The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

Rinker Buck

Simon and Schuster

From "a virtuoso storyteller in a very American vein" (Phillip Lopate), The Oregon Trail is an epic account of traveling the length of the Oregon Trail the old-fashioned way--in a covered wagon with a team of mules, an audacious journey that hasn't been attempted in a century--which also chronicles the rich history of the trail, the people who made the migration, and its significance to the country. Spanning two thousand miles and traversing six states from Missouri to the Pacific coast, the Oregon Trail is the route that made America. In the fifteen years before the Civil War, when 400,000 pioneers used the trail to emigrate West--scholars still regard this as the largest land migration in history--it united the coasts, doubled the size of the country, and laid the groundwork for the railroads. Today, amazingly, the trail is all but forgotten. 

Rinker Buck is no stranger to grand adventures. His first travel narrative, Flight of Passage, was hailed by The New Yorker as "a funny, cocky gem of a book," and with The Oregon Trail he brings the most important route in American history back to glorious and vibrant life. Traveling from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Baker City, Oregon, over the course of four months, Buck is accompanied by three cantankerous mules, his boisterous brother, Nick, and an "incurably filthy" Jack Russell terrier named Olive Oyl. Along the way, they dodge thunderstorms in Nebraska, chase runaway mules across the Wyoming plains, scout more than five hundred miles of nearly vanished trail on foot, cross the Rockies, and make desperate fifty-mile forced marches for water. The Buck brothers repair so many broken wheels and axels that they nearly reinvent the art of wagon travel itself. They also must reckon with the ghost of their father, an eccentric yet loveable dreamer whose memory inspired their journey across the plains and whose premature death, many years earlier, has haunted them both ever since. 

But The Oregon Trail is much more than an epic adventure. It is also a lively and essential work of history that shatters the comforting myths about the trail years passed down by generations of Americans. Buck introduces readers to the largely forgotten roles played by trailblazing evangelists, friendly Indian tribes, female pioneers, bumbling U.S. Army cavalrymen, and the scam artists who flocked to the frontier to fleece the overland emigrants. Generous portions of the book are devoted to the history of old and appealing things like the mule and the wagon. We also learn how the trail accelerated American economic development. Most arresting, perhaps, are the stories of the pioneers themselves--ordinary families whose extraordinary courage and sacrifice made this country what it became. At once a majestic journey across the West, a significant work of history, and a moving personal saga, The Oregon Trail draws readers into the journey of a lifetime. It is a wildly ambitious work of nonfiction from a true American original. It is a book with a heart as big as the country it crosses.

Bulls Before Breakfast: Running with the Bulls and Celebrating Fiesta de San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain

Peter Milligan

St. Martin's Press

Ever since Ernest Hemingway popularized the fiesta de San Fermin with the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1926, the world has been enthralled with the concept of running with the bulls. For millions, running with the bulls remains on their bucket list, and for Hemingway fans it is a lifelong dream. For Peter N. Milligan, it is a way of life. Part memoir and part travel guide, Bulls Before Breakfast recounts Milligan's many adventures in Pamplona, Spain. In his dozen years of visiting the fiesta de San Fermin, Milligan has run with the bulls over 70 times and accumulated stories both thrilling and terrifying. "Bulls Before Breakfast" is the definitive guide to Pamplona, its famed fiesta, and the surrounding Kingdom of Navarra. It is also a memoir of two brothers running with the bulls and exploring every corner of the city, the countryside, the mountains, the beaches, and the famed restaurants of the Basque hinterland. The book focuses on local knowledge, and the hidden mysteries of this closed, private culture and community. Milligan has slowly pried open this trove of secrets over the past twelve years, all while refining the art of getting between the horns of a massive, perfect Spanish killing machine, el toro bravo, and running for his life.

The English Spy

Daniel Silva

Harper

Gabriel Allon returns in the summer's hottest thriller, from #1 New York Times bestselling author Daniel Silva. 

Stretched topless upon the foredeck, drink in hand, her flawless skin baking in the sun, was the most famous woman in the world. And one deck below, preparing an appetizer of tuna tartare, cucumber, and pineapple, was the man who was going to kill her. . . . She is an iconic member of the British Royal Family, beloved for her beauty and charitable works, resented by her former husband and his mother, the Queen of England. But when a bomb explodes aboard her holiday yacht, British intelligence turns to one man to track down her killer: legendary spy and assassin Gabriel Allon. 

Gabriel's target is Eamon Quinn, a master bomb maker and mercenary of death who sells his services to the highest bidder. Quinn is an elusive man of the shadows "a whisper in a half-lit chapel, a loose thread at the hem of a discarded garment" but fortunately Gabriel does not pursue him alone. At his side is Christopher Keller, a British commando turned professional assassin who knows Quinn's murderous handiwork all too well. The English Spy moves at light speed from the glamorous island of Saint Barthelemy to the mean streets of West Belfast to a cottage atop the cliffs of Cornwall that Gabriel holds dear. And though he does not realize it, he is stalking an old enemy a cabal of evil that wants nothing more than to see him dead. Gabriel will find it necessary to oblige them, for when a man is out for vengeance, death has its distinct advantages.

The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel

Taylor Stevens

Crown Publishing Group

Vanessa Michael Munroe, chameleon and information hunter, has a reputation for getting things done: dangerous and not quite legal things that have taken her undercover into some of the world's deadliest places. Still healing from a Somali hijacking gone wrong and a brutal attack that left her near death, Munroe joins her lover, Miles Bradford, in Japan where he's working as a security consultant protecting high-value technology from industrial espionage. In the domesticity of their routine she finds long sought-after peace until Bradford is arrested for murder, and the same interests who targeted him come after her, too. Searching for answers and fighting to stay alive, Munroe will soon discover how far she ll go to save Bradford from spending the next twenty years in locked-up isolation; how many laws she ll break when the truth seems worse than his lies; and who to trust and who she must kill. Because she's a strategist and hunter with a predator's instincts, and the man she loves has just stabbed her in the back.

Local Girls

Caroline Zancan

Riverhead Books

Maggie, Lindsey, and Nina have been friends for most of their lives. The girls grew up together in a dead-end Florida town on the outskirts of Orlando, and the love and loyalty they have for one another have been their only constants. Now nineteen and restless, the girls spend empty summer days bouncing between unfulfilling jobs, the beach, and their favorite local bar, The Shamrock. It's there that a chance encounter with a movie star on the last night of his life changes everything. Passing through Orlando, Sam Decker comes to The Shamrock seeking anonymity, but finds Maggie, Lindsey, and Nina instead. 

Obsessed with celebrity magazines that allow them a taste of the better lives they might have had, the girls revel in his company. But the appearance of Lila, the estranged former member of the girls group, turns the focus to their shared history, bringing all their old antagonisms to the surface Lila's defection to Orlando's country club school when her father came into some money, and the strange, enchanting boy she brought into their circle, who fundamentally altered dynamics that had been in play for years. By the night's end, the escalation of these long-buried issues forces them to see one another as the women they are now instead of the girls they used to be.

The Book of Strange New Things

Michel Faber

Hogarth

A monumental, genre-defying novel that David Mitchell calls "Michel Faber's second masterpiece," The Book of Strange New Things is a masterwork from a writer in full command of his many talents. It begins with Peter, a devoted man of faith, as he is called to the mission of a lifetime, one that takes him galaxies away from his wife, Bea. Peter becomes immersed in the mysteries of an astonishing new environment, overseen by an enigmatic corporation known only as USIC. His work introduces him to a seemingly friendly native population struggling with a dangerous illness and hungry for Peter's teachings his Bible is their book of strange new things. But Peter is rattled when Bea's letters from home become increasingly desperate: typhoons and earthquakes are devastating whole countries, and governments are crumbling. Bea's faith, once the guiding light of their lives, begins to falter. Suddenly, a separation measured by an otherworldly distance, and defined both by one newly discovered world and another in a state of collapse, is threatened by an ever-widening gulf that is much less quantifiable. While Peter is reconciling the needs of his congregation with the desires of his strange employer, Bea is struggling for survival. Their trials lay bare a profound meditation on faith, love tested beyond endurance, and our responsibility to those closest to us.

Us

David Nicholls

Harper Paperbacks

Douglas Petersen may be mild mannered, but behind his reserve lies a sense of humor that, against all odds, seduces beautiful Connie into a second date . . . and eventually into marriage. Now, almost three decades after their relationship first blossomed in London, they live more or less happily in the suburbs with their moody seventeen-year-old son, Albie. Then Connie tells Douglas that she thinks she wants a divorce. The timing couldn't be worse. Hoping to encourage her son's artistic interests, Connie has planned a monthlong tour of European capitals, a chance to experience the world's greatest works of art as a family, and she can't bring herself to cancel. Douglas is privately convinced that this landmark trip will rekindle the romance in the marriage, and may even help him to bond with Albie. From the streets of Amsterdam to the famed museums of Paris, from the cafes of Venice to the beaches of Barcelona, Douglas's odyssey brings Europe to vivid life just as he experiences a powerful awakening of his own. Will this summer be his last as a husband, or the moment when he turns his marriage, and maybe even his whole life, around?

The Map of Chaos

Felix J. Palma

Atria Books

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Map of Time and The Map of the Sky, the final installment in the award-winning trilogy that The Washington Post "called "a big, genre-bending delight." When the person he loves most dies in tragic circumstances, the mysterious protagonist of The Map of Chaos does all he can to speak to her one last time. A session with a renowned medium seems to offer the only solution, but the experience unleashes terrible forces that bring the world to the brink of disaster. Salvation can only be found in The Map of Chaos, an obscure book that he is desperate to uncover. In his search, he is given invaluable help by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Lewis Carroll, and of course by H. G. Wells, whose Invisible Man seems to have escaped from the pages of his famous novel to sow terror among mankind. They alone can discover the means to save the world and to find the path that will reunite the lovers separated by death. 

Proving once again that he is "a master of ingenious plotting" (Kirkus Reviews), Felix J. Palma brings together a cast of real and imagined literary characters in Victorian-Age London, when spiritualism is at its height. "The Map of Chaos" is a spellbinding adventure that mixes impossible loves, nonstop action, real ghosts, and fake mediums, all while paying homage to the giants of science fiction.