Life, Only Better

Anna Gavalda

Europa Editions

Mathilde is twenty-four. She has abandoned her studies in art history in lieu of a menial job and lives in a house she shares with twin sisters. One day she forgets her bag in a cafe and a week later an unknown man returns it to her. Following this encounter, Mathilde decides to throw caution to the wind and change her life entirely. Yann is twenty-six, a university graduate, unemployed. There may be better days ahead. Perhaps. While waiting for them, he works as a sales assistant in a home appliances store. He wouldn t say he is unhappy. But sometimes when he is crossing a bridge over the Seine River at night, he imagines jumping. One day he does a favor for one of his neighbors and is asked to stay for dinner as thanks. The following morning Yann throws caution to the wind and decides to change his life entirely.

Cross Justice

James Patterson

Little Brown and Company

When his cousin is accused of a heinous crime, Alex Cross returns to his North Carolina hometown for the first time in over three decades. As he tries to prove his cousin's innocence in a town where everyone seems to be on the take, Cross unearths a family secret that forces him to question everything he's ever known. Chasing a ghost he believed was long dead, Cross gets pulled into a case that has local cops scratching their heads and needing his help: a grisly string of socialite murders. Now he's hot on the trail of both a brutal killer, and the truth about his own past--and the answers he finds might be fatal.

The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters

Karl Rove

Simon and Schuster

From New York Times bestselling author and political mastermind Karl Rove comes a fresh look at President William McKinley, whose 1896 campaign ended a bitter period of political gridlock and reformed and modernized his party, thereby creating a governing majority that dominated American politics for the next thirty-six years. The 1896 political environment resembles that of today: A rapidly changing electorate affected by a growing immigrant population, an uncertain economy disrupted by new technologies, growing income inequality, and contentious issues the two parties could not resolve. McKinley found ways to address these challenges and win, which is why his campaign is so relevant to our politics now. McKinley, a Civil War hero who preferred The Major above any other title he was given, changed the arc of American history by running the first truly modern presidential campaign. Knowing his party could only win if it grew beyond its base, he reached out to diverse ethnic groups, including openly seeking the endorsement of Catholic leaders and advocating for black voting rights. Running on the slogan The People Against the Bosses, McKinley also took on the machine men who dominated his own party. He deployed campaign tactics still used today, including targeting voters with the best available technology. Above all, he offered bold, controversial answers to the nation's most pressing challenge how to make a new, more global economy work for every American and although this split his own party, he won the White House by sticking to his principles, defeating a charismatic champion of economic populism, William Jennings Bryan. The 1896 election is a compelling drama in its own right, but McKinley's strategies offer important lessons for both political parties today.

Travelling to Work: Diaries 1988 - 1998

Michael Palin

Thomas Dunne Books

As in Halfway to Hollywood and The Python Years, Travelling to Work contains a decade's worth of unedited, unabridged diary entries from multi-talented funnyman Michael Palin. In this volume, the last Palin has agreed to publish, the former Python documents his experience hosting a series of BBC travel documentaries even as he continues to develop new dimensions as a writer and actor. Python faithful will love Palin's candid comments and wry wit even as they are awed by his dogged work ethic and myriad accomplishments. From his work for the BBC to his dramatic portrayal of the headmaster on Alan Bleasdale's award-winning drama "GBH," to his success as screenwriter, playwright and novelist, these pages display a true modern-day Renaissance Man. Included as well are behind the scenes stories from the making of "Fierce Creatures, "the tumultuous follow-up to "A Fish Called Wanda, "along with Palin's reflections on dealings with his manager, editors and publishers--enough insider information to please any show business enthusiast. In short, Travelling to Work is a roller-coaster ride driven by the Palin hallmarks curiosity, a sense of adventure and unflappable cool demonstrating he is truly, in his own words, 'someone grounded and safe who can be tempted into almost anything.'

And Yet...: Essays

Christopher Hitchens

Simon and Schuster

The death of Christopher Hitchens in December 2011 prematurely silenced a voice that was among the most admired of contemporary writers. For more than forty years, Hitchens delivered to numerous publications on both sides of the Atlantic essays that were astonishingly wide-ranging and provocative. The judges for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, posthumously bestowed on Hitchens, praised him for the way he wrote with fervor about the books and writers he loved and with unbridled venom about ideas and political figures he loathed. He could write, the judges went on to say, with undisguised brio, mining the resources of the language as if alert to every possibility of color and inflection. He was, as Benjamin Schwarz, his editor at The Atlantic magazine, recalled, slashing and lively, biting and funny and with a nuanced sensibility and a refined ear that he kept in tune with his encyclopedic knowledge and near photographic memory of English poetry. And as Michael Dirda, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, observed, Hitchens was a flail and a scourge, but also a gift to readers everywhere. The author of five previous volumes of selected writings, including the international bestseller Arguably, Hitchens left at his death nearly 250,000 words of essays not yet published in book form. And Yet assembles a selection that usefully adds to Hitchens's oeuvre. It ranges from the literary to the political and is, by turns, a banquet of entertaining and instructive delights, including essays on Orwell, Lermontov, Chesterton, Fleming, Naipaul, Rushdie, Pamuk, and Dickens, among others, as well as his laugh-out-loud self-mocking makeover. The range and quality of Hitchens's essays transcend the particular occasions for which they were originally written. Often prescient, always pugnacious, and formidably learned, Hitchens was a polemicist for the ages. With this posthumous volume, his reputation and his readers will continue to grow.

Gratitude

Oliver Sacks

Knopf Publishing Group

No writer has succeeded in capturing the medical and human drama of illness has honestly and as eloquently as Oliver Sacks. During the last few months of his life, he wrote a set of essays in which he movingly explored his feelings about completing a life and coming to terms with his own death. It is the fate of every human being, Sacks writes, to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death. Together, these four essays form an ode to the uniqueness of each human being and to gratitude for the gift of life.

Over the Top and Back: The Autobiography

Tom Jones

Blue Rider Press

Across six decades, Sir Tom Jones has maintained a vital career in a risky, unstable business notorious for the short lives of its artists. With a drive that comes from nothing but the love for what he does, he breaks through and then wrestles with the vagaries of the music industry, the nature of success and its inevitable consequences. Having recorded an expansive body of work and performed with fellow artists from across the spectrum and across every popular music genre, from rock, pop and dance to country, blues and soul, the one constant throughout has been his unique musical gifts and unmistakable voice. But how did a boy from a Welsh coal-mining family attain success across the globe? And how has he survived the twists and turns of fame and fortune to not only stay exciting, but actually become more credible and interesting with age? In this, his first ever autobiography, Tom revisits his past and tells the tale of his journey from wartime Pontypridd to LA and beyond. He reveals the stories behind the ups and downs of his fascinating and remarkable life, from the early heydays to the subsequent fallow years to his later period of artistic renaissance. It's the story nobody else knows or understands, told by the man who lived it, and written the only way he knows how: simply and from the heart. Raw, honest, funny and powerful, this is a memoir like no other from one of the world's greatest ever singing talents.