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FICTION

DELUSION

Peter Abrahams (Morrow April 2008)

Twenty years ago, Nell Jarreau witnessed the murder of her boyfriend. Her testimony put a man behind bars--- and led to her husband, Clay, the gentle detective who solved the case. They’ve been happy since, until one phone call changes everything.

New evidence exonerates Alvin Du Pree, and now he’s on the loose. Nell is overwhelmed with guilt and doubt, and for the first time in their marriage, Clay is no help. For him the case is closed, and her attempts to find out what went wrong are met with coldness and anger.

Is DuPree—a much changed man---really innocent? Could Nell have been so wrong? Is her own daughter somehow involved in the case? Nell’s search leads her to the freed man himself; to the unearthing of old secrets some want to keep buried; and deeper into danger than she’s ever been before.

“When you get right down to it, there are basically only two kinds of crime stories: the ones where you know what’s coming and he ones where you don’t, which applies to just about everything Peter Abrahams writes.” –New York Times

Also by Peter Abrahams: THE FAN, A PERFECT CRIME, CRYING WOLF, LAST OF THE DIXIE HEROES, THE TUTOR, THEIR WILDEST DREAMS, OBLIVION, END OF STORY, NERVE DAMAGE

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BEGINNER’S GREEK

James Collins (Little Brown January 2008)

Harper Collins UK; Rizzoli Italy; Presses De La Cite France; Aschehoug Denmark; Lubbe Germany; Espasa Calpe Spain; Israel; Turkey

DEBUT FICTION

Love at first flight

By Amy Scribner From BOOKPAGE

“Most air travelers these days dread their flights, knowing they’ll be crammed in the

plane for a journey that likely will feature too few refreshments and too many delays. Not

Peter Russell, the unabashedly romantic hero of author James Collins’ irresistible new

comedy of manners, Beginner’s Greek. Whenever Peter boards a plane, which is often, due

to his Wall Street job, he wonders whether this will be the flight on which he meets the woman of his dreams. Then, on a trip from New York to Los Angeles, it actually happens: A woman sits next to him who is not only beautiful, but on page 500 of one of Peter’s favorite books. They talk (or rather, Holly talks and a smitten Peter tries his best to answer intelligibly). They learn about each other’s favorite books, their families, their jobs. It looks as if this might

be love at first sight. “He felt sort of the way he did when he floated on his back in cold ocean water on a clear hot day and aligned his body with the sun. The cold wavelets lapped up against him; the sun warmed his face, and he felt deliciously stimulated and calm. They had not talked about anything particularly important. They had not fused their identities with the force of smashed atoms. They had come together as simply as two flowers intertwining. How happy he felt.” Five hours later, they land in L.A. and promise to meet for dinner. But when Peter gets to his hotel, her phone number has vanished from his shirt pocket. Years later, when he and Holly meet again, she’s on the arm of a womanizing but charming author who also happens to be Peter’s closest friend. The two eventually marry, and, resigned, Peter marries the dull but sweet Charlotte. It seems Peter and Holly weren’t meant to be, but fate proves it sometimes has a funny way of working things out. Collins, a former Time editor who has also contributed to The New Yorker, writes with spare, graceful style, and Peter Russell exudes an earnest everyman appeal that will make many a reader wish he could spring out of the pages. Beginner’s Greek is one of those books that both perfectly satisfies and leaves you wanting more.”

About the Author:

James Collins was formerly an editor at Time and has contributed to The New Yorker and other magazines. He grew up in New York City and now lives in Virginia with his family. This is his first novel.

Praise for Beginner’s Greek

“Such a rare delight: a smart, elegant, madly romantic comedy with characters who seem perfectly, charmingly real as they swerve and stumble from fairy tale to social satire and back again. If you ever wished there were more Jane Austen and Laurie Colwin novels to read, or more Preston Sturges and George Cukor movies to watch, your dream has hereby come true.” -- Kurt Andersen, author of Heyday

“Beginner’s Greek is either an incisive romantic comedy or a feel-good social satire; it hardly matters, it's a huge entertainment. With his big, sloppy heart and astringent soul, James Collins is the new Jane Austen, only taller.” -- Larry Doyle, author of I Love You, Beth Cooper

“James Collins is on home turf when it comes to the secret world of the American aristocracy. He knows these people uncomfortably well. I enjoyed it enormously.” -- Julian Fellowes, author of Snobs

“James Collins has written a romantic, funny and insightful page turner about love in modern times, missed opportunities and the wheel of fate (with a blow-out!) that is so engaging and real, you will find it impossible to put down. Peter Russell is an everyman filled with longing, lust and good sense. I promise you will root for him as fate throws him curves aplenty on his path to true love. Beginner’s Greek and Peter Russell are keepers.”-- Adriana Trigiani, bestselling author of Lucia, Lucia and Big Stone Gap

“Beginner's Greek is full of humor and a rare, perceptive sweetness. Jim Collins is a skeptic, a realist and a fervent romantic all in one.”-- Cathleen Schine is the author of seven novels, including The Love Letter, Rameau’s Niece and, most recently, The New Yorkers.

'In Beginners Greek James Collins achieves a tone -- a farcical fatalism, poised, astringent, generous -- that I thought until now was the exclusive property of the finest British comic novelists. How wrong I was, and how right this novel is, building from small domestic observations and cunning dramatic turnabouts toward a wise and ample vision of human romantic folly."-- Walter Kirn, author of Mission to America and Thumbsucker

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APOLOGIZE, APOLOGIZE!

Liz Kelly (Warner TWELVE)

Knopf Canada; Adelphi Italy; House of Books Holland; Heyne Germany

Elizabeth Kelly is a magazine editor and award-winning journalist with several Canadian National Magazine Awards and nominations to her credit. Her writing has appeared in many prominent Canadian newspapers and magazines—her column work was selected to appear in the 2003 edition of Writing Prose, Oxford Press.

TWELVE and Knopf Canada have pre-emptively acquired APOLOGIZE, APOLOGIZE!, a first novel by Elizabeth Kelly, a 52-year-old magazine editor and award-winning journalist from eastern Ontario with several Canadian National Magazine Awards and nominations to her credit. Literary agent Molly Friedrich sold the novel, a tragicomic tale of a wild, brilliant, wealthy, crazy Massachusetts family, to both publishers within a week of her initial submission.

“The storytelling is so funny, heartfelt, and distinctive that we had to publish it,” said Jonathan Karp, publisher of TWELVE. At Knopf Canada, the acquiring editor was Diane Martin, who plans to publish the novel as part of the imprint’s successful New Face of Fiction program, which introduced authors Yann Martel and Ann-Marie MacDonald, among others. Publication in both countries will be March 2009.

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DOG ON IT

Spencer Quinn (Atria, May 2008)

Blanvalet Germany; Sperling & Kupfer Italy

The first in a series with roots in the long and successful tradition of sleuthing partnerships that goes back to Holmes and Watson. The Chet and Bernie mysteries break completely new ground here because the narrating partner is the dog. The author, a NY Times Best Seller, is writing under a pseudonym. This is a gripping mystery; a dog’s life; a dog’s insights into people; and most of all this bond between two species made for each other.

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LADY KILLLER

Lisa Scottoline (Harper Collins 2/08)

Macmillan UK; De Fontein Holland

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLING AUTHOR!

A young woman searches for her missing rival from high school--- and gets more than she bargained for--- in the latest high-octane thriller from the New York Times Bestselling author.

This will be the last book published by Harper Collins before she moves over to St. Martin’s Press.

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TEN DAYS IN THE HILLS

Jane Smiley (Knopf Feb 15)

Faber & Faber UK; Rivages France; Neri Pozza Italy;

Longlisted for England's prestigious Orange Broadband Prize!

A talky, bawdy book that says a lot about Hollywood and even more about the humanness of the 21^st century American . . . Smiley has taken a step toward rejecting the traditional novel’s story arc and instead moved toward a form that is both old and new. It’s all about the story . . . Ultimately, her message here is one of art and its ability to free the artist. Forget the idiots in Washington: Get naked; make art; tell stories. Could there by any saner advice for the age we dwell in?

“The reigning master of social satire pens a wicked and heartfelt portrait of stars, semicelebrities, and sybarit[es] . . . The beauty of Smiley’s garrulous new novel is that it sublimates polemics in a breezy narrative upon which she has liberally bestowed her trademark gifts: deft characterization, uncanny psychological naturalism, polymathic curiosity, and an astonishing ability to inhabit a given milieu as if it’s been bred in her very bones (in this case, the Hollywood Hills). Smiley models her tale on Boccaccio’s Decameron—only instead of waiting out the bubonic plague at an Italian villa, her 10 storytellers gather during the opening days of the Iraq war . . . What ensues? Robust, Boccaccian sex. (Jane! Who knew?) Gourmet food. Jokes. Hollywood lore. Imaginary movies. Endless musings about theology, books, art, life. And a Fellini-esque denouement at a Russian robber baron’s world-class estate nearby. Are the digressions and bedroom farces merely passing hallucinations, or are they, like iron filings, indiscernibly organizing themselves around some principle whose emergence we await with often euphoric anticipation? You find out: It’s worth the trip.” —John Updike, The New Yorker (January 29, 2007)

“Smiley goes Hollywood in this scintillating tale of an extended Decameron-esque L.A. House party. Gathering at the home of washed-up director Max the morning after the 2003 Academy Awards are his Iraq-obsessed girlfriend, Elena; his movie-diva ex-wife Zoe and her yoga-instructor–cum–boyfriend Paul; Max’s insufferably PC daughter, Isabel, and his feckless agent, Stoney, who are conducting a secret affair; Zoe’s oracular mother, Delphine; and Max’s boyhood friend and Republican irritant Charlie. They watch movies, negotiate their clashing diets and health regimens, indulge in a roundelay of lasciviously detailed sexual encounters and, most of all, talk—holding beguiling conversations about movies, Hollywood, relationships, the war and the state of the world. Through it all, they compulsively reimagine daily life as art . . . Smiley delivers a delightful, subtly observant sendup of Tinseltown folly, yet she treats her characters, their concerns with compelling surfaces and their perpetual quest to capture reality through artifice, with warmth and seriousness.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)(December 4, 2006)

Also by Jane Smiley: THE GREENLANDERS, ORDINARY LOVE AND GOOD WILL, A THOUSAND ACRES, MOO, THE ALL TRUE TRAVELS AND ADVENTURES OF LIDIE NEWTON, HORSE HEAVEN, GOOD FAITH, 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE NOVEL

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Die a Little

By Megan Abbott

From Publishers Weekly
A velvety 1950s Southern California vibe suffuses this noirish novel about a young woman who sacrifices her own innocence while trying to protect her brother from the seamy side of life. Orphaned when they were children, Bill and Lora King live together well into adulthood, until Bill meets Alice Steele, a beautiful damsel in distress whose mysterious past and even more mysterious present set off alarms for Lora. Ere long Bill, a junior investigator in the district attorney's office, proposes to Alice and the two marry, but Lora becomes increasingly sure there's more to Alice's murky past than the alcoholic mother and deadbeat father she talks about. "Under the harsh lamp, in sharp contrast to the dark room, her eyes look strangely eaten through. The eyes of a death mask..." Lora makes self-deprecating Nancy Drew jokes even as she initiates a personal investigation, skulking around seedy motor courts and hiding in alleys. What the likable Lora discovers—drugs, sex, corruption and murder—fascinates her as much as it frightens her. Abbott, author of a nonfiction study of hard-boiled literature and film, crafts a stylish, sensuous tale with picture-perfect period trappings.
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The Wonder Spot

By Melissa Bank

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Fans of the megasuccessful Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing, rejoice. Bank is back with an equally entertaining first novel, starring Sophie Applebaum, a sarcastic, self-deprecating middle child from a suburban Jewish family who moves from a fish-out-of-water adolescence to a how-did-I-get-here adulthood. Likable Sophie's (mis)adventures in life and love include an attempt to use lyrics from Bob Dylan's "It Ain't Me, Babe" to argue against the necessity of attending Hebrew school and a penchant for imagining her future life with men she barely knows (a potential beau's ability to cook fish becomes "a metaphor for the hard things we will face together"). A slightly cynical yet romantic optimism grounds Sophie—and gives Bank plenty of opportunities for clever quips: cribbing a career objective in publishing from a résumé handbook, Sophie diligently copies exercises found in the long-overdue library book 20th Century Typing, including "Know Your Typewriter," and she agrees to a blind date with a pediatric surgeon by noting that she possesses her own "pediatric heart." But this isn't just another urban chick-lit bildungsroman; Bank's work also features the intriguing transformations of the other Applebaums: a grandmother's slip into senility, Sophie's mother's dip into infidelity, a brother's turn toward Orthodox Judaism. Through it all, Sophie never quite escapes the sense of being a "solid trying to do a liquid's job," a feeling as frightening as it is familiar to those struggling to achieve a grownup self-awareness. Engrossing, engaging—it's a wonderful return for Bank.

Amazon.com
Six years after her amazingly successful debut, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, Melissa Bank rewards her fans for their patience with The Wonder Spot, a refreshingly honest interpretation of one young woman's journey into adulthood. As we follow heroine Sophie Applebaum through a comfortable, yet awkward childhood in suburban Pennsylvania to the challenges of finding love and a career in midtown Manhattan, The Wonder Spot is never guilty of the self-indulgent traps set by other members of the Chick Lit genre Bank helped launch.

We first meet the Applebaum clan on their way to cousin Rebecca's bat mitzvah in Chappaqua, New York, where Sophie ends up sneaking cigarettes in the woods with a handsome eighth grader one year her senior. Yet even this minor rebellion is more charming than anything else; as with most of her future transgressions, Sophie is less the instigator than the innocent witness. Defining moments in Sophie's life are revealed through her relationships: an almost mythical college roommate named Venice; her charismatic yet capricious older brother; her brilliant younger brother; her unpenetrable father; and her hilarious grandmother, who takes it upon herself to save her "Sophila" from "impending spinsterhood." Of course no real journey into young womanhood is complete without a series of committment phobic, potentially deliquent, overly nice men whose appearances seem less about love than about demonstrating our heroine's inability to ever truly be comfortable with herself. As Sophie observes during a seventh grade skating party, "I felt sure that everyone was looking at me and then realized that no one was, and i experienced the distinct shame of each."

Undeniably clever, occasionally hilarious, and often poignant, The Wonder Spot is captivating enough for readers to forgive Sophie's indecisive, self-destructive tendancies and simply bask in her sincerity. --Gisele Toueg

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The Abortionist's Daughter

By Elizabeth Hyde

From Publishers Weekly
Dr. Diana Duprey—abortion clinic director, wife of local Colorado DA Frank Thompson and mother of 19-year-old college freshman Megan—has plenty of enemies, so when her body is found floating in the exercise pool of her garden tour–featured house, the list of suspects is long. Aside from abortion opponents and distraught parents, there were the arguments overheard between Frank and Diana, and Megan and Diana shortly before. The coroner, a woman with whom Frank had had an affair, won't do the autopsy, and a man harboring a grudge against Frank takes her place. Meanwhile, Megan finds herself attracted to Huck Berlin, the policeman assigned to the case, and Huck finds Megan in various compromising positions. Former U.S. attorney Hyde (Crazy as Chocolate) describes Megan's contradictory, confused emotions without oversimplification ("Have fun killing babies" were Megan's inadvertent last words to her mother). Hyde also jumps back in time, delving into Diana's work at the clinic and her feelings about it, as well as the lives and feelings of her clients. Rather than generating suspense, the murder provides a frame for the turbulence in and around a woman propelled by idealism and strongly held beliefs. Look for this book to get play as South Dakota's challenge to Roe v. Wade wends through the courts. 150,000 announced first printing.(June 23)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Were it not for its fully realized characters and crisp prose, one might be tempted to see The Abortionist's Daughter as just another legal thriller for the beach. The elements are all there: a murder victim who was an outspoken abortion doctor; her attorney husband, who seems the most likely suspect; a daughter with whom the doctor had, at best, a bristly relationship; an antiabortion minister who may also have had a personal vendetta against the doctor; and the daughter's spurned lover, who appears to be dangerously disturbed.

Yet it is precisely Elisabeth Hyde's arresting prose and astute observations about family life that elevate her fourth novel to domestic tragedy. Any writer who can describe a hit on the head as a "bruise [that] was huge and ripe and living, a fat, blue-gray slug in her tangled hair," or who begins a novel with the delicious complication of a daughter who has just taken her second hit of ecstasy before picking up the phone to hear that her mother has drowned in the pool, has a talent for the closely observed detail as well as a keen sense of human failings.

With 20 years of experience as a prosecuting attorney, Frank Thompson knows better than to start tampering with evidence. Understandably, though, he doesn't have his wits about him the day his wife is found dead. "Frank Thompson couldn't tell if it was the reflection of pool water bouncing off the windows, or the shriek of his daughter over the phone, or the flapping sound of the sheet as the paramedics covered his wife that made his legs begin to wobble and shake. All he knew was that the ground beneath him was falling out from under, and he had to get down, fast, or he was going to be sick."

He fears that the shards from a glass shattered during a fight with his wife the afternoon of the murder will look bad. Predictably, he removes them, and, predictably, he doesn't get them all. Because his house has become a crime scene, he and his daughter, Megan, who has come home from college after hearing the news, must find other housing and share a life together -- even though he has found compromising pictures of Megan on the Internet and Megan has begun to suspect her father.

Across town, the Rev. Steven O'Connell, self-righteous spokesman for a coalition of antiabortion activists, discovers that he still has a pressing debate with the late Dr. Duprey on his hands: Rose, a 15-year-old pregnant girl, who had been seen and counseled by Dr. Duprey, takes up residence with the O'Connells. Branson, Megan's old boyfriend, starts stalking her, while Huck, the detective on the case, develops a relationship with her that threatens his job. It's enough domestic entanglement for Jane Austen on speed.

What works best in this novel is not the issue of abortion (duly presented and dissected from both sides) nor the revelation of the murderer but the family backstories, which reveal Hyde at her best. The dialogue between Megan and her mother is biting, edgy and dismayingly real. "Have fun killing babies," Megan tosses off as a parting zinger the last time she sees her mother. So, too, are the flashback scenes between Frank and his wife, a couple on the brink of divorce. Their fights have at times escalated to brief flurries of violent behavior. "Frank wheeled around and grabbed her arms and shook her once, hard, so that her neck snapped back. It was the second time that day someone had done this to her."

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NON-FICTION

SERVICE INCLUDED: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter

Phoebe Damrosch (Morrow Fall 2007)

Ponte Alle Grazie Italy; Arena Holland

Kitchen Confidential meets Sex in the City in this delicious, behind-the-scenes memoir from the first female captain at one of New York City’s most prestigious restaurants

While Phoebe Damrosch was waiting for life to happen—that is, deciding whether to go on to graduate school—she supported herself by working as a waitress. Before long, she was a captain at the New York City four-star restaurant Per Se. Service Included is the story of her experiences there: her obsession with food; her love affair with a sommelier; and her observations of the highly competitive and frenetic world of fine dining. What Anthony Bourdain did for (or to) the kitchen, Damrosch now does for the dining room. Her account is provocative and highly entertaining, and readers will never sit down at a restaurant table the same way again.

“Highly entertaining, wryly revealing, and very funny.”

-----Thomas McNamee, author of Alice Waters and Chez Panisse

“An experience worth savoring.” ---Debra Ginsberg, author of Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress

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HER LAST DEATH

Susanna Sonnenberg (Scribner January 2008)

Virago UK; Prometheus Holland;

A searing, beautifully written and compulsively readable memoir by a daughter who grew up with a narcissistic and addictive mother – reminiscent of The Glass Castle, The Duke of Deception and The Liars’ Club.

Her Last Death begins as the phone rings early one morning in the Montana house where Susanna Sonnenberg lives with her husband and two young sons. Her aunt is calling to say that Susanna’s mother, after a bad car accident, is in a coma. She might not live. Of course, the good daughter would rush to her mother’s bedside. But Susanna cannot bring herself to do that. Her brave and candid memoir explains why.

Sonnenberg’s mother, raised in England, eloped as a teenager and was on her own in New York City with two children by the age of twenty-one. Glamorous, charismatic and a compulsive liar, she seduced everyone who entered her orbit. The daughter was raised on the shifting ground of her mother’s inventions. As a child, Sonnenberg monitored her mother’s growing addiction to cocaine and injectible narcotics and learned, above all, that sex and lies were the way of the world.

Sonnenberg mines her painful and often startling memories as she examines her struggle to break free of her mother’s all-consuming influence. She describes a journey of fierce resolve as she forges her own identity and becomes a mother and woman capable of trust. Her Last Death is riveting, redemptive and beautifully told.

Susanna Sonnenberg was born in London in 1965 and grew up in New York. She has written for Elle, O, The Oprah Magazine, Parenting, and Entertainment Weekly, among other magazines. She lives in Montana with her husband and two sons.

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