This week, our friends at independent publisher Unbridled Books are offering you an opportunity to test drive Google eBooks. Google eBooks is a partnership between Google and Rainy Day Books, allowing you to purchase eBooks and support your locally-owned independent bookstore.

Unbridled Books, publisher of independent favorites including The Singer's Gun and Stranger Here Below, is offering 25 eBooks from their library. Each of these titles will cost just 25 cents when purchased June 9-11. Click here for the complete list.

Fiction

The Long-Shining Waters  

Hardcover, Milkweed Editions

To Be Sung Underwater

Tom McNeal  

Hardcover, Little Brown

Judith Whitman always believed in the kind of love that "picks you up in Akron and sets you down in Rio." Long ago, she once experienced that love. Willy Blunt was a carpenter with a dry wit and a steadfast sense of honor. Marrying him seemed like a natural thing to promise. But Willy Blunt was not a person you could pick up in Nebraska and transport to Stanford. When Judith left home, she didn't look back. Twenty years later, Judith's marriage is hazy with secrets. In her hand is what may be the phone number for the man who believed she meant it when she said she loved him. If she called, what would he say?  Read more. 

Hardcover, Minotaur Books  

The murder of Judge Hugo Jackson is out of Detective Simon Ziele's jurisdiction in more ways than one. For one, it's high-profile enough to command the attention of the notorious new police commissioner, since Judge Jackson was presiding over the sensational trial of Al Drayson. Drayson, an anarchist, set off a bomb at a Carnegie family wedding, but instead of killing millionaires, it killed passersby, including a child. The dramatic trial has captured the full attention of 1906 New York City. Furthermore, Simon's assigned precinct on Manhattan's West Side includes the gritty Tenderloin but not the tonier Gramercy Park, which is where the judge is found in his locked town house with his throat slashed on the night before the jury is set to deliberate. But his widow insists on calling her husband's old classmate criminologist, Alistair Sinclair, who in turn enlists Ziele's help. Together they must steer Sinclair's unorthodox methods past a police force that is so focused on rounding up Drayson's supporters that they've all but rejected any other possibilities. ... Read more.

Nonfiction

The Dance of Air and Sea 

Hardcover, Oxford University Press

How can tiny plankton in the sea just off Western Europe be affected by changes in the Gulf Stream four thousand miles away, on the other side of the North Atlantic Ocean? How can a slight rise in the temperature of the surface of the Pacific Ocean have a devastating impact on amphibian life in Costa Rica? How can the temperature of the equatorial Pacific Ocean help predict the yields of maize far away in Zimbabwe? In The Dance of Air and Sea, oceanographer Arnold Taylor illuminates the extraordinarily vast and powerful forces driving the world's ecosphere, revealing the astonishing ways that the atmosphere and oceans interact, and revealing how ecosystems in water and on land respond to changes in weather. Ranging through the fields of oceanography, meteorology, and ecology, Taylor sheds light on the immense variations of the atmosphere which can span a whole ocean, the best known of which is the El Nino cycle of the equatorial Pacific Ocean, a colossal see-saw in which atmospheric pressure rising over Australia mirrors a fall thousands of miles away in Tahiti. And as he explores this remarkable dance of sea and air, Taylor conveys the enormous power of these forces... Read more. 

The Ripple Effect: The Fate Of Freshwater In The Twenty-First Century  

Alex Prud'Homme

Hardcover, Scribner  

As Alex Prud'Homme and his great-aunt Julia Child were completing their collaboration on her memoir, My Life in France, they began to talk about the French obsession with bottled water, which had finally spread to America. From this spark of interest, Prud'homme began what would become an ambitious quest to understand the evolving story of freshwater. What he found was shocking: as the climate warms and world population grows, demand for water has surged, but supplies of freshwater are static or dropping, and new threats to water quality appear every day. The Ripple Effect is Prud'homme's vivid and engaging inquiry into the fate of freshwater in the twenty-first century. The questions he sought to answer were urgent: Will there be enough water to satisfy demand? What are the threats to its quality? What is the state of our water infrastructure-both the pipes that bring us freshwater and the levees that keep it out? How secure is our water supply from natural disasters and terrorist attacks? Can we create new sources for our water supply through scientific innovation? Is water a right like air or a commodity like oil-and who should control the tap? Will the wars of the twenty-first century be fought over water? Read more. 

Children's Book Pick: 

A Long Walk To Water

Linda Sue Park   

Hardcover, Clarion   

A Long Walk to Water begins as two stories, told in alternating sections, about a girl in Sudan in 2008 and a boy in Sudan in 1985. The girl, Nya, is fetching water from a pond that is two hours' walk from her home: she makes two trips to the pond every day. The boy, Salva, becomes one of the "lost boys" of Sudan, refugees who cover the African continent on foot as they search for their families and for a safe place to stay. Enduring every hardship from loneliness to attack by armed rebels to contact with killer lions and crocodiles, Salva is a survivor, and his story goes on to intersect with Nya's in an astonishing and moving way. Read more.