Everybody's Fool

Richard Russo

Knopf Publishing Group

Richard Russo will be In Conversation on Tuesday, May 17, 2016.  Full details here!

A best-selling and beloved author, at the very top of his game, now returns to North Bath, in upstate New York, and the characters who made Nobody's Fool, his third novel, his first great success. The irresistible Sully, who in the intervening years has come by some unexpected good fortune, is now staring down a VA cardiologist's estimate that he only has a year or two left, and he's busy as hell keeping the news from the most important people in his life: Ruth, the married woman he carried on with for years... the ultra-hapless Rub Squeers, who worries that he and Sully aren't still best friends... Sully's son and grandson, for whom he was mostly an absentee figure... Doug Raymer, now chief of police and still obsessing over the identity of the man his wife might have been having an affair with before she died in a freak accident... North Bath's mayor, the former academic Gus Moynihan, who also has a pressing wife problem... and then there's Carl Roebuck, whose lifelong run of failing upwards might now come to ruin. Everybody's Fool is filled with humor, heart, hard times, and characters whom you can't help but love for all their faults. It is classic Richard Russo, and a crowning achievement from one of the greatest storytellers of our time.

Imagine Me Gone

Adam Haslett

Little Brown and Company

When Margaret's fiance, John, is hospitalized for depression in 1960s London, she faces a choice: carry on with their plans despite what she now knows of his condition, or back away from the suffering it may bring her. She decides to marry him. Imagine Me Gone is the unforgettable story of what unfolds from this act of love and faith. At the heart of it is their eldest son, Michael, a brilliant, anxious music fanatic who makes sense of the world through parody. Over the span of decades, his younger siblings -- the savvy and responsible Celia and the ambitious and tightly controlled Alec -- struggle along with their mother to care for Michael's increasingly troubled and precarious existence. Told in alternating points of view by all five members of the family, this searing, gut-wrenching, and yet frequently hilarious novel brings alive with remarkable depth and poignancy the love of a mother for her children, the often inescapable devotion siblings feel toward one another, and the legacy of a father's pain in the life of a family.

Zero K

Don DeLillo

Scribner Book Company

Jeffrey Lockhart's father, Ross, is a billionaire in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to a life of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say an uncertain farewell to her as she surrenders her body. We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? Isn t it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate? These are the questions that haunt the novel and its memorable characters, and it is Ross Lockhart, most particularly, who feels a deep need to enter another dimension and awake to a new world. For his son, this is indefensible. Jeff, the book's narrator, is committed to living, to experiencing the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth. Don DeLillo's seductive, spectacularly observed and brilliant new novel weighs the darkness of the world terrorism, floods, fires, famine, plague against the beauty and humanity of everyday life; love, awe, the intimate touch of earth and sun.

Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

Chris Cleave

Simon & Schuster

New from the Bestselling Author of Little Bee!

London, 1939. The day war is declared, Mary North leaves finishing school unfinished, goes straight to the War Office, and signs up. Tom Shaw decides to ignore the war until he learns his roommate Alistair Heath has unexpectedly enlisted. Then the conflict can no longer be avoided. Young, bright, and brave, Mary is certain she d be a marvelous spy. When she is bewilderingly made a teacher, she finds herself defying prejudice to protect the children her country would rather forget. Tom, meanwhile, finds that he will do anything for Mary. And when Mary and Alistair meet, it is love, as well as war, that will test them in ways they could not have imagined, entangling three lives in violence and passion, friendship and deception, inexorably shaping their hopes and dreams. Set in London during the years of 1939 1942, when citizens had slim hope of survival, much less victory; and on the strategic island of Malta, which was daily devastated by the Axis barrage, Everyone Brave is Forgiven features little-known history and a perfect wartime love story inspired by the real-life love letters between Chris Cleave's grandparents. This dazzling novel dares us to understand that, against the great theater of world events, it is the intimate losses, the small battles, the daily human triumphs that change us most.

The Sport of Kings

C. E. Morgan

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Hellsmouth, an indomitable Thoroughbred with the blood of Triple Crown winners in her veins, runs for the glory of the Forge family, one of Kentucky's oldest and most powerful dynasties. Henry Forge has partnered with his daughter, Henrietta, in an endeavor of raw obsession: to breed the next superhorse, the next Secretariat. But when Allmon Shaughnessy, an ambitious young black man, comes to work on their farm, the violence of the Forges history and the exigencies of appetite are brought starkly into view. Entangled in fear, prejudice, and lust, the three tether their personal dreams of glory to the speed and grace of Hellsmouth. A spiraling tale of wealth and poverty, racism and rage, The Sport of Kings is an unflinching portrait of lives cast in shadow by the enduring legacy of slavery. C. E. Morgan, who received a 2016 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction, has given life to a tale as mythic and fraught as the South itself a moral epic for our time.

Heat & Light

Jennifer Haigh

Ecco Press

Acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Haigh returns to the Pennsylvania town at the center of her iconic novel Baker Towers in this ambitious, achingly human story of modern America and the conflicting forces at its heart a bold, moving drama of hope and desperation, greed and power, big business and small-town families. Forty years ago, Bakerton coal fueled the country. Then the mines closed, and the town wore away like a bar of soap. Now Bakerton has been granted a surprise third act: it sits squarely atop the Marcellus Shale, a massive deposit of natural gas. To drill or not to drill? Prison guard Rich Devlin leases his mineral rights to finance his dream of farming. He doesn t count on the truck traffic and nonstop noise, his brother's skepticism or the paranoia of his wife, Shelby, who insists the water smells strange and is poisoning their frail daughter. Meanwhile his neighbors, organic dairy farmers Mack and Rena, hold out against the drilling until a passionate environmental activist disrupts their lives. Told through a cast of characters whose lives are increasingly bound by the opposing interests that underpin the national debate, Heat and Light depicts a community blessed and cursed by its natural resources.

15th Affair

James Patterson with Maxine Paetro

Little Brown and Company

Detective Lindsay Boxer chases an elusive suspect...her husband. As she settles into motherhood and a happy marriage, Lindsay Boxer thinks she has found domestic bliss. But when a beautiful, alluring blonde woman with links to the CIA disappears from the scene of a brutal murder at a downtown luxury hotel, Lindsay's life begins to unravel. Before she can track down the woman for questioning, a plane crash plunges San Francisco into chaos and Lindsay's husband Joe vanishes. The deeper she digs, the more Lindsay suspects that Joe shares a secret past with the mystery blonde. Thrown into a tailspin and questioning everything she thought she knew, Lindsay turns to the Women's Murder Club for help as she tries to uncover the truth.

White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World

Geoff Dyer

Pantheon Books

From one of our most original writers comes an expansive and exacting book firmly grounded but elegant, often hilarious, and always inquisitive about travel, unexpected awareness, and the questions we ask when we step outside ourselves. Geoff Dyer's restless search "for what? "is unclear, even to him continues in this series of fascinating adventures and pilgrimages: with a tour guide who may not be a tour guide in the Forbidden City in Beijing; with friends in New Mexico, where D. H. Lawrence famously claimed to have had his greatest experience from the outside world; with a hitchhiker picked up on the way from White Sands; with Don Cherry (or a photo of him, at any rate) at the Watts Towers in Los Angeles. Weaving stories about places to which he has recently traveled with images and memories that have persisted since childhood, Dyer tries to work out what a certain place a certain way of marking the landscape means; what it's trying to tell us; what we go to it for.

The Romanovs: 1613-1918

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Knopf Publishing Group

The Romanovs were the most successful dynasty of modern times, ruling a sixth of the world's surface for three centuries. How did one family turn a war-ruined principality into the world's greatest empire? And how did they lose it all? This is the intimate story of twenty tsars and tsarinas, some touched by genius, some by madness, but all inspired by holy autocracy and imperial ambition. Simon Sebag Montefiore's gripping chronicle reveals their secret world of unlimited power and ruthless empire-building, overshadowed by palace conspiracy, family rivalries, sexual decadence and wild extravagance, with a global cast of adventurers, courtesans, revolutionaries and poets, from Ivan the Terrible to Tolstoy and Pushkin, to Bismarck, Lincoln, Queen Victoria and Lenin. To rule Russia was both imperial-sacred mission and poisoned chalice: six of the last twelve tsars were murdered. Peter the Great tortured his own son to death while making Russia an empire, and dominated his court with a dining club notable for compulsory drunkenness, naked dwarfs and fancy dress. Catherine the Great overthrew her own husband (who was murdered soon afterward), enjoyed affairs with a series of young male favorites, conquered Ukraine and fascinated Europe. Paul I was strangled by courtiers backed by his own son, Alexander I, who in turn faced Napoleon's invasion and the burning of Moscow, then went on to take Paris. Alexander II liberated the serfs, survived five assassination attempts and wrote perhaps the most explicit love letters ever composed by a ruler. The Romanovs climaxes with a fresh, unforgettable portrayal of Nicholas II and Alexandra, the rise and murder of Rasputin, war and revolution and the harrowing massacre of the entire family.

Paul McCartney: The Life

Philip Norman

Little Brown and Company

The definitive Paul McCartney biography, written with his approval by bestselling biographer Philip Norman. Since the age of twenty-one, Paul McCartney has lived one of the ultimate rock-n-roll lives played out on the most public of stages. Now, Paul's story is told by rock music's foremost biographer, with McCartney's consent and access to family members and close friends who have never spoken on the record before. PAUL McCARTNEY reveals the complex character behind the facade and sheds new light on his childhood--blighted by his mother's death but redeemed by the father who introduced him to music. This is the first definitive account of Paul's often troubled partnership with John Lennon, his personal trauma after the Beatles' breakup, and his subsequent struggle to get back to the top with Wings--which nearly got him murdered in Africa and brought him nine days in a Tokyo jail. Readers will learn about his marriage to Linda, including their much-criticized musical collaboration, and a moving account of her death. Packed with new information and critical insights.