The Teahouse Fire* by Ellis Avery. (A Fabulous Fiction Firsts)
Orphaned and alone in Kyoto, 9 year-old Aurelia Caillard is taken in by a Japanese family of tea ceremony masters. “...(T)old in an enchanting and unforgettable voice, The Teahouse Fire is a lively, provocative, and lushly detailed historical novel of epic scope and compulsive readability”.

Self Storage by Gayle Brandeis.
From the Barbara Kingsolver Bellewether Prize winner comes this quirky and moving story of Flan Parker who owns a thriving resale business, and a mysterious box from an abandoned storage unit that bears only an address and a note with the word “yes”. Yes – put your name on that wait list.

Sacred Games* by Vikram Chandra.
7 years in the making, this 900-page epic novel of Mumbai's underworld is a glorious and demanding literary thriller. “Corruption, murder, arms dealing, Bollywood, plastic surgery, and a superstar guru on an apocalyptic mission--all fuel this novel of crime and punishment, survival and annihilation. A splendidly big, finely made book destined to dazzle”.

Napoleon's Pyramids by Willaim Dietrich.
Action-packed thriller involving an American expatriate, Napoleon’s army and an ancient medallion for anyone looking for impeccable period details, passion and plot.

Looks to die for by Janice Kaplan.
Well-connected Hollywood insider sleuths to save her man. A new series of suspense-meet-shopping from the former deputy editor of TV Guide and the author of Mine are spectacular!

The Case of the Missing Books by Ian Sansom.
In this “Nick Hornby meets Alexander McCall Smith”, Israel Armstrong, a roving bookmobile driver must solve the mystery of the missing 15,000 books from the library. A charming and entertaining first in a projected mystery series set in Ireland.

AT LONG LAST!!! The much anticipated first novel from Peter Ho Davies, named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 2003 for his two award winning short-story collections The Ugliest House in the World and Equal Love, is finally here.

The Welsh Girl* is an ambitious and moving wartime romance. The story opens with the building of a POW camp for German prisoners in the remote Welsh countryside in 1944. 17 year-old Esther, pregnant after being rape by an English soldier, and Karsten, a German POW haunted by the loss of honor, are thrown together during his escape.

Adding texture and contrast to Esther and Karsten’s story is British army officer Rotheram’s difficult assignment to interrogate captured nazi officer Rudolf Hess, both of them haboring secrets and struggling with matters of honesty and honor.

“What makes this first novel …an intriguing read isn't the plot, …but the beautifully realized characters, who learn that life is a jumble of difficult compromises best confronted with eyes wide open.” (Publishers’s Weekly)

Read an interview with P.H.D. and an interesting piece in Michigan Today by Leslie Stainton.

* = Starred Reviews

Call Me By Your Name* is the “clear-eyed, bare-knuckled, and ultimately unforgettable” first novel by André Aciman, author of Out of Egypt: A Memoir.

Set in a cliffside mansion on the idyllic Italian Riviera, what is to be another relaxed summer of fun and sunshine for Elio and his family, becomes the erotic coming-of-age for this 17 year-old, with the latest in a string of visiting resident scholars invited by his father, a prominent expatriate professor.

From the moment Oliver steps out of the taxi, Elio found himself troubling attracted to the young, breezy, spontaneous and sexy American graduate student working on a book about Heraclitus.

"In his first work of fiction, Aciman describes Elio's anxiety, uncertainty, awkwardness, and, later, passion in incredibly vivid detail, leaving no thought process unexplored. The strong bond between the two characters is reminiscent of the bond between Ennis and Jack in Brokeback Mountain, where each finds in the other the one true love of his life."

*= Starred Review

Yesterday I started reading The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. What I find so interesting about the book is the amount of research that has gone into the story. The author spent 10 years working on this, her first novel. The story revolves around a group of people who are studying Vlad the Impailer aka Dracula. Much of the information is given to the readers in the form of letters written by various researchers, from primary and secondary sources. As I've been going through the story I keep asking myself how much of the information is real and how much the author invented. Some people may find the amount of detail slows the story down. I found it provides added depth to the story, making it more real. I hope you enjoy it.

Inspired by the 1922 sensational case of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters, the British couple who were executed for the murder of Thompson’s husband, Percy, Leslie Margolin’s fiction debut The adulteress is “unusually sensitive and judicious”.

Young Alma was smitten when the much-older, world renowned architect Francis "Rats" Rattenbury left his wife to marry her. Soon they were forced to leave their comfortable lifestyle in Canada for Bournsmouth, England under a cloud of rumors. After Alma’s senseless automobile wreck that seriously injured their son, Rats hired 17 year-old Percy Stoner who could barely drive, to chauffeur her around. Before long, Alma has taken the good-looking and sulky Percy to bed. Rats, forever condescending, goaded Percy into retaliation and Alma found herself pregnant and at a crossroad.

Margolin, author of a true-crime study of the Snyder-Gray case Murderess! The Chilling True Story of the Most Infamous Woman Ever Electrocuted traces each stage of the adulterous couple's eventual descent into murder with surgical precision and Alma's turbulent emotions with understanding and compassion.

For readers of true crime and psychological thriller.

Starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Library Journal, “this brilliant debut is a must read”.

Set in Chicago, The Blade Itself opens with a botched pawnshop robbery that would send young Evan to prison while Danny, his partner and childhood friend walks away and builds himself a respectable life. Seven years later, Evan is out and looking for payback. In an attempt to outwit Evan without succumbing to his past life, Danny devises a kidnap/ransom scheme that would bring on escalating collateral damage.

The Song is You* by Megan Abbott.
Noir crime fiction by an Edgar Award nominee. "Shiz-bang adventure through Tinseltown's underbelly" when two starlets gone missing. A retro thrill ride.

The Sidewalk Artist (FFF) by Gina Buonaguro and Janice Kirk.
Alternating between contemporary Paris and Renaissance Italy this debut novel follows two parallel, intertwined romances. Novelist Tulia Rose comes to Europe looking for inspiration but unexpectedly finds romance with a mysterious, talented sidewalk artist while researching the story of Renaissance painter Raphael and his secret lover. A touch of magic and plenty of cappuccino.

Arlington Park* by Rachel Cusk.
Over the course of one rainy day, the Whitbread Award-winner plumbs the extraordinary inner nature of the ordinary suburban English life. “Darkly comic, deeply affecting and wise”.

The Bastard of Istanbul* by Elif Shafak
Turkish author recently cleared by the government of “denigrating Turkishness” because of her frank look at Turkish-Armenian antipathy, gives us this enlightening and entertaining novel of 4 generations of the Kazanci women, set in Istanbul.

The Terror* by Dan Simmons.
Scurvy, frostbite, botulism, and an enomous THING out on the ice plagued Sir John Franklin’s failed 1840 mission to find the Northwest Passage. A spellbinding sea story with grisly details.

Red River* by Lalita Tademy
A follow-up to her 2001 Oprah sensation Cane River – this time the repercussions of the Colfax Riot of 1873 – an engrossing and eye-opening emotional family saga.

* = Starred Review(s)

Iggy gets kicked out of high school and there’s no one at home for him to tell. His mother has been gone for days, his father is stoned on the couch and the phone’s been disconnected, so even his social worker can’t get through.

Walking away from his public housing, Iggy sets out to make something of his life. Not an easy task when he has no skills and his only friend is mixed up with the dealer who got his mom hooked.

Iggy’s got problems galore, but Iggy also has the kind of wisdom that lets him see what no one else can. Try Saint Iggy.

If you just cannot get enough of the religious suspense genre, here is another one for you.
Oh yes, the Knights Templars are again in the thick of things.

In Julia Navarro’s Brotherhood of the Holy Shroud, when the unidentified body of a tongue-less man turns up in the ashes of a suspicious fire in the Turin Cathedral, home of the Holy Shroud of Turin, Marco Valoni, Director of the Italian Art Crimes Department, investigates.

Soon he is sure several shadowy, anonymous groups of powerful and wealthy men with ties to Legend of the Knights Templars are somehow involved, while his only suspect is already in the Turin prison. More importantly, a far more shocking crime is about to happen. It is up to Valoni and his crack team of investigators to stop it.

Julia Navarro is a well-known Madrid-based journalist who is currently a political analyst for Agencia OTR/Europa Press and a correspondent for other prominent Spanish radio and television networks. Her second novel is due out in 2008. Brotherhood is already a bestseller in Europe.

The seven-year-old Jesus relates his life in Alexandria and the return of his family to Nazareth. Spare and lean, lyrical and reverent, vivid and riveting, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt is "a mystery story, of the child grappling to understand his miraculous gifts and numinous birth" (Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2005).

Anne Rice's act of faith in writing this novel is detailed in her author's note where she describes her research and her journey back to the Catholic Church.