The Circle by Dave Eggers. The San Francisco-based writer (
A Hologram for the King, Zeitoun, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) offers up a compelling cautionary tale
about power and the digital age. The story focuses on a woman working for the Circle, the world's most powerful internet company, who is seduced by the perks and the feel-good vibe the company puts forth. But, in a novel that blends social satire with frightening plausibility, her new life turns out to be more of a brave new world.
Fin and Lady by Catherine Schine. Just for fun, you might try this new novel from an author (
The Three Weissmanns of Westport) who deals wisely with family ups and downs. Here's how one independent bookseller describes it:
"Fin is a charmer. The bright 11-year-old boy's life changes when his mother dies and
he is consigned to the care of his older half-sister, Lady. Fin leaves behind the bucolic
Connecticut countryside of his mother's dairy farm and heads to Greenwich Village. Lady might be older, but it soon becomes clear that Fin is the protector of his spirited sister. Set in the 1960s, the era of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, this delightful story is a comic romp about the bonds between a brother and a sister."
- Deon Stonehouse, Sunriver Books & Music, Sunriver, OR
Inferno by Dan Brown. For fans of
The Da Vinci Code and the adventures of the harried but heroic Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon, Brown's latest is now in softcover. Our peerless
protagonist awakens in an Italian hospital, disoriented and with no recollection of the past 36 hours, including the origin of the macabre object hidden in his belongings. With a relentless female assassin trailing them through Florence, Langdon and his resourceful doctor, Sienna Brooks, are forced to flee. Embarking on a harrowing journey, they must unravel a series of codes, which are the work of a brilliant scientist whose obsession with the end of the world is matched only by his passion for one of the most influential masterpieces ever written, Dante Alighieri's
The Inferno.
, was to my mind as good a legal thriller as any written by the master of the genre at the time, John Grisham. With Natchez Burning, however, Iles has raised his game a notch and produced an 800-page thriller that is riveting, fast-paced, and impossible to put down (unless it gets too heavy).
with whom he worked in the dark days of the 1960s. Worse yet, Dad refuses to discuss the matter with a son eager to investigate and exonerate, so Penn sets off on a quest for the truth. His search sends him deep into his father's past, where a sexually charged secret lies waiting to tear their family apart. Unfortunately, it also embroils him in a decades-long conspiracy of greed and murder involving the vicious Double Eagles, an offshoot of the KKK controlled by some of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the state. Penn teams up with a determined reporter to expose the bad guys and clear his father's good name, but that proves much easier said than done.