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Greetings!
Happy New Year to you, and Thank You for your attention in 2012 - reading our newsletter, attending author events, engaging in bookish conversations with our staff, and shopping at the Concord Bookshop. Let's do it all again in 2013!
This week's newsletter starts off a new year of our Author Series with an anthology of short mysteries. Join us on for a panel with five of the authors featured in the 2013 edition of Best New England Crime Stories.
As with all our events, if you can't visit us in person to purchase a signed copy of the featured book, you're welcome to call or email before the event - we'll ask the author to personally inscribe the book to your specifications, and will arrange to ship the book or hold it for pick up.
Our non-fiction pick this week is Jared Diamond's examination of what our (modern) society can learn from more traditional (primitive) societies. We're closer to them than you may think!
Our three fiction picks are recent staff favorites, hot-off-the-presses in paperback editions.
Scroll down a bit further to read about a handful of 2012 book awards you may have missed. If you follow the awards and the "best of" lists, we don't want to miss an opportunity to help you add to your "to be read" stack!
We look forward to chatting with you in the Bookshop -- when you come in to take a closer look at an item mentioned here, please tell us "I saw it in the newsletter" and let us know what you're reading now.
Comments are always welcome via email to
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Our next event: mystery anthology
Best New England Crime Stories 2013: Blood Moon
Anthology featuring local mystery authors
Level Best Books' annual crime wave continues with release of Best New England Crime Stories 2013: Blood Moon, its new anthology of original tales of cons, capers, subterfuge, suspense and, of course, murder and mayhem.
Featuring thirty-one of New England's most acclaimed mystery and crime writers, along with several compelling new voices, this anthology takes its readers on a sometimes scary, sometimes hilarious, walk down the region's dark side.
Participants in the panel include:
Katherine Fast aka Kat is focusing on fiction writing, watercolor, handwriting analysis, and is doing her level best as a design and production editor. She and her husband live in Weston, Massachusetts.
Ruth M. McCarty's short mysteries have appeared in all Level Best Books' anthologies. She received honorable mentions in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine for her flash fiction and won the 2009 Derringer award for Best Flash Story for "No Flowers for Stacey" published in Deadfall: Crime Stories by New England Writers. She lives in Leominster, Massachusetts with her family.
Ben and Beth Oak, both Connecticut natives, met in a literature course at Boston University and have been enthralled with Henry David Thoreau (and each other) ever since. As B. B. Oak they have created a mystery series featuring Thoreau as "the Sherlock Holmes of Walden Pond," and the first book is slated for publication by Kensington in 2013.
A co-editor at Level Best Books and the author of three Miranda Lewis "living history" mysteries, Leslie Wheeler of Cambridge is now working on a new series. She is Speakers Bureau Coordinator of Sisters in Crime/New England, and a founding member of the New England Crime Bake Committee.
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Pulitzer Prize winning author explores our connection to primitive societies
The World Until Yesterday:
What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?
by Jared Diamond
Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional societies still or recently in existence. Societies like those of the New Guinea Highlanders remind us that it was only yesterday - in evolutionary time - when everything changed and that we moderns still possess bodies and social practices often better adapted to traditional than to modern conditions.
The World Until Yesterday provides a mesmerizing firsthand picture of the human past as it had been for millions of years - a past that has mostly vanished - and considers what the differences between that past and our present mean for our lives today.
Diamond draws extensively from his decades of field work in the Pacific islands, as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian Indians, Kalahari San people, and others. He doesn't romanticize traditional societies - after all, we are shocked by some of their practices - but he finds that their solutions to universal human problems such as child rearing, elder care, dispute resolution, risk, and physical fitness have much to teach us.
Author Jared Diamond is a professor of geography at UCLA. Among his many awards are the National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, Japan's Cosmos Prize, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and the Lewis Thomas Prize honoring the Scientist as Poet, presented by The Rockefeller University. His previous books include Why Is Sex Fun?, The Third Chimpanzee, Collapse, and Guns, Germs, and Steel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
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A favorite mystery nod to Austen - now in paperback
Death Comes to Pemberley by P. D. James
A rare meeting of literary genius: P. D. James, long among the most admired mystery writers of our time, draws the characters of Jane Austen's beloved novel Pride and Prejudice into a tale of murder and emotional mayhem.
It is 1803, six years since Elizabeth and Darcy embarked on their life together at Pemberley, Darcy's magnificent estate. Their peaceful, orderly world seems almost unassailable, and preparations are under way for their much-anticipated annual autumn ball.
Then, on the eve of the ball, the patrician idyll is shattered. A coach careens up the drive carrying Lydia, Elizabeth's disgraced sister, who with her husband, the very dubious Wickham, has been banned from Pemberley. She stumbles out of the carriage, hysterical, shrieking that Wickham has been murdered. With shocking suddenness, Pemberley is plunged into a frightening mystery.
Inspired by a lifelong passion for Austen, P. D. James masterfully re-creates the world of Pride and Prejudice, electrifying it with the excitement and suspense of a brilliantly crafted crime story, as only she can write it.
P. D. James is the author of twenty previous books, most of which have been filmed for television and broadcast in the US and other countries. She spent thirty years in various departments of the British Civil Service, and has served as a magistrate and as a governor of the BBC. The recipient of many honors and prizes, she was created Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991 and was inducted into the International Crime Writing Hall of Fame in 2008. She divides her time between London and Oxford.
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Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist's latest - now in paperback
Home by Toni Morrison
"Haunting . . . [Morrison] maps the day-to-day lives of her characters with lyrical precision.... Home encapsulates all the themes that have fueled her fiction, from the early novels Sula and The Bluest Eye, through her dazzling masterwork, Beloved."
-- Michiko Kakutani
The New York Times
When Frank Money joined the army to escape his too-small world, he left behind his cherished and fragile little sister, Cee. After the war, his shattered life has no purpose until he hears that Cee is in danger.
Frank is a modern Odysseus returning to a 1950s America mined with lethal pitfalls for an unwary black man. As he journeys to his native Georgia in search of Cee, it becomes clear that their troubles began well before their wartime separation. Together, they return to their rural hometown of Lotus, where buried secrets are unearthed and where Frank learns at last what it means to be a man, what it takes to heal, and - above all - what it means to come home.
Toni Morrison is the author of ten novels; she has received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Historically detailed spy novel - now in paperback
Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd
"A tantalizing, fast-paced spy novel. . . . As seductive as it is, Waiting for Sunrise is no bodice-ripper. It's a brainteaser, charged with uncertainty and danger, electric with restraint."
--The New York Times Book Review
Vienna, 1913. Lysander Rief, a young English actor, becomes caught up in a feverish affair with a beautiful, enigmatic woman. When she goes to the police accusing him of rape, Lysander is mystified. But a carefully plotted getaway steadily dismantles Lysander's life.
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2012 Book Awards That You May Have Missed
So many wonderful awards in 2012, plus end-of-year "Best of the books" and "Top Tens" in every category imaginable!
Here are some other well-deserved 2012 book awards that may have slipped under the radar; let's give credit to (and add to our reading lists!) the following:
Costa Book Awards has five categories and is "is one of the  UK's most prestigious and popular literary prizes and recognises some of the most enjoyable books of the year by writers based in the UK and Ireland."
The Costa Book of the Year was Pure by Andrew Miller. This is a lovely Europa Edition title, "vividly realized fiction played out against the rich cacophony of Paris on the cusp of the French Revolution."
 The Edgar Award honors the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction and television. Mo Hayder's Gone won the 2012 Edgar Award for Best Novel.
Detective Jack Caffery's newest case seems like a routine carjacking, a crime he's seen plenty of times before until he realizes the sickening truth: the thief wasn't after the car, but the 11-year-old girl in the backseat. Meanwhile police diver Sergeant Flea Marley is pursuing her own theory of the case, and what she finds in an abandoned, half-submerged tunnel could put her in grave danger. The carjacker is always a step ahead of the Major Crime Investigation Unit, and as the chances for his victims grow slimmer, Jack and Flea race to fit the pieces together in time.
The National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction  was presented to Edith Pearlman for Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories.
In an essay on the NBCC website, Colette Bancroft writes "Pearlman's stories can capture the quotidian in sparkling prose, then suddenly submerge us in the irresistible dark force of dreams or fairy tales."
Pearlman's writing has won the PEN/Malamud Award, the Pushcart Prize (twice), the O.Henry Prize (three times), and the National Book Award for Fiction. Her work has been published numerous times in the Best American Short Stories annual anthologies.
 The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction is a national prize which honors the best published works of fiction by American citizens in a calendar year.
When the judges announced that the 2012 award was given to The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka, they called it "a precise, poetic novel that tells the story of Japanese picture brides brought to California from Japan in the early twentieth century."
The Hugo Award (voted on by science-fiction fans at the World  Science Fiction Convention) and the Nebula Award (given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) are awarded annually to works of science fiction literature. Oftentimes the same winner is selected for each award.
This was the case in 2012, when Jo Walton was given both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award for Among Others. This novel is the compelling story of a young woman struggling to escape a troubled childhood, a brilliant diary of first encounters with the great novels of modern fantasy and SF, and a spellbinding tale of escape from ancient enchantment.
Among Others is a wonderful "cross-over" book, which will appeal to both Young Adult and Adult readers of science fiction.
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