Books that captivate with their exquisite prose and unforgettable storytelling. Perfect for readers who appreciate the art of language.
The Radleys
Matt Haig, 2011
366 pp.
October 2011
Vampire walks into a pub. Pretty young barmaid says, "Can I get you something to eat?" Vampire looks at her and says, "Thanks, but I'm watching what I eat." Bada boom.
It's a line straight out of The Radleys, one of the newest in the vampire craze. By turns funny and serious, author Matt Haig has managed to freshen up what has become, for some, a stale genre.
The Emperor's Children
Claire Messud, 2006
528 pp.
September 2011
The title of Claire Messud's book is a dead giveaway—think "clothes" instead of "children." Things in Messud's world are not how they appear; there is a wide gap between perception and reality, what people say they believe in and what they do in their lives.
Training her eye on New York's glittering literati, Messud has written a stinging comedy of manners, in the style of Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and Tom Wolff. The Emperor's Children is that good. The beauty of her book is following the multiple strings of plot and characters as she works her way toward the finale.
The Dry Grass of August
Anna Jean Mayhew, 2011
352 pp.
August 2011
Inevitable comparisons are already being made of this recent debut novel to The Help, The Secret Life of Bees and even To Kill a Mockingbird—comparisons well deserved.
Mayhew has given us a powerful story of lost innocence in the face of racial injustice—a story that comes to us through the voice of 13-year-old Jubie Watts, a whilte girl from Charlotte, North Carolina.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
David Mitchell, 2010
496 pp.
July 2011
Critics—universally—consider David Mitchell one of the most versatile, talented authors around. Capable of fabulous, mind-bending pyrotechnics, he's dabbled in surrealism, post-modernism, and now, with this novel, he's given us a gorgeous old-fashioned 19th-century narrative in the vein of George Eliot.
Actually, A Thousand Autumns is a historical novel, suspense-thriller, and melodrama—steeped in historical veracity and charged with high-impact emotionalism. In other words, it's seat-of-your-pants reading with characters you care about.
The Big Short:Inside the Doomsday Machine
Michael Lewis, 2010
320 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
June 2011
A handful of guys made spectacular sums of money when Wall Street crashed—and, for most of us, it's hard to tell whether they're heroes or villains.
For Michael Lewis, they're mavericks—loners who bucked the system. As Lewis tells it, while others ran mindlessly with the herd, listening to the sound of their own hooves, these men knew the herd was headed over a cliff—it was just a matter of time. And they saw it coming for years.