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Week of July 11, 2011

New in Paperback

Week of July 11, 2011

Meeting a stranger on an airplane leads Elyse into a risky affair that jeopardizes her place in the community and her safe, albeit stale, marriage in Kim Wright's debut, LOVE IN MID-AIR.

RICH BOY is Sharon Pomerantz’s story of a middle-class Jewish boy who creates a new identity to suit the highest circles of Manhattan society.

A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog by Dean Koontz - Memoir

A tender, insightful, loving homage to Trixie, a Golden retriever companion dog whom New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz and his wife of 35 years, Gerda, took into their southern California home in 1998.

Buddha’s Orphans by Samrat Upadhyay - Fiction

Buddha’s Orphans, uses Nepal’s political upheavals of the past century as a backdrop to the story of an orphan boy, Raja, and the girl he is fated to love, Nilu, a daughter of privilege. Their love story scandalizes both families and takes readers through time and across the globe, through the loss of and search for children, and through several generations, hinting that perhaps old bends can, in fact, be righted in future branches of a family tree.

Dexter Is Delicious by Jeff Lindsay - Thriller

DEXTER IS DELICIOUS is the fifth book in Jeff Lindsay’s series about America’s most beloved serial killer. Just in time for the September 26th season premiere of “Dexter,” Showtime’s program that is based on the series, the new novel shows Lindsay stretching his wings (along with those of Dexter’s Dark Passenger, the personification of evil urges that gives new meaning to the term “wingman”) to take his character, and readers, into even darker territory.

Love in Mid Air by Kim Wright - Fiction

Elyse Bearden is flying back from a pottery show in Phoenix when fate seats her next to Gerry Kincaid.

Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid - Fiction

Lucy is a teenage girl from the West Indies working as an au pair for an American family. Faced with a different cultural backdrop and elements of time, Lucy is able to compare, dismiss, and draw her own conclusive ideals based on the premise that the family she's working for are not as perfect as originally thought. As she matures, and her life focuses on the realistic ramifications of how things really are in this new environment, we began to see a difference in mannerisms and expression.

Perfect Reader by Maggie Pouncey - Fiction

When her father, a Thomas Hardy scholar and former college president, dies suddenly, Flora Dempsey leaves her job as editor of a magazine for the “domestically obsessive and organically minded” to return to the small New England town of Darwin (“three hours from everywhere”) to act as his literary executor, or “High Literary Executioner,” as she grimly recasts it. 

Rich Boy by Sharon Pomerantz - Fiction

Robert Vishniak is the favored son of Oxford Circle, a working-class Jewish neighborhood in 1970s Philadelphia. Handsome and clever, Robert glides into the cloistered universities of New England, where scions of unimaginable wealth and influence stand shoulder to shoulder with scholarship paupers like himself who wash dishes for book money. The doors that open there lead Robert to the highest circles of Manhattan society during the heart of the Reagan boom where everything Robert has learned about women, through seduction and heartbreak, pays off. 

The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman - Fiction

It is November 1999 in Berkeley, California. Jessamine Bach is a poor, idealistic graduate student, while her sister Emily is the chief executive officer of Veritech, a major data storage start-up. As Veritech prepares to go public, Emily presents her sister with a splendid opportunity.

The Distant Hours by Kate Morton - Fiction


There is a castle in THE DISTANT HOURS, and a moat, not to mention a deep forest; there is a trio of slightly batty, secretive sisters; there is a likable protagonist --- an editor, passionate about reading --- who goes sleuthing where she shouldn’t; and there is one particularly crucial dark and stormy night. There is romance, too, but most of the love affairs lie in the past and are forbidden and/or thwarted.

The Four Fingers of Death by Rick Moody - Science Fiction

Montese Crandall is a downtrodden writer whose rare collection of baseball cards won't sustain him, financially or emotionally, through the grave illness of his wife. Luckily, he swindles himself a job churning out a novelization of the 2025 remake of a 1963 horror film, The Crawling Hand. Crandall tells there in of the United States, in a bid to regain global eminence, launching at last its doomed manned mission to Mars. Three space pods with nine Americans on board travel three months, expecting to spend three years as the planet's first colonists. When a secret mission to retrieve a flesh-eating bacterium for use in bio-warfare is uncovered, mayhem ensues.

The Postcard Killers by James Patterson and Liza Marklund - Thriller

NYPD detective Jacob Kanon is on a tour of Europe's most gorgeous cities. But the sights aren't what draw him--he sees each museum, each cathedral, and each cafe through the eyes of his daughter's killer.

The Widower’s Tale by Julia Glass - Fiction

Seventy-year-old Percy Darling is settling happily into retirement: reading novels, watching old movies, and swimming naked in his pond. But his routines are disrupted when he is persuaded to let a locally beloved preschool take over his barn. As Percy sees his rural refuge overrun by children, parents, and teachers, he must reexamine the solitary life he has made in the three decades since the sudden death of his wife.

Tutankhamun: The Book of Shadows by Nick Drake - Historical Mystery

Young Tutankhamun is ready to claim his birthright—a vast, powerful, and opulent empire troubled by foreign wars, corruption, and court conspiracies. He plans to return tolerance and enlightenment to Egypt.