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Week of October 5, 2020

New in Paperback

Week of October 5, 2020

Paperback releases for the week of October 5th include WALK THE WIRE, the sixth entry in David Baldacci's Memory Man series, which finds Amos Decker --- the FBI consultant with a perfect memory --- trying to solve a gruesome murder in a booming North Dakota oil town; GRAND UNION, Zadie Smith's debut short story collection, which is about time and place, identity and rebirth, the persistent legacies that haunt our present selves and the uncanny futures that rush up to meet us; IMAGINARY FRIEND, Stephen Chbosky's first novel since 1999's THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER, an epic work of literary horror about a young boy who is haunted by a voice in his head; A SINGLE THREAD by Tracy Chevalier, the story of a woman coming into her own at the dawn of the Second World War; and Susan Ronald's CONDÉ NAST: The Man and His Empire, the first biography in over 30 years of Condé Nast, the pioneering publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair and main rival to media magnate William Randolph Hearst.

All Blood Runs Red: The Legendary Life of Eugene Bullard — Boxer, Pilot, Soldier, Spy by Phil Keith with Tom Clavin - Biography

October 6, 2020

Eugene Bullard lived one of the most fascinating lives of the 20th century. The son of a former slave and an indigenous Creek woman, Bullard fled home at the age of 11 to escape the racial hostility of his Georgia community. When his journey led him to Europe, he garnered worldwide fame as a boxer, and later as the first African American fighter pilot in history. After the war, Bullard returned to Paris a celebrated hero. But little did he know that the dramatic, globe-spanning arc of his life had just begun. ALL BLOOD RUNS RED is the inspiring untold story of an American hero, a thought-provoking chronicle of the 20th century, and a portrait of a man who came from nothing and by his own courage, determination, gumption, intelligence and luck forged a legendary life.

A Bend in the River by Libby Fischer Hellmann - Historical Fiction

October 7, 2020

In 1968, two young Vietnamese sisters flee to Saigon after their village on the Mekong River is attacked by American forces and burned to the ground. The only survivors of the brutal massacre that killed their family, the sisters struggle to survive but become estranged, separated by sharply different choices and ideologies. Mai ekes out a living as a GI bar girl, but Tam’s anger festers, and she heads into jungle terrain to fight with the Viet Cong. For nearly 10 years, neither sister knows if the other is alive. Do they both survive the war? And if they do, can they mend their fractured relationship? Or are the wounds from their journeys too deep to heal?

Bright and Dangerous Objects by Anneliese Mackintosh - Science Fiction

October 6, 2020

Commercial deep-sea diver Solvig has a secret. She wants to be one of the first human beings to colonize Mars, and she’s one of a hundred people shortlisted by the Mars Project to do just that. But to fulfill her ambition, she’ll have to leave behind everything she’s ever known --- for the rest of her life. As the prospect of heading to space becomes more real, 37-year-old Solvig is forced to define who she really is. Will she come clean to James, her partner, about her plans? Or will she turn her back on the project and commit to her life on Earth? Maybe even try for a baby, like James is hoping? Is there any way she can start a family and go to Mars? Does she even want both things?

The Companions by Katie M. Flynn - Dystopian/Science Fiction

October 6, 2020

In the wake of a highly contagious virus, California is under quarantine. Sequestered in high-rise towers, the living can’t go out, but the dead can come in --- and they come in all forms. Wealthy participants in the “companionship” program choose to upload their consciousness before dying, so they can stay in the custody of their families. The less fortunate are rented out to strangers upon their death, but all companions become the intellectual property of Metis Corporation, creating a new class of people --- a command-driven product-class without legal rights or true free will. Sixteen-year-old Lilac is one of the less fortunate, leased to a family of strangers. But when she realizes she’s able to defy commands, she throws off the shackles of servitude and runs away, searching for the woman who killed her.

Condé Nast: The Man and His Empire: A Biography by Susan Ronald - Biography

October 6, 2020

Condé Nast’s life and career was as high profile and glamorous as his magazines. Moving to New York in the early 20th century with just the shirt on his back, he soon became the highest paid executive in the United States, acquiring Vogue in 1909 and Vanity Fair in 1913. Alongside his editors, he built the first-ever international magazine empire, introducing European modern art, style and fashions to an American audience. Written with the cooperation of his family on both sides of the Atlantic and a dedicated team at Condé Nast Publications, critically acclaimed biographer Susan Ronald reveals the life of an extraordinary American success story.

A Cruel Deception: A Bess Crawford Mystery by Charles Todd - Historical Mystery

October 6, 2020

Sister Bess Crawford, who has been working with the severely wounded in England in the wake of the Great War, is asked to carry out a personal mission in Paris for a Matron at the London headquarters of The Queen Alexandra’s. When she locates Lawrence Minton, she finds a bitter and disturbed officer who is well on his way toward an addiction to opiates. He tells her that he doesn’t care if he lives or dies, as long as he can find oblivion. But what has changed him? What is it that haunts him? He can’t confide in Bess, because the truth is so deeply buried in his mind that he can only relive it in nightmares. The officers who had shared a house with him in Paris profess to know nothing. Still, Bess is reluctant to trust them even when they offer her their help.

A Door in the Earth by Amy Waldman - Fiction

October 6, 2020

College senior Parveen Shams feels pulled between her charismatic and mercurial anthropology professor and the comfortable but predictable Afghan-American community in her Northern California hometown. When she discovers a bestselling book called Mother Afghanistan, a memoir by humanitarian Gideon Crane that has become a bible for American engagement in the country, she is inspired. Galvanized by Crane's experience, Parveen travels to a remote village in the land of her birth to join the work of his charitable foundation. When she arrives, however, Crane's maternity clinic is mostly unstaffed. The villagers do not exhibit the gratitude she expected to receive. And Crane's memoir appears to be littered with mistakes, or outright fabrications.

Every Now and Then by Lesley Kagen - Historical Fiction

October 6, 2020

The summer of 1960 was the hottest ever for Summit, Wisconsin. But for Frankie, Viv and Biz, 11-year-old best friends, it would forever be remembered as the summer that evil paid a visit to their small town. With a to-do list in hand, the girls set forth from their hideout to make their mark on that summer, but when three patients escape from Broadhurst Mental Institution, their idyllic lives take a sinister turn. Determined to uncover long-held secrets, the girls have no idea that what they discover could cost them their lives and the ones they hold dear. Six decades later, Biz, now a bestselling novelist, remembers that long-ago summer and how it still haunts her and her lifelong friend.

Grand Union: Stories by Zadie Smith - Fiction/Short Stories

October 6, 2020

In her first short story collection, Zadie Smith combines her power of observation and her inimitable voice to mine the fraught and complex experience of life in the modern world. Interweaving 11 completely new and unpublished stories with some of her best-loved pieces from The New Yorker and elsewhere, Smith presents a dizzyingly rich and varied collection of fiction. Moving exhilaratingly across genres and perspectives, from the historic to the vividly current to the slyly dystopian, GRAND UNION is a sharply alert and prescient collection about time and place, identity and rebirth, the persistent legacies that haunt our present selves, and the uncanny futures that rush up to meet us.

Gumshoe Rock by Rob Leininger - Mystery

October 6, 2020

Early in July, northern Nevada’s senior Internal Revenue Service agent, Ronald Soranden --- disliked by every agent in the Reno IRS office --- vanished without a trace. In September, his skull is dropped through the slashed top of a Mustang convertible. The vehicle belongs to Lucy Landry, PI Mortimer Angel’s gorgeous young assistant now working with him on a seemingly unrelated embezzlement case. But Mort is a former IRS field agent in Reno who had done his time during the tyrannical reign of Soranden. When the FBI is brought in to investigate the murder, Mort and Lucy realize shocking details about their own case --- primarily Soranden’s involvement. It becomes evident that events and suspects of the embezzlement case and Soranden’s murder are heavily entangled with those enmeshed in an ugly case of blackmail.

The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher - Supernatural Thriller/Horror

October 6, 2020

Pray they are hungry. Kara finds the words in the mysterious bunker that she’s discovered behind a hole in the wall of her uncle’s house. Freshly divorced and living back at home, Kara now becomes obsessed with these cryptic words and starts exploring this peculiar area --- only to discover that it holds portals to countless alternate realities. But these places are haunted by creatures that seem to hear thoughts…and the more one fears them, the stronger they become.

Hymns of the Republic: The Story of the Final Year of the American Civil War by S. C. Gwynne - History

October 6, 2020

The fourth and final year of the Civil War offers one of the most compelling narratives and one of history’s great turning points. Now, Pulitzer Prize finalist S. C. Gwynne breathes new life into the epic battle between Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant; the advent of 180,000 black soldiers in the Union army; William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea; the rise of Clara Barton; the election of 1864 (which Lincoln nearly lost); the wild and violent guerrilla war in Missouri; and the dramatic final events of the war, including Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and the murder of Abraham Lincoln.

Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky - Horror

October 6, 2020

Determined to improve life for her and her son, Christopher, single mother Kate Reese flees an abusive relationship in the middle of the night with her child. Together, they find themselves drawn to the tight-knit community of Mill Grove, Pennsylvania. It's as far off the beaten track as they can get. At first, it seems like the perfect place to finally settle down. Then Christopher vanishes. For six awful days, no one can find him. Until Christopher emerges from the woods at the edge of town, unharmed but not unchanged. He returns with a voice in his head only he can hear, with a mission only he can complete: Build a tree house in the woods by Christmas, or his mother and everyone in the town will never be the same again.

In the Shadow of Vesuvius: A Lady Emily Mystery by Tasha Alexander - Historical Mystery

October 6, 2020

Lady Emily and her husband, Colin Hargreaves, have accompanied her dear friend, Ivy Brandon, on a trip to Pompeii. When they uncover a corpse and the police dismiss the murder as the work of local gangsters, Emily launches an investigation of her own. She seems to be aided by the archaeologists excavating the ruins, but each of them has secrets. The sudden appearance of a beautiful young woman who claims a shocking relationship to the Hargreaves family throws Emily’s investigation off-course. And as she struggles to face an unsettling truth about Colin’s past, it becomes clear that someone else wants her off the case --- for good. How far below the surface can Emily dig before she risks burying herself along with the truth?

On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey by Paul Theroux - Travel/Memoir

October 6, 2020

Paul Theroux has spent his life crisscrossing the globe in search of the histories and peoples that give life to the places they call home. Now, as immigration debates boil around the world, Theroux has set out to explore a country key to understanding our current discourse: Mexico. Just south of the Arizona border, in the desert region of Sonora, he finds a place brimming with vitality, yet visibly marked by both the US Border Patrol looming to the north and mounting discord from within. Theroux stops to talk with residents, visits Zapotec mill workers in the highlands, and attends a Zapatista party meeting, communing with people of all stripes who remain south of the border even as their families brave the journey north.

Ordinary People by Diana Evans - Fiction

October 6, 2020

In a crooked house in South London, Melissa feels increasingly that she’s defined solely by motherhood, while Michael mourns the former thrill of their romance. In the suburbs, Stephanie’s aspirations for bliss on the commuter belt, coupled with her white middle-class upbringing, compound Damian’s itch for a bigger life catalyzed by the death of his activist father. Longtime friends from the years when passion seemed permanent, the couples have stayed in touch, gathering for births and anniversaries, bonding over discussions of politics, race and art. But as bonds fray, the lines once clearly marked by wedding bands aren’t so simply defined.

The Other People by C. J. Tudor - Thriller

October 6, 2020

Driving home one night, Gabe is stuck behind a rusty old car. He sees a little girl’s face appear in its rear window. It’s his five-year-old daughter, Izzy. He never sees her again. Three years later, Gabe spends his days and nights traveling up and down the highway, searching for the car that took his daughter. When that same vehicle is found abandoned with a body inside, Gabe must confront not just the day Izzy disappeared but the painful events from his past now dredged to the surface. Fran and her daughter, Alice, are trying to keep one step ahead of the people who want to hurt them --- because Fran knows what really happened to Gabe’s daughter. She knows who is responsible. And she knows what they will do if they ever catch up to her and Alice.

People Die in Sunshine: A Novel of Miami by Gloria Nagy - Mystery/Thriller

October 6, 2020

PEOPLE DIE IN SUNSHINE is a carnival ride through the externally glamorous but internally twisted lives of two people, Frederick and Coco Rothenstein, and their world --- one most of us only know about from reading true-crime stories and news accounts of the lives of the super-rich and entitled dwellers in the bastions of wealth and privilege where families such as the Rothensteins reign. The first four words of Gloria Nagy's scorching, ironic tale of greed, glamour, envy, avarice and the Janus-headed coin of love and hate are: "Money. Money. Money. Money." What Nagy accomplishes in a work of humor, heartbreak, murder and redemption reinforces those four words.

The Return by Rachel Harrison - Thriller/Horror

October 6, 2020

Julie is missing, and no one believes she will ever return --- except Elise. Elise knows Julie better than anyone, and feels it in her bones that her best friend is out there and that one day Julie will come back. She’s right. Two years to the day that Julie went missing, she reappears with no memory of where she’s been or what happened to her. Along with Molly and Mae, their two close friends from college, the women decide to reunite at a remote inn. But the second Elise sees Julie, she knows something is wrong --- she’s emaciated, with sallow skin and odd appetites. And as the weekend unfurls, it becomes impossible to deny that the Julie who vanished two years ago is not the same Julie who came back. But then who --- or what --- is she?

The Rise of Magicks: Chronicles of The One, Book 3 by Nora Roberts - Dystopian Fantasy

October 6, 2020

After the sickness known as the Doom destroyed civilization, magick has become commonplace, and Fallon Swift has spent her young years learning its ways. Fallon cannot live in peace until she frees those who have been preyed upon by the government or the fanatical Purity Warriors, endlessly hunted or locked up in laboratories, brutalized for years on end. She is determined to save even those who have been complicit with this evil out of fear or weakness --- if, indeed, they can be saved. Strengthened by the bond she shares with her fellow warrior, Duncan, Fallon has already succeeded in rescuing countless shifters and elves and ordinary humans. Now she must help them heal --- and rediscover the light and faith within themselves.

A Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier - Historical Fiction

October 6, 2020

After the Great War took both her beloved brother and her fiancé, Violet Speedwell has become a "surplus woman," one of a generation doomed to a life of spinsterhood after the war killed so many young men. Yet Violet cannot reconcile herself to a life spent caring for her grieving, embittered mother. So she saves enough to move out of her mother's place and into the town of Winchester, home to one of England's grandest cathedrals. There, Violet is drawn into a society of broderers --- women who embroider kneelers for the Cathedral. But when forces threaten her new independence and another war appears on the horizon, Violet must fight to put down roots in a place where women aren't expected to grow.

Spoiler Alert by Olivia Dade - Romantic Comedy

October 6, 2020

The world may know Marcus Caster-Rupp as Aeneas, star of the biggest show on television, but fanfiction readers call him something else: Book!AeneasWouldNever. Marcus gets out his frustrations with the show through anonymous stories about the internet’s favorite couple, Aeneas and Lavinia. But if anyone discovered his online persona, he’d be finished in Hollywood. April Whittier has secrets of her own. A hardcore Lavinia fan, she’s long hidden her fanfic and cosplay hobbies from her “real life” --- but not anymore. When she dares to post her latest costume creation on Twitter, her plus-size take goes viral. And when Marcus asks her out to spite her internet critics, truth officially becomes stranger than fanfiction.

Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts by Kate Racculia - Mystery/Humor

October 6, 2020

Tuesday Mooney is a loner who keeps to herself and begrudgingly socializes. But when Vincent Pryce, Boston’s most eccentric billionaire, dies --- leaving behind an epic treasure hunt through the city, with clues inspired by his hero, Edgar Allan Poe --- Tuesday’s adventure finally begins. Puzzle-loving Tuesday searches for clue after clue, joined by a ragtag crew. The hunt tests their mettle, and with other teams from around the city also vying for the promised prize --- a share of Pryce’s immense wealth --- they must move quickly. Pryce’s clues can't be cracked with sharp wit alone; the searchers must summon the courage to face painful ghosts from their pasts (some more vivid than others) and discover their most guarded desires and dreams.

Walk the Wire by David Baldacci - Thriller

October 6, 2020

When Amos Decker and his FBI colleague Alex Jamison are called to London, North Dakota, they instantly sense that the thriving fracking town is ripe for trouble. They are ordered to investigate the death of a young woman named Irene Cramer, whose body was expertly autopsied and then dumped in the open --- which is only the beginning of the oddities surrounding the case. As Decker and Jamison dig into Irene's life, they are shocked to discover that the woman who walked the streets by night as a prostitute was a teacher for a local religious sect by day --- a sect operating on land once owned by a mysterious government facility that looms over the entire community.

When Life Gives You Pears: The Healing Power of Family, Faith, and Funny People by Jeannie Gaffigan - Memoir

October 6, 2020

In 2017, Jeannie Gaffigan's life came to a crashing halt when she was diagnosed with a life-threatening brain tumor. As the mother of five kids --- six if you include her husband, author/comedian Jim Gaffigan --- sat in the neurosurgery department, all she could think was "Am I going to die?" Thankfully, Jeannie and her family were able to survive their time of crisis, and now she is sharing her deeply personal journey through this miraculous story: the challenging conversations she had with her children; how she came to terms with feeling powerless and ferociously crabby while bedridden and unable to eat for a month; and how she ultimately learned, re-learned and re-re-learned to be more present in life.

When We Were Young & Brave by Hazel Gaynor - Historical Fiction

October 6, 2020

China, December 1941. Having left an unhappy life in England for a teaching post at a missionary school in northern China, Elspeth Kent is now anxious to return home to help the war effort. But as she prepares to leave China, a terrible twist of fate determines a different path for Elspeth and those in her charge. Ten-year-old Nancy Plummer has always felt safe at Chefoo School, protected by her British status. But when Japan declares war on Britain and America, Japanese forces take control of the school, and the security and comforts Nancy and her friends are used to are replaced by privation, uncertainty and fear. Now the enemy, and separated from their parents, the children look to their teachers to provide a sense of unity and safety.