Happy Friday, dear readers.  And…happy summer?  It looks as if my grumpy post about wearing sweaters may have finally persuaded Mother Nature to cut us some slack.  So you can bet I’ll be whining about the heat very very shortly.

But, until then–and after then, and always–there are books.  Here are some of the new titles that leapt onto our shelves this week and are eager to make your acquaintance!

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine: Here’s a book that’s been getting stellar reviews and press coverage since it was first announced, and seems to be an ideal pick-me-up for your summer reading list.  Eleanor Oliphant struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy.  But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the three become the kinds of friends who rescue one another from the lives of isolation they have each been living. And it is Raymond’s big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one.  Funny, breezy, and full of hope, heart, and humor, Gail Honeyman’s debut earned a starred review from Booklist, which said in its review “Walking in Eleanor’s practical black Velcro shoes is delightfully amusing, her prudish observations leavened with a privately puckish humor. But readers will also be drawn in by her tragic backstory, which slowly reveals how she came to be so entirely Eleanor. Witty, charming, and heartwarming, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is a remarkable debut about a singular woman. Readers will cheer Eleanor as she confronts her dark past and turns to a brighter future. Feel good without feeling smarmy.”

The Grantchester Mysteries: Sydney Chambers and the Persistence of Love: Some time back, Lady Pole wrote about her appreciation of the Grantchester series, and, because I take all her literary advice to heart immediately, I myself have become fond of the full-time priest, part-time detective Sidney Chambers–and I hope you will, too!  In this sixth installment, set in 1971, now Archdeacon Sidney Chambers is walking in the woods with his daughter Anna and their aging Labrador, Byron, when they stumble upon a body. Beside the dead man lies a basket of wild flowers, all poisonous. And so it is that Sidney is thrust into another murder investigation, entering a world of hippies, folk singers, and psychedelic plants, where love triangles and permissive behavior seem to hide something darker.  Sidney is kept on his toes in this series of clerical who-dun-its, along with his old friend, Detective Inspector Geordie Keating.   Between the disappearance of an historic religious text from a Cambridge college, and the later disappearance of Sidney’s nephew, and the burgeoning free love movement, which complicates a number of relationships in this deceptively quiet parish, this is a collection that series’ fans and newcomers alike will enjoy immensely.  The New York Times Review of Books agrees wholeheartedly, saying “Taken individually, each of these clerical whodunits poses a clever puzzle for armchair detectives. Viewed as a collective study of British life as it was lived when Elizabeth II first ascended the throne, these stories present a consistently charming and occasionally cutting commentary on ‘a postwar landscape full of industry, promise and concrete.”

The Answers: Catherine Lacey has already established a strong reputation for herself as a genre-bending author, and this book shows her challenging conventions–literary, grammatical, social–with relish, gusto, and style.  Her tale focuses on Mary Parsons, who is broke.  Like seriously broke.  Between an onslaught of medical bills and a mountain of credit card debt, she has been pushed to the brink. Hounded by bill collectors and still plagued by the painful and bizarre symptoms that doctors couldn’t diagnose, Mary seeks relief from a holistic treatment called Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia―PAKing, for short. Miraculously, it works. But PAKing is prohibitively expensive.  So Mary, like so many of her generation, decide to scour Criagslist for work.  And it is there that she finds a job…as Emotional Girlfriend in the “Girlfriend Experiment”―the brainchild of a wealthy and infamous actor, Kurt Sky, who is looking for a scientific solution for how to build and maintain the perfect romantic relationship, with himself as the constant. There’s a Maternal Girlfriend who folds his laundry, an Anger Girlfriend who fights with him, a Mundanity Girlfriend who just hangs around his loft, and a whole team of girlfriends to take care of Intimacy.  As Mary falls deeper and deeper into Kurt’s ego-driven universe, Catherine Lacey gives us a brilliant feminist analysis of modern-day romance, society, and an utterly unique story that Vogue called a “darkly funny, tartly feminist look at the tender state of our bodies and souls in the Information Age . . . [Lacey’s] work …captures the absurdity of a culture that persists in thinking that enlightenment is a matter of the right purchase, hashtag, or Google search.”

Chuck Klosterman X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century:  Chuck Klosterman has written about, I think, nearly every subject in the human experience, from sports to politics to food to pop culture…and this last is the main topic of this latest collection of essays, culled from his writings in Esquire, Vanity Fair, GQ, and other media sources.  What’s even neater is that Klosterman presents many of these articles in their original form, featuring previously unpublished passages and digressions that didn’t make the final cut in other outlets. Subjects include Breaking Bad, Lou Reed, zombies, KISS, Jimmy Page, Stephen Malkmus, steroids, Mountain Dew, Chinese Democracy, The Beatles, Jonathan Franzen, Taylor Swift, Tim Tebow, Kobe Bryant, Usain Bolt, Eddie Van Halen, Charlie Brown, the Cleveland Browns, and many more cultural figures and pop phenomena.  These are interesting times in which we live, friends, but Klosterman somehow manages to keep them interesting, engaging, and somehow just a little bit worthwhile.  Plus, the page-ends are black, giving this book a very exciting ninja quality that I’m sure you’ll appreciate.  Paste magazine wrote a terrific review of this book, saying, in part: “Klosterman is a master of the high-low…He injects a level of intellectual rigor into subjects that receive precious little…With X, Klosterman wallows in the trivial…but he’s not trivializing…proving that culture essays can teach us something about ourselves and the people around us…Each of his essays is a love letter to a moment.” 

American Eclipse: A Nation’s Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World: I love this title, and the subject matter of David Baron’s book sounds just as lofty and exciting.  On a scorching July afternoon in 1878, at the dawn of the Gilded Age, the moon’s shadow descended on the American West, darkening skies from Montana Territory to Texas. This rare celestial event―a total solar eclipse―offered a priceless opportunity to solve some of the solar system’s most enduring riddles, and it prompted a clutch of enterprising scientists to brave the wild frontier in a grueling race to the Rocky Mountains.  This book details the fascinating, sometimes absurd, sometimes terribly poignant adventure, as eclipse-seekers around the country raced to become the Gilded Age’s Galileo–including Maria Mitchell, a female astronomer who faced down not only rough conditions, but the prejudices of her profession to be a part of the events.  Baron–a gifted and celebrated science writer–has had a lifelong fascination with eclipses, and that passion shines through in this bizarre and beautiful story that has drawn praise from critics, other writers, and readers alike.  Publisher’s Weekly gave the book a starred review, saying “Baron shares a timely tale of science and suspense in this story of rival Gilded Age astronomers contending with everything from cloudy skies to train robbers to overserve the historic total solar eclipse of July 29, 1878. . . . Baron skillfully builds tension, giving readers a vivid sense of the excitement, hard work, and high stakes in play. With the first total solar eclipse to cross the U.S. in 99 years set to occur in late August 2017, this engrossing story makes an entertaining and informative teaser.”

Until next week, beloved patrons–happy reading!

It’s a glorious holiday weekend, dear readers, and so we’ll keep things brief, wish you a very happy, safe, relaxing, joyful Memorial Day!  Don’t forget, after today, the Library will be closed until Tuesday!

And now, here are some of the books that have gamboled onto our shelves this week:

Into the Water: One of the summer’s biggest releases is here–Paula Hawkins’ second book after her stunning and wildly successful Girl on a Train.  In this twisty tale, Hawkins brings another tale of psychic tension and social unease that is sure to keep fans flipping the pages.  A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged.  Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother’s sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from—a place to which she vowed she’d never return.  Sophomore works are always a challenge, but Hawkins seems to have carried this one off with aplomb, resulting in a work that the USA Today calls a “succulent new mystery… Hawkins, influenced by Hitchcock, has a cinematic eye and an ear for eerie, evocative language… So do dive in. The payoff is a socko ending. And a noirish beach read that might make you think twice about dipping a toe in those dark, chilly waters.”

Since We Fell: And speaking of summer blockbusters, I think it’s probably safe to say that Dennis Lehane’s newest release is going to be another summer favorite–and, hopefully, a much-needed twist on the current run of psychological thrillers involving scary spouses.  Here, Rachel Childs, a former journalist who, after an on-air mental breakdown, now lives as a virtual shut-in. In all other respects, however, she enjoys an ideal life with an ideal husband. Until a chance encounter on a rainy afternoon causes that ideal life to fray. As does Rachel’s marriage. As does Rachel herself. Sucked into a conspiracy thick with deception, violence, and possibly madness, Rachel must find the strength within herself to conquer unimaginable fears and mind-altering truths. By turns heart- breaking, suspenseful, romantic, and sophisticated, Lehane is already winning acclaim from critics and readers across the country, with New York Times confirming “[Lehane] remains one of the great, diabolical thriller kings who seems intimately acquainted with darkness and can make it seep from the page.”

Behave : the biology of humans at our best and worst: From the celebrated neurobiologist and primatologist, a landmark, genre-defining examination of human behavior, both good and bad, and an answer to the question: Why do we do the things we do?  Sapolsky begins with a neurological answer: What went on in a person’s brain a second before the behavior happened? Then Sapolsky pulls out to a slightly larger field of vision, a little earlier in time: What sight, sound, or smell caused the nervous system to produce that behavior? And then, what hormones acted hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual is to the stimuli that triggered the nervous system?  From there he expands to consider behavioral and learned habits and cultural experiences that weigh in on the brain’s inherent reactions.  Utilizing cutting-edge research across a range of disciplines, Sapolsky builds on this understanding to wrestle with some of our deepest and thorniest questions relating to tribalism and xenophobia, hierarchy and competition, morality and free will, and war and peace. Wise, humane, often very funny, Behave is a towering achievement that Kirkus called (in it’s starred review), a “wide-ranging, learned survey of all the making-us-tick things that, for better or worse, define us as human…. An exemplary work of popular science, challenging but accessible.”

Burntown: This is a “new to us” books, but any time a Jennifer McMahon novel comes to the Library, it’s worthy of note.  In her newest tale of sleepy towns and hidden secrets, McMahon has also worked in a little science fiction that makes the whole story into something utterly original.  Ashford, Vermont, might look like your typical sleepy New England college town, but to the shadowy residents who live among the remains of its abandoned mills and factories, it’s known as “Burntown.” Eva Sandeski, known as “Necco” on the street, has been a part of this underworld for years, ever since the night her father Miles drowned in a flood that left her and her mother Lily homeless. A respected professor, Miles was also an inventor of fantastic machines, including one so secret that the plans were said to have been stolen from Thomas Edison’s workshop. According to Lily, it’s this machine that got Miles murdered. Necco has always written off this claim as the fevered imaginings of a woman consumed by grief. But when Lily dies under mysterious circumstances, and Necco’s boyfriend is murdered, she’s convinced her mother was telling the truth. Now, on the run from the man called “Snake Eyes,” Necco must rely on other Burntown outsiders to survive, resulting in a story of edge-of-your-seat suspense that Booklist calls “bar-raising. . . . . A stunning genre blend of thriller and fantasy.”

The potlikker papers : a food history of the modern South: Like great provincial dishes around the world, potlikker is a salvage food. During the antebellum era, slave owners ate the greens from the pot and set aside the leftover potlikker broth for the enslaved, unaware that the broth, not the greens, was nutrient rich. After slavery, potlikker sustained the working poor, both black and white. In the South of today, potlikker has taken on new meanings as chefs have reclaimed it. Potlikker is a quintessential Southern dish, and The Potlikker Papers is a people’s history of the modern South, told through its food. Beginning with the pivotal role cooks and waiters played in the civil rights movement, noted authority John T. Edge narrates the South’s fitful journey from a hive of racism to a hotbed of American immigration. He shows why working-class Southern food has become a vital driver of contemporary American cuisine.  Over the last three generations, wrenching changes have transformed the South. The Potlikker Papers tells the story of that dynamism—and reveals how Southern food has become a shared culinary language for the nation.   Whether you’re a connoisseur, or interested in the ways in which food is an intricate part of our history and culture, this is a book for you.  Indeed, Southern Living called this book “The one food book you must read this year…No matter the subject, there is always something to learn from Edge’s work…The Potlikker Papers is a reminder of where we’ve been, how far we’ve come, and how far we still have to go.”

Until next week, beloved patrons–happy reading!

First off, dear readers, some sincere apologies for missing you this week.  A Kafka-esque combination of end-of-semester stress, a random power-outage, and plain old poor time-management skills meant that we didn’t get a chance to celebrate our new releases this past Friday.  So, as a means of making amends, we present you here with The List That Should Have Been, along with an extra book to make the alliteration complete.  We sincerely hope it gets your week started off on best of footings!

And now, without further ado, here are some of the excellent books that have traipsed up onto our shelves this week:

The Book of Joan: Lidia Yuknavitch’s newest release was listed on some of the literary world’s “Best of the Year” awards even before its release, and it seems that the reading world has similarly embraced this powerful and provocative novel.  In the near future, world wars have transformed the earth into a battleground. Fleeing the unending violence and the planet’s now-radioactive surface, humans have regrouped in a vessel hovering over their former home, lead by a ruthless and charismatic cult leader who turns life onboard into a kind of paranoid police state.  A group of rebels unite to dismantle his iron rule—galvanized by the heroic song of Joan, a child-warrior who possesses a mysterious force that lives within her and communes with the earth.  But when Joan becomes a martyr, no one—not the rebels, their enemy, or Joan herself—can foresee the way her story and unique gift will forge the destiny of an entire world for generations.  Yuknavitch’s willingness to explore themes of power and resistance, gender, sex, and love in her detailed futuristic world is a pitch-perfect blend of genres and philosophies that NPR called “[A] searing fusion of literary fiction and reimagined history and science-fiction thriller and eco-fantasy. . . Yuknavitch is a bold and ecstatic writer, wallowing in sex and filth and decay and violence and nature and love with equal relish.”

The Stars are Fire: Anita Shreve’s newest book turns to a real-life event–the 1947 fire that became the largest in the history of the state of Maine (and which, incidentally, is also prominently featured and fictionalized in Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot).  In October 1947, after a summer long drought, fires break out all along the Maine coast from Bar Harbor to Kittery and are soon racing out of control from town to village. Five months pregnant, Grace Holland is left alone to protect her two toddlers when her husband, Gene, joins the volunteer firefighters. Along with her best friend, Rosie, and Rosie’s two young children, Grace watches helplessly as their houses burn to the ground, the flames finally forcing them all into the ocean as a last resort. The women spend the night frantically protecting their children, and in the morning find their lives forever changed: homeless, penniless, awaiting news of their husbands’ fate, and left to face an uncertain future in a town that no longer exists.  But in the midst of such devastation, Grace finds a freedom she never dreamed existed–and one she may not have the strength to keep.  In it’s own way, this, too, is a story about growing in the face of adversity, as well as being a study on love, loyalty, and self-hood that Library Journal (who also named this book an Editor’s Pick) stated categorically: “This is sure to be a best seller. Shreve’s prose mirrors the action of the fire, with popping embers of action, licks of blazing rage, and the slow burn of lyrical character development. Absolutely stunning.”

The Last Neanderthal: Claire Cameron’s newest release is set in a world perhaps even more alien to us that any futuristic one–she begins 40,000 years ago with some of the last Neanderthals (a sibling species to homo sapiens).  After a crushingly hard winter, their numbers are low, but Girl, the oldest daughter, is just coming of age and her family is determined to travel to the annual meeting place and find her a mate. But the unforgiving landscape takes its toll, and Girl is left alone to care for Runt, a foundling of unknown origin. As Girl and Runt face the coming winter storms, Girl realizes she has one final chance to save her people, even if it means sacrificing part of herself. In the modern day, archaeologist Rosamund Gale works well into her pregnancy, racing to excavate newly found Neanderthal artifacts before her baby comes. Linked across the ages by the shared experience of early motherhood, both stories examine the often taboo corners of women’s lives.  By uniting the past and the present in such a concrete and tangible manner, Cameron offers the premise that, even though their features and habit may have changed, the human heart, its ability to feel and to break and to change the world around itself, is a thing that never alters.  Publisher’s Weekly gave this book a starred review, noting that “[The] book’s greatest strength [is] its ability to collapse time and space to draw together seemingly dissimilar species: ancestors and successors, writer and reader.”

Ice Ghosts : The Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin Expedition: I’l not ashamed to admit that the news of the discovery of the HMS Terror–the ship that carried the doomed Franklin Expedition in their quest to locate the Northwest Passage–in 2016 was perhaps my favorite news story of the year.  A journalist by training, Watson was on the icebreaker that led the expedition that discovered the HMS Erebus in 2014, and he broke the news of the discovery of the HMS Terror in 2016, and in this book he weaves together an account of the legendary Franklin Expedition of 1845 (whose two ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, and their crew of 129 were lost to the Arctic ice) with the modern tale of the scientists, researchers, divers, and local Inuit behind the recent discoveries of the two ships, and the way that oral tradition provided the information scientists needed to find one of the most famous wrecks in modern history.  Booklist calls this work “Riveting. . . . An engrossing chronicle of a legendary doomed naval voyage and the nearly 200-year effort to bring the Franklin Expedition to a close.” I can’t wait to read it–how about you?

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage murders and the birth of the FBI:  In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. Her relatives were shot and poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more members of the tribe began to die under mysterious circumstances. As the death toll climbed to more than twenty-four, the FBI took up the case. It was one of the organization’s first major homicide investigations and the bureau badly bungled the case. In desperation, the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including one of the only American Indian agents in the bureau. The agents infiltrated the region, struggling to adopt the latest techniques of detection. Together with the Osage they began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.  Journalist David Grann is an excellent researcher, and a master at spinning gripping, suspenseful yarns that brings a chilling, under-researched piece of American history to light in a work that USA Today calls “A shocking whodunit…What more could fans of true-crime thrillers ask?”

Incendiary: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber, and the Invention of Criminal Profiling: It’s a good week for true crime in American History books, dear readers, and Michael Cannell’s newest book about New York in the 1950’s, and the bomber whose actions changed the world of detection is being hailed as a fascinating piece of research work and storytelling.   For almost two decades, no public place in New York City seemed safe from the man who signed his anonymous letters “FP” and left his lethal devices in phone booths, storage lockers, even tucked into the plush seats of movie theaters.  Desperate to end the threat before any more innocent people were maimed, Police Captain Howard Finney sought the help of a little known psychiatrist, Dr. James Brussel, whose expertise was the criminal mind. Examining crime scene evidence and the strange wording in the bomber’s letters, he compiled a portrait of the suspect down to the cut of his jacket. But how to put a name to the description? Seymour Berkson―a handsome New York socialite, protégé of William Randolph Hearst, and publisher of the tabloid The Journal-American―joined in pursuit of the Mad Bomber. The three men hatched a brilliant scheme to catch him at his own game. Together, they would capture a monster and change the face of American law enforcement. Cannell paints a fascinating portrait of place and time in this book, making the race to trace down the villainous ‘F.P.’ into a richly detailed exploration of New York City.  Publisher’s Weekly agrees, noting “Cannell is at his best in making the impact of F.P.’s crimes palpable: he conveys in detail the dangers faced by the members of the NYPD Bomb Squad . . . and aptly captures the state of terror created by explosions in random places such as movie theaters and train station restrooms.”

Until next week, beloved patrons–happy reading!