Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter / Seth Grahame-Smith

If you want a different spin on Honest Abe, try this novel on for size. Before Abe Lincoln got to the White House he swung his ax for quite a different reason than what you might remember learning in elementary school. Apparently there was a thriving community of vampires in 1800s America, and due to a certain family tragedy Abe vowed as a young boy to do something about it. He swung that ax quite mightily, felling a goodly number of vampires before his political successes brought him to the White House. Abe’s presidency gets a new spin in this book too, what with the Civil War being recast as a conflict in which vampires figure largely in the motivations of the Southern succession, and John Wilkes Booth is revealed as—what else? -- a vampire. I liked this until about two thirds of the way through and then wearied of the premise. It’s pretty clever though, I must admit, and there’s sure to be a lot of interest in this title when the movie appears on June 22, 2012. The author boasts about using Wikipedia and Google as major research guides, but accuracy wasn’t the point exactly, was it? By the same author as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Click here for the trailer for the movie "Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter".

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And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini

The latest book by the author of The Kite Runner reads like a collection of short stories, but they are all interconnected. The link between stories isn’t always immediately apparent and there are some diversions that take the reader far from Kabul, and sometimes confusingly so (the detour to Greece was interesting, but a bit disconnected from the rest of the storyline, I thought). There were some great narratives—one in particular that I think was worth the whole of the book— a story about Afghani-American cousins, Idris and Timur, who return to Kabul to attempt to regain an ancestral home, abandoned after the Soviet invasion. While Timur goes out and carouses and flaunts his American wealth, Idris spends most of his time showing charity to a young girl in hospital, a victim of an unspeakable act of violence which leaves her in need of surgery in a western nation. Idris, himself a doctor, promises to arrange the needed medical intervention, but when he returns to the US, the...

Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.

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