Lahiri, Jhumpa.
Unaccustomed Earth
If you loved Lahiri’s Pulitzer-Prize winning stories in Interpreter of Maladies and her novel, The Namesake, than you’ve got to read her latest collection of short stories. This collection’s five powerful stories and haunting triptych of tales about the fates of two Bengali families in America map the perplexing hidden forces that pull families asunder and undermine marriages. “Unaccustomed Earth”, the title story, dramatizes the divide between immigrant parents and their American-raised children, and is the first of several scathing inquiries into the lack of deep-down understanding and trust in a marriage between a Bengali and non-Bengali. Reviewers are calling this collection “stunning” and even better than her first set.

Wolff, Tobias
Our Story Begins: New and Collected Stories
Wolff's first story collection, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981), was a major salvo in the short story renaissance that included Raymond Carver. The 10 spare, elegant new stories here, collected with 21 stories from Wolff's three previous collections, are as good as anything Wolff has done. In most, there is a moment of realization, less a startling epiphany than a distant, gradual ache of understanding, that changes how the character looks at the world. The retired, 41-year-old female in “Marine of A Mature Student”, compares her female professor's experiences in Communist-era Prague and her own son's service in Iraq. “Deep Kiss” movingly chronicles the fractious results when a teenaged boy, infatuated with a promiscuous classmate, neglects to bond with his dying father. A hilarious description of a brash, ignorant thug in “Her Dog” shows Wolff's gift for demotic speech. If you like these tales, check out Wolff’s somewhat biographical novel, Old School (Knopf, 2003 F W855o)

Strout, Elizabeth
Olive Kitteridge
“Hell. We’re always alone. Born alone. Die alone”, says Olive Kitteridge, redoubtable seventh-grade math teacher in Crosby, Maine. Anyone who gets in Olive’s way had better watch out, for she crashes unapologetically through life like an emotional storm trooper. She forces her husband, Henry, the town pharmacist, into tactical retreat; and she drives her beloved son, Christopher, across the country and into therapy. But appalling though Olive can be, Strout manages to make her deeply human and even sympathetic, as are all of the characters in this novel in stories. Though loneliness and loss haunt these pages, Strout also supplies gentle humor and a nourishing dose of hope. People are sustained by the rhythms of ordinary life and the natural wonders of coastal Maine, and even Olive is sometimes caught off guard by life’s baffling beauty.

Berenson, Alex
The Ghost War
If you love thrillers, this one is getting raves. Having enjoyed an illustrious debut with the 2007 Edgar Award winning The Faithful Spy, Berenson deploys CIA agent John Wells to defuse a cleverly triangulated scheme aimed at vaulting China to full status as a major world power. Ambitious General Li, hoping to aid hundreds of millions of struggling Chinese have-nots, launches plots in North Korea, England, and Afghanistan to consolidate his power in Beijing. Working with shards of evidence, Wells races to decode the plot just hours before the Li-choreographed war erupts. Especially effective as psychological studies of men under stress are the contrasting portrayals of CIA agent Wells, warts and all, with the CIA mole who shops the United States to General Li. Berenson marshals turncoats, the Taliban, and testosterone to produce a tautly paced, credible, and gripping scenario guaranteed to buttress Berenson's niche as one of the stars in the suspense firmament.

Ravel, Edeet.
Ten Thousand Lovers. Harper, 2003.
The personal and the political are forever struggling to coexist, especially in Israel. Such is the case in this moving first novel about two lovers in Tel Aviv in the 1970s. Lilly is a young Canadian studying in Israel; Ami is a handsome former actor, the perfect boyfriend except for one flaw: he is an army interrogator. Ravel tells the tale in flashbacks, jumping between the past, as Ami becomes more and more disenchanted with the treatment of the Arab prisoners he must interrogate, and the present, as Lily, now a professor, remembers her first love. By setting the action at a time when the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands was in its first stage, Ravel adds an extra level of poignancy. Lily and her college friends anticipate peace, while Ami, seeing the hatred from both sides, is less sanguine. The tragedy here is both anticipated and inevitable, but the textured personal story rises above its political context like a melody soaring beyond the steady rhythm pulsing below it.

Perkins, Emily
Novel about My Wife
Due out in June, this chilling gothic tale about a gorgeous young wife's descent into madness is written by a rising literary star. When Tom moves with his wife, Ann, from their tiny Camden flat into a large house in Hackney, he feels as if it's the start of the rest of their life together. Deeply in love, and with a baby on the way, Tom thinks everything is finally coming together. He and Ann anticipate the arrival of the baby, as Ann, particularly galvanized, spends hours cleaning and reorganizing the house, and sitting up all night talking with a renewed passion about life, love, and art. But there is a darker side to this new fervor, somehow linked with her conviction that someone is lingering threateningly around their new home. Someone who—Tom soon realizes—may not exist at all.

Russell, Mary Doria
Dreamers of the Day
"I suppose I ought to warn you at the outset that my present circumstances are puzzling, even to me. Nevertheless, I am sure of this much: My little story has become your history. You won't really understand your times until you understand mine." So begins the account of Agnes Shanklin, the charmingly diffident narrator of Dreamers of the Day. And what is Miss Shanklin's "little story?" Nothing less than the creation of the modern Middle East at the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference, where Winston Churchill, T. E. Lawrence, and Lady Gertrude Bell met to decide the fate of the Arab world-and of our own. A forty-year-old schoolteacher from Ohio, still reeling from the tragedies of the Great War and the influenza epidemic, Agnes has come into a modest inheritance that allows her to take the trip of a lifetime to Egypt and the Holy Land. Arriving at the Semiramis Hotel just as the Peace Conference convenes, Agnes enters into the company of the historic luminaries who will, in the space of a few days at a hotel in Cairo, invent the nations of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan.

Kadare, Ismail
Agamemnon’s Daughter: A Novella and Stories
Writing in the tradition of Kundera, Solzhenitsyn, and Kafka, Albanian fiction writer Kadare was the inaugural recipient of the Man Booker International Prize (2005). In this book, which includes a novella and two short stories, he continues his long interest in chronicling life under oppressive totalitarian regimes. In "Agamemnon's Daughter" and "The Blinding Order" he sets tender, skillfully drawn love stories within a confusing and violent world of state-sponsored atrocities and pathological government control and cruelty. As the titles of these stories suggest, this is a malevolent, maddening world that corrupts both love and friendship in tragic ways. This is important work, and Kadare has vital things to say about how extremist ideology can lead to devastation and misfortune on a massive scale. His portrait of totalitarian arrogance and ruthlessness here is absolutely chilling.

Sebold, W.G.
Austerlitz
Sebold's novels concerns the melancholic life of Jacques Austerlitz who, justifiably, exclaims, "At some point in the past, I thought, I must have made a mistake, and now I am living the wrong life." The unnamed narrator met Austerlitz, an architectural historian, in Belgium in the '60s, then lost track of his friend in the '70s. When they accidentally run into each other in 1996, Austerlitz tells the story that occupies the rest of the book, the story of Austerlitz's life. For a long time, Austerlitz did not know his real mother and father were Prague Jews - his first memories were of his foster parents, a joyless Welsh couple. While exploring the Liverpool Street railroad station in London, Austerlitz experiences a flashback of himself as a four-year-old. Gradually, he tracks his history, from his birth in Prague to a cultivated couple through his flight to England, on the eve of WWII, on a train filled with refugee children. His mother, Agata, was deported first to Theresienstadt and then, presumably, to Auschwitz. His father disappeared in Paris. Austerlitz's isolation and depression deepen after learning these facts.

Rees, Matt
The Collaborator of Bethlehem
Omar Yussef is a schoolteacher in Bethlehem, struggling to teach history unfettered by politics. When a PLO soldier is murdered, and a Palestinian Christian is arrested for the crime (and accused of being a collaborator with the Israelis), Yussef launches his own investigation, convinced that the accused, a former student, is innocent. Yussef knows he is not a brave man, but his determination to stand up for his friend outweighs the futility of his quest, even if it means jeopardizing his family. The premise of this gripping first novel by Time magazine's former Jerusalem bureau chief evokes that sense of mean-streets honor that drives so much crime fiction, but there is no sentimentality lurking beneath Rees' complex, uncompromising tale of a good man trapped in an untenable world. The plot unfolds with a tragic inevitability, but along the way, Rees captures the human spark of daily lives being led in totally polarized, soul-deadening conditions.

Haien, Jeannette
The All of It
A sleeper hit when first published in 1986, Jeannette Haien's exquisite, beloved first novel is a deceptively simple story that has the power and resonance of myth. The story begins on a rainy morning as Father Declan de Loughry stands fishing in an Irish salmon stream, pondering the recent deathbed confession of one of his parishioners. Kevin Dennehy and his wife, Enda, have been sweetly living a lie for some 50 years, a lie the full extent of which Father Declan learns only when Enda finally confides "the all of it." Her tale of suffering mesmerizes the priest, who recognizes that it is also a tale of sin and scandal, a transgression he cannot ignore. The resolution of his dilemma is a triumph of strength and empathy that, makes The All of It a book to remember.

Diaz, Junot
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
(Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)

Readers who have had to wait a decade for Diaz’s first novel are now spectacularly rewarded. Paralleling his own experiences growing up in the Dominican Republic and New Jersey, he has choreographed a family saga at once sanguinary and sexy that confronts the horrific brutality at loose during the reign of the dictator Trujillo. Diaz’s besieged characters look to the supernatural for explanations and hope, from the curse unleashed when Europeans arrived on Hispaniola, to the forces dramatized in the works of science fiction and fantasy so beloved by the chubby ghetto nerd Oscar Wao, the brilliantly realized boy of conscience at the center of this whirlwind tale.

Gallop, Alan
Mr. Stanley, I Presume. Sutton, 2004.
(B STA)

Did you know Sir Henry Morton Stanley, the intrepid New York Herald reporter, was not an American, but a Welsh bastard by the name of John Rowland who grew up in a “poor house”? Abandoned or scorned by almost every relative, he hopped a ship to New Orleans and re-made himself as Henry Morton Stanley. After serving in the Civil War as a Confederate, he switched sides and reported on it from the Union side. His journalistic skills finally got him an assignment in Turkey where he narrowly escaped with his life. Undaunted, Stanley was assigned the almost geographically and physically insurmountable task of finding the great missionary-turned explorer, David Livingstone. Stanley’s “news scoop” catapulted him to fame. He became the hottest speaker on the nineteenth century lecture circuit only to discover that many reporters were trying for their own scoops in uncovering Stanley’s British past. This well-documented biography is a fascinating rags-to-riches story of an orphan who took on the English establishment, only to join its ranks.

Morrison, Toni
What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction
For Nobel laureate Morrison, language is holy, story is power, and inspiration is found at the margin, that is, in lives locked out of America’s white, corporate mainstream, in art of conscience, in overlooked beauty and hidden truths. Editor Denard incisively introduces this well-structured collection of clarion works spanning three decades and exemplifying Morrison’s exacting arguments, commanding forthrightness, and blistering wit on subjects personal and universal, timely and timeless. Whether she is remembering her grandparents, praising Toni Cade Bambara and other writers, defining black womanhood, celebrating black heritage, or dissecting racial and political issues, Morrison, drawing on her experiences as a book editor and educator as well as a novelist, rejects lump thinking, pursues historic facts, and brings courage and candor to bear on complex conflicts.

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher
Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History
(305.4 U45)

An often-quoted sentence from a 1976 article written by Ulrich has become the title and premise of her most recent book. Here, Ulrich explores how and why women make history and how three women—15 th century French poet and scholar Christine de Pizan, 19th-century American activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and 20th-century English novelist Virginia Wool—helped to define and expand the history of women through their writings and their beliefs. Ulrich uses each as a starting point in discussing both real and fictional characters in stories about Amazons, Shakespeare's sisters and his female contemporaries, female slaves in 19th-century America, and the history of ordinary women. Looking at new scholarship in women's history over the past 30 years, Ulrich calls attention to the expansion of this field of study and its influence on a whole new generation of feminists and scholars.

Bennetts, Leslie
The Feminine Mistake
(331.4 B472)

The author maintains that many well-educated American women are giving up the struggle to balance career and motherhood and making the "willfully retrograde choice" of relying on men to support them and their children. Financial dependency can jeopardize women's futures and those of their children, she warns. Drawing on interviews with hundreds of women as well as sociologists, economists, legal scholars, and other experts, Bennetts lays out the dangers of giving up careers. She looks at how new divorce laws have altered alimony, reducing the likelihood of a lifetime guarantee of support for stay-at-home mothers after divorce. She details the impact of a loss of income on medical and retirement benefits and weighs it against lifelong financial needs. Bennetts encourages women to consider a "fifteen-year paradigm," viewing their lives beyond the years of motherhood and asking themselves what they want from life when their children are grown and gone. Allowing women to tell their own stories of economic abandonment, Bennetts presents a cautionary tale for women pondering giving up economic independence.