Table of Contents: Hurry Down Sunshine

Author: Michael Greenberg
Publisher: Harper Collins
Year: 2008
Synopsis: The transcendent and groundbreaking memoir of a father's courageous journey to understand his daughter's mental illness At the age of 15, during one long and difficult summer, Michael Greenberg's daughter, Sally, was struck mad. Her visionary crack-up occurred on the streets of Greenwich Village, and continued, among other places, in the lost-in-time world of a Manhattan psychiatric ward during the city's most sweltering months. "I feel like I'm travelling and travelling with nowhere to go back to," Sally says in a burst of lucidity while hurtling toward insanity. Hurry Down Sunshine is Greenberg's journey to comprehend mental illness and his own family, and to rescue his daughter from her desperate downward spiral. With touching honesty and intimacy, he reveals Sally's effect on those closest to her--her brother, her grandmother, her mother and her stepmother--and, finally, on himself. Greenberg's memorable gallery of characters includes a surprisingly unconventional psychiatrist, an Orthodox Jewish mental patient and a manic classics professor. Unsentimental, nuanced and deeply humane, Hurry Down Sunshine is a transcendent memoir about mental illness and the restorative power of one father's love for his daughter.


What Others Have to Say:
New York Times
"What sets “Hurry Down Sunshine” apart from the great horde of mediocre memoirs, with their sitcom emotions and too neatly resolved fights and reconciliations, is Greenberg’s frank pessimism, dark humor and fundamental incapacity to make sense of his daughter’s ordeal, let alone to derive an uplifting moral from it."

The Seattle Times
"Greenberg deftly shows that sometimes the ones who bear the "stigma" of a diagnosis can possess potent distillations of truth, while others who move about in the "real world" seem to have only a marginal grasp on reality."

The Globe and Mail
""Hurry Down Sunshine" is not just a book about a girl gone mad, it's about the fierce love of a father for a daughter."

Star Tribune
"...thought-provoking memoir of his daughter's first episode of full-blown bipolar mania."

The Washington Post
"Greenberg's writing is so effective that it somehow removes the sense of shock one might have about a father taking a dose of his daughter's mood stabilizers, as Greenberg does in an effort to get closer to what Sally is feeling."

The New Yorker

Table of Contents: Beginner's Greek

Author: James Collins
Publisher: Little, Brown
Year: 2008
Synopsis: When Peter Russell finally meets the woman of his dreams he falls as madly in love as you can on a flight from New York to LA. Her name is Holly. She's achingly pretty with strawberry-blonde hair, and reads Thomas Mann for pleasure. She gives Peter her phone number on a page of The Magic Mountain , but in his room that night Peter finds the page is inexplicably, impossibly, enragingly...gone. So begins the immensely entertaining story of Peter and his unrequited love for his best friend's girl; of Charlotte and her less-than-perfect marriage to a man in love with someone else; of Jonathan and his wicked and fateful debauchery; and of Holly, the impetus for it all. Along the way, there's the evil boss, the desirable temptress, miscommunications, misrepresentations, fiendish behavior, letters gone astray, and ultimately, an ending in which every character gets his due. Both incisive and wonderfully funny, this is a brilliantly understated comedy of manners in which love lost is found again.


What Others Have to Say:
New York Times
"...“Beginner’s Greek” is, from start to finish, delicious."

Pop Matters
"...is resolutely old fashioned"

USA Today
"... a literary love story for grown-ups..."

Entertainment Weekly
"[Collins] makes magic of it all by infusing those would-be clichés with so much old-school charm that you want to believe, and with so much patient detail that you actually can."

Christian Science Monitor
"...has a rare ability to satirize without becoming nasty, and periodically gives romantic clichés a good tweak"

New York Daily news
"...filled with charming twists of fate in the lives of New York's poshest."

San Francisco Chronicel
""Beginner's Greek" touches on all the traditional details of a comedy of manners..."

Washington Post
"Though Collins crafts the occasional charming scene or sentence, he routinely serves up clunkers such as referring to a man's formal footwear as "black patent leather pumps"..."

New York Observer
"He has acquitted himself admirably as far as a potentially commercial entertainment is concerned. But as the phrase went in the days before e-mail, parts of his novel seem to have been phoned in."

Extras:
Read the First Chapter Online!

Table of Contents: Gods Behaving Badly

Author: Marie Phillips
Publisher: Little, Brown
Year: 2007
Synopsis: The twelve gods of the Greek Pantheon are still alive (they are immortal) and living in a dirty, rat-infested house in modern-day London. Compelled partly out of boredom they take on everyday jobs that, in one way or another, match their "godly" skills: dog walker, phone sex operator, bartender. When two mortals (Alice and Neil) are unwittingly pulled into their godly orbit, the pair must figure out how to muddle through their own budding romance amidst all the confusion and interference.


What Others Have to Say:
New York Times
"...much more fun than it has any right to be"

The Independent (UK)
"...delightfully original as well as acutely clever in a makes-you-think-about-contemporary-morality-without-realising kind of way."

The Globe and Mail
"...has made the gods and goddesses so consistent in their arrogance and obliviousness that they are truly believable and likeable."

USA Today
"...a charming comic touch and the laughs are real, even if some seem in need of a sitcom laugh track."

Pop Matters
"...Phillips has a knack for conveying the fluidity of human emotion."

Entertainment Weekly
"Marie Phillips' writing is fizzy, her premise clever, and her first novel amusing — if not immortal."

Christian Science Monitor
"Phillips's novel is at once a witty, effervescent romantic comedy and an irreverent primer on Greek mythology."

London Times
"the cleverness is that Phillips does with Zeus, Aphrodite, Apollo et al precisely what the Greeks did with them. They become many-times-magnified versions of us."

Washington Post
"Phillips has an Olympian sense of absurdity, and there's enough ambrosial wit here to seduce most mortals for an afternoon or two on the divan."

Table of Contents: Monsters of Templeton

Author: Lauren Groff
Publisher: Hyperion
Year: 2007
Synopsis: Willie Upton returns to her hometown of Templeton, NY at the same time as an enormous monster dies in Lake Glimmerglass. Coincidence or serendipity? Willie looks at her return as a way to hide from the disgrace of getting pregnant by a colleague. But Willie soon learns that the story her mom told her about her father has all been a lie. Not a one-night stand as long-believed, but someone else completely, someone deeply tied to Templeton. Willie, putting her archaelogical skills to the test, begins digging through her lineage and the town's dark past to solve old mysteries and to find out who she really is.


What Others Have to Say:
Christian Science Monitor
"As a work of imagination, "The Monsters of Templeton" excels."

New York Times
"It speaks well for her narrative talents that Willie Upton, disarming and smart, holds even more interest than the elaborate events that surround her."

USA Today
"The Monsters of Templeton makes readers work, but its rewards are worth it."

Entertainment Weekly
"...both thrills and delights with its poignant, breathtaking prose..."

Pop Matters
"...the ingenious use of photo illustrations of Willie’s relatives is irresistibly effective..."

Globe and Mail
"It is an astounding debut, in which Groff's talent is evident from structural complexity to exuberant and unique writing style."

Extras:
Read Chapter One Online

Table of Contents: The Faraday Girls

Author: Monica McInerney
Publisher: Ballantine
Year: 2007
Synposis: The Faraday Girls opens in 1979, in Tasmania, Australia, just before the lives of Juliet, Miranda, Eliza, Sadie, Clementine and their father, Leo, are irrevocably altered by 16-year-old Clementine's announcement that she's pregnant. The family makes a uneasy, and soon to be destructive, pact to raise the child together until the start of elementary school. However, an error in judgement five years into the pact fragments the fragile family bonds and propels the sisters into their own individual destinys.


What Others Have to Say:
Publisher's Weekly
"Straightforward prose (leavened with spots of humor and upbeat, witty exchanges) keeps the narrative moving along."

Curled Up
"it is well-written and has heart even as it explores family demons"

Fresh Fiction
"[McInerney's] forte is the elegant prose she so expertly crafts that breezes across the pages and captures the reader from the very start. Charming, engrossing, and thought-provoking... McInerney is truly at her best."

Courier Mail
"filled with McInerney’s trademark warmth and humour"

Extras:
Chapter 1 Excerpt