New in hardcover The Lost Saints of Tennessee A Novel by Amy Franklin-Willis Indie Next Pick (February 2012) With enormous heart and dazzling agility, debut novelist Amy Franklin-Willis expertly mines the fault lines in one Southern working-class family. Driven by the soulful and intrepid voices of forty-two-year-old Ezekiel Cooper and his mother, Lillian, The Lost Saints of Tennessee journeys from the 1940s to the 1980s as it follows Zeke’s evolution from anointed son to honorable sibling to unhinged middle-aged man. After Zeke loses his twin brother in a mysterious drowning and his wife to divorce, only ghosts remain in his hometown of Clayton, Tennessee. Zeke makes the decision to leave town in a final attempt to escape his pain, puts his two treasured possessions—a childhood copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tucker, his dead brother’s ancient dog—into his truck, and heads east. He leaves behind two young daughters and his estranged mother, who reveals her own conflicting view of the Cooper family story in a vulnerable but spirited voice stricken by guilt over old sins as she clings to the hope that her family isn’t beyond repair. When Zeke finds refuge with his sympathetic cousins in Virginia horse country, divine acts in the form of severe weather, illness, and a new romance collide, leading Zeke to a crossroads where he must decide the fate of his family —either by clinging to the way life was or moving toward what life might be. Written with abundant charm, warmth, and authority, The Lost Saints of Tennessee is the story of a unique brotherhood and a moving consideration of the ways grief can first devastate and then restore. New in hardcover The Retribution by Val McDermid Val McDermid is a world-class crime writer whose books have sold millions of copies worldwide, making her a household name. Now joining the Atlantic Monthly Press list for the first time, she arrives with a chilling, high-velocity thriller featuring her immensely popular characters, Dr. Tony Hill and Carol Jordan. Clinical psychologist Tony Hill has had a good run. He and police detective Carol Jordan have put away scores of dangerous criminals and have a clearance rate that colleagues envy or resent. But there is one serial killer who has shaped and defined their careers, a person whose evil surpasses all others: Jacko Vance, an ex-celebrity and sociopath whose brilliance and utter lack of remorse have never left Tony’s mind in the ten years Vance has been locked up. Now Jacko has broken out of prison and, with a mind even more twisted and cunning than before, he is focused on wreaking revenge on Tony and Carol for the years he has spent in prison. They don’t know when Jacko will strike, or where. All they know is that he will cause them to feel fear like they’ve never known. A chilling, utterly gripping tour de force, The Retribution is the ideal introduction or reintroduction to the world of Tony Hill and Carol Jordan. It is an unforgettable read. New in paperback Gone by Mo Hayder An Indie Next List Notable selection (February 2011) Finalist for the 2010 CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger An Edgar Award Nominee for Best Novel Praised as a “maestro of the sinister” by the New York Daily News— Mo Hayder delivers her most suspenseful novel to date. By turns thrilling and horrifying, Gone follows the investigation of a brilliant and twisted carjacker with a disturbing game to play. Jack Caffery’s newest case seems like a routine carjacking, a crime he’s seen plenty of times before. But as the hours tick by and his investigation morphs into a nightmare, he realizes the sickening truth: the thief wasn’t after the car, but the eleven-year-old girl in the backseat. Meanwhile, police diver Sergeant Flea Marley is pursuing her own theory of the case, and what she finds in an abandoned, halfsubmerged tunnel could put her in grave danger. The carjacker is always a step ahead of the Major Crime Investigation Unit, toying with their minds in taunting letters, and ready to strike again. As the chances for his victims grow slimmer, Jack and Flea race to fit the pieces together in time. Gone is Mo Hayder at her terrifying best. Each dark and captivating twist reveals a new dimension to this tight-knit plot, burrowing deeper into the chilling and clever world Mo Hayder creates. New in hardcover A Good Man by Guy Vanderhaeghe A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of the Year A National Post Best Book of the Year Long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize A Canadian best seller Best-selling author Guy Vanderhaeghe’s final installment in his frontier trilogy is at once a riveting account of personal and historic revenge, and the endearing story of an unlikely love affair. Wesley Case, a former soldier and the son of a Canadian lumber baron, sets out into the untamed borderlands between Canada and the United States to escape a dark secret from his past. He settles in Montana where he hopes to buy a cattle ranch, and where he begins work as a liaison between the American and Canadian militaries in an effort to contain the Native Americans’ unresolved anger in the wake of the Civil War. Amid the brutal violence that erupts between the Sioux warriors and U.S. forces, Case’s plan for a quiet ranch life is further compromised by an unexpected dilemma: he falls in love with the beautiful, outspoken, and recently widowed Ada Tarr. It’s a budding romance that soon inflames the jealousy of Ada’s quiet and deeply disturbed admirer, Michael Dunne. When the American government unleashes its final assault on the Indians, Dunne commences his own vicious plan for vengeance in one last feverish attempt to claim Ada as his own. Vanderhaeghe expertly weaves a gritty account of the end of the Wild West with an intimate tale of love, retribution, and rebirth. Beautifully imagined and deeply moving, A Good Man is Vanderhaeghe’s triumphant conclusion to his venerated turn-of-the-century epic. New in hardcover Rez Life by David Treuer Celebrated novelist David Treuer has gained a reputation for writing fiction that expands the horizons of Native American literature. In Rez Life, his first full-length work of nonfiction, Treuer brings a novelist’s storytelling skill and an eye for detail to a complex and subtle examination of Native American reservation life, past and present. With authoritative research and reportage, Treuer illuminates misunderstood contemporary issues of sovereignty, treaty rights, and natural-resource conservation. He traces the convoluted waves of public policy that have deracinated, disenfranchised, and exploited Native Americans, exposing the tension and conflict that has marked the historical relationship between the United States government and the Native American population. Through the eyes of students, teachers, government administrators, lawyers, and tribal court judges, he shows how casinos, tribal government, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs have transformed the landscape of Native American life. A member of the Ojibwe of northern Minnesota, Treuer grew up on the Leech Lake Reservation, but was educated in mainstream America. Treuer traverses the boundaries of American and Indian identity as he explores crime and poverty, casinos and wealth, and the preservation of his native language and culture. Rez Life is a strikingly original work of history and reportage, a must read for anyone interested in the Native American story. New in hardcover Ragnarok by A.S. Byatt In this brilliant retelling of the Norse myth about the end of the world, the award-winning author of Possession and The Children’s Book unleashes a story of the destruction of life on this planet and the end of the gods themselves. Just as Wagner used this dramatic and catastrophic struggle for the climax of his Ring Cycle, so A. S. Byatt now reinvents it in all its intensity and glory. As the bombs of the Blitz rain down on Britain, one young girl is evacuated to the countryside. She is struggling to make sense of her new wartime life. Then she is given a copy of Asgard and the Gods—a book of ancient Norse myths—and her inner and outer worlds are transformed. How could this child know that fifty years on, many of the birds and flowers she took for granted on her walks to school would become extinct? War, natural disaster, reckless gods, and the recognition of impermanence in the world are just some of the threads that Byatt weaves into this most timely of books. Linguistically stunning and imaginatively abundant, Ragnarök is a landmark piece of storytelling from one of the world’s great writers. New in paperback Blueprints of the Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot Ryan Boudinot is one of the most promising young novelists of his generation, called “wickedly talented” (The Boston Globe ) and “darkly funny” (The New York Times Book Review). Blueprints of the Afterlife is a tour de force—part George Saunders, part Philip K. Dick; a novel that marries absurd satire with the high-concept storytelling of slipstream sci-fi. It is the future. The end of the world is no more than a distorted memory called “the Age of F***ed-up Shit.” A sentient glacier has wiped out most of North America’s cities. Medical care is supplied by networked nanotechnology, and human nervous systems can be hacked. Abby Fogg is a film archivist with a niggling feeling that her life is not her own. And she’s right. Al Skinner is a former mercenary for the Boeing Army, who’s dragged his war baggage behind him for nearly a century. Woo-jin Kan is a virtuoso dishwasher with the Hotel and Restaurant Management Olympics medal to prove it. Over them all hovers a mysterious man named Dirk Bickle, who puts people in the right places at the right times—and it all culminates in a full-scale replica of Manhattan under construction in Puget Sound. Blueprints of the Afterlife establishes Ryan Boudinot as an exceptional novelist of great daring. New in paperback Me and You by Niccol• Ammaniti From internationally best-selling author Niccolò Ammaniti, comes a funny, tragic, gut-punch of a novel, charting how an unlikely alliance between two outsiders blows open one family’s secrets. Lorenzo Cumi is a fourteen-year-old misfit. To quell the anxiety of his concerned, socially conscious parents, he tells them he’s been invited on an exclusive ski vacation with the popular kids. On the morning of the trip, Lorenzo demands that his mother drop him off before they arrive at the train station, insisting that his status will be compromised if he shows up accompanied by his mother. Reluctantly, she agrees, and as soon as she is safely out of the vicinity, he turns around and makes his way back to his neighborhood, to put his real plan in motion: for one blessed week, Lorenzo will retreat to a forgotten cellar in his family’s apartment building, where he will live in perfect isolation, keeping the adult world at bay. But when his estranged half-sister, Olivia, shows up in the cellar unexpectedly, his idyll is shattered, and the two become locked in a battle of wills—forced to confront the very demons they are each struggling to escape. Evoking the fierce intensity and the pulse-quickening creepiness of I’m Not Scared, Ammaniti’s best-selling first novel, Me and You is a breathtaking tale of alienation, acceptance, and wanting to be loved by “a fearsomely gifted writer” (The Independent). New in paperback Harlem The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America by Jonathan Gill Harlem is perhaps the most famous, iconic neighborhood in the United States. A bastion of freedom and the capital of Black America, Harlem’s twentieth-century renaissance changed our arts, culture, and politics forever. But this is only one of the many chapters in a wonderfully rich and varied history. Jonathan Gill’s Harlem is a groundbreaking history, the first to present the complete chronicle of this remarkable place. From Henry Hudson’s first contact with native Harlemites on the island they called Mannahatta, through Harlem’s years as a colonial outpost at the edge of the known world, Gill traces the neighborhood’s story, marshaling a tremendous wealth of detail and a host of fascinating figures. Harlem was an agricultural center under British rule, the site of a key early Revolutionary War battle, and later a bucolic site for the great estates of wealthy elites like Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and John James Audubon, who all sought respite from the epidemics raging downtown. In the nineteenth century, improved transportation brought urbanization as well as waves of immigrants: Harlem is central to the American experience of Germans, Jews, Italians, Irish, West Indians, Puerto Ricans, and, later, Dominicans and West Africans. Harlem’s mix of cultures, races, religions, extraordinary wealth and refinement, and extreme poverty and violent crime has been both electrifying and explosive. Jazz, the musical, the American songbook, hip-hop, and some of the bravest voices in American literature found their home in Harlem. So, too, did street-corner preachers, racial demagogues, and civil rights pioneers. Like Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World and Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace’s Gotham, Jonathan Gill’s history will delight readers interested in early New York and will be read for years to come, but its unique focus on the incomparable Harlem sets it apart. New in paperback Old Flames An Inspector Troy Thriller by John Lawton A Book Sense 76 Selection It is April 1956, the height of the Cold War. Khrushchev and Bulganin, leaders of the Soviet Union, are in Britain on an official visit. Chief Inspector Troy of Scotland Yard is assigned to be Khrushchev’s bodyguard and to spy on him. Soon after, a Royal Navy diver is found dead and mutilated beyond recognition in Portsmouth Harbor. Troy embarks on an investigation that takes him to the rotten heart of MI6, to the distant days of his childhood, and into the dangerous arms of an old flame. Brilliantly evoking the intrigue of the Cold War and 1950’s London, Old Flames is a thrilling adventure of intrigue and suspense. It is “a lucid, disenchanted view of crimes past, quite brilliantly presented, with nostalgia kept at bay and every inducement to find your own perspective” (Philip Oakes, The Literary Review). For assistance with this site please contact sales@groveatlantic.com GroveAtlantic Online created by Peter Grand, Inc. Privacy Policy Term of use