Editor’s Choice
Sourland, by Joyce Carol Oates, $25.99 Oates’ latest collection explores Oatesian themes, primary among them violence, loss and privilege. Oates’ fiction has the curious, morbid draw of a car wreck. It’s a testament to Oates’ talent that she can nearly always force the reader to look. Publishers Weekly
FICTION
Bad Blood, by John Sandford, $27.95 When 19-year-old Bob Tripp hits farmer Jacob Flood in the head with a T-ball bat at the outset of Sandford’s exciting fourth thriller to feature Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Agent Virgil Flowers (after “Rough Country”), Tripp’s subsequent attempt to make murder look like an accident fails. Publishers Weekly
Nashville Chrome, by Rick Bass, $24 In his grand return to fiction, Bass (“Why I Came West”) summons — with a lyrical style befitting his best nature writing — Arkansas and backwoods trio the Browns, the true- life country-music trailblazers who pioneered the 1950s sound from which the novel takes its title. Publishers Weekly
NONFICTION
Long Way Home: A Young Man Lost in the System and the Two Women Who Found Him, by Laura Caldwell, $26 In another account of justice gone wrong, a good kid from a bad neighborhood had never been in trouble before Aug. 6, 1999, when he was falsely accused of and arrested for participating in a fight that turned deadly. Caldwell evokes Jovan Mosley’s struggles to have faith in a justice system that so obviously failed him. Publishers Weekly
Stalling for Time: My Life As an FBI Hostage Negotiator, by Gary Noesner, $26 Noesner, a former FBI hostage negotiator for 23 years, was the first person to run the bureau’s Crisis Negotiation Unit. He recalls major standoffs along with his efforts to understand and interpret the behavior of hostage takers, sometimes finding negotiations thwarted by the actions of his own colleagues. Publishers Weekly
Hostage Nation: Colombia’s Guerrilla Army and the Failed War on Drugs, by Victoria Bruce, Karin Hayes and Jorge Enrique Botero, $26.95 In this thrilling account of the origins and workings of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), (the authors) marshal years of research into the guerrilla group, the Colombian drug trade and the story of three American private contractors and Ingrid Betancourt, a Colombian presidential candidate, held captive by the FARC from 2003 to 2008. Publishers Weekly
PAPERBACKS
Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese, $15.95 Lauded for his sensitive memoir (“My Own Country”) about his time as a doctor in eastern Tennessee at the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the ’80s, Verghese turns his formidable talents to fiction, mining his own life and experiences in a magnificent, sweeping novel. Publishers Weekly
Sarah’s Key, by Tatiana de Rosnay, $13.95 In summer 1942, French police arrested thousands of Jewish families and held them outside of Paris before shipping them to Ausch- witz. On the 60th anniversary of the roundups, an expatriate American journalist covering the atrocities discovers a personal connection — her apartment was formerly occupied by one such family. Publishers Weekly
The Paris Vendetta, by Steve Berry, $7.99 Another historically tinged Cotton Malone thriller from Berry. Awakened by late-night noises, the former U.S. Justice Department agent finds that his secondhand bookstore in Copenhagen has been broken into by Sam Collins, who was sent by Cotton’s friend. Kirkus
COMING UP
Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia, by Michael Korda, $34.99 This magisterial biography of British soldier and adventurer T.E. Lawrence celebrates a life spent subverting authority in the most glamorous — and bizarre — ways. (November)
