The Religion
Publisher Weekly Review: Starred Review. Willocks, a novelist (Bad City Blues) and screenwriter (Sin), strikes gold with this epic account of the Turkish siege of Malta in 1565?the first of a planned trilogy featuring Mattias Tannhauser, the son of a Saxon blacksmith. Young Tannhauser is kidnapped by Muslim raiders and trained as a holy warrior […]
Divided By God : America's Church-state Problem – and What We Should Do About It
The Control of Nature
The World Is Flat : a Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
A Long Way Gone
The New Yorker: In 1993, when the author was twelve, rebel forces attacked his home town, in Sierra Leone, and he was separated from his parents. For months, he straggled through the war-torn countryside, starving and terrified, until he was taken under the wing of a Shakespeare-spouting lieutenant in the government army. Soon, he was […]
The Braid
Publishers Weekly Frost's (Spinning Through the Universe) ingeniously structured novel in verse about a Scottish family may be set in 1850, but its themes will resonant with today's teens. The events unfold through the alternating perspectives of sisters Sarah, the oldest of four, whose strength and agility with tools help her father ("just like a […]
The Echo Maker
Publisher Weekly Review: Starred Review. A truck jackknifes off an "arrow straight country road" near Kearney, Nebr., in Powers's ninth novel, becoming the catalyst for a painstakingly rendered minuet of self-reckoning. The accident puts the truck's 27-year-old driver, Mark Schluter, into a 14-day coma. When he emerges, he is stricken with Capgras syndrome: he's unable […]
After This
Publisher Weekly Review: Starred Review. A master at capturing Irish-Catholic American suburban life, particularly in That Night (1987) and the National Book Award?winning Charming Billy (1998), McDermott returns for this sixth novel with the Keane family of Long Island, who get swept up in the wake of the Vietnam War. When John and Mary Keane […]
Strange Piece of Paradise
Library Journal Review: Starred Review. This book opens 15 years after a horrifyingly brutal assault in which Jentz and a Yale classmate, asleep at an Oregonian campground, were first run over and then attacked by a hatchet-wielding stranger. Jentz first returned to Oregon in 1992 to reclaim the self she lost at 19 and conduct […]
Marvelous Mattie; How Margaret E. Knight Became an Inventor
Publisher Weekly Review: Starred Review. Caldecott Medalist McCully's (Mirette on the High Wire) lucid narrative and crisp period illustrations illuminate the early life of an impressive visionary. Born in 1838, young Mattie is inspired by the treasured toolbox she inherited from her father: "When she thought of things that could be made with the tools, […]