Line By Line: Lionel Shriver, The Post-Birthday World

"Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are."

"Yet Irina had once tucked away, she wasn't sure when or why, that happiness is almost definitionally a condition of which you are not aware at the time. To inhabit your own contentment is to be wholly present, with no orbiting satellite to take clinical readings of the state of the planet. Conventionally, you grow conscious of happiness at the very point that it begins to elude you. When not misused to talk yourself into something - when not a lie - the h-word is a classification applied in retrospect. It is a bracketing assessment, a label only decisively pasted onto an era once it is over."

"Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are."

"Now, bitterly, with one sweep of the front door, the compassion was spent. To the degree that Lawrence's face was familiar, it was killingly so - as if she had been gradually getting to know him for over nine years and then, bang, he was known. She'd been handed her diploma. There were no more surprises - or only this last surprise, that there were no more surprises. To torture herself, Irina kept looking, and looking, at Lawrence's face, like turning the key in an ignition several times before resigning herself that the battery was dead."

"Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks."

Table of Contents: The Department of Lost and Found

Author: Allison Winn Scotch
Publisher: Harper Collins
Year: 2007
Synopsis: Some side-effects of cancer treatment are pretty fabulous in magazine writer Scotch's debut novel. Natalie Miller, a driven 30-year-old senior aideto a woman senator from New York, is having a rough time: just days after she's diagnosed with breast cancer, her cheating live-in boyfriend ditches her. She's feeling gloomy, then, when she begins chemo. (Her hunky and sweet gynecologist, Zach, is a mitigating factor.) Though the election is six weeks away, Natalie is ordered to stay home, where she writes in her diary (excerpts appear throughout) and becomes addicted to The Price Is Right while an ambitious junior aide takes over her job. Natalie battles through rounds of chemo and a mastectomy until, out of the blue, an old love, up-and-coming rocker Jake, comes back to take care of her. He seems intent on making things work, but Natalie's long-simmering (and seemingly requited) attraction to Zach only intensifies. Meanwhile, Natalie's journalist friend Sally lands her first big story: an exposé of Natalie's boss. Her loyalties on the line and her cancer on the wane, Natalie makes some tough choices about the postcancer person she wants to be. [From Publisher's Weekly]

What Others Have to Say:

Publisher's Weekly
"“A bonbon of a book.”

Tampa Bay Tribune
"...Natalie's story is that rare thing: a serious comedy that shines light into the darkness."

Booklist
"The changes and realizations that the characters make are profound and moving....An impressive debut."

Extras:
Read an excerpt.

Table of Contents: The Zero

Author: Jess Walter

Publisher: Harper Collins

Year: 2006

Synopsis: Hero cop Brian Remy wakes up to find he's shot himself in the head-and so begins a harrowing tour of a city and a country shuddering through the aftershocks of a devastating terrorist attack. As the smoke slowly clears, Remy finds that his memory is skipping, lurching between moments of lucidity and days when he doesn't seem to be living his own life at all. The landscape around him is at once fractured and oddly familiar: a world dominated by a Machiavellian mayor known as "The Boss," and peopled by gawking celebrities, anguished policemen peddling First Responder cereal, and pink real estate divas hyping the spoils of tragedy. Remy himself has a new girlfriend he doesn't know, a son who pretends he's dead, and an unsettling new job chasing a trail of paper scraps for a shadowy intelligence agency known as the Department of Documentation. Whether that trail will lead Remy to an elusive terror cell-or send him circling back to himself-is highly uncertain.

What Others Have To Say:
The New York Times
"This book’s heightened paranoia invites the asking of more questions, from why cellphones need to take pictures to why a piece of cake is so much more than its component parts."

The Washington Post
"It becomes increasingly hard to care for a narrator who is unsure of his own motives and whose goals remain murky even to himself."

Entertainment Weekly
"political satire at its best"

Wally Lamb, Author
"Jess Walter's The Zero is a tense and compulsively readable roller-coaster ride fraught with psychological thrills, unanticipated dips and lurches and existential truths. The novel frightened and fascinated me in equal measures. Walter has written a neo-noirish masterpiece."

Table of Contents: Life on the Refrigerator Door

Author: Alice Kuipers
Publisher: HarperCollins
Year: 2007
Synopsis: Life on the Refrigerator Door is a poignant and deeply moving first novel about the bonds of love and frustration that tie mothers and daughters together. Told entirely in a series of notes left on the kitchen fridge—some casual, some intimate, some funny, some angry—it is the story of nine months in the life of 15–year-old Claire and her single mother. Preoccupied with their busy separate lives, rarely in the same room at the same time, they talk to each other in a series of short snippets that reflect the daily drama of school, boyfriends, work and chores that make up their days. Yet the mundane soon becomes extraordinary when a crisis overtakes their lives—a momentous change that will redefine their relationship and unfold in their exchanges on the refrigerator door.


What Others Have To Say:
Quill and Quire
"Kuipers’ novel begins as a lighthearted look at familial bickering, but is ultimately a disappointingly sentimental portrait of a typically dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship."

The Coast
"...Kuiper enables the reader to fill in the details with personal experiences and imaginings rather than spelling everything out."

CM Magazine
"Though published as an adult novel, Life on the Refrigerator Door should be a surefire hit with girls, and its contents will be readily accessible to weaker readers."

Extras:
HarperCollins Reading Guide

Table of Contents: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

Author: David Wroblewski
Publisher:HarperCollins
Year: 2008
Synopsis: Edgar Sawtelle is a mute boy growing up on a Wisconsin farm that trains a unique breed of dogs. Edgar uses a sign language that lets him communicate easily with both his parents and the dogs. When his Uncle Claude comes to live at the farm, and then his father dies under mysterious circumstances, Edgar takes three dogs and heads for the woods. Edgar and the dogs struggle for survival in the wild, but he knows he'll have to eventually return and confront his uncle.



What Others Have to Say:
New York Times
"Pick up this book and expect to feel very, very reluctant to put it down."

Washington Post
"...a devastating finale, shocking though foretold, that transforms the story of this little family into something grand and unforgettable."

USA Today
"You can hear echoes of Hamlet..."

New York Daily News
"..."Wroblewski takes his time with his story and you will as well."

Boston Globe
"Wroblewski is a terrific writer and has an unerring ear for dialogue - both spoken and signed ..."

Entertainment Weekly
"...a good old-fashioned coming-of-age yarn."

Extras:
Read an excerpt from the book.

Table of Contents: Run

Author: Ann Patchett
Publisher: Harper
Year: 2007
Synopsis: Run centers around two families. Bernard Doyle is an ex-mayor of Boston, and ten years after his wife's death, he's raised their three sons to adulthood. The oldest son, Sullivan, has been a disappointment to his father, but his two adopted black children, Tip and Teddy, have become good men, but they lack their father's desire to follow him into the political world. Tip is nearly run down on the street one evening, but he's saved by a black woman, Tennessee Moser, who pushes him out of the way and is instead hit by the vehicle. Her 11-year-old daughter, Kenya, has nowhere to stay while Tennessee is in the hospital, so the Doyles take her in. It turns out that the Mosers just lived blocks away from the Doyles, but it's a world of difference.


What Others Have to Say:
Washington Post
"...Patchett has given this one an ending that is just about perfect."

Boston Globe
"...the novel possesses an easy confidence..."

New York Times
"...shimmers with its author’s rarefied eloquence, and with the deep resonance of her insights."

The Independent
"[Patchett's]kind of practical magic comes from the emotional pitch she can inject into a scene involving three estranged people making coffee, her belief in the power of the happyish ending, and a faith in humanity that seems to be growing stronger with every book."

The Guardian
"...a book about good people who try to do their best by each other."

Entertainment Weekly
"...capable of lovely work, but there isn't a believable moment in this inert novel."

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