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Reviews

Reviews

by Jonathan Evison - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Four modern families aboard a passenger train hurtle into the night. One hundred and seventy years earlier, their forebearers make their way in a young nation built on grand promises. Each family follows their own path, only to find that their destinies are linked inextricably, the culmination of five generations of shared history. Jonathan Evison’s SMALL WORLD is a novel that speaks to the present moment, a grand adventure that explores the American experiment in its most human and intimate aspects, a novel that asks if America has made good on those early promises.

by David Guterson - Fiction, Literary Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

A girl dies one late, rainy night a few feet from the back door of her home. The girl, Abeba, was born in Ethiopia. Her adoptive parents, Delvin and Betsy Harvey --- conservative, white fundamentalist Christians --- are charged with her murder. Royal, a Seattle criminal attorney in the last days of his long career, takes Betsy Harvey’s case. An octogenarian without a driver’s license, he leans on his son --- the novel’s narrator --- as he prepares for trial.

by Elizabeth Strout - Fiction

Lucy Barton is a writer, but her ex-husband, William, remains a hard man to read. William, she confesses, has always been a mystery to me. Another mystery is why the two have remained connected after all these years. They just are. So Lucy is both surprised and not surprised when William asks her to join him on a trip to investigate a recently uncovered family secret --- one of those secrets that rearrange everything we think we know about the people closest to us.

by Abe Streep - Biography, Nonfiction

March 11, 2017, was a night to remember. In front of the hopeful eyes of thousands of friends, family members and fans, the Arlee Warriors would finally bring the high school basketball state championship title home to the Flathead Indian Reservation. The game would become the stuff of legend, with the boys revered as local heroes. The team’s place in Montana history was now cemented, but for starters Will Mesteth, Jr. and Phillip Malatare, life would keep moving on --- senior year was only just beginning. In BROTHERS ON THREE, we follow Phil and Will, along with their teammates, coaches and families, as they balance the pressures of adolescence, shoulder the dreams of their community, and chart their own individual courses for the future.

by T.C. Boyle - Fiction

When animal behaviorist Guy Schermerhorn demonstrates on a TV game show that he has taught Sam, his juvenile chimp, to speak in sign language, Aimee Villard, an undergraduate at Guy's university, is so taken with the performance that she applies to become his assistant. A romantic and intellectual attachment soon morphs into an interspecies love triangle that pushes hard at the boundaries of consciousness and the question of what we know and how we know it. What if it were possible to speak to the members of another species --- to converse with them, not just give commands or coach them but to really have an exchange of ideas and a meeting of minds?

by Lionel Shriver - Fiction

When her father dies, Kay Wilkinson can’t cry. Over 10 years, Alzheimer’s had steadily eroded this erudite man into a paranoid lunatic. Both medical professionals, Kay and her husband, Cyril, have seen too many elderly patients in similar states of decay. Although healthy and vital in their early 50s, the couple fears what may lie ahead. To spare themselves and their loved ones such a humiliating and protracted decline, Cyril proposes that they agree to commit suicide together once they’ve both turned 80. When their deal is sealed, the spouses are blithely looking forward to another three decades together. But then they turn 80. SHOULD WE STAY OR SHOULD WE GO portrays 12 parallel universes, each exploring a possible future for Kay and Cyril.

by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Flora Mancini has been happily married for more than 20 years. But everything she thought she knew about herself, her marriage and her relationship with her best friend, Margot, is upended when she stumbles upon an envelope containing her husband’s wedding ring --- the one he claimed he lost one summer when their daughter, Ruby, was five. Flora and Julian struggled for years, scraping together just enough acting work to raise Ruby in Manhattan and keep Julian’s small theater company --- Good Company --- afloat. A move to Los Angeles brought their first real career successes and a reunion with Margot, now a bona fide television star. But has their new life been built on lies? What happened that summer all those years ago? And what happens now?

by Tamara Kaye Sellman - Essays, Memoir, Nonfiction, Poetry

INTENTION TREMOR collects prose and poetry that chronicle Tamara Kaye Sellman’s life in the five years that followed her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. She wrote the majority of these pieces next to a campfire or inside a travel trailer at Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, WA. One-hundred percent of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to the Accelerated Cure Project, which works to accelerate research and improve the quality of life for those affected by MS.

by Jonathan Lethem - Fiction, Science Fiction

Before the Arrest, Sandy Duplessis had a reasonably good life as a screenwriter in L.A. Peter Todbaum, an old college friend and writing partner, had become one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. Now, post-Arrest, nothing is what it was. Sandy, who calls himself Journeyman, has landed in rural Maine. There he assists the butcher and delivers the food grown by his sister, Maddy, at her organic farm. But then Todbaum shows up in an extraordinary vehicle: a retrofitted tunnel-digger powered by a nuclear reactor. Todbaum has spent the Arrest smashing his way across a fragmented and phantasmagorical United States, trailing enmities all the way. Plopping back into the siblings’ life with his usual odious panache, his motives are entirely unclear.

by Jess Walter - Fiction

The Dolans live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While 16-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his older brother, Gig, dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. Enter Ursula the Great, a vaudeville singer who performs with a live cougar and introduces the brothers to a far more dangerous creature: a mining magnate determined to keep his wealth and his hold on Ursula. Dubious of Gig’s idealism, Rye finds himself drawn to a fearless 19-year-old activist and feminist named Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. But a storm is coming, threatening to overwhelm them all, and Rye will be forced to decide where he stands.