Literary Fiction
A Selection of Titles Published in 2007

Garden Spells
Sarah Addison Allen
FIC ALLEN
After many years of separation, two very different, gifted sisters draw on their talents to forge a bond and find their ways in life in Allen's easygoing debut novel. Fans of Alice Hoffman will be drawn to Allen’s book.

Outcast
Shimon Ballas
FIC BALLAS
Ballas is a seventy-something Israeli novelist who emigrated from Baghdad in 1951. His book Outcast fictionalizes the life of Ahmad Soussa, an Iraqi Jew who converted to Islam in the 1930s.

Away  
Amy Bloom
FIC BLOOM
Writing of prison and poetry, Yiddish humor and Yukon settings, Bloom's tale offers linguistic twists, startling imagery, sharp wit, and a compelling vision of the past.

The Double Bind
Christopher Bohjalian
FIC BOHJALIAN
Bohjalian’s latest is a puzzler about 26-year-old Laurel Estabrook who works in a Burlington, Vermont homeless shelter and is trying to overcome mental and physical scars incurred from a brutal assault six years earlier.

The Wedding Officer
Anthony Capella
FIC CAPELLA
London-based culinarian Capella’s The Wedding Officer is a WWII-era story of Livia Pertini, a beautiful young widow who leaves her family's destitute country osteria to try to find work in Naples.

New England White
Stephen L. Carter
FIC CARTER
Lemaster and Julia Carlyle are the stars of this compelling, literary age-turner that effortlessly blends a gripping whodunit with complex discussions of politics and race in contemporary America.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
Michael Chabon
FIC CHABON
They are the "Frozen Chosen," two million people living, dying,and complaining in imaginary Sitka, Alaska, the temporary homeland established for displaced World War II Jews in Chabon's ambitious and entertaining new novel.

The Welsh Girl
Peter Ho Davies
FIC HO DAVIES
Young Esther Evans has lived her whole life within the confines of her remote mountain village. The daughter of a fiercely nationalistic sheep farmer, Esther yearns for a taste of the wider world that reaches her only through broadcasts on the BBC. Then, in the wake of D-Day, the world comes to her in the form of a German POW camp set up on the outskirts of Esther's village.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Diaz
FIC DIAZ
Junot Diaz's dark and exuberant first novel makes a compelling case for the multi-cultural view of a life, wherein an individual cannot be known or understood in isolation from the history of his family and his nation.

The Gathering
Anne Enright
FIC ENRIGHT
The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan are gathering in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother, Liam, drowned in the sea. His sister, Veronica, collects the body and keeps the dead man company, guarding the secret she shares with him - something that happened in their grandmother's house in the winter of 1968.

Then We Came to the End
Joshua Ferris
FIC FERRIS
In this wildly funny debut from former ad man Ferris, a group of copywriters and designers at a Chicago ad agency face layoffs at the end of the '90s boom and begin dividing the office “spoils.”

The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Mohsin Hamid
FIC HAMID
Hamid's book is an intelligent and absorbing 9/11 novel, written from the perspective of Changez, a young Pakistani whose sympathies, despite his fervid immigrant embrace of America, lie with the attackers.

Loving Frank
Nancy Horan
FIC HORAN
Horan’s fictionalized account of the life of Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the woman who destroyed Frank Lloyd Wright's first marriage is not a romance. but a portrayal of an independent, educated woman at odds with the restrictions of the early 20th century.

A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini
FIC HOSSEINI
Hosseini’s much-awaited second novel is a harrowing story that covers three decades of anti-Soviet jihad, civil war, and Taliban tyranny through the lives of two women. Don’t miss this important tale!

A Free Life
Ha Jin
FIC JIN
We follow the Wu family as they fully sever their ties with China in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and begin a new, free life in the United States.

Tree of Smoke
Denis Johnson
FIC JOHNSON
This is the story of William "Skip" Sands, a CIA agent - engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong - and the disasters that befall him. It also is the story of brothers Bill and Jim Houston, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert and into a war where the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away.

Mister Pip
Lloyd Jones
FIC JONES
 Minor rebellions and disillusionments, which constitute a young narrator's coming-of-age, unfold against an ominous backdrop of war when the conflict between the natives and the invading redskin soldiers erupts on an unnamed tropical island in the early 1990s.

Pontoon: A Lake Wobegon Novel
Garrison Keillor
FIC KEILLOR
Keillor's delightful addition to the Lake Wobegon series opens with his typically laconic musing: Evelyn was an insomniac, so when they say she died in her sleep, you have to question that. The author's storytelling skills come to the fore as he describes Evelyn Peterson, a sprightly 82-year-old whose secret life of romance and adventure is revealed after her death.

Trespass
Valerie Martin
FIC MARTIN
This thought-provoking novel by Orange Prize winner Martin opens deceptively, as the quiet story of a mother slowly adjusting to her 21-year-old son becoming an adult.  A tragedy (somewhat convenient) paves the way for a startlingly light resolution. Forgiveness doesn't come easy for the characters as they learn that nothing, not family, borders, or survival is inviolable.

Breakfast with Buddha
Roland Merullo
FIC MERULLO
Merullo delivers a comic, winningly spiritual road-trip novel. Otto Ringling is a food-book editor and a happily married father of two living in a wealthy New York suburb. After Otto's North Dakota parents are killed in a car crash, he plans to drive his ebulliently New Age sister, Cecilia, back home to sell the family farm. But when Otto arrives to pick up Cecilia in Paterson, New Jersey, she declares her intention to give her half of the farm to her guru.

Caspian Rain
Gina Barkhordar Nahai
FIC NAHAI
Nahai explores the struggles of an Iranian family in the tenuous decade before the Islamic revolution. Twelve-year-old Yaas narrates her family's story, beginning before her birth at her parents' unlikely meeting.

Be Near Me
Andrew O’Hagan
FIC O’HAGAN
In a small Scottish parish, an English priest is stalked by the fear of scandal, class hatred, and lost ideals. Over the spring and summer of 2003, Father David becomes friends with two young people, Mark and Lisa. By year's end his life is the focus of public hysteria, and he begins to examine the central events of his life, and to see what may have happened to the political ideals of his generation.

Run
Ann Patchett
FIC PATCHETT
Run is a novel with timeless concerns about class and belonging, parenthood, and love. Patchett’s latest book is lovely to read and is satisfyingly bold in its attempt to say something patient and true about family.

Out Stealing Horses
Per Petterson
FIC PETTERSON
Award-winning Norwegian novelist Petterson renders an account of the meditations of Trond Sander, a man nearing 70, dwelling in self-imposed exile at the eastern edge of Norway in a primitive cabin.

By George
Wesley Stace
FIC STACE
Singer-songwriter John Wesley Harding, writing under his given name Wesley Stace (Misfortune), crafts a British performing family's saga filled with wit, warmth, and imagination.

The Street of a Thousand Blossoms
Gail Tsukiyama
FIC TSUKIYAMA
In a powerfully moving story that spans almost 30 years, Tsukiyama brings her readers an epic novel of tradition and change, of loss and renewal, and above all, the enduring strength of family ties at a turning point in modern history.

Petropolis
Anya Ulinich
FIC ULINICH
Ulinich's debut novel traces Russian-Jewish Sasha Goldberg's screwball coming-of-age and search for her long-ago disappeared father.

St. Charles Public Library

MC
4/08