Editor’s Choice
The Financial Lives of the Poets, by Jess Walter, $25.99.
Unemployed suburban dad teetering on the brink comes up with a high-risk, recession-proof way to get out of debt. The American Dream, for former newspaper journalist and failed Web entrepreneur Matt Prior, is not living up to its hype. Midlife crisis farce laced with some larger truths about how we live now. Kirkus
FICTION
Blind Eye, Stuart MacBride, $26.99.
Det. Sgt. Logan McRae, who’s still recovering from the bloody events of 2008’s “Flesh,” investigates a series of brutal attacks on Polish immigrants in MacBride’s excellent fifth novel to feature the Aberdeen, Scotland, cop. Publishers Weekly What Remains of Heaven, by C.S. Harris, $23.95. Long-festering family secrets, treachery and worse threaten Sebastian St. Cyr in Harris’s addictive fifth Regency-era mystery starring the dashing soldier-turned-sleuth (after 2008’s “Where Serpents Sleep”). Publishers Weekly
NONFICTION
American Sketches: Great Leaders, Creative Thinkers, and Heroes of a Hurricane, by Walter Isaacson, $25.95.
The author, former managing editor of Time magazine, collects essays and other journalistic pieces focusing on the personalities behind significant figures in American history. Brief, illuminating portraits of Benjamin Franklin and John Adams set the tone. A fresh, lucid and lively volume of profiles and analysis. Kirkus
Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town, by Elyssa East, $26.
In June 1984, Gloucester resident Anne Natti was beaten to death while walking her dog, her body found stripped naked in the Dogtown woods. That gruesome event, and the arrest and trial of Natti’s killer, provide a narrative center for East’s wide-ranging history. A worthwhile portrait of Dogtown’s historical wilderness. Kirkus
Thank Heaven: A Memoir, Leslie Caron, $25.95.
Best known for “An American in Paris” and “Gigi,” Caron has had a multifaceted career in dance, film, theater, and television, served on the jury of the Cannes Film Festival, authored short stories, and became an innkeeper in Burgundy. Her book, much more memoir than straight autobiography, gives one the feeling of being in the room with her. Library Journal
PAPERBACKS
Stealing Fatima, by Frank X. Gaspar, $15.95. In his second novel, award-winning poet-novelist Gaspar (“Leaving Pico”) explores an unnamed Massachusetts burg (with a strong resemblance to Provincetown) through its Portuguese-speaking community, a collection of rich, stormy characters. Publishers Weekly
A Splintered History of Wood: Belt-Sander Races, Blind Woodworkers & Baseball Bats, by Spike Carlsen, $15.99.
Carlsen gives a solid history of wood as he travels the world, analyzing the vast number of uses of a mundane natural resource. In doing so, he also uncovers the wide variety of personalities that work with wood every day, from the chainsaw artist appropriately named the “Wild Mountain Man” to the blind cabinetmaker who “can see things with his fingers that you may not see with your eyes.” Publishers Weekly
Sashenka, by Simon Montefiore, $15.
Simon Montefiore’s first novel is a historical whodunit with the epic sweep of a Hollywood movie. Montefiore is a natural storyteller who brings his encyclopedic knowledge of Russian history to life in language that glitters like the ice of St. Petersburg. Washington Post
COMING UP
Day Out of Days, by Sam Shepard, $24.95.
The actor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of more than 45 plays offers a collection of tales set mainly in the West. (January)
