Editor’s Choice
The Dark Lantern, by Gerri Brightwell, $24.95.
Brightwell’s debut, an uncanny thriller, brings late Victorian London to vivid life. Devon-born housemaid Jane Wilbred has snared her new post with the Bentley family with a letter of reference she forged, omitting any mention of the possibly pertinent fact that her late mother was a notorious murderer.
Fiction
The Silver Swan, by Benjamin Black, $25.
In this stunning follow-up to 2007’s “Christine Falls,” Black (pseudonym of Booker Prize- winner John Banville) spins a complex tale of murder and deception in 1950s Ireland. Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, by Anne Rice, 25.95. In the New Testament, the miracle at the wedding at Cana, where Jesus turned water into wine, marks the commencement of his ministry. In Rice’s beautifully observed novel, a sequel to 2005’s “Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt,” however, the wedding miracle is in fact the culmination of an intimate family saga of love, sorrow and misunderstanding.
Nonfiction
Breaking News: A Stunning and Memorable Account of Reporting From Some of the Most Dangerous Places in the World, by Martin Fletcher, $24.95.
The NBC news bureau chief in Tel Aviv, Fletcher offers a vivid account of his 30-year career as a war correspondent in the hot spots of the globe. Fletcher’s engagement with his own family’s suffering in the Holocaust adds complexity to a narrative that is both fast-paced and moving.
A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca, by Andres Resendez, $26.95.
In 1528, 300 conquistadores embarked on the ambitious mission of colonizing Florida. They all disappeared. Eight years later, a band of Spanish slave traders . . . espied a group of men who appeared to be natives approaching them. Their march across Florida, their voyage on spindly rafts across the Gulf of Mexico, their captivity in Texas and their trek across the southwest to the Pacific coast form the backbone of Resendez’s riveting account of the epic journey.
Paperbacks
The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe, $16.
“The Bonfire of the Vanities” chronicles the collapse of a Wall Street bond trader and examines a world in which fortunes are made and lost at the blink of a computer screen. … Wolfe’s subject couldn’t be more topical.
Burning Bright, by Tracy Chevalier, $14.
If you believe in urchins happily united in the country dusk and reciting Blake to each other, then this book will convince. Chevalier’s villains are deep-dyed villains, her good people blindingly good; they go from innocence to experience with scarcely a hitch in their stride.
The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño; translated by Natasha Wimmer, $15.
Not since Gabriel García Márquez, whose masterpiece, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” turns 40 this year, has a Latin American redrawn the map of world literature so emphatically as Roberto Bolaño does with “The Savage Detectives.”
Coming up
The Philosopher’s Apprentice, by James Morrow, $25.95.
A failed philosopher with plenty of smarts but little common sense takes on the task of giving ethics lessons to a young amnesia victim. Its an epic tale, part “Pygmalion” and part “Lolita.” (April)
Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, by Tim Shorrock, $27.
Shorrock explains how tasks usually performed by government, including running spy networks, interrogating prisoners, eavesdropping on phone calls and more, are being outsourced to the private sector. (May)
