Q2 2014 Details

Review comments and publishers' summaries are shown here.

Anil's Ghost, Michael Ondaatje
http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-9780375410536-0
In modern day Sri Lanka, Anil Tissera is a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island. Bodies and skeletons are discovered. What follows is a story about family, identity, and the unknown enemy, about the quest to unlock the hidden past--all propelled by a spellbinding mystery.

The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, Andrew Sean Greer
http://www.powells.com/biblio/18-9780062213792-0
After the death of her beloved twin brother and the abandonment of her long-time lover, Greta Wells undergoes electroshock therapy. Over the course of the treatment, Greta finds herself repeatedly sent to 1918, 1941, and back to the present. . . . In this spellbinding novel by Andrew Sean Greer, each reality has its own losses, its own rewards; each extracts a different price. Which life will she choose as she wrestles with the unpredictability of love and the consequences of even her most carefully considered choices?

Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, Robert Gates
http://www.powells.com/biblio/2-9780307959478-4
From the former secretary of defense, a strikingly candid, vividly written account of his experience serving Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. . . . In relating his personal journey as secretary, Gates draws us into the innermost sanctums of government and military power during the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, illuminating iconic figures, vital negotiations, and critical situations in revealing, intimate detail. Offering unvarnished appraisals of Dick Cheney, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Presidents Bush and Obama among other key players, Gates exposes the full spectrum of behind-closed-doors politicking within both the Bush and Obama administrations.

The Glass Palace, Amitav Ghosh
http://www.powells.com/biblio/7-9780375758775-5
Set in Burma during the British invasion of 1885, this masterly novel by Amitav Ghosh tells the story of Rajkumar, a poor boy lifted on the tides of political and social chaos, who goes on to create an empire in the Burmese teak forest. When soldiers force the royal family out of the Glass Palace and into exile, Rajkumar befriends Dolly, a young woman in the court of the Burmese Queen, whose love will shape his life. He cannot forget her, and years later, as a rich man, he goes in search of her.

Cold Sassy Tree, Olive Ann Burns
http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-9780385312585-2
If the preacher's wife's petticoat showed, the ladies would make the talk last a week. But on July 5, 1906, things took a scandalous turn. That was the day E. Rucker Blakeslee, proprietor of the general store and barely three weeks a widower, eloped with Miss Love Simpson — a woman half his age and, worse yet, a Yankee! On that day, fourteen-year-old Will Tweedy's adventures began and an unimpeachably pious, deliciously irreverent town came to life.

All The Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
http://www.powells.com/biblio/18-9781476746586-0
From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

Under the Wide and Starry Sky, Nancy Horan
http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780345516534-4
This engaging tale of historical fiction indulges the reader with a telling portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and his fiercely independent wife, Fanny. Fans of Stevenson will especially enjoy this glimpse into the couple's exciting yet turbulent life as they travel the globe.

Frog Music, Emma Donoghue
http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780316324687-10
Emma Donoghue's meticulously researched story of 1870's San Francisco is a perfectly realized murder mystery, but with a definite literary bent. Prostitutes, frog catchers, madams, gamblers, and "baby farms" all play an integral part here. What is so rewarding about this story are the characters; Donoghue created them from real-life people, based on sketchy references and slim information.

You Should Have Known, Jean Hanff Korelitz
http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9781455599493-0
Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the only life she ever wanted for herself. Devoted to her husband, a pediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice, her days are full of familiar things . . . [but terrible disasters happen]

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot
http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-9781400052189-11
Shaved from a tumor in a poor black woman in the 1950s, cultured without her knowledge, and grown to amazing proportions, HeLa cells would change the face of science and medicine forever. Pivotal in the search for disease obliteration, HeLa would prove invaluable because it simply would not die. Yet, Henrietta Lacks did die, in pain and obscurity, and her family knew nothing of her living cells. Posing some very serious questions ranging from tissue ownership to the billion dollar pharmaceutical industry to the mad rush for the elusive cure for cancer to the impossible cost of health insurance, Skloot has done an admirable job of research here. Ironically, Henrietta's story, if read in a novel, would seem ridiculously fantastical. Yet she lived — and her cells still do.

Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials, Marilynne K Roach
http://www.powells.com/biblio/2-9780306821202-1
Six Women of Salem is the first work to use the lives of a select number of representative women as a microcosm to illuminate the larger crisis of the Salem witch trials. By the end of the trials, beyond the twenty who were executed and the five who perished in prison, 207 individuals had been accused, 74 had been “afflicted,” 32 had officially accused their fellow neighbors, and 255 ordinary people had been inexorably drawn into that ruinous and murderous vortex, and this doesn't include the religious, judicial, and governmental leaders.

A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
http://www.powells.com/biblio/7-9781400030651-18
With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers — a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village — will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future.

Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, Francine Prose
http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-9780061713781-0
Paris in the 1920s. It is a city of intoxicating ambition, passion, art, and discontent, where louche jazz venues like the Chameleon Club draw expats, artists, libertines, and parvenus looking to indulge their true selves. It is at the Chameleon where the striking Lou Villars, an extraordinary athlete and scandalous cross-dressing lesbian, finds refuge among the club's loyal denizens, including the rising photographer Gabor Tsenyi, the socialite and art patron Baroness Lily de Rossignol, and the caustic American writer Lionel Maine. As the years pass, their fortunes -- and the world itself -- evolve. . . . Told in a kaleidoscope of voices, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 evokes this incandescent city with brio, humor, and intimacy.

Far From The Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity, Andrew Solomon
http://www.powells.com/biblio/18-9780743236720-0
Solomon's startling proposition in Far from the Tree is that being exceptional is at the core of the human condition--that difference is what unites us. He writes about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, or multiple severe disabilities; with children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are transgender. While each of these characteristics is potentially isolating, the experience of difference within families is universal, and Solomon documents triumphs of love over prejudice in every chapter.

Where The Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West, Wallace Stegner
http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780375759321-5
This book brings together essays, criticism, and excerpts to provide a varied and fascinating account of the American West, its history, and our need to preserve it.

The History of Love: A Novel, Nicole Krauss
http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-9780393328622-155
Leo Gursky is just about surviving, tapping his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he's still alive. But life wasn't always like this: sixty years ago, in the Polish village where he was born, Leo fell in love and wrote a book. And though Leo doesn't know it, that book survived, inspiring fabulous circumstances, even love. Fourteen-year-old Alma was named after a character in that very book. And although she has her hands full — keeping track of her brother, Bird (who thinks he might be the Messiah), and taking copious notes on How to Survive in the Wild — she undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family.