Meet Our New VIB

From New England Book Award winner Lily King comes a breathtaking novel about three young anthropologists of the ‘30’s caught in a passionate love triangle that threatens their bonds, their careers, and, ultimately, their lives.

English anthropologist Andrew Banson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in the Territory of New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers’ deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when a chance encounter with colleagues, the controversial Nell Stone and her wry and mercurial Australian husband Fen, pulls him back from the brink. Nell and Fen have just fled the bloodthirsty Mumbanyo and, in spite of Nell’s poor health, are hungry for a new discovery. When Bankson finds them a new tribe nearby, the artistic, female-dominated Tam, he ignites an intellectual and romantic firestorm between the three of them that burns out of anyone’s control.

Set between two World Wars and inspired by events in the life of revolutionary anthropologist Margaret Mead, Euphoria is an enthralling story of passion, possession, exploration, and sacrifice from accomplished author Lily King.

Cathy says:

"From page one and Nell's broken glasses I was spellbound and riveted. Euphoria is a novel to devour for its nuanced and complicated characters made all the more intriguing due to novelist's Lily King's incorporating the legendary anthropologist Margaret Mead's life and experiences into the unforgettable Nell Stone.

New Guinea in the 1930's is the setting for King's novel about three anthropologists living with native tribes; Nell and her husband Fen, and their friend and colleague Andrew Bankson. The three are insatiable in their desire to understand the cultures they've placed themselves in some peril to study. They are also vulnerable to each other, and as Euphoria unfolds it becomes clear that the real peril to their survival does not come from the natives. Euphoria is exactly the kind of novel I crave and love to recommend to our readers. Thank you, Lily King." 

Save The Date!!!

On Friday, June 27, 2014, Lily King will be reading from and discussing her latest book (and our VIB).  The event starts at 7:00 pm at our Historic Lodo store.

Every now and then we encounter a new book that we’re so excited about we want to shout it from the rooftops, so we've created a special tag to distinguish it from the rest: TC VIB (very impressive book)! That means it’s a true stand-out in a season of many excellent and compelling new books.

Meet Our New VIB!!!

The breakout book from a prizewinning young writer: a breathtaking, suspenseful story of one man’s obsessive search to find the truth of another man’s downfall.

Nelson’s life is not turning out the way he hoped. His girlfriend is sleeping with another man, his brother has left their South American country, leaving Nelson to care for their widowed mother, and his acting career can’t seem to get off the ground. That is, until he lands a starring role in a touring revival of The Idiot President, a legendary play by Nelson’s hero, Henry Nunez, leader of the storied guerrilla theater troupe Diciembre. And that’s when the real trouble begins.

The tour takes Nelson out of the shelter of the city and across a landscape he’s never seen, which still bears the scars of the civil war. With each performance, Nelson grows closer to his fellow actors, becoming hopelessly entangled in their complicated lives, until, during one memorable performance, a long-buried betrayal surfaces to force the troupe into chaos.

Nelson’s fate is slowly revealed through the investigation of the narrator, a young man obsessed with Nelson’s story—and perhaps closer to it than he lets on. In sharp, vivid, and beautiful prose, Alarcón delivers a compulsively readable narrative and a provocative meditation on fate, identity, and the large consequences that can result from even our smallest choices.

Cathy says:

"Daniel Alarcon is a genius. I'll bet he's on the MacArthur Foundation short list, already a New Yorker 20 Under 40 and a Pen/Hemingway Award winner. His new novel At Night We Walk in Circles took my breath away with the beauty of his prose and the incredible depth of his characters, most remarkably the young actor Nelson. 

Set in an unnamed South American country years after a protracted civil war has ended.  At Night We Walk in Circles chronicles the life and dark fate of Nelson, a bright and promising young man who joins a small guerrilla theater group. Nelson and its two original founders, one of whom, Henry, playwright and leading man, is a psychically battle-scarred casualty of the political conflict, bring their play, The Idiot President to villages in the countryside and mountains, looking for escape, renewal, and perhaps redemption. The village that is the troupe's final destination holds deep secrets, and an innocent and kind act results in a shocking outcome. Unbelievably brilliant."

Every now and then we encounter a new book that we’re so excited about we want to shout it from the rooftops, so we've created a special tag to distinguish it from the rest: TC VIB (very impressive book)! That means it’s a true stand-out in a season of many excellent and compelling new books.

Meet Our New VIB!

In the tradition of In the Time of the Butterflies and The Kite Runner, a tender, evocative novel about the years leading up to the Sri Lankan civil war
On the day the Herath family moves in, Sal Mal Lane is still a quiet street, disturbed only by the cries of the children whose triumphs and tragedies sustain the families that live there. As the neighbors adapt to the newcomers in different ways, the children fill their days with cricket matches, romantic crushes, and small rivalries. But the tremors of civil war are mounting, and the conflict threatens to engulf them all.
    
In a heartrending novel poised between the past and the future, the innocence of the children—a beloved sister and her overprotective siblings, a rejected son and his twin sisters, two very different brothers—contrasts sharply with the petty prejudices of the adults charged with their care. In Ru Freeman’s masterful hands, On Sal Mal Lane, a story of what was lost to a country and her people, becomes a resounding cry for reconciliation.

Cathy says:

"In my excitement to dive in to On Sal Mal Lane, the deeply moving and brilliant novel by Ru Freeman, I missed the map and list of families of the title lane. The map of the lane is a charming line drawing of the homes and gardens of the families about which this moving story is written. A lovely, protected enclave and exactly what I'd imagined while devouring this vivid, beautiful and deeply tragic tale of the families that live on the lane and the ethnic divisions that ultimately destroy the fragile harmony of the lane and the country of Sri Lanka as a whole.

On Sal Mal Lane is based on Freeman's childhood. She grew up in Colombo, Sri Lanka and witnessed the ethnic tension between the Tamils and Sinhalese the escalated to a civil war that lasted 26 years and cost many tens of thousands of lives. This was a conflict that I heard about but honestly didn't really understand until now. Sal Mal Lane is a microcosm of Sri Lanka. The novel opens as the Herath family is moving in. They are middle class, educated, with four lively, lovely children, each one special and written with amazing heart and understanding of childhood. The youngest, Devi, is a bright, mischievous 7 year old born on an very inauspicious day. Her brother Nihil has taken it upon himself to keep her safe, a task that proves more difficult as both Devi and the conflict between the Tamils and Sinhalese grow. These children are just two of a bevy of amazingly realized characters that inhabit the very unforgettable Sal Mal Lane. Devi reminds me of Scout from To Kill A Mockingbird and Swede from Peace Like A River, small girls who make very large impressions, and I'm sure that On Sal Mal Lane will join their ranks as a new perennial favorite of booksellers, librarians and of course, readers."

 Every now and then we encounter a new book that we’re so excited about we want to shout it from the rooftops, so we've created a special tag to distinguish it from the rest: TC VIB (very impressive book)! That means it’s a true stand-out in a season of many excellent and compelling new books.

Meet Our New VIB, And Its Author

 

From the beloved and best-selling author of Plainsong and Eventide comes a story of life and death, and the ties that bind, once again set out on the High Plains in Holt, Colorado.

When Dad Lewis is diagnosed with terminal cancer, he and his wife, Mary, must work together to make his final days as comfortable as possible. Their daughter, Lorraine, hastens back from Denver to help look after him; her devotion softens the bitter absence of their estranged son, Frank, but this cannot be willed away and remains a palpable presence for all three of them. Next door, a young girl named Alice moves in with her grandmother and contends with the painful memories that Dad's condition stirs up of her own mother's death.

Meanwhile, the town’s newly arrived preacher attempts to mend his strained relationships with his wife and teenaged son, a task that proves all the more challenging when he faces the disdain of his congregation after offering more than they are accustomed to getting on a Sunday morning. And throughout, an elderly widow and her middle-aged daughter do everything they can to ease the pain of their friends and neighbors.

Despite the travails that each of these families faces, together they form bonds strong enough to carry them through the most difficult of times.  Bracing, sad and deeply illuminating, Benediction captures the fullness of life by representing every stage of it, including its extinction, as well as the hopes and dreams that sustain us along the way. Here Kent Haruf gives us his most indelible portrait yet of this small town and reveals, with grace and insight, the compassion, the suffering and, above all, the humanity of its inhabitants.

Read an excerpt HERE. 

Cathy says:
"Holt, Colorado, a small town on the Eastern Plains is again the home for a cast of characters exquisitely rendered by the gifted novelist Kent Haruf. Dad Lewis is dying, and as he grows weaker his life story unfolds, one of hard work, heartbreak, grave errors and lasting love. Woven through are memorable characters: a minister and his family, new to Holt by way of Denver and struggling with crises of culture shock and faith, a young girl who recently lost her mother to cancer, an older mother and daughter living on the edge of town who host a most extraordinary ordinary afternoon gathering of women, and others, each deeply human and written with great respect for the human condition. Haruf's prose is as deliberate as poetry and is stunning in its power."

Every now and then we encounter a new book that we’re so excited about we want to shout it from the rooftops, so we've created a special tag to distinguish it from the rest: TC VIB (very impressive book)! That means it’s a true stand-out in a season of many excellent and compelling new books.

On Wed, March 6, 2013 at our Historic Lodo store, will be reading from and signing his book.

Free numbered tickets for a place in the booksigning line will be handed out at 6:30 pm. Seating for the presentation prior to the booksigning is limited, and available on a first-come, first-served basis to ticketed customers only.

Can’t make it to the signing? Request an autographed copy here: books@tatteredcover.com

Dispatch from the Field: "J.R. Moehringer’s Sutton is as much a novel of this time as it is a study of a very interesting and purely American character… Willie Sutton, the man who, even after his death, is still reinventing himself."

"Willie 'The Actor' Sutton was a celebrity bank robber in an era when the vast majority of Americans were poor, feeling mistreated by the banks and their wealthy owners. And although Willie Sutton lived (and robbed banks) mostly during the Great Depression, this is a very contemporary story. Willie Sutton was a real man, convicted multiple times for robbing banks and for escaping jail, he was eventually pardoned by New York’s Governor Rockefeller and released from prison for good in 1969, mostly due to his ailing health. And although Sutton would live until 1980, he would live in relative obscurity.

J.R. Moehringer’s Sutton is not a biography: it is a work of fiction, based on Sutton’s own two memoirs (which often contradicted one another), among other sources. The premise of the book is an exclusive interview with a New York newspaper on Christmas Day, 1969, the day after Sutton is released from prison. Sutton, with a reporter and photographer in tow, take a chronological tour of Sutton’s life in New York City. At each stop, Sutton tells them a version of the events that occurred there. Sometimes Sutton is talking to his guides (or is he the guide?) and sometimes he’s telling the story as it occurred, back in time. This is just one of the ways this book is unlike many others I’ve read… instead of telling the story from multiple characters’ viewpoints, Moehringer’s Sutton tells it from multiple places in time, creating a living and morphing history.  It’s a vastly entertaining premise and Moehringer’s prose manages to make a murder mystery out of one of the aspects of the story.

Although not really crime fiction, Sutton is for fans of the genre, as well as for those who like biographies, and those who love stories about the Great Depression. And it’s for those who may be mired down in the election news cycle. This isn’t the first time we’ve faced a struggle between the rich and poor in this nation. Sure, the last time the 1% were called the Bankers, and Robber Barons before that… but this is an age-old struggle in the United States, and Willie Sutton was an inspiration to millions in the dark days of the Depression, when he took the banks on… by robbing them. Now I don’t advocate robbing the banks, but I understand the feeling of frustration regular working folks must have had when they were unemployed and hungry and saw banks (and stores and restaurants) that catered to the wealthy… J.R. Moehringer’s Sutton is as much a novel of this time as it is a study of a very interesting and purely American character… Willie Sutton, the man who, even after his death, is still reinventing himself…."

--Joe

And Our New VIB Is....

 "I wasn't going to read this book.  I picked it up, however, after hearing so many coworkers praising the book.

This is a debut novel about a Muslim boy (in a never named foreign country), orphaned by an American military operation gone terribly wrong, and his new life in America thanks to an international relief organization. It is the story of Younis (who Americanized himself to Jonas during the air flight over), and how he is trying to adjust to life in Pittsburgh and his very Christian foster family.  This is easier said than done, of course, and Dau takes us through Jonas' turmoils, the real time hostility around him as well as the inner nightmare of how and why he survived when his family did not.  Told in the short vignettes, we follow Jonas into young adulthood, steadily being fed faint details of his inner demons, many centering around the American soldier who saved him but then went missing in action.  Piece by piece, the picture becomes heartbreakingly clear. The costs of war are not just in dollars, and they aren't always paid completely on the battlefield.  This is a stunningly nuanced novel, and a gem of a debut."

--Jackie 

Every now and then we encounter a new book that we’re so excited about we want to shout it from the rooftops, so we've created a special tag to distinguish it from the rest: TC V.I.B. (very impressive book)! That means it’s a true stand-out in a season of many excellent and compelling new books. 

Click on the green V.I.B. to get the complete list of our V.I.B. selections. 

Our New V.I.B.

Heart-stopping prose and crackling observations on a spiritual journey toward a life rich in love and freedom.

Stuck in a dead-end relationship, this fearless narrator leaves her metaphorical baggage behind and finds a comfort zone in the air, “feeling safest with one plane ticket in her hand and another in her underwear drawer.” She flies around the world, finding reasons to love life in dozens of far-flung places from Alaska to Bhutan.

Along the way she weathers unplanned losses of altitude, air pressure, and landing gear. With the help of a squad of loyal, funny, wise friends and massage therapists, she learns to sort truth from self-deception, self-involvement from self-possession.

At last, having found a new partner “who loves Don DeLillo and the NHL” and a daughter “who needs you to teach her to dive and to laugh at herself”—not to mention two dogs and two horses—“staying home becomes more of an option. Maybe.”

Watch this beautiful slide show of images from the author's travels and home--a stunning companion to the book. 

 Our Lead Buyer Cathy Langer says: "Her breakout collection of stories, Cowboys are My Weakness rocketed Pam to literary fame. In her latest tome, Contents May Have Shifted, the heroine ricochets all over the world, from one set of odd and interesting friends to the next, from one diffident lover to a new one, always on the move and always back to Boulder, home to her newest lover and his ex-wife Sofree (yes, really!) or, to her ranch and her heart’s true home in Creede, nestled deep down in south central Colorado. It takes a writer of enormous talent to make 20 below zero sound beautiful and fun, and Pam Houston succeeds. She reaches up and brings the deep blue of the Colorado sky and the majesty of the mountains vividly onto the printed page, and her readers will want to join her in the hot springs and on walks full of interesting and eccentric women enjoying great conversations and a nice bottle of wine."

Every now and then we encounter a new book that we’re so excited about we want to shout it from the rooftops, so we've created a special tag to distinguish it from the rest: TC V.I.B. (very impressive book)! That means it’s a true stand-out in a season of many excellent and compelling new books.

Tattered Cover's First 2012 VIB: The Snow Child

 

Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.

Lisa C says:
"The Snow Child is set at the turn of the century when people were homesteading in Alaska - we meet Mabel and Jack, a middle-aged, childless, couple doing their best to farm the land and survive the winters. Everything looks as bleak as the white snow, when she appears, this child, or sprite, or snow maiden, ethereal,  feral and wild. Is this the child they hoped to have; is it a miracle; is it magic? Ivey weaves a beautiful tale about average people who are involved in something extraordinary. Her use of language makes the setting as important as the characters. As stark as the Alaskan wilderness can be in winter, part of the time I was reading it, I felt like I was running the snow-covered hills along with the characters. It was as if I could have reached out and touched them, yet they was just out of grasp, like the girl. This is a book I will re-read, and it will be a stunning book club choice."

Jackie says:
"This is a tale of loneliness and magic, of a mystical reality that veils a more bleak one and answers a dream only halfway.  What can you do when the only way to have your fondest wish is to lose it time and time again?  This tale of an older couple in 1920s Alaska is filled with profound emotion and delicate storytelling. It weaves its own magic around the reader, drawing you in until you can feel and smell the glittering snow, hear the logs in the stove crackling, and perhaps see a glimpse of a blue coat, a flash of white-blonde hair, or the tail of a fox disappearing behind a tree just across the yard.  This is a very strong start for a debut novelist--I'll be keeping my eye on her to see what she conjures up next."

Every now and then we encounter a new book that we’re so excited about we want to shout it from the rooftops, so we've created a special tag to distinguish it from the rest: TC V.I.B. (very impressive book)! That means it’s a true stand-out in a season of many excellent and compelling new books.

Announcing Our New VIB: The Art of Fielding

At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended.

Henry's fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight, a longtime bachelor, has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love. Owen Dunne, Henry's gay roommate and teammate, becomes caught up in a dangerous affair. Mike Schwartz, the Harpooners' team captain and Henry's best friend, realizes he has guided Henry's career at the expense of his own. And Pella Affenlight, Guert's daughter, returns to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life.

As the season counts down to its climactic final game, these five are forced to confront their deepest hopes, anxieties, and secrets. In the process they forge new bonds, and help one another find their true paths. Written with boundless intelligence and filled with the tenderness of youth, The Art of Fielding is an expansive, warmhearted novel about ambition and its limits, about family and friendship and love, and about commitment--to oneself and to others.

Cathy says:
"This utterly compelling novel, despite the title, is not really about baseball, though there are some beautifully written baseball scenes. Chad Harbach's world at Westish College is written with such a sense of deep humanity and affection, and his gift to the reader is amazing characters that move far beyond the printed page and into our hearts. The Art of Fielding delves deeply into character in the way that Jonathan Franzen can bringing us people we care for deeply as we watch them live their complicated lives."

 

 Every now and then we encounter a new book that we’re so excited about we want to shout it from the rooftops, so we've created a special tag to distinguish it from the rest: TC V.I.B. (very impressive book)! That means it’s a true stand-out in a season of many excellent & compelling new books.

Take A Good Hard Look At Our New VIB!!!

A Good Hard Look

Crippled by lupus at twenty-five, celebrated author Flannery O’Connor was forced to leave New York City and return home to Andalusia, her family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia.  Years later, as Flannery is finishing a novel and tending to her menagerie of peacocks, her mother drags her to the wedding of a family friend.

Cookie Himmel embodies every facet of Southern womanhood that Flannery lacks: she is revered for her beauty and grace; she is at the helm of every ladies’ organization in town; and she has returned from her time in Manhattan with a rich fiancée, Melvin Whiteson.  Melvin has come to Milledgeville to begin a new chapter in his life, but it is not until he meets Flannery that he starts to take a good, hard look at the choices he has made.  Despite the limitations of her disease, Flannery seems to be more alive than other people, and Melvin is drawn to her like a moth to a candle flame.

Melvin is not the only person in Milledgeville who starts to feel that life is passing him by.  Lona Waters, the dutiful wife of a local policeman, is hired by Cookie to help create a perfect home.  As Lona spends her days sewing curtains, she is given an opportunity to remember what it feels like to truly live, and she seizes it with both hands.

Heartbreakingly beautiful and inescapably human, these ordinary and extraordinary people chart their own courses in life. In the aftermath of one tragic afternoon, they are all forced to look at themselves and face up to Flannery’s observation that the truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

Tattered  Cover staff have really fallen for this book.  Bill T., in his very first BTC review says:

“Ann Napolitano’s A Good Hard Look starts out with a few diverse incidents establishing the themes which expand throughout this superb biographical novel of one of the South’s greatest fiction writers. The author’s rich imagination is fed by the several generations of her family’s contact with middle Georgia and even with Flannery and her mother, Georgia, which, no doubt, provides the authenticity pervading the book.

Although Flannery O’Connor’s literary and personal history have been well examined, Napolitano shows an exquisite ability to capture the essence of mid-20th century Georgia and the fictional characters that live with Flannery. A true measure of this novel’s believability is when the reader continues to flesh out Flannery’s life after A Good Hard Look is put down, one is drawn to investigate happenings which only occurred in Napolitano’s mind.

Some novelists might have been tempted to emulate Flannery’s Southern Gothic or Grotesque style; Napolitano treads lightly, letting tragedy work where it best fits. She captures both the joys and weaknesses of her characters that parallel Flannery’s belief, expressed throughout her writings and speech: Many times it is difficult to distinguish between blessings and curses.

Flannery wrote that the basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode. A Good Hard Look is an artful novel that is as electrifying as her peacocks and as magnetic as her life.”

And Cathy was a very early champion of this book, saying:

“A Good Hard Look is a brilliant, engaging novel about Flannery O’Connor’s final years and the odd and difficult relationships in her small southern town of Milledgeville that might very well have been models for her wonderful and disturbing fiction. I was moved by it and completely drawn into the characters and their deeply flawed humanity. I will now go back and reread O’Connor, with different eyes and a new appreciation for her gifts and the tragedy of a life cut short. Of course I know it is fiction, but I feel like Ann Napolitano understood and conveyed Flannery’s world and the truths behind her fiction. The novel is a gift to the reader, giving us all a new understanding of Grace.”

 

A book we’re so excited about, we’ve made it a V.I.B.! That means it’s a true stand-out in a season of many great new books.

Our Latest VIB (Very Impressive Book)

A book we’re so excited about, we’ve made it a V.I.B.! That means it’s a true stand-out in a season of many great new books.





Tom Franklin's extraordinary talent has been hailed by the leading lights of contemporary literature—Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Lee Smith, and Dennis Lehane. Reviewers have called his fiction "ingenious" (USA Today) and "compulsively readable" (Memphis Commercial Appeal). His narrative power and flair for character-ization have been compared to the likes of Harper Lee, Flannery O'Connor, Elmore Leonard, and Cormac McCarthy.

Now the Edgar Award-winning author returns with his most accomplished and resonant novel so far—an atmospheric drama set in rural Mississippi. In the late 1970s, Larry Ott and Silas "32" Jones were boyhood pals. Their worlds were as different as night and day: Larry, the child of lower-middle-class white parents, and Silas, the son of a poor, single black mother. Yet for a few months the boys stepped outside of their circumstances and shared a special bond. But then tragedy struck: Larry took a girl on a date to a drive-in movie, and she was never heard from again. She was never found and Larry never confessed, but all eyes rested on him as the culprit. The incident shook the county—and perhaps Silas most of all. His friendship with Larry was broken, and then Silas left town.

More than twenty years have passed. Larry, a mechanic, lives a solitary existence, never able to rise above the whispers of suspicion. Silas has returned as a constable. He and Larry have no reason to cross paths until another girl disappears and Larry is blamed again. And now the two men who once called each other friend are forced to confront the past they've buried and ignored for decades.

Jackie says:

I read an interview with Franklin from a couple of years ago that was very interesting. He was asked why, in his opinion, so many great writers come from the South. His answer: "...in part, there's a lot more to write about in a failed place, a place mired in its own self-made sin. And it's more rural, for course, so it breeds the type of people who choose to live there or it traps people. Either way: characters. Material." There are plenty of memorable characters and "rural noir" material in Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter , named after the way school children are taught to spell Mississippi--M I crooked letter crooked letter I crooked letter crooked letter I humpback humpback I. And this book is VERY Mississippi--it's pretty much a character in its own right. Not in a Southern belle sort of way, but in a sweaty, small town, old grudges kind of way. This is very much a man's book, though women will like it as well. It's a literary crime/thriller novel that's full of taut suspense and engaging dialog that sets the mood and place of the book far more than any pastoral description could. The basic plot--Silas and Larry were childhood friends, though secretly because Silas is black and Larry is white and the town, especially their fathers, did not tolerate any sort of mixing of the races. The secrecy and guilt got more complicated as the boys became teenagers and a young girl disappeared after a date with Larry. No body was found, but the town basically tried and condemned Larry anyway. He became a recluse, running a mechanics shop after his Army service that no local would step foot in, trapped in a town he couldn't let go and that wouldn't let go of him. Silas became a police officer--one of the two full time employees of his small home town. When another body turns up, suspicion once again falls upon Larry, and Silas is caught between old guilt, new crimes, and a scared and angry populace who have their doubts about a black police officer anyway. This book sucked me in and held me tight as the pages turned and my mind tried to follow the twists and turns of both past and present to figure out just what was going on. The characters LEAP off the page--vivid, alive and staring you straight in the eye. You won't forget any of them any time soon."

Joe says:

"Tom Franklin's latest book, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is set in rural southeastern Mississippi (hence the title...) and serves as a perfect slice of small-town life in the rural South. Larry Ott and Silas "32" Jones were briefly boyhood friends. Larry was a rather odd lower-middle class white boy and Silas the son of a poor black woman. While still in their teens, Larry is accused of killing and hiding a fellow student. Her body is never found and Larry never confesses, but the stigma never goes away. About the same time, Silas goes away to finish high school and returns, years later, to the town as a police officer. This is a story about things left unsaid, and how they can ruin not only friendships, but whole lives. Franklin's writing brings the South alive... at times hilarious, at other times heartbreaking, and always realistic. Not only is this book a great Southern story, it is a taught murder mystery that had plenty of surprises. Ultimately, this book is about forgiveness and what power it has to heal. I can not wait to get others to read this wonderful book!"

Watch bookpage.com's interview with Tom Franklin:

Tattered Cover's New VIB (Very Impressive Book)

They were born on the same day, in the same small New Hampshire hospital, into families that could hardly have been less alike.

Ruth Plank is an artist and a romantic with a rich, passionate, imaginative life. The last of five girls born to a gentle, caring farmer and his stolid wife, she yearns to soar beyond the confines of the land that has been her family's birthright for generations.

Dana Dickerson is a scientist and realist whose faith is firmly planted in the natural world. Raised by a pair of capricious drifters who waste their lives on failed dreams, she longs for stability and rootedness.

Different in nearly every way, Ruth and Dana share a need to make sense of who they are and to find their places in a world in which neither has ever truly felt she belonged. They also share a love for Dana's wild and beautiful older brother, Ray, who will leave an indelible mark on both their hearts.

Told in the alternating voices of Ruth and Dana, The Good Daughters follows these "birthday sisters" as they make their way from the 1950s to the present. Master storyteller Joyce Maynard chronicles the unlikely ways the two women's lives parallel and intersect—from childhood and adolescence to first loves, first sex, marriage, and parenthood; from the deaths of parents to divorce, the loss of home, and the loss of a beloved partner—until past secrets and forgotten memories unexpectedly come to light, forcing them to reevaluate themselves and each other.

Moving from rural New Hampshire to a remote island in British Columbia to the '70s Boston art-school scene, The Good Daughters is an unforgettable story about the ties of home and family, the devastating force of love, the healing power of forgiveness, and the desire to know who we are.

From his own farm, Joe writes:

Joyce Maynard returns with another amazingly well-written and hard-to-put-down novel. The Good Daughters follows the lives of two women, born on the same day, in the same hospital, to two completely different families. Their lives couldn't be more different, but the one thing they have in common is a feeling of never quite fitting in. At times comedic, at times tragic, at times horrifying, this novel is a fascinating study of what it means to be family. I read this book in nearly one session, sitting up far past my bedtime because I had to finish it. Once I did, I couldn't wait to talk about it with a friend who'd also read it. This is not a book to simply read and enjoy, it's one that is going to stick with you.

Jackie loves it too, saying:

I'll tell you flat out that I enjoyed this book more than her last book, Labor Day, a book I liked quite a bit. It was easier for me to relate to the two main characters--maybe because they were women, maybe because they were farmers at points in their lives, maybe because they were searching for a place to belong and someone to be cherished by who would love them for themselves. I definitely became attached to them and enjoyed watching their lives unfold (though they both face difficult times that moved me greatly) over the 50ish years the book ranges over. I figured out the "big secret" in the book pretty quickly (I felt that Maynard was a bit heavy handed with the foreshadowing, actually, but nobody's perfect). Even so, I knew WHAT it was, but I kept reading because I really wanted to know WHY it was. The answer was not as complex as I had hoped for, but the ending of the book was better than I expected, so I'm satisfied. I too lost sleep to this book, but I don't begrudge it at all.