Lisa's A Fan of This Debut Novel

The debut of a stunning new voice in fiction— a novel both heartbreaking and transcendent

After four harrowing years on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia and takes a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day’s journey from the coast. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes once a season and shore leaves are granted every other year at best, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel hears a baby’s cries on the wind. A boat has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby.

Tom, whose records as a lighthouse keeper are meticulous and whose moral principles have withstood a horrific war, wants to report the man and infant immediately. But Isabel has taken the tiny baby to her breast. Against Tom’s judgment, they claim her as their own and name her Lucy. When she is two, Tom and Isabel return to the mainland and are reminded that there are other people in the world. Their choice has devastated one of them.

M. L. Stedman’s mesmerizing, beautifully written novel seduces us into accommodating Isabel’s decision to keep this “gift from God.” And we are swept into a story about extraordinarily compelling characters seeking to find their North Star in a world where there is no right answer, where justice for one person is another’s tragic loss.

The Light Between Oceans is exquisite and unforgettable, a deeply moving novel.

This is the UK trailer for the book--only the covers are different.

Lisa says:
"In this debut novel, author M.L. Stedman, who was born in Western Australia but now lives in London, asks her readers to immerse themselves in a story about heart-wrenching love, loyalty and morality. Tom, a lighthouse keeper just after WWI is seeking solace to quiet the nightmares of the Somme. He meets Isabel, who is playful and bright and they fall in love, marry and move to the lonely island to man the lighthouse off of the coast of Australia. One day a dingy washes ashore with a dead man and a crying baby girl in it. Isabel, who has had three miscarriages desperately wants to keep the baby. Tom wants to do the right thing and report it. The decision they make not only throws their world into turmoil, it changes the lives of many. What is right and wrong? How about something that is done in the name of right but really ends up being self-serving? What about the consequences? This is a story that will stick with you. A lighthouse, lonely, solitary, yet important and life-saving for some, is the perfect setting for this book."

“An unabashedly polemic, angry manifesto that is certain to open eyes, intensify outrage and incite argument about corporate greed. . . . A call for a new American revolution, passionately proclaimed.” —Kirkus Reviews

Camden, New Jersey, with a population of 70,390, is per capita the poorest city in the nation. It is also the most dangerous. The city's real unemployment — hard to estimate, since many residents have been severed from the formal economy for generations — is probably 30 to 40 percent. The median household income is $24,600. There is a 70 percent high school dropout rate, with only 13 percent of students managing to pass the state's proficiency exams in math. The city is planning $28 million in draconian budget cuts, with officials talking about cutting 25 percent from every department, including layoffs of nearly half the police force. The proposed slashing of the public library budget by almost two-thirds has left the viability of the library system in doubt. There are perhaps a hundred open-air drug markets, most run by gangs like the Bloods, the Latin Kings, and MS-13. Camden is awash in guns, easily purchased across the river in Pennsylvania, where gun laws are lax.

Camden, like America, was once an industrial giant. It employed some 36,000 workers in its shipyards during World War II and built some of the nation's largest warships. It was the home to major industries, from RCA Victor to Campbell's Soup. It was a destination for immigrants and upwardly mobile lower middle class families. Camden now resembles a penal colony.

In Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges and American Book Award winning cartoonist Joe Sacco show how places like Camden, a poster child of postindustrial decay, stand as a warning of what huge pockets of the United States will turn into if we cement in place a permanent underclass. In addition to Camden, Hedges and Sacco report from the coal fields of West Virginia, Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and undocumented farm worker colonies in California. With unemployment and underemployment combined at far over ten percent, as Congress proposes to slash Medicare and Medicaid, Food Stamps, Pell Grants, Social Security, and other social services, Hedges and Sacco warn of a bleak near future—where cities and states fall easily into bankruptcy, neofeudalism reigns, and the nation’s working and middle classes are decimated.

A shocking report from the frontlines of poverty in America, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is a clarion call for reform.

TC Tidbit: aMAZEme

Check it out HERE.

BTC Chats With Author Lynda Rutledge

A fifth generation Texan, Lynda has hopped across literary and geographic boundaries in her writing career. She's been a freelance journalist, travel writer, ghostwriter, restaurant and film reviewer, copywriter, college professor, book collaborator, and nonfiction author while living/​writing/​studying in Chicago, San Diego, New Orleans, Madrid, and lots of other heres and theres around the globe.

 

As a freelance journalist, she's petted baby rhinos, snorkeled with endangered sea turtles, hang-glided off a small Swiss mountain, dodged hurricanes, and interviewed the famous and not-so-famous to write dozens of articles for national and international magazines, newspapers and travel guides, her travel photographs often appearing with her work. She's also crafted collaborative nonfiction with people from all walks of life as well as organizations such as the San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park for which she's shown below doing an interview.

 

 Her creative writing, though, has always been the love of her writing life and the stuff of her literary dreams. She holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and has won awards and residencies from the Illinois Arts Council, Writers League of Texas, Ragdale Foundation, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Squaw Valley Community of Writers as well as juried attendance to Sewanee Writers Conference among others. 

 

Currently, she is behaving herself in front of her computer screen in the hill country outside Austin, pursuing those pesky literary pretensions as she enjoys her debut novel with Putnam's Amy Einhorn Books.

 

Her debut novel:

 

On the last day of the millennium, sassy Faith Bass Darling, the richest old lady in Bass, Texas, decides to have a garage sale. With help from a couple of neighborhood boys, Faith lugs her priceless Louis XV elephant clock, countless Tiffany lamps, and everything else from her nineteenth-century mansion out onto her long, sloping lawn.
Why is a recluse of twenty years suddenly selling off her dearest possessions? Becasue God told her to.
 

As the townspeople grab up five generations of heirlooms, everyone drawn to the sale--including Faith's lon-lost daughter--finds that the antiques not only hold family secrets but also inspire some of life's most imponderable questions: 

 

Do our possessions possess us? What are we without our memories? Is there life after death or second chances here on earth? And is Faith really selling that Tiffany lamp for $1?

 

 

Lynda tells us more about the book:

 

Lynda shares her thoughts about her editor, agents as well as some writing advice:

Cathy's Recommendation List for Serious Summer Reads

Click on the book cover to learn more about the book.

TC Tidbit: Artist Robin Tatlow-Lord Compairs Book to Movie Characters

See more of her art HERE.

They Were The Beatles of Basketball, The Mercury Seven In Sneakers

In Dream Team, acclaimed sports journalist Jack McCallum delivers the untold story of the greatest team ever assembled: the 1992 U.S. Olympic Men’s Basketball Team that captivated the world, kindled the hoop dreams of countless children around the planet, and remade the NBA into a global sensation.

As a senior staff writer for Sports Illustrated, McCallum enjoyed a courtside seat for the most exciting basketball spectacle on earth, covering the Dream Team from its inception to the gold medal ceremony in Barcelona. For the duration of the Olympics, he lived with, golfed with, and—most important—drank with some of the greatest players of the NBA’s Golden Age: Magic Johnson, the ebullient showman who shrugged off his recent diagnosis of HIV to become the team’s unquestioned captain and leader; Michael Jordan, the transcendent talent at the height of his powers as a player—and a marketing juggernaut; and Charles Barkley, the outspoken iconoclast whose utterances on and off the court threatened to ignite an international incident. Presiding over the entire traveling circus was the Dream Team’s beloved coach, Chuck Daly, whose laissez-faire approach proved instrumental in getting the most out of such disparate personalities and superstars such as Larry Bird, Patrick Ewing, and Scottie Pippen.

Drawing on fresh interviews with the players, McCallum provides the definitive account of the Dream Team phenomenon. He offers a behind-the-scenes look at the controversial selection process. He takes us inside the team’s Olympic suites for late-night card games and bull sessions where the players debate both the finer points of basketball and their respective places in the NBA pantheon. And he narrates a riveting possession-by-possession account of the legendary July 1992 intrasquad scrimmage that pitted the Dream Teamers against one another in what may have been the greatest pickup game—and the greatest exhibition of trash talk—in history.

In the twenty years since the Dream Team first captivated the world’s attention, its mystique has only grown—and so has its influence. The NBA is now flush with international stars, many of them inspired by the exuberant spirit of ’92. Dream Team vividly re-creates the moment when a once-in-a-millennium group of athletes came together, outperformed the hype, and changed the future of sports—one perfectly executed fast break at a time.

The Dream Team was . . .
 
Michael Jordan, Guard, Chicago Bulls
Magic Johnson, Guard, Los Angeles Lakers
Larry Bird, Forward, Boston Celtics
Charles Barkley, Forward, Phoenix Suns
Chris Mullin, Forward, Golden State Warriors
Scottie Pippen, Forward, Chicago Bulls
John Stockton, Guard, Utah Jazz
Karl Malone, Forward, Utah Jazz
David Robinson, Center, San Antonio Spurs
Patrick Ewing, Center, New York Knicks
Christian Laettner, Forward, Duke University
Clyde Drexler, Guard, Portland Trailblazers

“Hilarious, provocative, and supersmart, 'Year Zero' is a brilliant novel to be enjoyed in perpetuity in the known universe and in all unknown universes yet to be discovered.”—John Hodgman, resident expert, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

An alien advance party was suddenly nosing around my planet.
 
Worse, they were lawyering up. . . .

In the hilarious tradition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Rob Reid takes you on a headlong journey through the outer reaches of the universe—and the inner workings of our absurdly dysfunctional music industry.

Low-level entertainment lawyer Nick Carter thinks it’s a prank, not an alien encounter, when a redheaded mullah and a curvaceous nun show up at his office. But Frampton and Carly are highly advanced (if bumbling) extraterrestrials. And boy, do they have news.

The entire cosmos, they tell him, has been hopelessly hooked on humanity’s music ever since “Year Zero” (1977 to us), when American pop songs first reached alien ears. This addiction has driven a vast intergalactic society to commit the biggest copyright violation since the Big Bang. The resulting fines and penalties have bankrupted the whole universe. We humans suddenly own everything—and the aliens are not amused.

Nick Carter has just been tapped to clean up this mess before things get ugly, and he’s an unlikely galaxy-hopping hero: He’s scared of heights. He’s also about to be fired. And he happens to have the same name as a Backstreet Boy. But he does know a thing or two about copyright law. And he’s packing a couple of other pencil-pushing superpowers that could come in handy.

Soon he’s on the run from a sinister parrot and a highly combustible vacuum cleaner. With Carly and Frampton as his guides, Nick now has forty-eight hours to save humanity, while hopefully wowing the hot girl who lives down the hall from him.

Listen to the first chapter HERE. 

John Hodgman interviews the author HERE.

TC Tidbit: Books That Make Guys Swoon

From our friends at flavorwire.com.

TARP Expert Gives A Behind The Scenes View of What Happened During And After The Bailout

In this bracing, page-turning account of his stranger-than-fiction baptism into the corrupted ways of Washington, Neil Barofsky offers an irrefutable indictment, from an insider of the Bush and Obama administrations, of the mishandling of the $700 billion TARP bailout fund. In vivid behind-the-scenes detail, he reveals proof of the extreme degree to which our government officials bent over backward to serve the interests of Wall Street firms at the expense of the broader public—and at the expense of effective financial reform.

During the height of the financial crisis in 2008, Barofsky gave up his job as a prosecutor in the esteemed U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York City, where he had convicted drug kingpins, Wall Street executives, and perpetrators of mortgage fraud, to become the special inspector general in charge of oversight of the spending of the bailout money. From his first day on the job, his efforts to protect against fraud and to hold the big banks accountable for how they spent taxpayer money were met with outright hostility from the Treasury officials in charge of the bailouts.

Barofsky discloses how, in serving the interests of the banks, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his team worked with Wall Street executives to design programs that would funnel vast amounts of taxpayer money to their firms and would have allowed them to game the markets and make huge profits with almost no risk and no accountability, while repeatedly fighting Barofsky’s efforts to put the necessary fraud protections in place. His investigations also uncovered abject mismanagement of the bailout of insurance giant AIG and Geithner’s decision to allow the payment of millions of dollars in bonuses—including $7,700 to a kitchen worker and $7,000 to a mail room assistant—and that the Obama administration’s “TARP czar” lobbied for the executives to retain their high pay.

Providing stark details about how, meanwhile, the interests of homeowners and the broader public were betrayed, Barofsky recounts how Geithner and his team steadfastly failed to fix glaring flaws in the Obama administration’s homeowner relief program pointed out by Barofsky and other bailout watchdogs, rejecting anti-fraud measures, which unleashed a wave of abuses by mortgage providers against homeowners, even causing some who would not have lost their homes otherwise to go into foreclosure. Ultimately only a small fraction (just $1.4 billion at the time he stepped down) of the $50 billion allocated to help homeowners was spent, while the funds expended to prop up the financial system—as Barofsky discloses—totaled $4.7 trillion. As Barofsky raised the alarm about the bailout failures, he met with obstruction of his investigations, and he recounts in blow-by-blow detail how an increasingly aggressive war was waged against his efforts, with even the White House launching a broadside against him. Bailout is a riveting account of his plunge into the political meat grinder of Washington, as well as a vital revelation of just how captured by Wall Street our political system is and why the too-big-to-fail banks have only become bigger and more dangerous in the wake of the crisis.

Read the Bloomberg Businessweek article about the author and his book HERE.

Mystery Lovers, If You Don't Know Harry Dolan, It's Time You Meet

"Witty, sophisticated, suspenseful and endless fun...the best first novel I've read this year." -Washington Post

The man who calls himself David Loogan is hoping to escape a violent past by living a quiet, anonymous life in Ann Arbor, Michigan. But when he's hired as an editor at a mystery magazine, he is drawn into an affair with the sleek blond wife of the publisher, Tom Kristoll-a man who soon turns up dead.

Elizabeth Waishkey is the most talented detective in the Ann Arbor Police Department, but even she doesn't know if Loogan is a killer or an ally who might help her find the truth. As more deaths start mounting up-some of them echoing stories published in the magazine-it's up to Elizabeth to solve both the murders and the mystery of Loogan himself.

From the national bestselling author of Bad Things Happen—the debut that Stephen King called a “great f***ing book”—comes a new crime novel that will blow readers away… 

Anthony Lark has a list of names—Terry Dawtrey, Sutton Bell, Henry Kormoran. To his eyes, the names glow red on the page. They move. They breathe. The men on the list were once involved in a notorious robbery. And now Lark is hunting them, and he won’t stop until every one of them is dead.

David Loogan—editor of the mystery magazine Gray Streets—is living a quiet life in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with Detective Elizabeth Waishkey and her daughter. But soon David and Elizabeth are drawn into Lark’s violent world. As Elizabeth works to track Lark down, David befriends Lucy Navarro, a reporter with a crazy theory about the case that threatens to implicate some very powerful people. And when Lucy disappears, David decides her theory may not be so crazy after all.

Read the opening chapters HERE.

Read a Q&A with the author HERE.

TC Tidbit: How Lydia Netzer Learned A Valuable Lesson From Her Own Book

Read her post HERE.

Jackie Thinks Melville Would Be Very Proud of His Great-Great-Great Granddaughter's Debut Novel

Nick and her cousin, Helena, have grown up sharing sultry summer heat, sunbleached boat docks, and midnight gin parties on Martha's Vineyard in a glorious old family estate known as Tiger House. In the days following the end of the Second World War, the world seems to offer itself up, and the two women are on the cusp of their 'real lives': Helena is off to Hollywood and a new marriage, while Nick is heading for a reunion with her own young husband, Hughes, about to return from the war.

Soon the gilt begins to crack. Helena's husband is not the man he seemed to be, and Hughes has returned from the war distant, his inner light curtained over. On the brink of the 1960s, back at Tiger House, Nick and Helena--with their children, Daisy and Ed--try to recapture that sense of possibility. But when Daisy and Ed discover the victim of a brutal murder, the intrusion of violence causes everything to unravel. The members of the family spin out of their prescribed orbits, secrets come to light, and nothing about their lives will ever be the same.

Brilliantly told from five points of view, with a magical elegance and suspenseful dark longing, Tigers in Red Weather is an unforgettable debut novel from a writer of extraordinary insight and accomplishment.

Read an interview with the author HERE.

Jackie says:
"This is a tale of a family, a Martha's Vineyard society kind of family, starting with the end of WWII and moving on through the late 60s.  The first third of the book is dominated by Nick, a controlling young woman who has married who she was supposed to marry, and hasn't had a happy day since.  She does what she must while yearning for other things (and other men), and produces the required child, Daisy.  Then a murder in the the community shakes things up, for everyone.

Next we hear from Helena, Nick's cousin, though really like a sister to her, gets her say.  Her first husband died in the war shortly after their marriage, and when we meet her, she is on her way to Hollywood to marry her second husband, a filmmaker.  It doesn't take her long to find that he is actually a grifter and is obsessed with a dead actress.  Helena drifts into alcohol and drugs, taking a short break to have a baby to see if that would improve her marriage.  It didn't, and she finds her son to be rather strange and frightening, so once more she moves into the arms of booze and drugs.  She is visiting her cousin in Martha's Vineyard the summer of the murder, and it was in fact her son Ed and Nick's daughter Daisy who find the mutilated body.  Sunny Daisy comes through it well, but Ed seems to get even more strange and worrisome.  Helena's resentment of Nick begins to grow in to a complicated hate.

Hughes, Nick's husband, takes over the story for a bit, offering fresh perspective on things already known, as well as some secrets of his own. Then Ed get's his turn, finishing the book with the stark confirmation and clarification of so many of the doubts and mysteries the whole family has held for 25+ years.

This is not a cheerful book in any way.  However, the writing is mesmerizing, with crisp dialog that makes you feel as if you are right there with the characters, and drives you to turn page after page into the wee hours of the morning.  This is a debut novel, and a very impressive one.  I'll be eagerly looking for more from Klaussmann in the future."

"The tension is palpable on virtually every page of a story that perfectly balances the protagonist’s complex inner life with an elaborately constructed puzzle.” --Publishers Weekly

In this latest novel from bestselling author John Verdon, ingenious puzzle solver Dave Gurney puts under the magnifying glass a notorious serial murder case – one whose motives have been enshrined as law-enforcement dogma - and discovers that everyone has it wrong.
 
The most decorated homicide detective in NYPD history, Dave Gurney is still trying to adjust to his life of quasi-retirement in upstate New York when a young woman who is producing a documentary on a notorious murder spree seeks his counsel.  Soon after, Gurney begins feeling threatened: a razor-sharp hunting arrow lands in his yard, and he narrowly escapes serious injury in a booby-trapped basement.  As things grow more bizarre, he finds himself reexamining the case of The Good Shepherd, which ten years before involved a series of roadside shootings and a rage-against-the-rich manifesto.  The killings ceased, and a cult of analysis grew up around the case with a consensus opinion that no one would dream of challenging  -- no one, that is, but Dave Gurney. 

Mocked even by some who’d been his supporters in previous investigations, Dave realizes that the killer is too clever to ever be found.  The only gambit that may make sense is also the most dangerous – to make himself a target and get the killer to come to him.

To survive, Gurney must rely on three allies: his beloved wife Madeleine, impressively intuitive and a beacon of light in the gathering darkness; his de-facto investigative “partner” Jack Hardwick, always ready to spit in authority’s face but wily when it counts; and his son Kyle, who has come back into Gurney’s life with surprising force, love and loyalty.

Displaying all the hallmarks for which the Dave Gurney series is lauded -- well-etched characters, deft black humor, and ingenious deduction that ends in a climactic showdown – Let the Devil Sleep is something more: a reminder of the power of self-belief in a world that contains too little of it.

Read an excerpt HERE.

Read "On Serial Killers", and article by Verdon in Publishers Weekly.

TC Tidbit: Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) performing "Without Libraries"

TC loves Daniel Handler and libraries, and we are pretty sure the feeling is mutual.

"Anderson's debut novel is filled with very human comedy, and very human tragedy, though it contains no humans at all, " says Heather.

At once an old-fashioned-buddy-novel-shoot-'em-up and a work of deliciously imagined fantasy, Howard L. Anderson's dazzling debut presents the haunting story of a world where something has gone horribly awry ...

Having escaped from Australia's Adelaide Zoo, an orphaned platypus named Albert embarks on a journey through the outback in search of "Old Australia," a rumored land of liberty, promise, and peace. What he will find there, however, away from the safe confinement of his enclosure for the first time since his earliest memories, proves to be a good deal more than he anticipated.

Alone in the outback, with an empty soft drink bottle as his sole possession, Albert stumbles upon pyromaniacal wombat Jack, and together they spend a night drinking and gambling in Ponsby Station, a rough-and-tumble mining town. Accused of burning down the local mercantile, the duo flees into menacing dingo territory and quickly go their separate ways-Albert to pursue his destiny in the wastelands, Jack to reconcile his past.

Encountering a motley assortment of characters along the way-a pair of invariably drunk bandicoots, a militia of kangaroos, hordes of the mercurial dingoes, and a former prize-fighting Tasmanian devil-our unlikely hero will discover a strength and skill for survival he never suspected he possessed.

Told with equal parts wit and compassion, Albert of Adelaide shows how it is often the unexpected route, and the most improbable companions, that lead us on the path to who we really are. Who you journey with, after all, is far more important than wherever it is you are going.

Take a look inside the book HERE. 

Heather says:
"I have read some odd books in my day, but nothing quite like this fable. Set in the Australian outback, and starring none other than a duck-billed platypus (Albert), a wombat, and a Tasmanian Devil, it is a story of adventure, friendship, finding an inner hero, and ultimately, finding peace. I was completely caught up in Albert's adventures on his journey from a cage in a zoo (in Adelaide) to freedom in 'Old Australia.' Anderson's debut novel is filled with very human comedy, and very human tragedy, though it contains no humans at all."

Spotlight on Alexandra Fuller

In Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller remembers her African childhood with candor and sensitivity. Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fuller’s endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate. Fuller’s debut is unsentimental and unflinching but always captivating. In wry and sometimes hilarious prose, she stares down disaster and looks back with rage and love at the life of an extraordinary family in an extraordinary time.

When Alexandra ("Bo") Fuller was home in Zambia a few years ago, visiting her parents for Christmas, she asked her father about a nearby banana farmer who was known for being a "tough bugger." Her father's response was a warning to steer clear of him; he told Bo: "Curiosity scribbled the cat." Nonetheless, Fuller began her strange friendship with the man she calls K, a white African and veteran of the Rhodesian war. With the same fiercely beautiful prose that won her acclaim for Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Fuller here recounts her friendship with K.

K is, seemingly, a man of contradictions: tattooed, battle scarred, and weathered by farm work, he is a lion of a man, feral and bulletproof. Yet he is also a born-again Christian, given to weeping when he recollects his failed romantic life, and more than anything else welling up inside with memories of battle. For his war, like all wars, was a brutal one, marked by racial strife, jungle battles, unimaginable tortures, and the murdering of innocent civilians—and K, like all the veterans of the war, has blood on his hands.

Driven by K's memories, Fuller and K decide to enter the heart of darkness in the most literal way—by traveling from Zambia through Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and Mozambique to visit the scenes of the war and to meet other veterans. It is a strange journey into the past, one marked at once by somber reflections and odd humor and featuring characters such as Mapenga, a fellow veteran who lives with his pet lion on a little island in the middle of a lake and is known to cope with his personal demons by refusing to speak for days on end. What results from Fuller's journey is a remarkably unbiased and unsentimental glimpse of men who have killed, mutilated, tortured, and scrambled to survive during wartime and who now must attempt to live with their past and live past their sins. In these men, too, we get a glimpse of life in Africa, a land that besets its creatures with pests, plagues, and natural disasters, making the people there at once more hardened and more vulnerable than elsewhere.

Scribbling the Cat is an engrossing and haunting look at war, Africa, and the lines of sanity.

A heartrending story of the human spirit from the author of the bestselling Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Alexandra Fuller returns with the unforgettable true story of Colton H. Bryant, a soulful boy with a mustang-taming heart who comes of age in the oil fields and open plains of Wyoming. After surviving a sometimes cruel adolescence with his own brand of optimistic goofiness, Colton goes to work on an oil rig-and there the biggest heart in the world can't save him from the new, unkind greed that has possessed his beloved Wyoming during the latest boom.

Colton's story could not be told without telling of the land that grew him, where the great high plains meet the Rocky Mountains to create a vista of lonely beauty. It is here that the existence of one boy is a true story as deeply moving as the life that inspired it.

A story of survival and war, love and madness, loyalty and forgiveness, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is an intimate exploration of Fuller’s parents and of the price of being possessed by Africa’s uncompromising, fertile, death-dealing land. We follow Tim and Nicola Fuller hopscotching the continent, restlessly trying to establish a home. War, hardship, and tragedy follow the family even as Nicola fights to hold on to her children, her land, her sanity. But just when it seems that Nicola has been broken by the continent she loves, it is the African earth that revives and nurtures her. Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is Fuller at her very best.

Listen to the Authors On Tour Live podcast of Fuller's Tattered Cover signing for this book HERE.

TC Tidbit: How To Read A Book

Dan Wells' Latest Is A Trip Into Madness

Dan Wells won instant acclaim for his three-novel debut about the adventures of John Wayne Cleaver, a heroic young man who is a potential serial killer. All who read the trilogy were struck by the distinctive and believable voice Wells created for John.

Now he returns with another innovative thriller told in a very different, equally unique voice. A voice that comes to us from the  realm of madness.

Michael Shipman is paranoid schizophrenic; he suffers from hallucinations, delusions, and complex fantasies of persecution and horror. That’s bad enough. But what can he do if some of the monsters he sees turn out to be real?

Who can you trust if you can't even trust yourself? The Hollow City is a mesmerizing journey into madness, where the greatest enemy of all is your own mind.

Here are some highlights from Wells' signing at Tattered Cover Colfax Avenue on 7-17-12:

"An emotionally jolting story of love, obsession and madness is played out to incredible effect... French has garnered a huge legion of fans and they will be thrilled with this, her fourth and possibly best novel." --Daily Mail

The mesmerizing fourth novel of the Dublin murder squad by New York Times bestselling author Tana French

Mick "Scorcher" Kennedy, the brash cop from Tana French’s bestselling Faithful Place, plays by the book and plays hard. That’s what’s made him the Murder squad’s top detective—and that’s what puts the biggest case of the year into his hands.

On one of the half-built, half-abandoned "luxury" developments that litter Ireland, Patrick Spain and his two young children are dead. His wife, Jenny, is in intensive care.

At first, Scorcher and his rookie partner, Richie, think it’s going to be an easy solve. But too many small things can’t be explained. The half dozen baby monitors, their cameras pointing at holes smashed in the Spains’ walls. The files erased from the Spains’ computer. The story Jenny told her sister about a shadowy intruder who was slipping past all the locks.

And Broken Harbor holds memories for Scorcher. Seeing the case on the news sends his sister Dina off the rails again, and she’s resurrecting something that Scorcher thought he had tightly under control: what happened to their family one summer at Broken Harbor, back when they were children.

With her signature blend of police procedural and psychological thriller, French’s new novel goes full throttle with a heinous crime, creating her most complicated detective character and her best book yet.

TC Tidbits: Myers-Briggs Ratings For Literary Characters

From the folks at huffingtonpost.com.

TC Folks Are Falling For Harold Fry

Meet Harold Fry, recently retired. He lives in a small English village with his wife, Maureen, who seems irritated by almost everything he does, even down to how he butters his toast. Little differentiates one day from the next. Then one morning the mail arrives, and within the stack of quotidian minutiae is a letter addressed to Harold in a shaky scrawl from a woman he hasn’t seen or heard from in twenty years. Queenie Hennessy is in hospice and is writing to say goodbye.

Harold pens a quick reply and, leaving Maureen to her chores, heads to the corner mailbox. But then, as happens in the very best works of fiction, Harold has a chance encounter, one that convinces him that he absolutely must deliver his message to Queenie in person. And thus begins the unlikely pilgrimage at the heart of Rachel Joyce’s remarkable debut. Harold Fry is determined to walk six hundred miles from Kingsbridge to the hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed because, he believes, as long as he walks, Queenie Hennessey will live.

Still in his yachting shoes and light coat, Harold embarks on his urgent quest across the countryside. Along the way he meets one fascinating character after another, each of whom unlocks his long-dormant spirit and sense of promise. Memories of his first dance with Maureen, his wedding day, his joy in fatherhood, come rushing back to him—allowing him to also reconcile the losses and the regrets. As for Maureen, she finds herself missing Harold for the first time in years.

And then there is the unfinished business with Queenie Hennessy.

A novel of unsentimental charm, humor, and profound insight into the thoughts and feelings we all bury deep within our hearts, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry introduces Rachel Joyce as a wise—and utterly irresistible—storyteller.

Linda says:
"This is an utterly charming book that quietly but firmly takes you by the hand and off you go, in the company of one, Harold Fry. Harold is a bored retiree who receives a letter from an old friend that sets him off on a journey he had not the faintest notion that he would ever take and certainly ever complete. Though he is in the latter part of his life, Harold discovers the world as if for the first time or after waking from a long dream, and as we walk along beside him, we, too, get to look at life freshly and with new hope.
     
This story is about the ways we can slowly die to ourselves and to those around us, but, most importantly, it is an affirmation of the resilience of the human spirit and the many ways we can choose to step back into life, with joy and with gratitude.
   
I thoroughly enjoyed it."

Pete says:
"There goes my hero. He's ordinary." Foo Fighters
"If you've ever been on a leisurely stroll and wondered what would happen if you just kept walking, then The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is the perfect novel for you. Harold Fry seems the least likely guy for any type of pilgrimage. He's retired, out of shape, not particularly religious, and had merely set out to drop off a letter in reply to a long lost friend. But this particular friend struck a nerve, and had such significance to his life that written words could not convey what she meant to him. So he pulls back the letter from the lip of the mailbox and decides to walk it to her -- 600 miles away. Harold leaves behind his wife, his home, and nearly all possessions as he puts one foot in front of the other aimed to the northern tip of coastal England. Along the way he meets an intriguing assortment of characters, attracts press attention and even groupies, and suffers a whole lot of aches and pains from both physical and mental exertion.

So why does he walk? Why not drive or take a bus? At times a pilgrimage is not necessarily location specific, but more specific to a state of mind. Harold has a lifetime of dark secrets to confront, mysteries to solve, and sometimes it really, really hurts. In the song 'Mr. Harris' Aimee Mann sings the lyric 'Sometimes it takes a lifetime to get what you need.' If a man feels the need to walk across the country then maybe he ought to do it.

I urge any lover of fiction to take this incredible journey with Mr. Fry. After finishing, I instantly felt the need to re-read the first three chapters to make sure I had a full grasp of the story. It's one of those rare books where you're reading about the ordinary and somewhere along the line it becomes extraordinary. And you put the book down and think, 'Wow, what was that?'"

"'In the Shadow of the Banyan is one of the most extraordinary and beautiful acts of storytelling I have ever encountered." --Chris Cleave

You are about to read an extraordinary story. It will take you to the very depths of despair and show you unspeakable horrors. It will reveal a gorgeously rich culture struggling to survive through a furtive bow, a hidden ankle bracelet, fragments of remembered poetry. It will ensure that the world never forgets the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, when an estimated two million people lost their lives. It will give you hope, and it will confirm the power of storytelling to lift us up and help us not only survive but transcend suffering, cruelty, and loss.

For seven-year-old Raami, the shattering end of childhood begins with the footsteps of her father returning home in the early dawn hours, bringing details of the civil war that has overwhelmed the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital. Soon the family’s world of carefully guarded royal privilege is swept up in the chaos of revolution and forced exodus. Over the next four years, as the Khmer Rouge attempts to strip the population of every shred of individual identity, Raami clings to the only remaining vestige of her childhood— the mythical legends and poems told to her by her father. In a climate of systematic violence where memory is sickness and justification for execution, Raami fights for her improbable survival.

Displaying the author’s extraordinary gift for language, In the Shadow of the Banyan is a brilliantly wrought tale of human resilience.

TC Tidbit: The Dog Who Loves To Read

Read more about Dublin the Dog HERE.

Lynn says that reading this book "can feel like picking up long-dormant or overlooked dimensions in one's own personal stories/myths/dreaming."

A spiritual coming-of-age memoir from a poet praised for her "breathtaking complex witness and world-remaking language" (Adrienne Rich).

In this transcendent memoir, grounded in tribal myth and ancestry, music and poetry, Joy Harjo, one of our leading Native American voices, details her journey to becoming a poet. Born in Oklahoma, the end place of the Trail of Tears, Harjo grew up learning to dodge an abusive stepfather by finding shelter in her imagination, a deep spiritual life, and connection with the natural world. She attended an Indian arts boarding school, where she nourished an appreciation for painting, music, and poetry; gave birth while still a teenager; and struggled on her own as a single mother, eventually finding her poetic voice. Narrating the complexities of betrayal and love, Crazy Brave is a memoir about family and the breaking apart necessary in finding a voice. Harjo’s tale of a hardscrabble youth, young adulthood, and transformation into an award-winning poet and musician is haunting, unique, and visionary.

Listen the the NPR interview with the author HERE.

Lynn says:
"Within the first few pages (if not sentences!) I was already remarking to myself how lucky I felt to have picked up this book.  Vaguely familiar with Harjo's band, Poetic Justice, and some of her poetry ('The Woman Who Fell From the Sky'), I opened Crazy Brave, curious what sort of jazz-inspired, Mvskoke/Creek memoir she'd produced, and was instantly transported into a world of smells, sounds, sights, and cosmological musings of infant-mind becoming child-mind, then adolescent-mind, then adult-mind, each stage evoking a primal, magical sort of time-transcendent mythic reality I hadn't felt quite so in touch with since my own childhood... Seriously. But playfully too.  And to use the word 'mind' here is wholly incomplete, as the mind and heart and even the soul of the very planet are all so intertwined in this story.  Not so surprising, considering her gifts as a poet/artist/musician... and retroactively informative of how and why it makes so much sense that her language/art/music-as-healing story trajectory put her on that kind of writer's path.  There are four segments to her story; East, North, West and South... and each one is contextualized within a (roughly) chronological chunk of the author's life.  Like poetry, painting and jazz can sometimes do, putting the book down between chapters and taking a walk can open the eyes and ears to added dimensions to which normal habituation to 'real life' may have dulled one's sensitivity... and picking it up again can feel like picking up long-dormant or overlooked dimensions in one's own personal stories/myths/dreaming.  Really. It's just that sort of book."

Meet the author tomorrow night, Tuesday, July 24, 2012, at 7:30 at our Colfax Avenue store. Free and open to the public.

Anthony Bourdain's Latest Book Is a Graphic Novel

In a not-too-distant future L.A. where master chefs rule the town like crime lords and people literally kill for a seat at the best restaurants, a bloody culinary war is raging.

On one side, the Internationalists, who blend foods from all over the world into exotic delights. On the other, the "Vertical Farm," who prepare nothing but organic, vegetarian, macrobiotic dishes. Into this maelstrom steps Jiro, a renegade and ruthless sushi chef, known to decapitate patrons who dare request a California Roll, or who stir wasabi into their soy sauce. Both sides want Jiro to join their factions. Jiro, however has bigger ideas, and in the end, no chef may be left alive!

Anthony Bourdain, top chef, acclaimed writer (Kitchen Confidential, Medium Raw) and star of the hit travel show, No Reservations, co-writes with Joel Rose (Kill Kill Faster Faster, The Blackest Bird) this stylized send-up of food culture and society, with detailed and dynamic art by Langdon Foss.

TC Tidbit: Pithy Posters for Writers

via latimes.com

Dragons Take Human Forms In This Debut Fantasy

Four decades of peace have done little to ease the mistrust between humans and dragons in the kingdom of Goredd. Folding themselves into human shape, dragons attend court as ambassadors, and lend their rational, mathematical minds to universities as scholars and teachers. As the treaty's anniversary draws near, however, tensions are high.

Seraphina Dombegh has reason to fear both sides. An unusually gifted musician, she joins the court just as a member of the royal family is murdered—in suspiciously draconian fashion. Seraphina is drawn into the investigation, partnering with the captain of the Queen's Guard, the dangerously perceptive Prince Lucian Kiggs. While they begin to uncover hints of a sinister plot to destroy the peace, Seraphina struggles to protect her own secret, the secret behind her musical gift, one so terrible that its discovery could mean her very life.

In her exquisitely written fantasy debut, Rachel Hartman creates a rich, complex, and utterly original world. Seraphina's tortuous journey to self-acceptance is one readers will remember long after they've turned the final page.

Two Sisters Write One Thrilling Tale

It seems so idyllic. But something is out of place. In the neatly raked gravel parking area is a dazzlingly clean black Jeep. The paint of the Jeep reflects a clematis with large pure white blossoms climbing up a knotted old apple tree. Someone is lying under the low trunk and crooked branches of the tree. A young woman, a girl. . . .

Siri Bergman is a thirty-four-year-old psychologist who works in central Stockholm and lives alone in an isolated cottage out of the city. She has a troublesome secret in her past and has been trying to move on with her life. Terrified of the dark, she leaves all the lights on when she goes to bed—having a few glasses of wine each night to calm her nerves—but she can’t shake the feeling that someone is watching her through the blackened windows at night.

When the lifeless body of Sara Matteus—a young patient of Siri’s with a history of drug addiction and sexual abuse—is found floating in the water near the cottage, Siri can no longer deny that someone is out there, watching her and waiting. When her beloved cat goes missing and she receives a photo of herself from a stalker, it becomes clear that Siri is next. Luckily, she can rely on Markus, the young policeman investigating Sara’s death; Vijay, an old friend and psychology professor; and Aina, her best friend. Together, they set about profiling Siri’s aspiring murderer, hoping to catch him before he kills again.

But as their investigation unfolds, Siri’s past and present start to merge and disintegrate so that virtually everyone in her inner circle becomes a potential suspect. With the suspense building toward a dramatic conclusion as surprising as it is horrifying, Siri is forced to relive and reexamine her anguished past, and finally to achieve some kind of peace.