EDITOR’SCHOICE
Body Surfing
Anita Shreve, $25.95
Shreve, author of the bestselling “A Wedding in December,” “The Pilot’s Wife” and “Fortune’s Rocks,” is back with a story of a family’s troubles. Sydney Sklar is only 29, but she’s been divorced and widowed. She decides to tutor the daughter of a well-to-do family and finds herself thrust into the family’s life. | Tom Walker
FICTION
Depths by Henning Mankell, $26.95 | A psychological study of a complicated man who is charged with the secret mission of taking depth readings in preparation for Sweden’s entry into World War I. He becomes obssessed with a widow isolated on an island.
Their Dogs Came With Them by Helena Maria Viramontes, $23 | Set in the 1960s and ’70s in East Los Angeles, the characters in Latin author Viramontes’ latest struggle with the threat of violence that hangs over day-to-day life.
NONFICTION
The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring by Richard Preston, $25.95 | Preston diverges from his usual subject of terrible diseases (“The Hot Zone,” “The Demon in the Freezer”) to delve into the world’s tallest trees, mostly California redwoods, some of which were around at the fall of Rome.
The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace by Ali A. Allawi, $28 | Until recently, Allawi was an official in the Iraqi government. Here he provides an insider’s look at that government and the American occupation.
Rainbow’s End: A Memoir of Childhood, War and an African Farm by Lauren St. John, $25 | Here is the author’s story of growing up on a farm during the Rhodesian Civil War, and his telling of a life of racism and violence.
PAPERBACKS
The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems by Billy Collins, $13.95 | The former two-term U.S. poet laureate’s collection explores boyhood, jazz, love, the passage of time and writing.
The Ghost Orchid by Carol Goodman, $13.95 | Goodman’s literary mystery is set at an artists’ retreat in upstate New York where she discovers the truth about tragic events more than a century before.
Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, A Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America by Cynthia Carr, $14.95 | In 1930, three black teenagers were dragged from jail and beaten. Two were hanged in Marion, Ind. The author examines how her home town could have such a dark past.
COMING UP
MAY
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, $25.95 | Hosseini (“The Kite Runner”) is back with another touching tale of life in modern Afghanistan. It follows the lives of two women married to the same abusive husband as they experience the Soviet invasion, the rise of the Taliban and the American invasion.
JULY
Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005 by J.M. Coetzee, $25.95 | The Nobel winner examines the works of some of the 20th century’s great writers, such as Samuel Beckett, Gunter Grass and Philip Roth.
Channeling Mark Twain, $24.95 by Carol Muske-Dukes, $24.95 | Set in a women’s prison, Muske-Dukes explores poetry, politics and sex during the 1970s.
