(Hardcover)

  

  

Garment of Shadows, by Laurie King 

Mary Russell wakes up, not knowing where she is. She doesn't even remember who she is. Her first step is to determine whether she's a guest...or a prisoner. She discovers that she is in Morocco, where the tensions are bubbling over, and the conflict will drag the great powers of Europe into battle. Holmes works the back channels, seeking the aid of the famed T.E. Lawrence to stop the fire before it starts, but he'll need more than Lawrence. He'll need Russell with her memory restored. Laurie R. King takes readers into the back alleys of Morocco, spinning a wildly inventive, utterly compelling tale of politics and espionage, of friendship and betrayal, of the ingenious Sherlock Holmes and the indomitable Mary Russell. (Hardcover)

  

  

Low Pressure, by Sandra Brown 

 Bellamy Lyston was only 12 years old when her older sister Susan was killed on a stormy Memorial Day. Bellamy's fear of storms is a legacy of the tornado that destroyed the crime scene along with her memory of what really happened during the day's most devastating moments. Now, 18 years later, Bellamy has written a sensational, bestselling novel based on Susan's murder. She published it under a pseudonym to protect her family from unwanted publicity. But when an opportunistic reporter for a tabloid newspaper discovers that the book is based on fact, Bellamy's identity is exposed along with the family scandal. (Hardcover)

  

  

Telegraph Avenue, by Michael Chabon 

 As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there, longtime friends, band mates and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the sketchy yet freewheeling borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland, on the quintessential East Bay avenue that gives the book its title. When ex-NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth richest black man in America, announces plans to go forward with the construction of his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby neglected stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. What they don't know is that Goode's announcement marks the climax of a decades-old secret history. (Hardcover)

  

  

The Yellow Birds, by Kevin Powers 

 "The war tried to kill us in the spring." So begins this powerful account of friendship and loss. In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. Bound together since basic training when Bartle makes a promise to bring Murphy safely home, the two have been dropped into a war neither is prepared for. (Hardcover) 

  

Richard Dawkins, bestselling author and the world's most celebrated evolutionary biologist, has spent his career elucidating the many wonders of science. Here, he takes a broader approach and uses his unrivaled explanatory powers to illuminate the ways in which the world really works. Starting with the magical, mythical explanations for the wonders of nature, Dawkins reveals the exhilarating scientific truths behind these occurrences. This is a page-turning detective story that not only mines all the sciences for its clues but primes the reader to think like a scientist as well. (Paperback.)

 From the moment John Roberts, the chief justice of the United States, blundered through the Oath of Office at Barack Obama's inauguration, the relationship between the Supreme Court and the White House has been confrontational. Both men are young, brilliant, charismatic, charming, determined to change the course of the nation-and completely at odds on almost every major constitutional issue. One is radical; one essentially conservative. The surprise is that Obama is the conservative-a believer in incremental change, compromise, and pragmatism over ideology. Roberts-and his allies on the Court-seek to overturn decades of precedent: in short, to undo the ultimate victory FDR achieved in the New Deal. (Hardcover)   

    

  

One Good Deed, by Erin McHugh 

Erin McHugh had spent the better part of her adult life doing community work, but in more recent years, the minutiae of life and working as a bookseller kept her busy and away from those higher impulses. Then one day she learned a distant relative was actually going to be canonized. Was this a sign? What followed next was McHugh's sincere urge to recapture a sense of charity, and so she set out on her birthday to do one good deed every day for an entire year. One Good Deed is the inspiring, smart, and frequently funny chronicle of that year, in which each page represents a day in McHugh's journey to reclaim the better part of herself, inspiring readers to do the same. (Hardcover.)

    

  

Safari, by Dan Kainen 

Safari is a magical journey. Readers, as if on safari, encounter eight wild animals that come alive. Using an innovative lenticular-based technology, precision sliding lenses, and original four-color video imagery, each image is like a 3-D movie on the page, delivering a rich, fluid, immersive visual experience. The cheetah bounds. The gazelle leaps. The African elephant snaps its ears. The gorilla munches the leaves off a branch. It's mesmerizing, as visually immediate as a National Geographic or Animal Planet special.(Hardcover.)

    

  

Stick Man's Really Bad Day  

Stick Man is that guy you see around town but don't really know very well. Everywhere you go, there he is, crossing the street, waiting for the bus, issuing warnings about potential disasters at sea and on land, at the mall and at work. But when he's not offering advice, what does a day in the life of Stick Man actually look like? This catastrophe-packed book uses images derived from real signs to follow a continuous narrative as Stick Man navigates the perils of a single, hilariously bad day. (Hardcover.) 

    

  

The Swerve, by Stephen Greenblatt 

One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. (Paperback.) 

  

    

  

  

  

Weird Things Customers Say in Bookstores, by Jen Campbell 

A simple Twitter question posed by John Cleese-"What is your pet peeve?"-inspired Jen Campbell to start a blog collecting all the ridiculous conversations overheard in her bookstore, everything from "Did Beatrix Potter ever write a book about dinosaurs?" to the hunt for a paperback which could forecast the next year's weather; from "I've forgotten my glasses, please read me the first chapter" to "Excuse me . . . is this book edible?"; and from "Can books conduct electricity?" to "My children are just climbing your bookshelves: that's ok . . . isn't it?" (Hardcover.)