New Fiction

a spot of bother
by Mark Haddon (Doubleday)

In case you were worried, Mark Haddon's second novel lives up to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Vintage). Here is a tale of ordinary people living quietly and desperately. It deals in truths: even if you're forty, you always turn into a teenager when you go back home; your parents will absolutely never change about certain things but can still manage to shock you sometimes; you can be in a relationship for years before you realize you're in love. And finally, sometimes, everything knits together and quiet desperation unfolds, believably and subtly, into quiet exultation. -R. Crawford

Rescue Missions
by Frederick Busch (Norton)

Hemingway advised, "Write hard and true about what hurts." Frederick Busch had him trumped. This collection of posthumous short stories with bittersweet plots is stunning. Lovers say goodbye in a shabby hotel room; a mother tries to comfort a son she no longer recognizes; a husband drops dead at the breakfast table; a couple becomes locked inside a house. The stories center on the theme of salvation, but there is a fine line between the rescuer and the imperiled when both parties are lost at sea. Busch had the ability to condense into twenty pages what many writers fail to accomplish in three hundred. -J. Darrah

Moral Disorder and Other Stories
by Margaret Atwood (Doubleday)

Margaret Atwood has given us a treasure with her new collection of stories. This is an elegant collage, snapshots of one woman's life from the 1930s to the present. We follow the central character through anxious moments of childhood in the early to midpart of the twentieth century, witnessing the social restrictions and responsibilities she faces as a young girl in those times. The girl resists the restrictions as she grows into womanhood and finally settles into a complicated relationship. Atwood remains sensitive to each decade's cultural shifts yet never loses sight of her character's independence and growth. -J. Wells

Brothers
by Da Chen (Shaye Areheart)

This fast-paced story of love, murder, revenge, and redemption pits two half brothers against each other in a race to lead the people of China out from the darkness of Mao Tse-tung's Cultural Revolution. Channeling the traditional fine art of storytelling, Chen takes the sweeping undulation of the epic and accentuates it with stylistic touches. He draws from the magical "ta-da!" of Salman Rushdie to the breathy whispers of Scheherezade without ever losing his distinctly Chinese essence. Like the work of a master calligrapher, Brothers is an expression of powerful, concise beauty, comprised of many individual brushstrokes of wondrous delicacy and perfection. -J. Zaidi

All Aunt Hagar's Children
by Edward P. Jones (Armistad)

As in his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Known World (Amistad), this gifted storyteller takes us straight to the emotional core of his characters within just a few elegant sentences. They are African Americans living in the urban north, just a few generations removed from the haunting legacy of slavery and continually tested by changes in luck or circumstance. From the story of a paroled convict learning what freedom might mean, to a medical doctor newly exposed to a medicine woman, to a vain woman suddenly struck blind on a bus, each character gets an honest, fearless rendering in this superb book. -E. Dorfman

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
by Karen Russell (Knopf)

These are dark, furry, swampy tales populated by alligator wrestlers, disordered dreamers, minotaur fathers, and delinquent teenage stargazers. Nuns attempt to tame girls raised by werewolves, a boy tries to find out what goes on during the palace's "Adult's Only" artificially induced blizzard whiteouts, two brothers go on midnight diving expeditions in search of the ghost of their sister, who was lost after setting sail in the exoskeleton of a giant crab.

Twenty-four-year-old Russell has conjured up a surreal and enchanting world where the bizarre seems commonplace, and the murky, anxious emotions of adolescence are given powerful, mythic voice. -L. Paus

The Echo Maker
by Richard Powers (Farrar Straus & Giroux)

Do you like neurotic people? Mark's your man. He knows what his sister looks like, what she talks like, and what she wears, but when he sees her after his near-deadly truck-rolling accident, he knows she's an impostor. Unfortunately for her, he can't be convinced otherwise. Oh, and his dog, Blackie? She has also been replaced by the government. Who would do such a sick thing?

This intriguing and emotionally charged novel explores how the brain defines and redefines reality, self, and loved ones, and it's set in any bird-loving fanatic's dreamscape: the nation's largest bird-migration stop spot. -L. Redinger

One Good Turn
by Kate Atkinson (Little, Brown)

Jackson Brodie (former soldier, policeman, and private detective) turns up at the Edinburgh Festival, and if the crowds and pretentious theater weren't enough, he's about to witness a bout of road rage that will escalate into a threat on his life. As layers of plot peel away, a host of bizarre characters appear (timid crime writer, disenchanted housewife, cranky female detective, her surly teenaged son, Russian prostitute doppelgangers, etc.) and Atkinson's superb prose twists to a triumphant finish. This novel is a sequel to Case Histories (Back Bay), but you don't have to read the precursor to grasp the brilliance of its follow-up. -R. Crawford

The Road
by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf)

Stark and lonesome going, no redemption in sight: Cormac McCarthy's newest feels like his oldest. Old Testament in tone, it is set in a fearsome, not-too-distant future. A father and son make their literal and metaphorical way, seeking to survive when all about them seems dead, or threatens to be. Utterly steeped in the present, for to survive requires it, this brave book carries emanations of older verities, ones we know as commonplace. In reading, there is wonder at what has been lost, what could be. Mr. McCarthy has never been better. -R. Simonson

The Meaning of Night
by Michael Cox (Norton)

In the tradition of Don Quixote and The Three Musketeers, the main text of this novel is presented as a document discovered by editor J. J. Antrobus years after the events it describes. This manuscript proves to be an astonishing enigma that begins: "After killing the red-haired man, I took myself to Quinn's for an oyster supper." Imagine a stupefied Antrobus reading his find through the night as one eye-popping revelation leads to the next. Many readers will follow his lead and arrive at work bleary eyed after having been unable to sleep until they, too, have heard the confession of Edward Glyver. -J. Zaidi

The Lay of the Land
by Richard Ford (Knopf)

Here is a novel that comes fully furnished, constructed in the crafted, handsome style of The Sportswriter and Independence Day (Vintage). Sportswriter-turned-realtor Frank Bascombe (who some readers will remember) escorts you through many rooms containing the accountings and accoutrements of life in turn-of-the-millennium U.S.A. Live here awhile and you will imagine what any new house offers, another possible life. Here, Frank narrates his own. It's a midlife view with all the laments and wonderments that this encompasses—dashed romances, precarious health, grown children, an aspiring younger colleague, random encounters along the Jersey Shore. This is the real deal. Don't miss out. -R. Simonson

The Blue Sky
by Galsan Tschinag (Milkweed)

The Blue Sky is a touching, yet tragic, fictional account of a nomadic Tuvan shepherd boy in the remote Altai Mountains of northern Mongolia. In writing the first part of his autobiographical trilogy, Galsan Tschinag has faithfully rendered the unforgiving collision of this ancient land—based on tribal custom—with the unyielding juggernaut that is modernity. Through a series of traumatic events, our young protagonist is wrested from his idealistic youth, only to lose faith in Father Sky. While foreign in culture and setting, this lovely book is at once accessible to all who have come of age feeling the touch of angst. -J. Reiner

After This
by Alice McDermott (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

After This is the story of the quintessential twentieth-century American family: two boys, two girls, Catholic faith, suburbs, Vietnam War, sexual revolution, tradition, and change. Whether it's a tale you know intimately or only distantly, McDermott makes you feel as though you are sitting at your grandmother's knees and listening to the stories of your own family. She winds through each relationship—brother/brother, father/daughter, the unrelated aunt—pulling you into the tragedies and the joys with the craftsmanship of an old-time storyteller. -I. Akio

The Stories of Mary Gordon
by Mary Gordon (Pantheon)

If you've read the novels of Mary Gordon—particularly Spending (Scribner) or the achingly tender Pearl (Anchor)—you already know that her gifts as a writer are unparalleled. What you probably don't know is that Ms. Gordon is one of the best short-story authors at work today. The forty-one stories in this book, more than half new and previously uncollected—on motherhood, vacationing, materialism, and podiatry, among other things—are simply stunning when placed side by side. What a joy to discover that one of our finest novelists is also capable of crafting these beautifully burnished tiny masterpieces. -P. Constant

Restless
by William Boyd (Bloomsbury)

Espionage is the backdrop for this exploration of the inherent duality of relationships among family, lovers, and spies. Sally reveals to her daughter, Ruth, that she was once Eva Delectorskaya and a British spy during the early years of World War II. At first, Ruth thinks her mother has lost her mind, but as the installments of Eva's story are given to her, Ruth begins to embrace this new heritage. Conversely, it becomes apparent that Sally has an unexpected motive for telling her story. Restless has the gunplay and trysts that a mystery requires, delivered with a depth that defies genre. -J. Darrah

The Zero
by Jess Walter (Regan)

Jess Walter has achieved an amazing feat with his new novel, The Zero. Set in New York during the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the book treats the tragedy with compassion and thoughtfulness, yet it still contains incredible wit and hilarity. Our hero is a retired cop who might be working for a secret government agency, but gaps in his memory prevent him from knowing quite what it is he does for them. As he stumbles through his increasingly disturbing life, he finds himself grappling with a world that is moving on, while he is left behind. –M. Hickner

Forgetfulness
by Ward Just (Houghton Mifflin)

Thomas Railles is a well-respected painter and former part-time CIA operative who lives quietly in the south of France with his French wife, Florette. One day Florette goes for a walk and is later found dead, presumably killed by unknown assailants. This is the setup for Ward Just's latest novel, Forgetfulness. Just has written a remarkable novel about this ex-patriot who has tried to escape America, and yet late in life finds geopolitical reality has entered his own home. Ward Just is among the first rank of American writers. Read him. -G. Berry

The Uses of Enchantment
by Heidi Julavits (Doubleday)

In her third novel, Heidi Julavits tells a complex tale drawn from a moody cast of characters. A young woman named Mary Veal vanishes for a month, raising fears that she has been kidnapped. Upon her enigmatic return, Mary's disbelieving therapist uses their session notes to support his own dark theories. Thirteen years after her disappearance, Mary goes back to her mother's funeral and a shattered family.

Each character in this mystifying novel starts off like a mismatched side on a Rubik's Cube, but Julavits smoothly guides this shifting story to its clear and clever completion. -R. Mita

New Nonfiction

Thunderstruck
by Erik Larson (Crown)

The best-selling author of Isaac's Storm and The Devil in the White City (Vintage) unleashes this electrifying new look into history with an ear-splitting crack. As with his previous works, Larson tells two stories, forming a serpentine caduceus of a narrative, intertwining the lives of Guglielmo Marconi (the unlikely pioneer of radio communication) and Harry Crippen (the mild-mannered doctor who just might have butchered his overbearing wife in a most grisly fashion). Their histories are told in alternating chapters until they eventually fuse into a sizzling finale. Feel the hairs on the back of your neck rise...you've been—thunderstruck! -J. Zaidi

Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York
by Adam Gopnik (Knopf)

Shortly after the Gopnik family returns to Manhattan following five years in Paris, the city is rocked by 9/11. It's every parent's nightmare: how do you help your children know joy in a time of fear? But sometimes it's the children who teach us. Meet Charlie Ravioli, four-year-old Olivia's imaginary friend, who, in true New Yorker fashion, is too busy to play; Bluie, the fish whose terrible end prompts discussions on the nature of consciousness with ten-year-old Luke; and the cast of lively characters who inhabit this resilient neighborhood. A paen to New York, this is a romance in the best sense of the word. -L. Paus

Chicken with Plums
by Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon)

True story: Nasser Ali Khan was a world-famous player of the tar, a traditional Iranian musical instrument. During a marital dispute, his beloved tar was shattered beyond repair. Unable to find any replacement tars that could satisfy, Nasser Ali Khan went to bed and decided that he was going to die. Eight days later, he did. Graphic-memoirist Satrapi's recounting of the last week of this man's life will astound you with its insights and sadness. This is a brilliantly told story about a great man laid low, a whodunit about a suicide that will stay with you forever. -P. Constant

The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History
by Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Franzen's memoir reads like fiction. He fumbles with social graces as an adolescent to the point where readers ache for him to get it right, but mostly we shake our heads and chuckle, because we've all been there. The book matures though, as Franzen matures. He shares his hilarious misadventures as a rebellious yet moral young man, moving on to the wonderful simplicity and comfort of middle age. No matter what your age, this book will make you laugh and appreciate the discomforts of life. -J. Wells

Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People who Love Books and Want to Write Them
by Francine Prose (HarperCollins)

If you've ever longed to be back in college, listening to a passionate professor illuminate a great work of fiction, then this book will serve as a close second choice. Prose takes us on a tour of an eclectic selection of writers: from Chekhov to Carver, from Proust to Z Z Packer, from Shteyngart to Shakespeare. Replete with excerpts (delicious to read aloud), and chapters divided into categories like "dialogue," "details," "narration," and "gesture," Prose walks us through all aspects of good writing, urging intimate reading of the masters to help us with our own struggles as writers. -L. Paus

The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins (Houghton Mifflin)

Renowned biologist Richard Dawkins states clearly in the title of his new book that belief in God is a delusion. Understandably, this belief is maybe comforting to many people, which surely is its purpose, but nonetheless, Dawkins says, it is an unreasonable fantasy. Point by point, Dawkins dismantles the monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He doesn't find "life without God" depressing, but empowering. We need more atheists courageous enough to enter this public and important debate. -G. Berry

Red, White and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass
by Natalie MacLean (Bloomsbury)

Natalie MacLean is a very grounded wine writer. In this accessible introduction to wine, she discusses topics ranging from the production of champagne to the practice of numerically rating wine and, in a casual yet informative manner, drops many helpful hints for consumers along the way. Her love for the people and places that produce wine is contagious. By the end of the book, you may be tempted to drop everything and go to work for a vineyard or, at the very least, spend all weekend lurking in your favorite wine shop. -M. Hickner

No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World's Fourteen Highest Peaks
by Ed Viesturs with David Roberts (Broadway)

This is the fascinating and intensely personal tale of a man striving to climb the world's fourteen highest mountains ("the 8,000ers") in the purest style possible: without the use of bottled oxygen or significant Sherpa support. Ed Viesturs, one of America's premier Himalayan climbers, immerses us in his passion for climbing to the top of the world, where nature is inimically opposed to the presence of man. By turns motivational, frustrating, heart-wrenching, and ultimately triumphant, this is a story that inspires each of us to conquer our own mountains, in whatever form they might take. -M. Hickner

Letter to a Christian Nation
by Sam Harris (Knopf)

Sam Harris argues that either you believe in Christian dogma or you don't believe in it—there is no middle ground on which to stand. He has written a secularist primer to combat the insidious influence of fundamentalist Christianity. As he did in The End of Faith (Norton), Harris takes a stand against an attachment to an imaginary God, and instead advocates our engagement in this life, which does far more, he claims, to create positive values. -G. Berry

Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance
by Ian Buruma (Penguin Press)

The 2004 murder in Amsterdam of filmmaker and provocateur Theo Van Gogh by a young, well-educated, and seemingly well-assimilated son of Moroccan immigrants is only part of the story Ian Buruma tells in this powerful account. His analysis of the clash of secularists and religious fundamentalists, of change agents and cultural enforcers, of promoters of pluralism and of violent, idealistic narcissists is nuanced and thoughtful. Here the story is not whether tolerance should be extended to extreme views or if art should be censored, but an exploration of the issues of culture, conflict and power behind the issue of free expression. -K.M. Allman

Riding With Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books
by Ted Bishop (Norton)

Even the most overplanned trips can take unexpected turns. After breaking his back in a high-speed motorcycle accident, professor Ted Bishop uses his down time to write about his recent motorcycle trip from Alberta in northern Canada to the University of Texas in Austin. While he was doing research on Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, an innocent question about the front cover of the first edition of Joyce's Ulysses sent him, his travels, and his research into territory he had never imagined. Bishop effortlessly fuses the worlds of the motorcycle enthusiast and the scholar of literature in this heartfelt memoir. -C. Joyner

The Buddha and the Terrorist
by Satish Kumar (Algonquin)

Internationally, Satish Kumar is known as a spiritual leader and peace activist in the Buddhist tradition. In this beautiful book, Kumar retells the story of Angulimala, "wearer of a finger necklace," who, in response to a childhood as an untouchable and an outcaste, turns to violence and becomes a murderer who strikes terror in the hearts of common people. Fear gives him power. It is through Angulimala's encounter with the Buddha, who does not fear death, that he changes and becomes Ahimsaka, "the nonviolent one." -G. Berry

There Is No Me Without You
by Melissa Faye Greene (Bloomsbury)

One day in 1999, Haregewoin Teferra, a middle-class Ethiopian woman, finds her own grief transformed into a desire, a need, to rescue children whose lives have been ravaged by a ruthless disease and who have been cast aside by an indifferent world. Greene handles her subject—the tragedy of AIDS in Africa, lives transformed by grief and love—as delicately as Teferra cradles one of her children. The narrative gracefully interweaves the personal, political, and historical to create a picture of the AIDS crisis in Africa that is complete, humbling, and utterly shocking. -C. Schwennsen

Watching the World Change: The Stories Behing the Images of 9/11
by David Friend (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Many people whose sole visual experiences of 9/11 were mediated by video or still photography have reported that these images seemed unreal, even comparable to a nightmarish action movie. In Watching the World Change, David Friend sets out to contextualize—and in a sense, attempt to make real what for so long has seemed unreal—these now-ubiquitous images. In so doing, he reveals the profound personal and political effects of their production, use, and reception. -D. Evans

Creationists: Selected Essays 1993-2006
by E.L. Doctorow (Random House)

Novelist E.L. Doctorow's rumination on storytellers and the work of creating worlds includes an examination of W.G. Sebald's genre-blending novels, an appreciation of Dos Passos's portrayal of the intersection of lives and history, and a celebration of Melville's explosion of narrative convention in Moby Dick. Storytellers, according to Doctorow, retell the stories of previous generations but with fresh imaginations. His storytellers are not limited to writers in the conventional sense. He includes the authors of the Bible, who drew from millennia of oral stories and diverse writings, and scientists who must put their work into a narrative context. -K.M. Allman

The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe and the Invention of Murder
by Daniel Stashower (Dutton)

The violent death of Mary Rogers on the banks of the Hudson River in 1841 mystified the city of New York. The unsolved event, sensationalized by the city's plethora of newpapers, sparked the imagination of a struggling writer by the name of Edgar Allan Poe.

Using his fictional character, Inspector Dupin, Poe set out to solve the crime by "ratiocination", a self-defined science of deductive reasoning later used by authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle. The result was the brilliant short story "The Mystery of Marie Roget," considered to be one of Poe's greatest achievements. -C. Joyner

Children's & Young Adult Books

The Looking Glass Wars
by Frank Beddor (Dial)

A lot of books lately have mused, "What if Alice in Wonderland were real?" and have concluded that such a thing would be creepily awesome. Of those, this book is the best. Princess Alyss Heart flees Wonderland after her Aunt Redd murders her entire family in a vicious coup. Alyss falls into our world, where she is fostered by the Liddells and pours out her story to the duplicitous Charles Dodgson ( a.k.a. Lewis Carroll). Beddor's writing is completely addictive—I couldn't put it down—and just wait till you see what he did with the Cheshire Cat! -R. Crawford

Skippyjon Jones in Mummy Trouble
by Judy Schachner (Dutton)

When Skippyjon Jones sees an article on cat mummies in National Leographic, his hyperactive imagination sends him off on a grand adventure to ancient Egypt, in search of the tomb of King Rootin-Tootin-Kitten-Kabootin. Along the way, he encounters his Chihuahua buddies, the Chimichangos pack; Egyptian goddesses; and the mighty Finx. Can El Skippito survive his journeys in time for bed? Writer and artist Schachner's third installment of Skippyjon's shenanigans is a colorful, joyful, verbally addictive tribute to the power of the imagination, and a perfect read-aloud book for parents and children to enjoy together. -V. Verano

an abundance of katherines
by John Green (Dutton)

Colin has just been dumped by a girl named Katherine for the nineteenth time—as in nineteen different girls named Katherine. Clearly, the only plausible solution to his demoralization is a road trip suggested by his hilarious best friend, Hassan. It's the perfect way for Colin to work on a mathematical equation for the probability of relationship survival—elevating him from child prodigy to genius status—and for Hassan to get off his fat arse and to stop constantly watching Judge Judy reruns. Printz Award–winner John Green has created another brilliant and sidesplitting cast of unforgettable characters. -L. Redinger

The Green Glass Sea
by Ellen Klages (Viking)

Set in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1944, The Green Glass Sea is the story of an unlikely friendship between two misfit girls. Bespectacled Dewey likes to build radios, read The Boy Mechanic and scavenger-hunt for treasures at the dump. Bossy Suze reads comic books, makes collages, and is learning Greek. With cameo appearances from Richard Feynman, Robert Oppenheimer, and more, this book offers a fascinating look at what constituted daily life on "the Hill" for children of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project. Readers of all ages will enjoy this spectacular work of historical fiction. Shazzam! -J. Darrah

Back Talk

by Paul Constant

In five short years, the graphica section at Elliott Bay has grown exponentially, and many of its titles have appeared on our store bestseller charts. Of course, Seattle has been very good to what others call graphic novels (which is a misnomer: some of the most prominent stars of the medium are nonfiction and not novels at all.) Harvey Pekar ( Ego & Hubris, The Quitter), famously portrayed by Paul Giamatti in the film version of his comic American Splendor, has entertained with frequent public appearances, and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis was chosen in 2006 as the Seattle Reads book.

The problem used to be that graphica had a shallow pool from which to recommend. A half decade later, the talent pool has gone beyond the brilliance of Dan Clowes, Robert Crumb, and Chris Ware to become an ocean—there’s something for everyone. Do you like Augusten Burroughs–style memoir? Try Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. Young adult fantasy? Try Jeff Smith's Bone or Linda Medley's Castle Waiting. There's spy graphica, political graphica, historical graphica, and a number of flat-out magnum opuses: the Hernandez Brothers' Locas and Palomar stand as some of the most impressive fiction of the last three decades, alongside Charles Burns's genre-twisting Black Hole. One of autumn's most anticipated—and controversial—graphica releases is Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls.

Authors like Michelle Tea, Michael Chabon, and Sherman Alexie are getting into the act as well: they seem to realize that there are things that you can say with graphica that no other medium can convey. It’s been exciting to watch the form develop and to announce with confidence that the most exciting time in this young art form's history—without hyperbole, its unabashed golden age—is happening right now.

The Owner's Corner

by Peter Aaron

By the time this appears in print, the setting it refers to will be old news. Or not. A hallmark of late summer in Puget Sound, Seafair—and the aerobatics of our crack navy flyers—took place this year against the backdrop of the carnage in Lebanon—which overshadowed, for several days, the glare of the ongoing savagery elsewhere in the world. Below is one man’s reaction to the air display:

BLUE ANGELS

Under perfect blue skies
a heavenly day for flight
for bird or angel the show
will soon commence.
For days they've rehearsed overhead
the scream of their dives thunder
of climbs precise acrobatic
furls and twists. My ear
so attuned I trick myself
mistaking each passing car
for their advent mistaking
a glancing flirtation for love.
But the real thing when it comes
astounds with its fury.
We can almost begin to imagine
what it's like for them—
the distant rumble then shrieking
down streaming bombs and rockets
into the throat of our spangled prayer—
Though we've no cause to fear
blue angels passing over—
so gaily we've slathered
our doorposts
                                                —August, 2006