Editor’s Choice
The Last Talk With Lola Faye, by Thomas H. Cook, $25. In this tightly coiled, intellectual drama, Cook unwinds a tense story of belated redemption. While in St. Louis for a book tour, Luke Page, a middle-aged writer of lackluster histories, agrees to meet with a long-forgotten acquaintance, the “little hayseed tramp” he believes triggered a bloody tragedy that befell his family decades earlier. Publishers Weekly
FICTION
Vermilion Drift, by William Kent Krueger, $25. Rock-solid prose combines with effective characterizations and a logical if complex plot for a thrilling read. This book succeeds on every level and ought to attract the author a deservingly wide readership. Publishers Weekly
With Friends Like These, by Sally Koslow, $25. Koslow (“The Late, Lamented Molly Marx”) lifts a potentially trite story of friendship to a knowing, sharp-edged chronicle of ambition and acceptance that’s smart, raw and achingly real. Koslow packs a trove of wit and wisdom into a slick pink package. Publishers Weekly
NONFICTION
The Grand Design, by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, $28. The three central questions of philosophy and science: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws and not some other? No one can make a discussion of such matters as compulsively readable as Hawking (“A Brief History of Time”), the celebrated University of Cambridge cosmologist. Publishers Weekly
Where the Road Ends: A Home in the Brazilian Rainforest, by Binka Le Breton, $25.99. The author and her agricultural economist husband moved to Brazil 20 years ago to take over an abandoned farm in a beautiful but remote locale. Le Breton’s story is of the challenges and joys they faced adapting to the community and working to realize their dream of bringing environmental awakening to the region through the establishment of the Iracambi Rainforest Research Center. Le Breton’s can-do attitude makes her an entertaining MacGyver of the jungle. Publishers Weekly
The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills That Shaped the American Economy, by Hardy Green, $26.99. Labor historian Green tells the story of American capitalism as played out in the rise and fall of the “company town” in this engaging book. From the tent cities of Appalachian coal fields to the model villages built for New England mill workers, the company town was once a common feature in the American landscape, with a legacy that can be seen in Google’s and Microsoft’s high-tech campuses. Publishers Weekly
PAPERBACKS
Homer & Langley, by E.L. Doctorow, $15. Doctorow again creatively reconfigures and amplifies the historical record. There’s a briskness to the book that never flags, and its solitary protagonists — two lost souls — possess a half-comical, half-nightmarish fascination. The Washington Post
The Farmer’s Daughter, by Jim Harrison, $14. In three novellas as dark as they are exuberant, Harrison delivers protagonists who are smart, lusty in that classic Harrison fashion and linked by “The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me,” a Patsy Cline song that appears throughout and could easily serve as the characters’ theme song. Publishers Weekly
Model Home, by Eric Puchner, $15. Puchner cannily trades on the very characteristics that have come to define a recognizable California “experience” in order to blast them apart, revealing the uncertainty and terror beneath the glossy postcard version we cling to and dismiss. The New York Times COMING UP Chasing the Night, by Iris Johansen, $27.99. A forensic sculptor and CIA agent join forces to find the agent’s missing child. (October)
