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: Lush Life

Author: Richard Price
Publisher: Picador
Year: 2008
Synopsis: The story begins with a murder on Manhattan's Lower East Side where trendy bars and restaurants clash with housing projects. Eric Cash, a restaurant manager and aspiring writer whose best days might be behind him is walking with Ike Marcus, one of his bartenders, when Ike is shot dead. Eric's account of the crime has some glaring inconsistencies, and Detective Matty Clark continues to hunt down every lead. Author Richard Price tells the story of the crime and its unraveling from the different perspectives of Eric, Matty, Ike's grieving father, and Tristan, an abused, poor black kid raised in the neighborhood, showing the clash and similarities of the different social strata in the city.


What Others Have to Say:
New York Times
"At its most basic level, “Lush Life” is a police procedural, and it possesses all the gut-level suspense of a detective story."

New York Times (2)
"Raymond Chandler is peeping out from Price’s skull, as well he should be, given such gloomy doings, but in the enormous, cross-sensory architecture of the last three words above, one detects Saul Bellow’s vision, too."

Salon
"...a first-rate police procedural."

New York Observer
"...the novel suggests that the brutality and neglect of the projects births new killers every day, doomed to life stories depressingly similar to the one just recounted."

Entertainment Weekly
"...real protagonist is the complicated, tragic, and endlessly fascinating American city street."

USA Today
"Who's right is at the heart of this compelling story..."

Table of Contents: Water For Elephants

Author: Sara Gruen
Publisher: Algonquin
Year: 2007
Synopsis: Water for Elephants has an elderly Jacob Jankowski telling the story of his life with the circus. In 1932 just before he graduated from veterinary school, his parents died in a car accident. Having lost everything, he finds himself on a train with the Benzini Brothers traveling circus and decides to join them. The Benzini Brothers is not a top flight circus, full of mangy animals and brutal and odd employees. Jacob's veterinary skills move him up to being an animal doctor, and he finds himself falling for the beautiful Marlena, wife of the mercurial and bad-tempered animal trainer. When the circus purchases an elephant named Rosie and who then appears to be untrainable, it's up to Jacob to train her and save the circus.


What Others Have to Say:
New York Times
"With a showman's expert timing, she saves a terrific revelation for the final pages, transforming a glimpse of Americana into an enchanting escapist fairy tale."

Curled Up
"...Jacob’s spirit retains the essence of his kind nature, a man who cannot be broken by circumstances."

Quill and Quire
"...heartfelt, entertaining, and poignant..."

Entertainment Weekly
"...sprightly tale has a ringmaster's crowd-pleasing pace."

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