If you are looking for flights of fancy this summer, you could check out Keith Donohue’s “The Stolen Child,” in which a group of fairies exchanges a local child with one of its own. In nonfiction, a readable biography, “Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair,” by Anthony Arthur, is just out during the centennial anniversary of the publication of his novel “The Jungle.” Paul Theroux’s 40th book, a semi-biographical novel that travels from Ecuador to Martha’s Vineyard, is just out in paperback. Looking ahead to August, Elizabeth Cox’s novel, “The Slow Moon,” depicts the cruelty of small-town America.
FICTION
The Stolen Child, by Keith Donohue, Doubleday, 336 pages, $23.95|The story is inspired by a W.B. Yeats poem in which changelings abduct a young child and replace him with one of their own. The story follows what happens to both children.
Triangle, by Katharine Weber, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 256 pages, $23|In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed nearly 150 women in a sweatshop. Weber tells the story of the event using the words of the last survivor of the tragedy.
Blue Screen, by Robert B. Parker, Penguin, 320 pages, $24.95|Parker, writing outside of Spenser mode, has Boston private detective Sunny Randall and Paradise, Mass., Police Chief Jesse Stone hot on the trail of a murderer.
NONFICTION
Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, by Anthony Arthur, Random House, 400 pages, $27.95|Arthur discusses the life of the celebrated novelist, Socialist, muckraker and feminist who ran for governor of California.
Fear: A Cultural History, by Joanna Bourke, Shoemaker and Hoard, 512 pages, $27|Social historian Burke takes a look at people’s reaction to death, combat, disasters and threats, all in the context of the effects of those reactions on society.
The Afterlife, by Donald Atrim, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 208 pages, $21|The novelist turns his writerly talents on himself as he attempts to explain his depression, anxiety and trouble with members of the opposite sex.
PAPERBACKS
Blinding Light, by Paul Theroux, Houghton Mifflin, 448 pages, $14.95|A novelist seeking inspiration and a hallucinogenic herb travels to the jungles of Ecuador. He finds the drug, but it has a particularly awful side-effect – temporary blindness.
Flag: An American Biography, by Marc Leepson, St. Martin’s, 352 pages, $14.95|The author, a journalist, includes not only the usual Francis Scott Key and Betsy Ross stories, but also discusses the more recent campaigns to use the flag as a central symbol of patriotism.
The Hungry Tide, by Amitav Ghosh, Mariner, Houghton Mifflin, 352 pages, $13.95|Anglo-Indian author Ghosh weaves together the stories of several natives and visitors to a string of islands in the Bay of Bengal.
COMING UP
The Slow Moon, by Elizabeth Cox, Random House, 320 pages, $23.95, Aug.|When a young woman is raped in the woods, all eyes center on her innocent boyfriend in this story of cruelty among a group of adolescents.
Facing Down Evil: Life on the Edge As an FBI Hostage Negotiator, by Clint Van Zandt, with Daniel Paisner, Putnam’s, 288 pages, $24.95, Sept.|This memoir tells of the author’s work on such cases as Waco, the Oklahoma City bombing and the Unabomber.
Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City, by Jed Horne, Random House, 400 pages, $25.95, July|Horne, part of a team of journalists who won the Pulitzer Prize for the Times-Picayune newspaper, recounts the storm and all the heartbreaking and anger-provoking effects and results.
