Each week we spotlight one book from the month's IndieNext List (a collection of recommendations by indie booksellers across the country). Ask for a copy of the IndieNext newsletter at our front counter or click to browse them online

Hardcover, Scribner

Each week we like to showcase a few of the great books on our shelves. Here are just a few titles we think are special:

Fiction

A Good Hard Look  

Hardcover, Penguin Press 

Pigeon English

Stephen Kelman  

Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Lying in front of Harrison Opuku is a body, the body of one of his classmates, a boy known for his crazy basketball skills, who seems to have been murdered for his dinner. Armed with a pair of camouflage binoculars and detective techniques absorbed from television shows like CSI, Harri and his best friend, Dean, plot to bring the perpetrator to justice. They gather evidence-fingerprints lifted from windows with tape, a wallet stained with blood-and lay traps to flush out the murderer. But nothing can prepare them for what happens when a criminal feels you closing in on him. Recently emigrated from Ghana with his sister and mother to London's enormous housing projects, Harri is pure curiosity and ebullience-obsessed with gummy candy, a friend to the pigeon who visits his balcony, quite possibly the fastest runner in his school, and clearly also fast on the trail of a murderer. Read more. 

Conquistadora

Esmeralda Santiago   

Hardcover, Knopf

As a young girl growing up in Spain, Ana Larragoity Cubillas is powerfully drawn to Puerto Rico by the diaries of an ancestor who traveled there with Ponce de Le�n. And in handsome twin brothers Ram�n and Inocente-both in love with Ana-she finds a way to get there. She marries Ram�n, and in 1844, just eighteen, she travels across the ocean to a remote sugar plantation the brothers have inherited on the island. Ana faces unrelenting heat, disease and isolation, and the dangers of the untamed countryside even as she relishes the challenge of running Hacienda los Gemelos. But when the Civil War breaks out in the United States, Ana finds her livelihood, and perhaps even her life, threatened by the very people on whose backs her wealth has been built: the hacienda's slaves, whose richly drawn stories unfold alongside her own. And when at last Ana falls for a man who may be her destiny-a once-forbidden love-she will sacrifice nearly everything to keep hold of the land that has become her true home. Read more. 

Paperback, Broadway   

I grew up as the son of a man who could not possibly have been my father. Though there was never any doubt that my seed had come from another man, Moses Froben, Lo Svizzero, called me "son." And I called him "father." On the rare occasions when someone dared to ask for clarification, he simply laughed as though the questioner were obtuse. "Of course he's not my son!" he would say. "Don't be ridiculous." But whenever I myself gained the courage to ask him further of our past, he just looked sadly at me. "Please, Nicolai," he would say after a moment, as though we had made a pact I had forgotten. With time, I came to understand I would never know the secrets of my birth, for my father was the only one who knew these secrets, and he would take them to his grave. Read more.

Hardcover, Doubleday   

An ambitious novel that spans decades and continents, The Things We Cherished tells the story of Charlotte Gold and Jack Harrington, two fiercely independent attor�neys who find themselves slowly falling for one another while working to defend the brother of a Holocaust hero against allegations of World War II-era war crimes. The defendant, wealthy financier Roger Dykmans, mysteri�ously refuses to help in his own defense, revealing only that proof of his innocence lies within an intricate timepiece last seen in Nazi Germany. As the narrative moves from Philadelphia to Germany, Poland, and Italy, we are given glimpses of the lives that the anniversary clock has touched over the past century, and learn about the love affair that turned a brother into a traitor. Read more.

Nonfiction

The Sun's Heartbeat 

Hardcover, Little Brown

The beating heart of the sun is the very pulse of life on earth. And from the ancients who plotted its path at Stonehenge to the modern scientists who unraveled the nuclear fusion reaction that turns mass into energy, humankind has sought to solve its mysteries. In this lively biography of the sun, Bob Berman ranges from its stellar birth to its spectacular future death with a focus on the wondrous and enthralling, and on the heartbreaking sacrifice, laughable errors, egotistical battles, and brilliant inspirations of the people who have tried to understand its power. What, exactly, are the ghostly streaks of light astronauts see-but can't photograph-when they're in space? And why is it impossible for two people to see the exact same rainbow? Why are scientists beginning to think that the sun is safer than sunscreen? And how does the fluctuation of sunspots-and its heartbeat-affect everything from satellite communications to wheat production across the globe? Read more. 

Beautiful Unbroken: One Nurse's Life  

Mary Jane Nealon

Paperback, Graywolf Press  

As a child, Mary Jane Nealon dreams of growing up to become a saint or, failing that, a nurse. She idolizes Clara Barton, Kateri Tekakwitha, and Molly Pitcher, whose biographies she reads and rereads. But by the time she follows her calling to nursing school, her beloved younger brother is diagnosed with cancer, which challenges her to bring hope and healing closer to home. His death leaves her shattered, and she flees into her work, and into poetry. Beautiful Unbroken details Nealon's life of caregiving, from her years as a flying nurse, untethered and free to follow friends and jobs from the Southwest to Savannah, to more somber years in New York City, treating men in a homeless shelter on the Bowery and working in the city's first AIDS wards. In this compelling and revealing memoir, Nealon brings a poet's sensitivity to bear on the hard truths of disease and recovery, life and death. Read more.  

Can Intervention Work  

Rory Stewart

Hardcover, Norton  

Rory Stewart (author of The Places In Between) and Gerald Knaus distill their remarkable firsthand experiences of political and military interventions into a potent examination of what we can and cannot achieve in a new era of "nation building." As they delve into the massive, military-driven efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Balkans, the expansion of the EU, and the bloodless "color" revolutions in the former Soviet states, the authors reveal each effort's enormous consequences for international relations, human rights, and our understanding of state building. Stewart and Knaus parse carefully the philosophies that have informed interventionism-from neoconservative to liberal imperialist-and draw on their diverse experiences in the military, nongovernmental organizations, and the Iraqi provincial government to reveal what we can ultimately expect from large-scale interventions, and how they might best realize positive change in the world. Read more.  

Children's Books: 

Say What?

Angela Diterlizzi   

Hardcover, Beach Lane Books  

This fabulously creative book by Caldecott Award winner Simms Taback features handmade postcards and funny letters that readers will enjoy pulling out of their envelopes. Michael is new to sleepaway camp, and it's not going so well. He thinks his counselor is an alien, his bunkmates are pranksters, and it's constantly raining. So he sends his dad a series of urgent notes pleading for rescue. His dad is quick to reply, but encourages Michael to stick it out, reminding him that he met some of his best buddies at camp. Eventually there is a subtle change in Michael's tone - and a mention of a friend or two. Before you know it, Michael's a happy camper who's planning a longer stay next time. Read more.