Editor’s Choice
Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips, $23.95. British blogger Phillips’s delightful debut finds the Greek gods and goddesses living in a tumbledown house in modern-day London and facing a very serious problem: their powers are waning, and immortality does not seem guaranteed. Publishers Weekly
FICTION
Diablerie by Walter Mosley, $23.95. In this short, intense roman dur (or “serious novel”), Mosley probes the human condition through Ben Dibbuk, a black man whose name evokes the dybbuk of Jewish folklore. This is Mosley at his deepest and best, scratching away the faces we wear to reveal the person behind the masks. Publishers Weekly
Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution by James Tipton, $24.95. Inspired by English poet William Wordsworth’s continental romance on the eve of the French Revolution, Tipton’s debut novel depicts the poet’s lover, Annette Vallon (1766-1841), as a Loire Valley Scarlet Pimpernel. Publishers Weekly
NONFICTION
Hunger: A Modern History by James Vernon, $29.95. We think of hunger and famine as symptoms of a failed economy and government. But shifting cultural perceptions of hunger are historical agents in their own right, as this probing study, concentrating on 19th- and 20th-century Britain, shows. Publishers Weekly
My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams edited by Margaret A. Hogan and C. James Taylor, $35. “My Dearest Friend” begins with a 1762 courtship letter to the 17-year-old Abigail Smith from the 26-year-old John Adams, and ends with the last surviving letter Abigail wrote John, shortly before he left Washington in 1801 at the end of his largely unsuccessful four-year presidency. The New York Times
Sentinel of the Seas: Life and Death at the Most Dangerous Lighthouse Ever Built by Dennis M. Powers, $21.95. Previously untold story of the historic St. George Reef Lighthouse. Historic photographs, maritime diaries, notes, reports and interviews round out this uniquely comprehensive, extensively researched maritime history. Kirkus
PAPERBACKS
The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, $24.95. Radical departure from Follett’s novels of international suspense and intrigue, this chronicles the vicissitudes of a prior, his master builder, and their community as they struggle to build a cathedral and protect themselves during the tumultuous 12th century. A precurser to the current bestseller “World Without End.” School Library Journal
Kabul Beauty School by Deborah Rodriguez, $14.95. In 2002, just months after the Taliban had been driven out of Afghanistan, Rodriguez, a hairdresser from Holland, Mich., joined a small nongovernmental aid organization on a mission to the war-torn nation. That visit changed her life. In Kabul, she chronicles her efforts to help establish the country’s first modern beauty school and training salon. School Library Journal
Wise Children by Angela Carter, $14. A splendid British writer (The Magic Toyshop; Nights at the Circus), Carter has a real winner in this giddy tale of a highly eccentric British theatrical family. Publishers Weekly
COMING UP
Duma Key by Stephen King, $28. Edgar Freemantle nearly dies in an industrial accident. After losing an arm and some of his cognitive ability, he also loses his wife to divorce. He moves onto the sparsely habited Duma Key where he rekindles an old passion for painting and meets a sprightly older woman and her odd caretaker. (Jan.)
Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories by Tobias Wolff, $26.95. One of our most gifted storyteller’s first collection in more than 10 years. He writes of biding one’s time, experiencing first love and burying one’s mother, among other subjects. (April)
The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate by James Rosen, $35. This is the first biography of Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s attorney general during the former president’s political downfall. (Feb.)
