New York, NY: Viking (2005)

Set in Canada and the battlefields of France and Belgium, Three Day Road is a mesmerizing novel told through the eyes of Niska, a Canadian Oji-Cree woman living off the land who is the last of a line of healers and diviners, and her nephew Xavier. At the urging of his friend Elijah, a Cree boy raised in reserve schools, Xavier joins the war effort. Shipped off to Europe when they are nineteen, the boys are not only marginalized from the Canadian soldiers by their native appearance, but by the fine marksmanship that years of hunting in the bush has taught them. Both become snipers renowned for their uncanny accuracy. But while Xavier struggles to understand the purpose of the war and to come to terms with his conscience for the many lives he has ended, Elijah becomes obsessed with killing, taking great risks to become the most accomplished sniper in the army. Eventually, the harrowing and bloody truth of war takes its toll on the two friends in different, profound ways. Intertwined with this account is the story of Niska, who takes in her wounded nephew and who herself has borne witness to lifetime of death--the death of her people. In part inspired by the legend of Francis Pegamahgabow, the great Indian sniper of World War I, Three Day Road is an impeccably researched and beautifully written story that offers a searing reminder about the cost of war.

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San Francisco, CA: Macadam Cage Publishing (2005)

A debut collection of short stories explores the absurd, offbeat world of quirky visionaries and misguided dreamers in such works as "Our Spring Catalog," "The Pipe," and the title story.

Boston, MA: Shambhala (2005)

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"There are scenes in this book that are so terrifyingly beautiful they take your breath away. Patrick Lane guides us accross a grueling landscape with a steady hand. This is a tremendous contribution by an author at the peak of his power."

- Alistair MacLeod

Savannah, GA: Frederic C. Beil (2005)

Marlin Barton's Dancing by the River is a superb collection of stories about the fascinating complexities of life in a small community. Winner of the O. Henry Award and the Andrew Lytle Prize, Barton has been called "one of the most distinctive new voices in Southern fiction," and this book, which entails the whole history of the community, proves that he is a masterful observer of family relations and the idiosyncratic logic that governs human lives. His writing does not call attention to itself - it is simple, powerful, and so fluid that it seems almost effortless.
A companion volume to The Dry Well, Marlin Barton's first collection of stories, the stories of Dancing by the River stand on their own, and prove that this is a book that is a gift for every reader ready to discover a vibrant sensibility fully engaged with the South.

San Francisco, CA: MacAdam Cage (2005)

Proving that the waters of Southern talent run deep and traditions are meant to be both honored and stood on their ear, the third volume of Stories from the Blue Moon Caf? IV presents the most talented practitioners of Southern writing. This year's anthology includes writing from Rick Bragg, William Gay, and Suzanne Hudson amongst others. Readers need not ever have set a foot south of the Mason-Dixon Line to appreciate the bold, the brash, the horrifying and the humorous short stories, essays, poems, and even songs from the South's preeminent authors and its strongest new voices gathered together for a feast in Stories from the Blue Moon Caf? IV. Fans of Southern literature cannot miss this!

New York, NY: Doubleday (2005)

From award-winning novelist Alexander Parsons comes a vivid chronicle of the traumatic impact of WWII on an American family at the dawn of the nuclear age. Set in the high desert badlands of New Mexico and the ravaged, war-torn landscape of the Philippine jungle, IN THE SHADOWS OF THE SUN tells the story of a New Mexican ranching family--the Stricklands--struggling to hold on to their way of life in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, while their son, Jack Strickland endures the horrors of the Bataan Death March. In the tradition of Hampton Sides' "Ghost Soldiers and Tim O'Brien's "If I Die in a Combat Zone, Alexander Parsons writes with haunting power about the effects of war. The result is an unforgettable novel, re-creating America's journey through the war and the postwar period, a passage lit by the fierce glare of the atomic bomb.

New York, NY: Norton (2005)

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. With consummate, Spell-binding skill. Nicole Krauss gradually draws together their stories. Thus extraordinary book was inspired by the author's four grandparents and by a pantheon of authors whose work is haunted by loss--Bruno Schulz, Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel, and more. It is truly a history or love: a tale brimming with laughter, irony, passion, and soaring imaginative power.

San Francisco, CA: MacAdam Cage (2005)

In 1962, in Albany, Georgia, Martin Luther King, Jr., tries and fails in his first attempts at nonviolent resistance. Rural churches harboring voter registration workers are routinely torched by Night Riders. Ku Klux Klan activities are at a peak, and law enforcement is often an accomplice. Kansas Lacey is twelve years old, intensely curious about a world she devours through National Geographic magazines and endless questions for the adults in her life. She has lived near Albany in Sumner, Georgia, with her grandparents and their hired help, since her mother's suicide years earlier. The Lacey family is prominent and respected, but riddled with an unspoken history of insanity, repression, addiction, and violence. Kansas catalogues these secrets as she uncovers them, determined to find out where she came from and why her mother killed herself. With a big heart and an unflinching eye, Suzanne Hudson has given us a powerful coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the dawning Civil Rights movement; the story of a girl who believes that in piecing together her history she will somehow figure out who she wants to become.

New York, NY: Little & Brown (2005)

George Pelecanos at last delivers the knockout punch his admirers have long awaited. Hard Revolution is a rich, dramatic, totally engrossing story of two brothers--one a rookie police officer, one a recently returned Vietnam veteran--who come to blows in the year 1968, when D.C. exploded into chaos and violence. Hard Revolution tells for the first time how Derek Strange first became a police officer, and what drove him to leave the force and go into business as a private investigator. Derek Strange was his family's straight arrow, but his older brother Dennis always had a harder time. Home from Vietnam with a disability pension, no job prospects, and old friends up to no good, Dennis is in danger of making one bad decision too many. While Derek makes his way as a rookie police officer, he also tries to be there for Dennis. But no amount of brotherly love can save him from Alvin Jones, a local drug dealer who draws Dennis into his plans. When Dennis runs afoul of Jones, the fallout will change Derek Strange's life forever. Filled with the rich details of time, place, music, and local color that are Pelecanos's trademark, and with an unerring insight into the morality of daily life, Hard Revolution is a fascinating, gripping novel about one man's personal quest for justice and revenge against the backdrop of a nation at war with itself.

New York, NY: Ballantine (2005)

Told by his doctor that he would die within a year, Henry Stuart decides not to accept his fate and moves to Alabama. For the next twenty years visitors traveled to visit the wise Stuart, who named his ten-acre property after Leo Tolstoy.

New York, NY: Scribner (2005)

Near fine in dust jacket.

Forensic expert Catherine "Cat" Ferry is a thirty-one year old woman at the peak of her professional career when she begins to have panic attacks and blackouts at murder scenes. Suspended from her current case, a string of puzzling murders in New Orleans, she returns to her hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, to regroup. When two bloody footprints are revealed by a spill of her forensic materials on the floor of her childhood bedroom, the sight shocks Cat more than any corpse she has seen in her forensic career. Cat's father was murdered when she was eight, but Cat always believed the murder took place in the garden. The bloody footprints suggest otherwise. Driven by this clue from her past, Cat begins a forensic reconstruction of that crime, even as developments by the New Orleans task force pull her back into the case she left behind. As she pieces together the horrifying childhood events she has been shielded from all her life, both she and the FBI realize the current murders in New Orleans are intimately tied to Cat's family and her past. Finding a solution to those murders means more than stopping a relentless killer; it's the only way to save her sanity and her life.

New York, NY: Doubleday (2005)

In his final hours in the Oval Office, the outgoing President grants a controversial last-minute pardon to Joel Backman, a notorious Washington power broker who has spent the last six years hidden away in a federal prison.

What no one knows is that the President issues the pardon only after receiving enormous pressure from the CIA. It seems Backman, in his power broker heyday, may have obtained secrets that compromise the world's most sophisticated satellite surveillance system. Backman is quietly smuggled out of the country in a military cargo plane, given a new name, a new identity, and a new home in Italy.

Eventually, after he has settled into his new life, the CIA will leak his whereabouts to the Israelis, the Russians, the Chinese, and the Saudis. Then the CIA will do what it does best: sit back and watch.

The question is not whether Backman will survive--there is no chance of that. The question the CIA needs answered is, who will kill him?

New York, NY: William Morrow (2005)

In a stunning follow-up to her bestselling debut, Mrs. Kimble, Jennifer Haigh returns with Baker Towers, a compelling story of love and loss in a western Pennsylvania mining town in the years after World War II

Bakerton is a company town built on coal, a town of church festivals and ethnic neighborhoods, hunters’ breakfasts and firemen’s parades. Its children are raised in company houses – three rooms upstairs, three rooms downstairs. Its ball club leads the coal company league. The twelve Baker mines offer good union jobs, and the looming black piles of mine dirt don’t bother anyone. Called Baker Towers, they are local landmarks, clear evidence that the mines are booming. Baker Towers mean good wages and meat on the table, two weeks’ paid vacation and presents under the Christmas tree.

The mines were not named for Bakerton; Bakerton was named for the mines. This is an important distinction. It explains the order of things.

Born and raised on Bakerton’s Polish Hill, the five Novak children come of age during wartime, a thrilling era when the world seems on the verge of changing forever. The oldest, Georgie, serves on a minesweeper in the South Pacific and glimpses life beyond Bakerton, a promising future he is determined to secure at all costs. His sister Dorothy, a fragile beauty, takes a job in Washington, D.C., and finds she is unprepared for city life. Brilliant Joyce longs to devote herself to something of consequence but instead becomes the family’s keystone, bitterly aware of the opportunities she might have had elsewhere. Sandy sails through life on looks and charm, and Lucy, the volatile baby, devours the family’s attention and develops a bottomless appetite for love.

Baker Towers is a family saga and a love story, a hymn to a time and place long gone, to America’s industrial past and the men and women we now call the Greatest Generation. This is a feat of imagination from an extraordinary new voice in American fiction, a writer of enormous power and skill.