New Books Coming Your Way, August 9, 2016

Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson
192 p. (Fiction; African-American)

Set in 1970s Brooklyn, the acclaimed, bestselling National Book Award-winning author of Brown Girl Dreaming delivers a searing tale of friendship, hopes, and the realities of an adulthood coming too soon.

Running into a long ago friend, sets memory in motion for August, a woman who once lived in a Brooklyn where friendship was everything—until it wasn’t anymore. For August and her girls, Brooklyn was a place where they believed as they walked the streets and confided in each other, that they were beautiful, talented, brilliant—a part of a future that belonged to them. But beneath the veneer, there was another Brooklyn, a dangerous place where men reached for them in dark hallways, where ghosts haunted their nights and mothers disappeared. A world where madness was just a sunset away and fathers found hope in religion.

Woodson heartbreakingly illuminates the formative time between childhood and becoming an adult—the promise and peril of growing up—and exquisitely renders a powerful, indelible and fleeting friendship that united four young lives.

Purchase: Amazon | B & N | Book Depository | IndieBound

Known and Strange Things: Essays by Teju Cole
416 p. (Non-fiction; essays)

A blazingly intelligent first book of essays from the award-winning author of Open City and "Every Day Is for the Thief. With this collection of more than fifty pieces on politics, photography, travel, history, and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today's most powerful and original voices. On page after page, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and historical moments, taking in subjects from Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and W. G. Sebald to Instagram, Barack Obama, and Boko Haram. Cole brings us new considerations of James Baldwin in the age of Black Lives Matter; the African American photographer Roy DeCarava, who, forced to shoot with film calibrated exclusively for white skin tones, found his way to a startling and true depiction of black subjects; and (in an essay that inspired both praise and push back when it first appeared) the White Savior Industrial Complex, the system by which African nations are sentimentally aided by an America developed on pillage.

Persuasive and provocative, erudite yet accessible, "Known and Strange Things" is an opportunity to live within Teju Cole's wide-ranging enthusiasms, curiosities, and passions, and a chance to see the world in surprising and affecting new frames.

Purchase: Amazon | B & N | Book Depository | IndieBound

I Hid My Voice by Parinoush Saniee
304 p. (Fiction; Iran)

Four-year-old Shahaab has not started talking. The family doctor believes there is no cause for concern; nevertheless, Shahaab is ridiculed by others who call him “dumb.” In his innocent and deeply hurt child’s mind, he begins to believe that the “good” and “intelligent” children like his older brother are their fathers’ sons. On the other hand, children like him who are “clumsy” and “problematic” are their mothers’ sons.

No one in the family can understand Shahaab except his maternal grandmother, who seems to possess the understanding and the kindness he so desperately craves. Their growing bond leads to a deep friendship in which Shahaab is able to experience some happiness and finally find his voice.

Purchase: Amazon | B & N | Book Depository | IndieBound

The Altogether Unexpected Disappearance of Atticus Craftsman by Mamen Sánchez
336 p. (Fiction; Spain)

Atticus Craftsman never travels without a supply of Earl Grey, an electric kettle, and a teacup—so he makes sure he has packed all three after his father, distinguished publisher of Craftsman & Co., sends him to Madrid to shut down a failing literary magazine, Librarte. But when nobody has heard from him in three months, his father knows something must be very wrong.

Fortunately, Inspector Manchego is on the case. Manchego gets to work unraveling the mystery of the Englishman’s disappearance, but there to block him at every turn are the five fiery and close-knit Spanish women who run Librarte and who will do anything to keep their jobs. From a kidnapping to the “discovery” of the long-lost poems of Federico García Lorca, Manchego and Atticus are taken on a madcap journey through the narrow streets of Madrid and down to the bohemian heart of Andalucía.

A charming tale with linguistic mishaps, literary intrigue, a clash of cultures, and an unexpected romance, The Altogether Unexpected Disappearance of Atticus Craftsman is at once a humorous literary caper and a touching love story, making for an altogether clever and delightfully different read.

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The Cauliflower by Nicola Barker
304 p. (Fiction; India)

He is only four years older, but still I call him Uncle, and when I am with Uncle I have complete faith in him. I would die for Uncle. I have an indescribable attraction towards Uncle. . . . It was ever thus.

To the world, he is Sri Ramakrishna--godly avatar, esteemed spiritual master, beloved guru (who would prefer not to be called a guru), irresistible charmer. To Rani Rashmoni, she of low caste and large inheritance, he is the brahmin fated to defy tradition and preside over the temple she dares to build, six miles north of Calcutta, along the banks of the Hooghly for Ma Kali, goddess of destruction. But to Hriday, his nephew and longtime caretaker, he is just Uncle--maddening, bewildering Uncle, prone to entering ecstatic trances at the most inconvenient of times, known to sneak out to the forest at midnight to perform dangerous acts of self-effacement, who must be vigilantly safeguarded not only against jealous enemies and devotees with ulterior motives, but also against that most treasured yet insidious of sulfur-rich vegetables: the cauliflower.

Rather than puzzling the shards of history and legend together, Barker shatters the mirror again and rearranges the pieces. The result is a biographical novel viewed through a kaleidoscope. Dazzlingly inventive and brilliantly comic, irreverent and mischievous, The Cauliflower delivers us into the divine playfulness of a 21st-century literary master.

Purchase: Amazon | B & N | Book Depository | IndieBound

#ComingAttractions: Books I Can't Wait to Read (Winter/Spring 2014)

Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina
Misty Copeland
On Sale Date: March 4, 2014

Summary:  In this deeply felt and beautifully written memoir, Misty Copeland reveals her inspiring and at times heartbreaking journey to become the third African-American soloist in the history of the American Ballet Theatre.




Boy, Snow, Bird
Helen Oyeyemi
On Sale Date: March 4, 2014

Summary:  In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty—the opposite of the life she’s left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman.

A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she’d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy’s daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African Americans passing for white. Among them, Boy, Snow, and Bird confront the tyranny of the mirror to ask how much power surfaces really hold.

Safe With Me
Amy Hatvany
On Sale Date: March 4, 2014

Summary:  The screech of tires brought Hannah Scott’s world as she knew it to a devastating end. Even a year after she signed the papers to donate her daughter’s organs, Hannah is still reeling with grief when she unexpectedly stumbles into the life of the Bell family, whose child, Maddie, survived only because hers had died. Mesmerized by this fragile connection to her own daughter and afraid to reveal who she actually is, Hannah develops a surprising friendship with Maddie’s mother, Olivia.



Every Day is for the Thief
Teju Cole
On Sale Date: March 25, 2014

Summary:  Visiting Lagos after many years away, Teju Cole's unnamed narrator rediscovers his hometown as both a foreigner and a local. A young writer uncertain of what he wants to say, the man moves through tableaus of life in one of the most dynamic cities in the world: he hears the muezzin's call to prayer in the early morning light, and listens to John Coltrane during the late afternoon heat. He witnesses teenagers diligently perpetrating e-mail frauds from internet cafes, longs after a woman reading Michael Ondaatje on a public bus, and visits the impoverished National Museum. Along the way, he reconnects with old school friends and his family, who force him to ask himself profound questions of personal and national history. Over long, wandering days, the narrator compares present-day Lagos to the Lagos of his memory, and in doing so reveals changes that have taken place in himself.

Things I Should Have Told My Daughter: Lies, Lessons & Love Affairs
Pearl Cleage
On Sale Date: April 8, 2014

Summary:  Though born and raised in Detroit, it was in Atlanta that Cleage encountered the forces that would most shape her experience. Married to Michael Lomax, now head of the United Negro College Fund, she worked with Maynard Jackson, Atlanta’s first African-American mayor. Lies, Lessons & Love Affairs charts not only the political fights, but also the pull she began to feel to focus on her own passions, including writing—a pull that led her away from Lomax as she grappled with ideas of feminism and self-fulfillment. This fascinating memoir follows her journey from a columnist for a local weekly (bought by Larry Flynt) to a playwright and Hollywood script writer, an artist at the crossroads of culture and politics whose circle came to include luminaries like Richard Pryor, Avery Brooks, Phylicia Rashad, Shirley Franklin, and Jesse Jackson. By the time Oprah Winfrey picked What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day as a favorite, Cleage had long since arrived as a writer of renown.