy. He gains entrance to this New India by becoming a murderer. The images that Adiga paints of India are exquisite and often metaphorical, illustrating the frequent madness that is commonplace there. The White Tiger brought to mind J.M. Coetzee’s apartheid novels, Richard Wright’s Native Son , and the movie Slumdog Millionaire. Adiga’s highly captivating novel masterfully exposes the underside of India’s economic aspirations with all its contradictions: poverty and excess, mo...

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

The Help / Kathryn Stockett Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This book by first-time novelist (and current Atlanta resident) Kathryn Stockett offers a glimpse into the 1962 segregated society of Jackson, Mississippi, where white women of even relatively modest means employed help (i.e. black maids) to cook, clean and essentially raise their children. Nearly one hundred years after the end of slavery, the relationships between the kitchen help and the mistress of the house are not all that different from antebellum times. The story is told in the distinctive voices of two black maids, Minny and Aibileen, and one white woman, Miss Skeeter, who thinks that the status quo bears some scrutiny. The book’s narrative and Miss Skeeter’s secret interviews with the maids reveal fascinating stories, and in the context of the civil rights movement, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, these stories threaten to turn Jackson society topsy-turvy. The resolution of some of the loose ends a...

La’s Orchestra Saves the World / Alexander McCall-Smith Click here to check for availability at AFPLS Alexander McCall-Smith hits another homerun with this standalone novel set in England during World War II. As usual, his characters drive the novel, but there is a wonderful sense of place and time that is different from his other writings. Lavender, known as “La,” has been unlucky in love and sets off from cosmopolitan London to a lonely refuge in Suffolk. The Blitz keeps her marooned in the countryside and she looks for things to do to keep her busy. She forms a small orchestra, made up of townspeople and airmen from the nearby field, and they practice once a month, preparing for a victory concert that is too long in coming. Alexander McCall-Smith just seems to have a knack for painting wonderful pictures with words. Like a Vermeer genre painting, his books create a picture of domesticity that is so accurate, it’s like watching a movie in your head. ©Ken Vesey, 7 June 2010

The Man from Beijing / Henning Mankell Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This thriller is global in scope, taking place as it does on four different continents. A horrific mass murder takes place in a remote village in the north of Sweden. The weapon is a samurai-like sword. The police peg a local crazy who offered a confession before taking his own life, but Birgitta Roslin, a judge from Helsingborg, who has a family link to two of the victims, sees an international connection to a “man from Beijing”. The police are quick to dismiss her theories, but turn back to her when things come full circle and Birgitta almost finds herself a murder victim. Mankell abandons his Kurt Wallander character in this novel and with Birgitta Roslin introduces a fascinating replacement. One hopes we’ll see more of her. ©Ken Vesey, 5 May 2010

Faceless Killers / Henning Mankell Click here to check availability at AFPLS If you, like me, were not sated with Scandinavian thrillers after the last Stieg Larsson Millennium installment, travel back to Sweden’s underworld in Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series, of which Faceless Killers is the first. The book opens with a horrifying scene of brutality that shatters the quiet solitude of a Swedish country idyll, and the intrigue grows as the case escalates with attacks against foreigners and an additional murder. The small southern Swedish town of Ystad in Skåne is the setting for this series and Kurt Wallander is as believable a police inspector as you’ll ever come across with many human faults and no superpowers whatsoever. His dogged tenacity and his intuition are his greatest assets and allow him to solve the crime in the end. Faceless Killers may not be as fast-paced as The Girl Who Played with Fire , but it still takes place in the same Scandinavian milieu where the win...

You Can Never Find a Rickshaw When It Monsoons: The World on One Cartoon a Day / Mo Willems Mo Willems is HUGE in kiddie lit and has received Caldecott honors for his cartoonish Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus and Knuffle Bunny and Knuffle Bunny Too . I was curious about this volume he published for a somewhat older audience, namely adults. The library system didn’t have it, so a quick order to Amazon and a few days later it was on my doorstep. Just out of university, Mo Willems did what many young adults do, he took a year off to see the world. At the end of each day he produced a pen and ink drawing about an unusual or memorable event that happened that day. The drawings are collected in You Can Never Find a Rickshaw When It Monsoons with contemporary commentary from Mr. Willems. He draws in an almost expressionistic style and with this volume has created a rather unusual chronicle of a trip to different cultures and peoples. It’s really quite enjoyable to flip through, and is ...

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo / Stieg Larsson Click here to check availability at AFPLS This crime novel from Sweden has become an international publishing sensation. The first in a trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo deals with the family history of a slightly faded Swedish industrial dynasty that holds many secrets. Just how horrific these secrets are doesn’t become apparent until journalist/investigator Mikael Blomkvist and his unlikely research assistant Lisbeth Salander (the girl in the title with said tattoo) start to unravel the details of the disappearance of a young female family member some forty years earlier. It was hard to put this one down. I liked the descriptions of the brutally cold Swedish winters, the coziness and banality of small town life in Hedeby, the bustle of Stockholm, the eccentric personalities in the family, work relationships... all this against the brutality of the crimes that are revealed. ©Ken Vesey, 21 Apr 2010

This Book Is Overdue! : How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All / Marilyn Johnson Click here to check availability in AFPLS This book is an interesting collection of essays that offer glimpses into the brave new world of librarianship. It’s sort of the antithesis of Nicholson Baker’s grumpy dissing of librarians in his 2001 book Doublefold . If you thought that librarians are still the be-bunned shushing ladies in wool skirts with reading glasses dangling around their necks on slender gold chains, then this book certainly is overdue for you. The author shows how librarians are morphing and adapting to the new information landscape, meeting new challenges with fewer resources and a public that wants instant gratification in clicks-and-mortar libraries. Meet librarians who offer triage reference services in streets filled with protesters and others who assume alternate identities and inhabit virtual libraries in the cyber universe called Second Life. Learn about how the venerable N...

Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life / Steve Martin Click here to check availability in AFPLS Anyone who remembers the silver-haired man in the white suit who delivered the catchphrases of the seventies, “Well, excuuuuuse me,” or “I’m just a wild and crazy guy,” will want to find out more about his rise to fame in this svelte self-penned memoir about his life leading up to his stand-up days. Reading this book, you realize how unlikely his comic success actually was, what with his intelligent “anti-comedy,” his hilarious non sequiturs, and his spastic dancing. This revolution in stand-up, however unlikely, propelled Steve Martin into enduring Hollywood fame, and even those who don’t remember his King Tut will know Steve Martin from his many movie roles and television appearances (and for your teenage daughter as Hillary Duff’s father on "Cheaper by the Dozen"). ©Ken Vesey, 15 Mar 2010

The Year of the Flood / Margaret Atwood Click here to check for availability in AFPLS In her latest book, The Year of the Flood , Margaret Atwood portrays a future, a very close future, in which there has been catastrophic environmental and societal collapse. Atwood explored this theme in 2003’s Oryx and Crake , and revisits the same timeframe with even some of the same characters making appearances, though this is neither a prequel or a sequel (maybe a co-quel?). The "flood" in the title refers to a waterless flood, a global pandemic that has wiped out all but a small percentage of Earth's human inhabitants. Flashbacks reveal the main characters in situations leading up to the flood. In The Year of the Flood Atwood creates a future world that is not so unfamiliar from our own, which may make it all the more terrifying. Reminiscent of Jose Saramago's Blindness or PD James's The Children of Men (both of which have been made into film). Often grim, but always th...

Quarantine / Jim Crace Click here to check for availability in AFPLS Five penitents wander into the Judean wilderness for various reasons, known only to themselves, for a quarantine (40 days) of meditation and fasting. Their planned solitude and prayerful reflection are somewhat derailed when they all convene near a waterhole and their destinies interconnect. One of the penitents is named Jesus, and while Crace’s story doesn’t follow the Gospels, and literalists will not care for it, the figure of Jesus is an enigmatic and a charismatic presence in their midst, even though he attempts to separate himself from the others. The characters are well-drawn and all are interesting in their own right. The ending is a surprise, there is death and resurrection of sorts, and this novel will offer much food for thought for readers of any religious persuasion. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 1997, Whitbread Novel winner 1997 ©Ken Vesey, 12 Feb 2010

The Little Stranger / Sarah Waters Click here to check availability in AFPLS One of the main characters in this neo-gothic novel is a crumbling old manor house in Warwickshire called Hundreds Hall, which has as much of a role in The Little Stranger as the mansion in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” or Manderley in Du Maurier ’s Rebecca . Hundreds is the home of the Ayres Family, once-distinguished, but now suffering with the changes stirring in England after World War II, all the while trying to keep up appearances with ever dwindling resources. The path of a local general practioner, Dr. Faraday, connects with the landed family, and their fates become ever more entwined as the story progresses. Strange goings-on begin to plague Hundreds. Grievous accidents occur, bells ring unexpectedly, strange writing appears on walls, and unexplained sounds are heard. The Ayres son is the first to fall and is institutionalized with his precarious mental state. Not long thereafter the mot...

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers Click here to check availability in AFPLS Dave Eggers, author of What is the What , A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius , and You Shall Know Our Velocity , writes another wonderful work of human drama. In Zeitoun , presented in the context of a family biography, Syrian-born Abdulrahman Zeitoun chooses to remain in New Orleans during Katrina to watch over the family property while his wife and children flee the storm. In the quiet desolation after the hurricane he paddles around the flooded streets in a canoe, helping out those in need, feeding abandoned dogs, and contemplating the future of the ravaged city. In an unexpected turn of events he is picked up by law enforcement, ostensibly for looting, and is thrown into a makeshift Gitmo-like chain link prison behind the Amtrak station before being transferred (without being allowed a phone call or a hearing, or even having his rights read to him) to a maximum security prison outside of Baton Rouge. Time pas...

Cutting for Stone / Abraham Verghese Click here to check availability in AFPLS The calamitous and sometimes horrifying first chapters of Cutting for Stone explain the unusual circumstances of the arrival of twins Marion and Shiva Praise Stone, originally conjoined by a small fleshy stalk at the head, and born from a secret liaison between a Carmelite nun and an English surgeon serving in a rustic hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.The twins are raised among the colorful characters of the Missing (Mission) Hospital, against a fascinating backdrop of Ethiopian history that includes the charismatic emperor Haile Salassie, the Eritrean independence movement, and the rule of Marxist-inspired dictator Mengistu. Marion is exiled to America to pursue a career in medicine, while Shiva remains behind in Ethiopia. Soon, however, both worlds collide and Marion’s past catches up with him-- all that was set in motion during his boyhood is brought full-circle in another hospital, on another continen...

August Heat (An Inspector Montalbano Mystery) / Andrea Camilleri Click here to check for availability at AFPLS Fans of detective novelists Donna Leon and Michael Dibdin will make an easy transition to Andrea Camilleri’s Italy-based detective series (originally published in Italian for an Italian readership). In August Heat Sicily is suffering with oppressive late summer temperatures when a body is discovered in a trunk in a secret lower-floor apartment of a vacation rental, a rental that Inspector Montalbano had arranged as a favor to his girlfriend. Details about the crime, which happened six years ago, emerge against a backdrop of colorful Sicilian characters operating within a confusing web of Italian bureaucracy and political intrigue. The way Montalbano conducts police business is unorthodox, to say the least, and his unusual approach may be one reason that reading this series is so refreshing. And it would not be a proper Italian detective novel without detailed descriptions ...

Her Fearful Symmetry / Audrey Niffenegger Click here to check for availability in AFPLS It's hard to know what to make of Audrey Niffenegger's much-anticipated follow-up to 2003's huge publishing blockbuster The Time Traveller's Wife . Julia and Valentina are 21-year-old suburban Chicago twins who inherit a flat in London's Highgate Village from an aunt they never met. Her will stipulates that they must live there a year before it can be sold. The flat overlooks the Victorian Cemetery Highgate, which figures largely in the plot and emphasizes the theme of death and life beyond death. The book really takes the reader for a spin at the end with a surprising revelation of switched identity, spirits, reincarnation, and bodyswitching. What starts out as a nice character novel quickly turns into Patrick Swayze inhabiting Whoopi Goldberg's body in the movie Ghost... well not that bad, but close. Be that as it may, this novel is ideal for London enthusiasts-- Niffenegg...