timely information for omnivorous readers
Fiction Stars of 1999
July - December
Titles are listed by approximate date of publication, then alphabetically by author.
Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine - unless otherwise noted..
December
- Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows
Author: Chamoiseau, Patrick
Publisher: Univ of Nebraska List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0803214952 Date: 1999
PWLibrary Journal
"A bewitching writer...Chamoiseau's particular gift is to be both buoyant in spirit and trenchant in observation." -- New York Times Book Review. "Imaginative and moving." -- Washington Post. "Sardonic and lyrical." -- Publishers Weekly. "Lovers of language, rejoice!...Chamoiseau's portraits of his native Martinique (have) exploded into the English language in a fascinating mixture of classical oils and Creole colors.... What is glorious, as always, is Chamoiseau's poetry." -- Los Angeles Times. "A joy to read." -- Chicago Tribune. - Fortune's Rocks
Author: Shreve, Anita
Publisher: Little Brown List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0316781010 Date: 1999PWLJ
In a summer community on the coast of New Hampshire at the turn of the last century, a girl is drawn into a passionate affair with a married man nearly three times her age. Olympia Biddeford is privileged, well educated, and mature beyond her years - and her affair is with John Haskell, a physician, essayist, and champion of mill workers. Drawn inexorably together on the night of the summer solstice, the pair set in motion a series of events with far-reaching consequences for all involved.
November
- What the Body Remembers
Author: Baldwin, Shauna Singh
Publisher: Doubleday List Price: $ 25.95 ISBN: 0385496044 Date: 1999PW - Ravenshadow
Author: Blevins, Win
Publisher: Forge List Price: $ 25.95 ISBN: 0312865651 Date: 1999Booklist
Before he was born, Joseph was chosen to carry the sacred ways of his Sioux people. The journey of redemption delivers him to Wounded Knee, where he must relive the trials of his ancestors, and, through his visions, understand the past and heal the present. - If I Told You Once
Author: Budnitz, Judy
Publisher: Picador List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0312202857 Date: 1999PW
In her utterly original novel about mothers, daughters, and love, Budnitz gives the traditional folktale an electrifying twist as she follows four generations of women from an Eastern European village to the tenements of an American city. - Women and Other Animals:
Stories
Author: Campbell, Bonnie Jo
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 1558492194 Date: 1999PW
These richly imaginative stories encompass train wrecks, circus acts, river journeys, transspecies transmogrification, and growing up and growing old around the small towns of Michigan. Here both nature and man can threaten a woman, but neither does more damage than her own choices. Bonnie Jo Campbell's hardworking, sometimes hard-drinking protagonists live precisely the lives they make for themselves, and it is not surprising that children look beyond human role models to dogs, milk cows, even gorillas. Though Campbell never glamorizes poverty, she details a vision in which shabbiness, beauty, brutality, and wisdom all coexist, and the stories can be surprisingly optimistic, often funny. These women of Michigan's lower peninsula may live without automotive safety belts or televisions or the right kind of love, but they are able to trust their instincts and are ultimately drawn to whatever can save them.
In "Sleeping Sickness" a twelve-year-old girl copes with the sexually charged atmosphere created by her mother's new boyfriend. In "Bringing Home the Bones" a woman must lose her leg before she can come to terms with her estranged daughters. In "Running" the narrator obsesses about the mating habits of birds and the promiscuity of her neighbor's daughter while her own fertility trickles away. In "Eating Aunt Victoria" a young woman finally looks into the face of her dead mother's lesbian lover. In "Shifting Gears" a man buys a new truck in order to get over his wife's leaving, but can't stop thinking about the pregnant woman next door. - Publisher marketing. - Voyage
Author: Caputo, Philip
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 26 ISBN: 0679450394 Date: 1999KirkusLibrary Journal
On a June morning at the turn of the century, Cyrus Brathwaite orders his three teenage sons to sail away from their Maine home and not to reappear until September. Now, almost a century later, Cyrus's great-granddaughter, Sybil, is determined to know the heart of the story.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - Disgrace
Author: Coetzee, J.M.
Publisher: Viking List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0670887315 Date: 1999PWLJ
Set in post-apartheid Cape Town, Professor David Laurie attempts to relate to his daughter, Lucy, and to a society with new racial complexities. But that is disrupted by an afternoon of violence that changes him and his daughter in ways he could never have foreseen. Coetzee is the only writer awarded the Booker Prize twice, and this work is a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle Awards.
Suggested Reading: Reading Group Stars - Walking Tour
Author: Davis, Kathryn
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0395945410 Date: 1999KirkusPW
By turns dazzling and as dark, as risky and entrancing as the landscape it describes, The Walking Tour is part mystery story, part shrewd visionary meditation on the uneasy marriage of art and commerce, telling the story of a fatal accident which occurs during a walking tour in Wales.
Suggested Reading: Dystopian Stars - Breakfast with Scot
Author: Downing, Michael
Publisher: Counterpoint List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 1582430276 Date: 1999Booklist
An enlightened modern couple faces sudden parenthood--and the embarrassing truth about their own definitions of "normal"- in this hilarious novel chronicling a joy ride into the unknown. - The Fan Maker's Inquisition
Author: Ducornet, Rikki
Publisher: Holt List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 0805059261 Date: 1999PWBooklist
This brilliant new novel details a new perspective on one of history's most notorious figures: the Marquis de Sade. "Rikki Ducornet is a magic sensualist, a writer's writer, a master of language, a unique voice."- Amy Tan.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - Thunder City: A Novel of Detroit
Author: Estleman, Loren D.
Publisher: Forge List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN:0312863691 Date: 1999Kirkus
When the 20th century was in its infancy, two things would be invented that would spawn the two biggest industries in history: the automobile and organized crime. Thunder City shows Detroit in the process of becoming the Motor City.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - My Century
Author: Grass, Gunter
Publisher: Harcourt List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 015100496x Date: 1999PWLibrary Journal
One hundred stories come full circle to create a novel of our century. - The Art of the Story: An International
Anthology of Contemporary Short Stories
Author: Halpern, Daniel (ed)
Publisher: Viking List Price: $ 40 ISBN:0670887617 Date: 1999PW
Following the success of his The Art of the Tale, Halpern has pulled together another extraordinary collection of short stories from all over the world. - Pushcart Prize XXIV: Best
of the Small Presses
Author: Henderson, Bill (ed)
Publisher: Pushcart List Price: $ 29.50 ISBN: 188889195 Date: 1999PW - The Delinquent Virgin: Stories
Author: Kalpakian, Laura
Publisher: Graywolf List Price: $ 14 (trade paper) ISBN: 1555972950 Date: 1999Library Journal
A plaster Virgin, conventionally set in a church Nativity scene, goes missing night after night with strange community consequences. - Thumbsucker
Author: Kirn, Walter
Publisher: Anchor List Price: $ 14 (trade paper) ISBN: 0385497091 Date: 1999Kirkus
Trading his lifelong habit of thumbsucking for a whole new collection of neuroses, 14-year-old Justin Cobb is the most appealingly bright and screwed up fictional adolescent since Holden Caulfield donned his hunter's cap. - A Bench On Which to Rest: The
Diary of an Immigrant - A Novel
Author: MacCaferri, Elena
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux List Price: $25 ISBN: 0374280355 Date: 1999Booklist
A sparely written, finely crafted novella - about family, the yearning for true love, a proud woman's deeply held secret, and her struggle to make peace with herself in life . . . Herodias Marketing. - Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister
Author: Maguire, Gregory
Publisher: Regan List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0060392827 Date: 1999Kirkus
From the author of the acclaimed novel Wicked comes a fresh perspective on another timeless tale - Cinderella - sure to enchant readers young and old alike.
Suggested Reading: Folk & Fairy Tale Stars - Blues Dancing
Author: McKinney-Whetstone, Diane
Publisher: Morrow List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0688149952 Date: 1999PW
From the beloved author of Tumbling and Tempest Rising comes a richly spun tale of love and passion, betrayal, redemption, and faith, set in contemporary Philadelphia. - Tiny One
Author: Minot, Eliza
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 037540645x Date: 1999PW
With stunning clarity, sensitivity, and precision, Minot captures the voice of a terrifically funny and innately wise little girl, who has a reckoning with death and comes instinctively to what remains: love and, through it, life. - Demons and Divas: Three Novels
Author: Molinaro, Ursule
Publisher: McPherson & Company List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0929701593 Date: 1999PW - Ahab's Wife or the Star-Gazer
Author: Naslund, Sena Jeter
Publisher: William Morrow List Price: $ 28 ISBN: 0688171877 Date: 1999PWBooklistLibrary JournalKirkus
"Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last." An epic-scale, brilliant and compelling saga, inspired by a brief passage in Moby Dick, chronicles the life of Capt. Ahab's wife.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | All Stars - Blue at the Mizzen
Author: O'Brien, Patrick
Publisher: W.W. Norton List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0393048446 Date: 1999PW
The excitement of the Aubrey/Maturin series soars to new heights in this volume, as Jack, again the daring frigate commander of old, stakes all on a desperate solo night raid against the might of the Spanish viceroy in Peru.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - The Unburied
Author: Palliser, Charles
Publisher: FSG $ 24 ISBN: 0374280355 Date: 1999PWLJ
Three separate tales are interwoven in this novel about Dr. Courtine, an unworldly academic, who is invited to spend the days before Christmas with an old friend. Doubly distracted, he becomes unwittingly enmeshed in the sequence of terrible events that follows his arrival.
Suggested Reading: Ghosts
Updated 8.2.05 - Tale of the Unknown Island
Author: Saramago, Jose
Publisher: Harcourt List Price: $ 16 ISBN: 0151005959 Date: 1999Kirkus
From the 1998 Nobel laureate comes a love story, a fable worthy of Swift or Voltaire. Line illustrations. - Baby Can Sing and Other Stories
Author: Slater, Judith
Publisher: Sarabande List Price: $ 21.95 ISBN: 1889330345 Date: 1999Kirkus
Stories that dramatize the efforts of regular people to bring more passion into their lives or at least less loneliness. Even as they do their laundry and worry about paying their rent, Slater's diverse characters are alert to the moments of possibility and transcendence that exist just under the surface of ordinary life. A vivid, witty prose dance. - Publisher marketing. - Losing Nelson
Author: Unsworth, Barry
Publisher: Doubleday List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0385486529 Date: 1999PWKirkusLibrary Journal
A novel of obsession, this is the story of a man unable to see himself separately from the hero he mistakenly idolizes - Lord Horatio Nelson, Britain's greatest admiral.
Suggested Reading: All Stars
October
- Daughter of Fortune
Author: Allende, Isabel
Publisher: Harpercollins List Price: $ 26 ISBN: 006019491x Date: 1999PW
Spirited Eliza leaves her home in Chile in search of her lover, who has set out for the California Gold Rush. What she finds instead is adversity and adventure and, through her own resourcefulness, an even more momentous journey to independence and freedom.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - The Adventures of Allegra
Fullerton; Or, a Memoir of Startling and Amusing Episodes from
Itinerant Life - A Novel
Author: Begiebing, Robert J.
Publisher: Unv Press of New England List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0874519470 Date: 1999Library Journal
Overbooked note: Begiebing, author of The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin, unveils the adventures of feisty Allegra Fullerton, an itinterant artist working in 19th century New England.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - At the Full and Change
of the Moon
Author: Brand, Dionne
Publisher: Grove List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0802116493 Date: 1999BooklistLibrary JournalPW
From acclaimed and award-winning poet and novelist Dionne Brand comes a saga of magnificent scope, spanning six generations of Africans in the Americas and beyond. Starting with a mass suicide of slaves on Trinidad in 1824, the epic follows a family over the years into the confusion, estrangement and violence of the late 20th century.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | African American Stars | All Stars - Peel My Love Like an Onion
Author: Castillo, Ana
Publisher: Doubleday List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0385496761 Date: 1999PWBooklist
Peel My Love Like an Onion is the breakthrough novel from the author of the wildly praised So Far from God - a lyrical, steamy and moving story of a love triangle set in the colorful world of flamenco dancing. - Doubleday marketing.
Suggested Reading: Latino/Latina Stars - Leaping Man Hill
Author: Emshwiller, Carol
Publisher: Mercury House List Price: $ 14.95 (trade paper) ISBN: 1562791117 Date: 1999PW - Where We Once Belonged
Author: Figiel, Sia
Publisher: Kaya List Price: $ 14.95 (trade paper) ISBN: 1885030274 Date: 1999Booklist - Simon's Family
Author: Fredriksson, Marianne
Publisher: Ballantine List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0345434595 Date: 1999Library Journal
Twelve-year-old Simon has always felt apart from others but it is not until World War II erupts, dominating everyday life in his native Sweden, that he begins to understand why.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - Fencing the Sky
Author: Galvin, James
Publisher: Holt List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 080562203 Date: 1999Kirkus
A long-awaited lyrical first novel that is nothing less that the story of the disappearance of the American West, Fencing the Sky tells of an accidental killing that springs from the best intentions. - Welding with Children
Author: Gautreaux, Tim
Publisher: Picador List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 031220308x Date: 1999Library JournalKirkus
Tim Gautreaux returns to the form that won him his first fans, with tales of family, sin, and redemption. They range from a man who realizes his grandchildren are growing up without any sense of right or wrong, and he's to blame; to a camera repairman who uncovers a young woman's secret in the undeveloped film she brings him; to a one-armed hitch-hiker who changes the life of the man who gives her a ride.Each one a small miracle of storytelling and compassion, these stories are a joyous confirmation of Tim Gautreaux's rare and generous talent. - Picador marketing.
- Hitler's Niece
Author: Hansen, Ron
Publisher: HarperCollins List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0060194197 Date: 1999Booklist
In this dazzling new novel, National Book Award-winning author Ron Hansen evokes the startling relationship between Adolph Hitler and his much younger niece, Geli Raubal, whose mysterious death at the age of 23 has never been fully explained.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - Orlanda
Author: Harpman, Jacqueline
Publisher: Seven Stories List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 1583220119 Date: 1999Booklist
One of the freshest voices in European fiction offers this evocative tale of a literature professor who must reunite her divided soul in a love affair with the physical embodiment of her suppressed self. She embarks on a journey into her psyche to confront her childhood memories and to learn to love the woman she can become. - Seven Stories Marketing. - Dark Eagle: A Story of Benedict Arnold
and the Amerian Revolution
Author: Harr, John Ensor
Publisher: Viking List Price: $ 27.95 ISBN: 0670887048 Date: 1999Kirkus
The story of Benedict Arnold's career, his heroism, his military exploits, and his May-September romance with Peggy Shippen, who became his wife and partner in treason.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - Plainsong
Author: Haruf, Kent
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0375406182 Date: 1999PWLibrary Journal
From the unsettled lives of three people emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together. Utterly true to the rhythms and patterns of life, Plainsong is a heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation, and tenacity. - Remember Me
Author: Hendrie, Laura
Publisher: Henry Holt List Price: $ 21.95 ISBN: 0805062181 Date: 1999PWLibrary JournalBooklistKirkus
Rose, who lives in the tiny town of Queduro, New Mexico, where she makes her living by selling embroidery, must face down her ghosts - and her hometown - to find belonging, identity, and love.
Suggested Reading: All Stars - Skateaway
Author: Jaffe, Michael Grant
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0374265712 Date: 1999BooklistLibrary Journal
Jaffe chronicles three stages - preteen, late teen, and early adult - in the lives of Clem, Garrett, and Samantha Boone, who try to lead a conventional childhood in the Ohio River valley, in spite of their unconventional parents. - Waiting
Author: Jin, Ha
Publisher: Pantheon List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0385486529 Date: 1999PWKirkus
Lin Kong is a devoted doctor in love with a modern young woman - a nurse who is educated, clever, and vivid. The only complication is the wife to whom he was married when they were very young - a tiny woman, humble and touchingly loyal, whom he visits in order to ask, again and again, for divorce.
Suggested Reading: Asian American Stars - Slapboxing with Jesus
Author: Lavalle, Victor D.
Publisher: Vintage List Price: $ 11 (trade paper) ISBN: 0375705902 Date: 1999KirkusPW
Thirteen original and interconnected stories in the tradition of Junot Diaz and Sherman Alexie. Victor D. La Valle's astonishing, violent, and funny debut offers harrowing glimpses at the vulnerable lives of young people who struggle not only to come of age, but to survive the city streets.
Listed as a 1999 top ten books of the year by the Washington Post editor Jabari Asim. Boston Phoenix review, S.F. Chronicle review
In "ancient history, " two best friends graduating from high school fight to be the one to leave first for a better world; each one wants to be the fortunate son. In "pops, " an African American boy meets his father, a white cop from Connecticut, and tries not to care. And in "kids on colden street, " a boy is momentarily uplifted by the arrival of a younger sister only to discover that brutality leads only to brutality in the natural order of things.
Written with raw candor, grit, and a cautious heart, Slapboxing with Jesus introduces an exciting and bold new voice in contemporary fiction. La Valle's voices echo long after their stories are told. - Publisher marketing.
- One Heart
Author: McCafferty, Jane
Publisher: HarperCollins List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0060192631 Date: 1999Library Journal
An inspiring debut novel from award-winning writer Jane McCafferty recounts the lives of two sisters whose experiences often separate them, but whose love for each other is complicated and deepened over a lifetime.
Suggested Reading: Debuts - Prince
Author: Michael, Ib
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0374237239 Date: 1999BooklistLibrary Journal
A lyrical novel of icebergs, ill-fated love, mutiny at sea, and one intensely imaginative boy who discovers a coffin that has drifted ashore - with a handsome young sailor inside. - Enchanted Night
Author: Millhauser, Steven
Publisher: Crown List Price: $ ? ISBN: 060960516x Date: 1999PW
The author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Martin Dressler returns with a magical novella imbued with the transforming power of the (almost) full moon. - The Love You Promised Me
Author: Molina, Silvia
Publisher: Curbstone List Price: $ 14.95 (trade paper) ISBN: 1880684624 Date: 1999Booklist
Silvia Molina Marcela is a professional woman in her forties sifting through her disappointment after an intense, extra-marital affair. While picking up the pieces of her life, Marcela discovers the secret past of her parents. Mexico's last elections (1994), the Chiapas insurrection, the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio serve as a backdrop, and also parallel the emotional vicissitudes in Marcela's own life.
Suggested Reading: Latino/Latina Stars - Our Fathers
Author: O'Hagan, Andrew
Publisher: Harcourt List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0151004943 Date: 1999Booklist
Watching over his dying grandfather and mentor, Jamie Bawn tells the story of his three generations of dreamers in postwar Scotland - a tale of pride and delusion, of nationality and strong drink, of Catholic faith and the end of the old Left. - Home Across the Road
Author: Peacock, Nancy
Publisher: Longstreet List Price: $ 18.95 ISBN: 1563525097 Date: 1999Booklist
Two families of the Roseberry Plantation - ones who lived there, ones who worked there - are featured in a riveting, haunting drama about their lives. - Jumping the Green
Author: Schwartz, Leslie
Publisher: Simon & Schuster List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0684855895 Date: 1999Kirksus
A new talent makes an auspicious debut with this haunting, erotic tale of a young woman whose grief over her sister's unsolved murder leads to a dangerous affair.
Suggested Reading: Debuts - Bad Jews: Stories
Author: Shapiro, Gerald
Publisher: Zoland List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 1581950128 Date: 1999PW
The stories of Bad Jews form a nuanced and comic vision of life, love, and spiritual adventurism among the determinedly secular class of contemporary American Jews. Cut off from the character-building hardships their parents and grandparents endured, unable to reach the safety and comfort of faith, the characters of Bad Jews suffer a range of antic misadventures - often finding redemption from the most improbable sources. - Publisher marketing. - Somewhere in a Desert
Author: Sigaund, Dominique
Publisher: Arcade List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 1559704926 Date: 1999Library Journal
Desert Storm has ended. A body lies in no-man's land in the desert, across the Iraqi border between the allied front and a small Saudi village. It hasn't decomposed or burned in the sun. Its eves are open, and its mouth is smiling. No wounds show how the man died. No dog tags or insignia identify which side he fought on. The man is John Miller, an American soldier who has gone missing in action. While his wife, Mary, waits at home in the States for news of her husband, John has disappeared and died an absurd death. - Publisher marketing.
Suggested Reading: Gulf War I - The Photographer's Wife
Author: Sole, Robert
Publisher: Harvill List Price: $ 26 ISBN: 1860465498 Date: 1999Kirkus - Best American Short Stories
1999
Author: Tan, Amy (ed)
Publisher: Hougton Mifflin List Price: $ 27.50 ISBN: 0395926831 Date: 1999PW - Before You Sleep
Author: Ullman, Linn
Publisher: Viking List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 067088698x Date: 1999PWLibrary Journal
Moving from present-day Oslo to Brooklyn in the 1930s, this beautifully rendered story tells of three generations of a Norwegian family dominated by strong-willed, eccentric, passionate women.
September
- The Long Firm
Author: Arnott, Jake
Publisher: Soho List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 156947169x Date: 1999PWKirkus
Club owner Harry Starks is a feared gangster in 1960s London. Five narrators tell the story of Harry's fall, and surprising resurrection, in this vividly imagined portrait of the sleazy London mobs ("firms") at the end of an era.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Mobbed Up - Big Trouble
Author: Barry, Dave
Publisher: Putnam List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0399145672 Date: 1999PWKirkusLibrary Journal
The humorous Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist makes his fiction debut with a ferociously funny novel about love and mayhem in south Florida, and the the life-changing events that rumble through a odd-ball family after two hit men pull up to their door.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | Debuts - The Catastrophist
Author: Bennett, Ronan
Publisher: Simon & Schuster List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0684863340 Date: 1999PW
In subtle, haunting prose, Bennett captures the ricochet between the personal and political in the 1960s Congo - a colonial paradise about to erupt into chaos, where a man struggles to hold on to his lover, his sanity, and his life.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - A Thirst for Rain
Author: Carrington, Roslyn
Publisher: Kensington List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 1575664461 Date: 1999Library Journal
Set in the bone-dry northern foothills of Trinidad, this debut evokes the vibrant rhythms of the Caribbean and captures the island unseen by tourists, as men and women struggle side by side in a cramped hillside neighborhood, thirsting for love, wholeness, and a better future.
Suggested Reading: Debuts - Look Back All the Green Valley
Author: Chappell, Fred
Publisher: Picador List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0312242158 Date: 1999Kirkus
In a magical novel rich in the storytelling traditions of Southern Appalachia, Jess Kirkman returns to the North Carolina mountain town of his boyhood to be with his ailing mother and to finally settle the family's accounts. - Apologizing to Dogs
Author: Coomer, Joe
Publisher: Scribner List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 0684859467 Date: 1999PW
Heartwarming, hilarious, and utterly human, this book tells the tale of a group of eccentric antique dealers, who must face the task of cleaning up the mess they're in, after a violent storm strikes, wreaking havoc as well as causing fire, a heart attack, and grand theft.
Suggested Reading: Dog Stars - Mine Work: A Novel
Author: Davidson, Jim
Publisher: Utah State Univ List Price: $ 17.95 (trade paper) ISBN: 0874212758 Date: 1999Library Journal
When Markus Cottin begins unreeling some of the family mysteries, his father tells him he will find only "a chain of fools, each one worse than the one that came before." His search takes him to Colorado mining towns, to the Navajo reservation, and around the desert Four Corners region, and the tale he turns up is a shameful one of race politics and union troubles of the 1950s. When he finds his own family involved in bombings and the murder of Navajo man, he won't stop pursuing it until the story leads him link by link to his grandfather, his father, and ultimately back to himself. - Publisher marketing. - The New York Diary
Author: Doucet, Julie
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly List Price: $ 14.95 (trade paper) ISBN: 1896597246 Date: 1999Kirkus
Julie Doucet is widely regarded as one of the most prominent cartoonists to emerge in the past decade. Now, Drawn & Quarterly is publishing Doucet's third book, her longest and most ambitious story collected for the first time in one beautifully produced softcover edition. The New York Diary documents in compelling and graphic detail the events in Doucet's life during a six-month period in 1991. At that time, she packed her bags and moved to New York and waiting for her in anticipation was her new boyfriend, an aspiring cartoonist himself who took Julie into his upper west side apartment. The excitement of this new beginning was shortlived; gradually, her boyfriend's over-bearing jealousy became more evident, and the confines of her surroundings slowly became more suffocating. Rounding up this new book are two more stories that complete the obsessive-boyfriend triptych: the sad and revealing "My First Time" and the 25-page "Julie in Junior College." - Publisher marketing. - A Star Called Henry
Author: Doyle, Roddy
Publisher: Viking List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0670887579 Date: 1999BooklistPWKirkus
Doyle's new novel introduces Henry Smart, adventurer, IRA assassin, and lover, as he tells the story of his life and of the part he played in Irish history.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | All Stars - Zwilling's Dream
Author: Feld, Ross
Publisher: Counterpoint List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 1582430217 Date: 1999KirkusPW
At the age of twenty-two, Joel Zwilling is emerging as a literary wunderkind. He has published a successful first novel and his story about a widowed writer is about to be featured in a leading magazine. Yet just before the piece appears, Joel's real wife and daughter are killed in a car accident. He his left with a young son to raise, and a resulting writer's block as large and unmoving as a pyramid. - Twinship
Author: Foos, Laurie
Publisher: Harcourt Brace List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 015100417x Date: 1999Booklist - Collectors
Author: Griner, Paul
Publisher: Random House List Price: $ 19.95 ISBN: 0679448462Library Journal
From the critically acclaimed author of Follow Me comes a suspenseful, exquisitely menacing story of one woman's dangerous fascination with a seductive, mysterious man. - The Story of a Million
Years
Author: Huddle, David
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0395966051 Date: 1999PWLibrary Journal
In the tradition of Updike and Cheever, Huddle skillfully captures the way "secrets cobweb within relationships, engendering a sharp-edged loneliness between people who think they know each other" (Orlando Sentinel). A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. - Sun King
Author: Ignatius, David
Publisher: Random List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0679448616 Date: 1999Kirkus
At last, a Washington love story that isn't an oxymoron. The Sun King tells the spellbinding tale of a charismatic tycoon who invades the capital and challenges the power barons with his irrepressible spirit - only to face the ultimate test from the woman he adores.
Suggested Reading: Political Fiction - The Divine Ryans
Author: Johnston, Wayne
Publisher: Anchor List Price: $ 12.95 (paper) ISBN: 0385495447 Date: 1999PWKirkus
The youngest member of an eccentric Irish-Catholic family in the dual business of newspaper-publishing and undertaking, nine-year-old Doyle must deal with ghostly appearances, his screwy relatives, and his own burgeoning sexuality. - Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies
Author: Kalfus, Ken
Publisher: Milkweed List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 1571310290 Date: 1999KirkusBooklist
The award-winning author of Thirst plucks individual lives from a century of Russian history and serves them up in tales that range from hair-raising to comic to fabulous. - The County of Birches
Author: Kalman, Judith
Publisher: St Martins List Price: $ 21.95 ISBN: 0312208863 Date: 1999Booklist
Narrated by a young girl without a country, this poignant collection of stories traces one family's flight from post-Holocaust Hungary to Montreal. - Pictures of a Dying Man
Author: Kamau, Kwadwo Agymah
Publisher: Coffeehouse List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 156689087x Date: 1999BooklistLibrary Journal
When Gladstone Belle is found hanging from a beam in his own house, everyone in the island village tries to comprehend who he really was and why he killed himself. With each chapter, the voices of Gladstone's past accumulates, complementing, and contradicting each other, to arrive at an understanding of Gladstone's true identity and the circumstances that complicated his life. - Coffeehouse marketing. - Liar's Moon: A Long Story
Author: Kimball, Philip
Publisher: Henry Holt List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0805061487 Date: 1999PW
Spanning the years immediately before the Civil War through those immediately following Wounded Knee, Liar's Moon presents a subversive retelling of the story of the American West.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - The Pleasing Hour
Author: King, Lili
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0871137542 Date: 1999Booklist
Rosie, an American au pair, comes to live with Nicole and Mark Tivot and their family on a houseboat in Paris. After one of the children witness something she shouldn't between Rosie and Marc, Rosie moves to the south of France to care for the Nicole's elderly aunt, where she soon learns she has much in common with the austere Nicole. - Hearts in Atlantis
Author: King, Stephen
Publisher: Scribner List Price: $ 28 ISBN: 0684853515 Date: 1999KirkusBooklistLibrary Journal
In his strongest collection since Different Seasons, Stephen King confirms the power of his storytelling with four brilliant, disturbing tales of an America shadowed by Vietnam: "Low Men in Yellow Coats, " "Hearts in Atlantis, " "Blind Willie, " and "Why We're in Vietnam."
Suggested Reading: All Stars - Lovers for a Day: New and Collected
Stories of Love
Author: Klima, Ivan
Publisher: Grove List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0802116515 Date: 1999Library Journal
Ivan Klima has been called a "Czech genius" by the Los Angeles Times Book Review. In these stories spanning his long career from the 1960s to the present, he gives us a gallery of people searching, in love, for escape: factory girls on their day off and assembly-line workers lost in Walter-Mittyesque fantasies; a young woman on a honeymoon with the man she did not marry; a divorce-court judge whose mistress cannot understand his affection for the routines of his marriage; a young wife who falls into a passionate affair with an elderly bookbinder crippled by war. Lovers for a Day is a book stamped with Klima's unique wisdom, a personal history of a national evolution and an acute and moving examination of our attempts to find freedom in love. - Publisher Marketing. - Cracks
Author: Kohler, Sheila
Publisher: Zoland List Price: $ 21 ISBN: 158195008x Date: 1999KirkusLibrary Journal
A stunning tale of the passion and tribalism of adolescence, Cracks - set in a South African boarding school for girls in the 1960s - is reminiscent of Lord of the Flies and Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - A Gesture Life
Author: Lee, Chang-Rae
Publisher: Riverhead List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 1573221465 Date: 1999BooklistLibrary JournalPWKirkus
From the acclaimed author of Native Speaker comes his second novel about a Japanese World War II veteran who becomes a proper man and upstanding citizen in New York.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | All Stars - Mother to Mother
Author: Magona, Sindiwe
Publisher: Beacon Press List Price: $ 20 ISBN: 0-8070-0948-2 Date: 1999Booklist
Based on the murder of Fulbright scholar Amy Elizabeth Biehl in Capetown, South Africa, Mother to Mother dares to imagine the story through the eyes of Mandisa, the mother of one of the killers. - The Crime of Olga Arbyelina
Author: Makine, Andre
Publisher: Arcade List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 1559704942 Date: 1999PWKirkus
A Russian princess, a refugee from the Bolsheviks, abandoned by a faithless husband, flees with her child to France, where she is subsequently found half-naked on a riverbank next to a body of a man with a terrible wound on his head.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - Schrodinger's Baby
Author: McGregor, H.R. (ed)
Publisher: William Morrow List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 0688168930 Date: 1999PW
At a reckless student house in Glasgow, Scotland, it's all good fun until Juliet finds a corpse under the staircase - which promptly disappears. - The Last Life
Author: Messud, Claire
Publisher: Harcourt List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0151004714 Date: 1999PWKirkus
A family of French Algerians begins to crumble after shots ring out from the grandfather's rifle, bringing to light hidden realities about the stability of the family. - All Quiet on the
Orient Express
Author: Mills, Magnus
Publisher: Arcade List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 1559704950 Date: 1999Kirkus
A hapless handyman dreams of setting out for the far east when his job at a summer campground ends. As a favor to the owner he agrees to stay on to complete last-minute tasks. But one small job leads to another and he finds himself enmeshed in the off-season mysteries of a placid community. - Why She Left Us
Author: Rizzuto, Reiko
Publisher: HarperCollins List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0060193700 Date: 1999PW
This powerful first novel weaves in and out of the personal tragedies and political persecution of three generations of a Japanese-American family.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - Abyssinian
Author: Rufin, Jean-Christophe
Publisher: Norton List Price: $ 25.95 ISBN: 0393047164 Date: 1999Library Journal
A young French physician braves the wilds of Abyssinia to cure its king, then returns to France on an equally perilous mission to the court at Versailles. Along the way, he falls madly in love with the French consul's daughter and discovers the splendors of a great empire and civilization.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - Dangerous Husband
Author: Shapiro, Jane
Publisher: Little Brown List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0316782475 Date: 1999Kirkus
As clever as it is heartbreaking, this comic masterpiece tells the story of a marriage that is not, after all, exactly like anyone else's. Or is it? - Girl in Hyacinth Blue
Author: Vreeland, Susan
Publisher: McMurray & Beck List Price: $ 17.50 ISBN: 1878448900 Date: 1999PWKirkusBooklist
The ownership of a supposed Vermeer painting is traced back to the moment of its inspiration; and as the painting moves through each owner's hands, what was long hidden or forgotten or repressed quietly surfaces. Like Vermeer's paintings, this bestselling novel illuminates the poignantly dear moments in people's lives.
Suggested Reading: Vermeer Stars - The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh
Author: Waugh, Evelyn
Publisher: Little Brown List Price: $ 30 ISBN: 0316925462 Date: 1999PW
Collected for the first time in a single volume: all of the short fiction by one of the 20th century's wittiest and most trenchant observers of the human comedy. - The Blind Side of the Heart
Author: White, Michael C.
Publisher: Cliff Street List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0060194316 Date: 1999Booklist
The author of A Brother's Blood offers a haunting story of an Irish housekeeper who sets out to discover the truth when her town accuses the parish priest of abusing altar boys. - Grace at Bender Springs
Author: Wright, Vinitia Hampton
Publisher: Broadman and Holman List Price: $ 12.99 (trade paper) ISBN: 0805421270 Date: 1999Booklist
In the dried-up, worn-out town of Bender Springs, Kansas, a small group of working-class people face the everyday struggles of living in a town where everyone knows your business but no one truly knows your heart. Sarah Morgan, the pastor's wife, is on the verge of break-down as she tries to uphold an image of Christian purity. Young Tony Gardino, while suffering from depression, experiments with drugs and even contemplates suicide. Old Mamie Rupert hires a painter who turns out to be an alcoholic and a thief. And Dave Seaton, the confirmed bachelor, has his life complicated when he falls for a young girl named Randy. - Publisher marketing.
August
- Empires of Sand
Author: Ball, David W.
Publisher: Bantam List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0553110144 Date: 1999PW
Two cousins from Paris meet on the Sahara's blazing sands, one as part of a foolhardy French expeditionary force, the other with the nomadic Tuareg, a majestic race of veiled warriors who live by the harsh desert code of honor.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - Loose Lips
Author: Brown, Rita Mae
Publisher: Bantam List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0553099728 Date: 1999Library Journal
Brown continues the story of the outrageous Hunsenmeir sisters, first introduced in Six of One and Bingo, whose quarrels grow serious when Louise insists that Julia is not a "real mother" to her adopted daughter. - The True History of Paradise:
A Novel
Author: Cezair-Thompson, Margaret
Publisher: Dutton List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0525944907 Date: 1999Kirkus - Capture the Flag
Author: Chace, Rebecca
Publisher: Simon & Schuster List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0684857588 Date: 1999PW
Shedding light on the traditions particular to elite society - and depicting the tumultuous 1970s with keen sensibility, Capture the Flag is a portrait of the children of sophisticated New Yorkers on their journey to adulthood. - Windward Heights
Author: Conde, Maryse
Publisher: Soho List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 1569471614 Date: 1999Booklist
Prize-winning Caribbean novelist Maryse Conde reimagines Emily Bronte's passionate novel as a tale of obsessive love between the "African" Rayze and Cathy, the mulatto daughter of the man who takes Rayze in and raises him, but whose treatment goads Rayze into rebellious flight. In Cuba, Rayze makes his fortune, but upon his return he discovers Cathy has wed the weak scion of a socially prominent Creole family. Rayze determines to be avenged for the Loss of his love. His vengeance continues into the next generation, haunting both Cathy's daughter and his son.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - O Careless Love
Author: Dodd, Susan M.
Publisher: Morrow List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 0688169996 Date: 1999PW
With same gift for language that marked her praised last book, The Mourners' Bench, Dodd again explores the multifarious and otherworldly nature of love in a wonderful new collection of short stories. - The Honey Thief
Author: Graver, Elizabeth
Publisher: Hyperion List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0786862823 Date: 1999Library JournalPW
Graver offers the story of Miriam, a young widow, and her adolescent daughter, Eva, whose habitual stealing forces them to leave New York City in search of a "normal life." - Perlman's Ordeal
Author: Hansen, Brooks
Publisher: Soho List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0374230781 Date: 1999BooklistKirkus
London, 1906: Dr. August Perlman - music lover, opium addict, and director of London Hospital's new department of "clinical suggestion" - is on his way to the symphony when an odd patient is brought to his office. Sylvie Blum is fourteen, catatonic, unwashed, dehydrated. It seems that another girl's personality is living inside her. Perlman returns from the symphony with the spiritualist Madame Helena Barrett, who gets Sylvie to talk. As her shadow self begins to tell her story, it bears astonishing resemblance to the myth of Atlantis. The girl within the girl says she once lived there. The doctor wants to suppress her story; the spiritualist wants it told. And so they battle for the soul of the girt. Their conflict is overshadowed by the ghost of Madame's late brother, a brilliantly imagined composer.Hansen's first novel, The Chess Garden, left the reader "grateful for and almost stupefied by the sustained effort of imagination" (The Boston Sunday Globe). In Perlman's Ordeal, he has taken the world of myth and brought it to life in a novel. - Farrar Straus Giroux marketing.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - Downers Grove
Author: Hornburg, Michael
Publisher: William Morrow List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0688165281 Date: 1999Library Journal
From the author of the critically acclaimed Bongwater comes a pitch-perfect tale of a teenage girl getting stoned and getting by in the strip-mall America of today. - The Good Times: Stories
Author: Kelman, James
Publisher: Anchor List Price: $ 12.95 (trade paper) ISBN: 0385495803 Date: 1999Booklist
James Kelman, one of the finest writers in the English language and the key figure in the rebirth of Scottish literature, has often been compared to Chekhov for the humanity and the integrity of his vision. The twenty first-person narratives in The Good Times continue that tradition, portraying ordinary people in a language that makes a glory of their lives. The narrators are men and boys who come face-to-face with uncomfortable truths, whether musing on mortality, encountering betrayals both devastating and trivial, or struggling to understand women or work. Tender, lyrical, darkly humorous, The Good Times is a dazzling collection from one of the great short story writers of our time. - Anchor marketing. - Buckskin Line
Author: Kelton, Elmer
Publisher: St Martins List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0312865228 Date: 1999Booklist
From a six-time Spur Award winner comes the story of a Texas Ranger who carries heavy burdens. The father and brother of the woman he loves have been lynched, and he is fated to meet the Comanche warrior whose band killed his family.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - Judas the Gentile
Author: Literas, D.S.
Publisher: Hampton Roads List Price: $ 19.95 ISBN: 1571741445 Date: 1999Booklist - Shadow-Box
Author: Logue, Antonia
Publisher: Grove List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0802116477 Date: 1999KirkusPWBooklist
Based on one of the greatest and most unusual love stories of the 20th century, this literary novel explores the life of Arthur Cravan - semi-professional boxer, influential art critic, legendary bon vivant, and nephew of Oscar Wilde.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | All Stars | Epistolary Stars - All That Glitters
Author: Morris, Gilbert
Publisher: Crossway List Price: $ 19.99 ISBN: 1581341075 Date: 1999Booklist
Though the hills of Kentucky resemble her native Scotland, Afton Burns could not be farther from home. After her mother dies, Afton decides to join her father on his movie set -- despite the fact that this invitation is Kyle Patton's first fatherly gesture since he left home fifteen years before. In debt and deeply unhappy, he is making the film that will determine the rest of hits career. Afton volunteers to help and finds herself in an alien world of big egos who reject her Christian values.Production is thwarted when "accidents" begin to occur, but hope and help come with the arrival of Peregrine, a quiet man with a rustic air. Though many of the locals believe he's a slow-witted hermit, Afton is convinced he's hiding behind a facade and soon finds herself depending completely on hits judgment - especially when the accidents take a deadly twist and her life is in his hands. - Crossway marketing.
- Fast Eddie: A Novel
Author: O'Connell, Robert L.
Publisher: William Morrow List Price: $ 24.50 ISBN: 0688166903 Date: 1999Booklist
The author of Arms and Men: A History of War, Weapons, and Aggression returns with a highly original novel of Eddie Rickenbacker - a pioneer in the world of automobiles, America's World War I flying ace, and a major influence on on the aircraft industry.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - Who I Was Supposed to Be:
Short Stories
Author: Perabo, Susan
Publisher: Simon & Schuster List Price: $ 20 ISBN: 0684862336 Date: 1999PW
From an award-winning new voice comes a remarkable collection of wise, absurdly funny stories that celebrates the everyday deviance of ordinary men and women. - The Visitation
Author: Peretti, Frank
Publisher: Word List Price: $ 24.99 ISBN: 0849911796 Date: 1999Booklist
The author of the bestselling Piercing the Darkness now tells the story of a small farming town in eastern Washington turned upside-down by supernatural occurrences and visitations of a new Messiah. - Tathea
Author: Perry, Anne
Publisher: Shadow Mountain List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 1573455369 Date: 1999Booklist
She was an empress until she lost everything. Now simply known as Tathea, she will wander the Lost Lands and become empowered by the teachings in a book--a book that will guide her onto a path even greater than the one she walked as a ruler. - Hangover Soup
Author: Redd, Louise
Publisher: Little Brown List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0316479004 Date: 1999PWLibrary Journal
As fall-down funny as it is slyly wise, Hangover Soup, by the author of Playing the Bones, is the story of one woman's struggle to save her marriage, sober up her husband, and find her true self. - Henry of Atlantic City
Author: Reuss, Frederick
Publisher: MacMurray & Beck List Price: $ 20 ISBN: 1878448897 Date: 1999BooklistLibrary Journal
The author of Horace Afoot now pens an affectionate and beautiful tale of a six-year-old prodigy with a photographic memory and a penchant for the Gnostic gospels and Byzantine history. Set against the background of Caesar's Palace, Henry of Atlantic City is a satirical story of a troubled child trying to make sense of the world around him. - Yellow Jack
Author: Russell, Jack
Publisher: Norton List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0393047687 Date: 1999PW
An apprentice at a Paris studio credited with inventing the magic art of photography flees to New Orleans with his master's stolen camera and achieves fame. His success leads to his entanglement with a voodoo-adept mistress.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | New Orleans - The Genius of Affection
Author: Sides, Marilyn
Publisher: Harmony List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0517704447 Date: 1999PW
An emotionally powerful, sensual novel about a woman's confrontations with the complexities of modern romance and the conflicting impulses of her heart, her mind, and her common sense. - Notebook of Lost Things
Author: Staffel, Megan
Publisher: Soho List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 1569471606 Date: 1999Booklist
Helene is forty-one; she enjoys sex with Harry, owner of Better Days, the local bar. But she will leave him if he cannot, just once, rise above the mundane and use his imagination so she can love him. Stella knows she loves Darryl, her high-school classmate, but her depressed, impoverished, weight- obsessed mother has to be her priority. And William Swick loves Uta, Helene's mother, loves her still although she died in a car accident two years earlier. On the anniversary of this death, each of them learns a lesson about the grace bestowed by love. - Soho marketing. - Stranger in the Earth
Author: Theroux, Marcel
Publisher: Harcourt List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0151004080 Date: 1999Kirkus
Twenty-two-year-old Horace Littlefair travels to London, where he is plunged into the discombobulating world of love, racism, rabies, blackmail, political intrigue . . . and Scrabble.
July
- Syrup
Author: Barry, Maxx
Publisher: Viking List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0670886408 Date: 1999Booklist
An over-the-top debut about a young wannabe buzzmaker who will do almost anything to get ahead and get a date - perfect for fans of Nick Hornby and Helen Fielding.
Suggested Reading: Debuts - My Father, Dancing
Author: Broyard, Bliss
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 0375400605 Date: 1999Booklist
These ten short stories capture the complicated bond between fathers and daughters. - Knopf marketing. - Song of the Exile
Author: Davenport, Kiana
Publisher: Ballantine List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0345425391 Date: 1999Booklist
From New Orleans to Paris to Shanghai, through the horrors of Pearl Harbor, Nazi occupation in Europe, Japanese prison camps, and beyond to Hawaii's struggle toward statehood, this stunningly original novel paints a mesmerizing portrait of the native Hawaiian peoples and their history.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Asian American Stars - 27th Kingdom
Author: Ellis, Alice Thomas
Publisher: Moyer Bell List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 1559212500 Date: 1999Kirkus
Tucked away in secret chambers in London's Chelsea, a mannered Russian emigre and her nephew are visited by a ghost in the shape of a young postulant on leave from a convent in Wales. - Can You Wave Bye, Bye, Baby: Stories
Author: Gasco, Elyse
Publisher: Picador List Price: $ 17 ISBN: 0312206313 Date: 1999PW
Can You Wave Bye Bye Baby? is a powerful, poignant collection of thematically interwoven stories about relationships between parents and children, especially mothers and daughters. Each story explores the complex and often volatile terrain of adoption and birth. We meet young adopted women who yearn for the sense of family that blood ties bring, and mothers who struggle with the decision to give their babies up. A grown woman who was adopted tries to imagine her birth mother's life, a young girl is abducted by her father and shares a series of strange adventures with him, a teenage mother plans to give up her newborn, a pregnant wife considers abortion. Edgy; urban, bold and vibrant, these stories mark the emergence of a young writer who understands the human heart and the secret lives of ordinary people. - Picador marketing. - True at First Light: A Fictional
Memoir
Author: Hemingway, Ernest and Patrick
Publisher: Scribner List Price: $ 26 ISBN: 0684849216 Date: 1999KirkusBooklist
Both a revealing self-portrait and a dramatic, invented chronicle of Hemingway's final African safari, this fictional memoir recounts the splendor of daily life in Kenya and tells of his love affair with a young African woman. - Hindenburg Crashes Nightly
Author: Hrbek, Greg
Publisher: Bard List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0380977419 Date: 1999Kirkus
In remarkably vivid and lyrical prose, this James Jones First Novel Award winner, set in 1947, tells the story of two lovers bound by shadowy secrets from their shared past.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Debuts - Never Forsaken
Author: Jacobs, Kathleen
Publisher: Crossway List Price: $ 10.99 (trade paper) ISBN: 1581341105 Date: 1999Booklist
When her father left for America, Louisa Shumaker did not know how long it would be until she saw him again. After two years he has finally earned enough money to have his wife and three children join him in St. Louis. Seventeen-year-old Louisa is torn between her grief at leaving behind all that she loves in Germany and her enthusiasm at being reunited with her father. Her conflicting feelings are also mixed with fear about the journey ahead, which proves to be very dangerous and uncomfortable.Louisa soon discovers that life in America is not as easy as she envisioned. When her mother is forced to work in a factory, Louisa and her siblings assume the household responsibilities. Despite the hardships, the family is happy and growing. Even amid grief and tragedies, Louisa knows that God will never forsake them. And as she becomes a young lady, Louisa finds that not only is America full of adventure, but also love. - Crossway marketing.
- Stargazer
Author: Jaffe, Michele
Publisher: Pocket List Price: $ 18 ISBN: 0671027395 Date: 1999Library JournalPW
A rich and unforgettable new voice in women's fiction emerges with this lush, exquisitely sensual novel, set in Venice, the world's most intriguing and picturesque city, during the Italian Renaissance.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - Mr. Dalloway
Author: Lippincott, Robin
Publisher: Sarabande List Price: $ 13.95 (trade paper) ISBN: 1889330299 Date: 1999Booklist
In a virtuoso performance of postmodern daring, Robin Lippincott's novella offers a rich augmentation of Virginia Woolf's classic novel. - Sarabande marketing. - Italian Fever
Author: Martin, Valerie
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 0375405429 Date: 1999BooklistLibrary Journal
From the author of The Great Divorce and Mary Reilly. Searching for her late employer's manuscript in Italy, Lucy Stark is drawn into the thick of various mysteries, including the whereabouts of the man's latest lover and the true cause of his death. - Mollie Peer: Underground Adventure
of the Moosepath League
Author: Reid, Van
Publisher: Viking List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0670886335 Date: 1999KirkusPW
P.G. Wodehouse meets Mark Twain in the further rollicking adventures and comical quirks of those turn-of-the-century Yankees who captured hearts in Cordelia Underwood.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - The Woman Who Cut Off her
Leg at the Maidenstone Club and Other Stories
Author: Slavin, Julia
Publisher: Holt List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 0805060855 Date: 1999Library JournalBooklist
Julia Slavin's Tales are bulletins from the front. Suburban young marrieds, the narrators have been stranded by their careers, their homes, their lives. Amidst the punishing schedules dictated by daily demands-baby-proofing the house, folding laundry, steaming carrots, taking clients out to steak houses-they live by their fantasies. - Holt marketing. - From the Black Hills
Author: Troy, Judy
Publisher: Random List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0375502300 Date: 1999PW
Perceptive, compelling, and soulful, From the Black Hills tells the story of a young man about to enter college, who's left to sort out the pieces after his father kills a young woman and disappears. - I Gave You All I Had
Author: Valdes, Zoe
Publisher: Arcade List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 1559704772 Date: 1999PWBooklist
An audacious, brazen, exuberant work of fiction from one of her generation's most important, exciting, and iconoclastic novelists.
"Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them." - Lemony Snicket
"...But a culture that doesn't value librarians doesn't value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we?" --Neil Gaiman (Sandman: The Kindly Ones)
"Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable." - Augustin Birrell
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