New Books for a New Year - 2010!

For those of you who made a New Year's resolution to read more, we have good news! There is a long list of new releases due out this month that should whet any appetite. From memoirs to historical fiction to short story collections, we will have the latest from the likes of Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love), Anne Tyler (Breathing Lessons), Tracy Chevalier (Girl With a Pearl Earring), Roberto Bolano (2666) and Amy Bloom (Away), to name but a few. Give us a call, or watch your weekly email for exact release dates. If you can't come by the store that day, call or email us and we will put your heart's desire on hold, or mail it to you! Happy New Year of Reading to All!!

One of the most eagerly anticipated releases of the new year, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage is Elizabeth Gilbert's follow-up to her phenomenally successful Eat, Pray, Love. At the end of that memoir, the author had fallen madly in love with a Brazilian-born man of Austrian citizenship who lived in Indonesia, but both she and her beloved were survivors of painful divorces and had vowed never to marry. When immigration issues in the United States force the issue, Gilbert attempts to confront her fears of marriage head on, and to determine, through historical research, interviews, and much personal reflection, just what this stubbornly enduring institution of matrimony is all about. Told with her trademark wit, intelligence and compassion, Committed is a celebration of love with all the complexity and consequence that real love, in the real world, entails. 

What would a new year be without a new novel from Joyce Carol Oates? A Fair Maiden, this prolific author's latest, is a gothic romance of sorts between a 16-year-old nanny and the elderly, wealthy Mr. Kidder with plot twists and turns aplenty.

Roberto Bolaño was widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry, before dying in July 2003 at the age of 50. Translations of his work, especially The Savage Detectives, and the more recent 2666, have won wide acclaim. Monsieur Pain offers more to his legions of fans. Set in 1938, a Peruvian poet suffers an from a mysterious illness and is treated by the equally mysterious Mesmerist Pierre Pain.

Fans of historical fiction in general, and Girl With a Pearl Earring specifically, will cheer the release of Tracy Chevalier's latest, Remarkable Creatures.  When Mary Anning, an eccentric, working-class woman on the southern coast of England uncovers an unusual fossilized skeleton in the cliffs near her home in 1810, she sets the religious fathers on edge, the townspeople to vicious gossip, and the scientific world alight. 

The Unbearable Lightness of Scones is the eagerly anticipated new novel in the bestselling 44 Scotland Street series, features all the quirky characters we have come to know and love in an entertaining tale set in the beautiful, stoic city of Edinburgh. 

in Noah's Compass, Pulitzer Prize winner Tyler (Breathing Lessons) offers a wise, gently humorous, and deeply compassionate novel about a schoolteacher, forced to retire at sixty-one, and how he comes to terms with the final phase of his life. Tyler's ability to reveal the everyman in her characters, and the everyday in their lives, is what makes her novels resonate so deeply with so many. 

Joshua Ferris's first novel, Then We Came to the End, won the PEN/Hemingway Award, was a National Book Award finalist, and was named one of the 5 best works of fiction by the New York Times in 2007. In The Unnamed, he switches from office politics to a tale about a marriage and a family and the unseen forces of nature and desire that seem to threaten them both. 

For those who enjoyed Kostova's The Historian, comes this sophomore effort, The Swan Thieves, in which renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and so becomes the patient of psychiatrist Andrew Marlow. To understand the secret that torments the genius painter, Marlowe embarks on a journey that leads him into the lives of the women closest to Oliver and a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism. 

From Gail Godwin, three-time National Book Award finalist and bestselling author of Evensong and The Finishing School, comes a new novel of Catholic school girls and the nuns who oversee them. Unfinished Desires tells of subtleties of friendships, rivalries and loyalites between teenage girls, their ambivalence toward religion and their struggles to define themselves as they grow into adulthood. 

Short story collections have been all the rage in 2009, and that trend may continue into the new year with offerings from Amy Bloom (Away) and T.C. Boyle (Talk, Talk, The Women.) in Where the God of Love Hangs Out, Bloom writes of love, in its many forms and complexities through interconnected stories that illuminate the mysteries of passion, family, and friendship. In contrast, nature is the main force in T.C. Boyle's collection, Wild Child and Other Stories.  Forests, mudslides and wind-driven fires test his characters' emotional and physical endurance.