Editor’s Choice
World and Town, by Gish Jen, $6.95. Jen unwinds another expansive story of identity and acceptance, deploying voices that are as haunting and revealing as they are original. Jen’s prose is unique, dense and enthralling, and her characters are marvels of authenticity. Publishers Weekly
FICTION
Trespass, by Rose Tremain, 24.95. Two pairs of siblings and their twisted pasts converge in this gripping, dark novel from Orange Prize-winner Tremain (“The Road Home”). Tremain renders the novel’s untamed area with haunting prose, but the sense of dread she builds makes her tale at times unrelentingly grim. Publishers Weekly The Dead Path, by Stephen M. Irwin, $25.95. Australian author Irwin’s impressive debut, a supernatural thriller, evokes a world full of death and spirits to which we are, mercifully, oblivious. Since the night of his wife’s death, Nicholas Close has been cursed with second sight to see ghosts re-enacting the final moments before their own often-violent deaths. Publishers Weekly
NONFICTION
Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family, by Condoleezza Rice, $27. Former secretary of state Rice only briefly treats her tenure during the second Bush administration in favor of a straightforward, reverential chronicle of her upbringing under two teachers in the segregated Deep South. Publishers Weekly Long Way Home: On the Trail of Steinbeck’s America, by Bill Barich, $26. In this perceptive, optimistic reprise of John Steinbeck’s 1962 “Travels With Charley,” Barich reveals the heartland along a Delaware- Kansas-San Francisco axis of narrow highways through small towns during the 2008 election campaign and economic collapse. Publishers Weekly Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption, by Jules Witcover, $27.99. Veteran political commentator Witcover (“Very Strange Bedfellows: The Short and Unhappy Marriage of Nixon & Agnew”) chronicles Vice President Joe Biden’s growth as a political operative, his personal tragedies and political triumphs, his mistakes and his disappointments. Library Journal PAPERBACKS
Spooner, by Pete Dexter, $14.99. What can you do when your twin brother, dead at birth, is your mother’s favorite? This is one of the burdens placed on Warren Spooner, the hero of National Book Award-winner Dexter’s calamitously funny and riotously tragic new novel. Publishers Weekly The Sellout: How Decades of Wall Street Greed and Government Mismanagement Destroyed the Global Financial System, by Charles Gasparino, $16.99 The most comprehensive anecdotal account to date of the crisis. . . . Gasparino cuts his way through Wall Street rhetoric and in the process uncovers in considerable detail how blind profit-making ambition led to the destruction of the markets. The New York Times Heartbroke Bay, by Lynn D’Urso, $15. The pseudonymous D’Urso’s bleak and promising debut is based on a true incident first covered by Jack London in 1906. A group of gold prospectors is stranded in the Alaskan wilds. The prospectors’ tale of survival proves to be an unsettling portrait of human greed, deceit and betrayal. Publishers Weekly
COMING UP
Port Mortuary, by Patricia Cornwell, $27.95. The all-knowing Kay Scarpetta is back for the 18th time in the story of how the good doctor got the way she is. (November)
