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A Partisan’s Daughter by Louis De Bernieres
De Bernières (Corelli's Mandolin) delivers an oddball love story of two spiritually displaced would-be lovers. During a dreary late 1970s London winter, stolid and discontented Chris is drawn to seedy and mysterious Roza, a Yugoslav émigrée he initially believes is a prostitute. She isn't (though she claims to have been), and soon the two embark on an awkward friendship (Chris would like to imagine it as a romance) in which Roza spins her life's stories for her nondescript, erstwhile suitor. Roza, whose father supported Tito, moved to London for opportunity but instead found a school of hard knocks, and she's all too happy to dole out the lessons she learned to the slavering Chris. The questions of whether Roza will fall for Chris and whether Chris will leave his wife (he calls her the Great White Loaf) carry the reader along, as the reliability of Chris and Roza, who trade off narration duties, is called into question sometimes to less than ideal effect. The conclusion is crushing, and Chris's scorching regret burns brightly to the last line. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
The Groom to Have Been by Saher Alam
A cosmopolitan Indian-Canadian Muslim gets engaged and must deal with complicated feelings for an old friend, in Alam's absorbing debut. After living as a bachelor in New York for several years, Nasr agrees to let his mother arrange a marriage for him, despite concerns raised by childhood friend Jameela. Three years later, an international search leads him to Farah, who he hopes will share his sensibilities about the appropriate balance between tradition and modernity. The attacks of 9/11 disrupt their already complicated harmonizing process. Nasr finds himself having to defend Islam in his financial firm's copy room. Meanwhile, Nasr's relationship with Jameela undergoes changes. The book's epigraph is from Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, and Alam sets up Nasr as Newland Archer and Jameela as the independent-minded Countess Olenska. (The two even attend a party hosted by a Van der Luyden.) Delicately crafted and multilayered, this moving book shows Alam to be a writer of great promise. (July) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
A good Indian wife: a novel by Anne Cherian
Separated at death by Sheldon Rusch
Quirky characters lift Rusch's convoluted third mystery to feature Illinois state investigator Liz Hewitt (after 2006's The Boy with Perfect Hands). The newly engaged Hewitt is in a contest with Jen Spangler, a single mom and criminal justice student, for the approval of Jen's father, who happens to be Hewitt's cop mentor. These two smart, cuttingly self-aware women also compete to stop a lunatic from decapitating estranged married couples. The present atrocities turn out to be related to a pair of cold case murders, and the swarm of suspects includes a libidinous psychiatrist, the pathetic editor of a neighborhood newspaper, an ultraempathetic priest and a mob of marriage counselors. Hewitt doesn't so much weigh evidence as blow cool jazz riffs on it, and Jen shows flashes of the same clever, nervous intuition. Rusch's style, dense with disconcerting wordplay and detached irony, works especially well in the chapters exhibiting the killer's skewed viewpoint. (Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
House rules: a Joe DeMarco thriller by Michael Lawson
At the start of Lawson's snappy third thriller starring congressional snoop Joe DeMarco (after The Second Perimeter), a series of three failed attempts by Muslim terrorists to attack Washington, D.C. one by plane, one by car, one by lone suicide bomber causes nationwide panic. DeMarco wades into the mess when his boss, House Speaker John Mahoney, asks him to check out the possibility that the terrorist onslaught may have been more homegrown than it appears. Quickly appearing on DeMarco's radar is a suspicious, high-profile piece of anti-Islamic legislation, pushed by the blowhard junior senator from Virginia, that's on the fast track for approval. While the efficient plot takes some predictable turns, Lawson's engaging characters, with DeMarco leading the pack, come across as seriously flawed individuals trying to navigate a political world of high demands and constant distractions. Full of insider information, this novel reinforces Lawson's place in the upper rank of Washington thriller specialists. (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
The view from the seventh layer by Kevin Brockmeier
Brockmeier follows up the acclaimed The Brief History of the Dead with a collection of 13 stories possessing the enchantment of his two children's books, but with adult twists. In the title story, Olivia lives in a little red cottage on an unnamed island and sells maps, umbrellas and candies to the tourists. She also sells prophylactics and believes that, in a glorious moment, she was abducted and examined by an alien Entity who came from the seventh layer of the universe. In a more O. Henryesque story, The Lives of the Philosophers, Jacob, a philosophy grad student, is trying to understand why certain great philosophers ceased to do philosophy. He finds the answer when his girlfriend, Audrey, becomes pregnant with a child he doesn't want. In The Air Is Full of Little Spots, the narrator, a presumably Afghan tribal woman, writes of her tribe's belief that we see the world only from the back, but at moments, by the grace of God, the world turns its face to us. While many characters reach such moments of clarity, the stories often falter when they do. At their best, though, the tales show Brockmeier's mastery of the tricky intersection between fantasy and realism. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Enlightenment by Maureen Freely
Starred Review. At the start of Freely's complex, often riveting novel set in contemporary and Cold War Turkey, a journalist known only as Miss M returns to Istanbul in 2005 after a long absence at the request of Jeannie Wakefield, whose father, William, was an American spy. Jeannie hopes that Miss M will write an article to help her husband, once Miss M's lover, who's been detained in the United States and sent to Guantánamo. A few months later, Jeannie disappears, leaving behind a long letter detailing events from the 1960s. The main narrative threads extracts from Jeannie's letter; Miss M's memories of Istanbul from that same period and her present-day account of investigating Jeannie's long-ago indoctrination into a Communist cell, which was at one point charged with the infamous but possibly apocryphal Trunk Murder interweave toward a quietly stunning conclusion. Both mystery/thriller and mainstream literary readers will be well rewarded. Freely is the English translator of Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk's novel, Snow. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Moyers on democracy by Bill D. Moyers
Veteran journalist and author Moyers (Moyers on America, The Power of Myth) staunchly attacks conservative government as one of "millions of Americans who are restless to get on with their revolution." In this volume-a collection of speeches, addresses, talks and lectures from as far back as the '80s-Moyers argues that participatory citizenship breathes life into American democracy, and whatever undermines active citizenship threatens to destroy the system. Moyers reminds readers that the U.S. stands "on the shoulders of brave ghosts," and challenges them to treat, with courage, the country's socio-political ills. The author provides illustrative portraits of dear friends like Fred Friendly and Hubert Humphrey, positioning himself among passionate journalists and left-leaning politicians. Some may recoil from his lobbyist outrage (they "hide... behind the flag while ripping off a country in crisis"), but his long-lived devotion to the American ideal of self-governance, on the whole, guides him well. His insight, sweeping political and historical expertise, and unflinching defense of his ideals should captivate both scholars and concerned citizens, though it's more likely to appeal to those already on Moyers's wavelength. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
The big both ways by John Straley
That little something: poems by Charles Simic
In his 18th collection, Poet Laureate Simic's neat stanzas continue to deliver odd moments and unexplained memories, by turns surreal, horrifying, funny, sad, and spoken with this Pulitzer Prize winner's trademark friendly bemusement. The startling solemnity of a Metaphysics Anonymous meeting for addicts of truth beyond appearances in one poem meets, in another, a list of topics for a late-night chat, including 'How to guess time of night by listening to one's own heartbeat. The second of the book's four sections takes on a decidedly political tone, as in Dance of the Macabre Mice, in which the president smiles to himself; he loves war. Similarly, Those Who Clean After imagines what's being done in our name while the speaker listens to the sounds of summer night. The final section groups short poems that Simic (My Noiseless Entourage) calls Eternities each offers a preserved moment's thought or image: Sewing room, linty daylight. While fans will find no stylistic surprises here, there is still the agreeable pathos in Simic's work, as in To the Reader, which ends, Bang your head / On your side of the wall / And keep me company. (Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
