Editor’s Choice
A Curable Romantic, by Joseph Skibell, $6.95. Skibell’s fat, cheeky and sweeping latest begins in early- 1895 Austria, when his endearing protagonist, young Dr. Jakob Sammelsohn, comes face-to-face with Sigmund Freud in a roomful of mirrors that create an ironic “unending trail of Freuds.” A magnetic collection of personalities. Publishers Weekly
FICTION
The Good Daughters, by Joyce Maynard, $24,99. Two families are mysteriously entwined in this exquisite novel that centers on decades of life at a New Hampshire farm. Publishers Weekly
Russian Winter, by Daphne Kalotay. Kalotay makes a powerful debut with a novel about a Soviet-era prima ballerina, now retired and living in Boston, who confronts her past as she puts up for auction the jewelry she took with her when she left her husband and defected. Publishers Weekly
NONFICTION
One Dog At a Time: Saving the Strays of Afghanistan, by Pen Farthing, $24.99. Farthing, a British Royal Marine, describes his struggles to save stray dogs languishing and dying in the streets of war-torn Afghanistan. His story will inspire, shock and move readers, introducing them, perhaps for the first time, to war’s most voiceless and unintented victims. Publishers Weekly
Mary Tudor: Princess, Bastard, Queen, by Anna Whitelock, $28. Whitelock seeks to rehabilitate Henry VIII’s daughter Bloody Mary (1516-1558), “one of the most reviled women in English history,” and to establish her as “a political pioneer who redefined the English monarchy.” A perceptive portrait of a zealous queen and the larger-than-life parents and tumultuous times that shaped her.Publishers Weekly
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson, $30. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wilkerson’s magnificent, extensively researched study of the “great migration,” the exodus of 6 million black Southerners out of the terror of Jim Crow to an “uncertain existence” in the North and Midwest. The drama, poignancy and romance of an immigrant saga pervade this book, hold the reader in its grasp and resonate long after the reading is done. Publishers Weekly
PAPERBACK
The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America, by Timothy Egan, $15.95. The epic forest fire of 1910 and how it kept business interests from strangling the nascent American conservation movement. New York Times columnist and National Book Award-winner Egan (“The Worst Hard Time”) dissects the nation’s worst-ever forest fire and its aftermath. Kirkus
Half Broke Horses, by Jeanette Walls, $5. After a fascinating memoir about her vagabond parents (“The Glass Castle”), Walls turns her sights on her maternal grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, who died when Walls was 8. Because she uses a first-person narrative to capture Lily’s scrappy voice and imaginatively fills in some of the missing details of Lily’s life, Walls calls the work “A True-Life Novel,” but it follows the straightforward linear path of biography. Kirkus
Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, by Morris Dickstein, $18.95. Just in time for our own era’s economic collapse, a literary critic looks back at the unusually rich art of the 1930s. In this scholarly yet immensely readable study, Dickstein examines how the artistic culture of that decade served a dual function. Kirkus
COMING UP
Worth Dying For, by Lee Child, $28. Child brings back Jack Reacher for the second time this year (“61 Hours”), and he’s on the hunt for some seriously bad guys. (October)
