New York, NY: Penguin Putnam (2001)

First-person narrator Alice is a precocious eleven-year-old growing up in rural East Texas with one wish on her mind: Get rid of Simon Jester.Simon is the man who saved her mother from drowning. Simon is her mother's hero, her savior -- and her new husband. He's an enigmatic man whose own family, he says, mysteriously drowned. But soon it becomes apparent that Simon's family did not drown. Alice and her brother become convinced that Simon intends to poison them. Their mother, Meg, tells her children that they have wild imaginations. Until she comes to kiss them one night, and instead of her usual endearments, whispers a single word: Run. The Absence of Nectar is a finely wrought and suspenseful coming-of-age novel that confirms the promise of Hepinstall's highly praised debut, The House of Gentle Men.

New York, NY: William Morrow (2001)

When Byrne and Susan Hollander are killed in a brutal home invasion, the whole city catches its collective breath. A few days later the killers turn up dead behind a locked door in Brooklyn. One has killed his partner, then himself. The city sighs with relief. The cops close the case.Matt and Elaine Scudder were in the same room with the Hollanders hours before their deaths. In spite of himself, Scudder is drawn to the Hollander case. The closer he looks, the more he senses the presence of a third man, a puppet master who manipulated his two accomplices, then cut their strings when he was done with them.The villain who looms in the shadows is one of Block's most inspired creations, cold and diabolical, murdering for pleasure and profit. Nobody but Scudder even suspects he exists -- and he's not done killing.He's just getting started....

New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press (2001)

Raised on tales of cowboys and pirates, eleven-year-old Reuben Land has little doubt that miracles happen all around us, and that it's up to us to "make of it what we will." Reuben was born with no air in his lungs, and it was only when his father, Jeremiah, picked him up and commanded him to breathe that his lungs filled. Reuben struggles with debilitating asthma from then on, making him a boy who knows firsthand that life is a gift, and also one who suspects that his father is touched by God and can overturn the laws of nature.
The quiet midwestern life of the Lands is upended when Davy, the oldest son, kills two marauders who have come to harm the family; unlike his father, he is not content to leave all matters of justice in God's hands. The morning of his sentencing, Davy - a hero to some, a cold-blooded murderer to others - escapes from his cell, and the Lands set out in search of him. Their journey is touched by serendipity and the kindness of strangers - among them a free spirit named Roxanna, who offers them a place to stay during a blizzard and winds up providing them with something far more permanent. Meanwhile, a federal agent is trailing the Lands, convinced they know of Davy's whereabouts.

New York, NY: Knopf (2001)

Near fine in dust jacket.

With the same emotional generosity and effortlessly compelling storytelling that made All Over but the Shoutin' a beloved bestseller, Rick Bragg continues his personal history of the Deep South. Bragg's grandfather Charlie Bundrum died before Bragg was born but remains vibrantly alive in the memories of the people who loved him. In telling Charlie's life story, Bragg conjures up the foothills of Georgia and Alabama in the years when the roads were still dirt and wounds were still treated with brown sugar. A masterly family chronicle and a human portrait so vivid one can smell the cornbread and whiskey, Ava's Man is unforgettable.

New York, NY: Atlantic (2001)

Barry Hannah has long been considered one of the country's best living writers, whose singular voice and wicked genius for storytelling have earned him legions of diehard fans. His first novel in ten years, Yonder Stands Your Orphan opens with the establishment of an orphans' camp and the discovery of an abandoned car with two skeletons in the trunk. Man Mortimer, a pimp and casino pretty boy who resembles dead country singer Conway Twitty, has just been betrayed, and his revenge becomes a madness that will ravage the Mississippi community of Eagle Lake and give vent to his lifelong fascination with knives. The pompous young sheriff is useless at solving the crimes, so Mortimer's only challengers are three eccentric Christians -- a disgraced doctor and two ex-bikers, all prey to their addictions -- and an African-American Vietnam veteran whose wife is ill with cancer. Mortimer has a hold on each one of them -- a long-standing debt, a forgotten crime, or responsibilities they cannot yet desert. Yonder Stands Your Orphan paints a searing picture of the American South and establishes Barry Hannah once again as one of the most important writers in America.

New York, NY: Penguin Putnam (2001)

Fine in dust jacket.

A mysterious series of paintings in a Hong Kong art museum, including one featuring a woman who bears a striking resemblance to her, draws photojournalist Jordan Glass into a painful search for the murderer of her twin sister, killed one year earlier, as she becomes embroiled in a deadly duel with the anonymous killer who knows all too much about her.

New York, NY: Knopf (2001)

A heart-stopping story, written with grace and lucidity, located at the dead center of Southern mythology and our most intransigent national trauma. The year is 1902, and the place is a small community deep in the Mississippi Delta, where black and white alike struggle to coexist as the era of Reconstruction gives way to Jim Crow. Into this tense atmosphere rides Tandy Payne -- brother to Loring's well-liked mayor, and a dissolute gambler looking to reclaim the family estate and escape his many enemies. The presence of a black postmistress in town soon awakens his darkest instincts, and the ensuing clash with his principled brother results in a harrowing confrontation. Fueled by a haunting and bloody history, their familial dispute quickly spreads through the countryside, testing those who long for an antebellum past, and all those who must face down deep hatreds in order to claim their future.

New York, NY: Knopf (2001)

Continuing the audacious fictional counter-history that he began in American Tabloid, the demon dog of American literature reimagines the bloody events that erupted in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and culminated five years later in the book-end assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. In The Cold Six Thousand James Ellroy portrays this chain of mayhem through three of its most dangerous links: a Las Vegas cop with ties to the lunatic right; a defrocked FBI agent turned mouthpiece for Howard Hughes and Jimmy Hoffa, and a drug-runner and hitman who serves as the wiseguys' emissary to the anti-Castro underground. Ingeniously orchestrated, terrifyingly plausible, and propelled by the rhythms of Ellroy's Mach-10 prose, the result is a masterwork of contemporary fiction.

New York, NY: Penguin Putnam (2001)

Ruth Young suspects that something is terribly wrong with her mother. As a child, Ruth was constantly subjected to her mother's disturbing notions about curses and ghosts and to her repeated threats to kill herself. But now LuLing Young seems happy -- far from her usual disagreeable and dissatisfied self. Ailing and struggling to hold onto the evaporating past. LuLing begins to write all that she can remember of her life as a girl in China. When Ruth discovers the papers, she is transported to a backwoods village known as Immortal Heart. Like layers of sediment being removed, each page reveals secrets of the mute nursemaid. Precious Auntie, and of the curse that LuLing believes she released through betrayal. Within LuLing's pages, written in Chinese, awaits the truth about a mother's heart that she cannot tell her daughter, yet hopes she will never forget. Set in contemporary San Francisco and in the Chinese village where Peking Man is being unearthed, The Bonesetter's Daughter conjures the pain of broken dreams, the power of myths, and the strength of love that enables us to recover in memory what we have lost in grief.

New York, NY: Doubleday (2001)

Inspired by the author's own childhood in rural Arkansas, this moving story follows one boy's journey from innocence to experience. Luke Chandler, 7, lives in the cotton fields with his parents and grandparents in a little house that's never been painted. During the harvest, he sees and hears things no child could possibly be prepared for and finds himself keeping secrets that not only threaten the crop but will change the lives of the Chandlers forever.

New York, NY: W.W. Norton (2001)

Mississippi Teenager Noel Weatherspoon is many things: an unwitting clairvoyant, an extreme asthma sufferer, a ghost-seeing insomniac, an endearing dopehead, a wanna-be erotic photographer, a would-be baseball star, a regretful vandal, a lamentable virgin who becomes an older woman's sex toy, and a never-accused, somnambulant mercy-killer. Noel is haunted by the specter of the boy he knocked into a coma while sliding into home in Little League and by the spirit of his father who died in Vietnam. He is equally haunted by his embarrassing failures with girls and his own dark secrets. The surely damned Noel must navigate all manner of bible thumpers, from gossiping Baptists, Pentecostal cousins, born-again Christians, and righteous Methodists to a stepfather who bears an uncanny resemblance to Billy Graham. Funny and dark, Rides of the Midway is a brilliantly told story about a boy whose life spins completely out of control.

New York, NY: Doubleday (2000)

Near fine in dust jacket.

It’s 1952, and E.F. Bloodworth is finally coming home to Ackerman’s Field, Tennessee. Itinerant banjo picker and volatile vagrant, he’s been gone ever since he gunned down a deputy thirty years before. Two of his sons won’t be home to greet him: Warren lives a life of alcoholic philandering down in Alabama, and Boyd has gone to Detroit in vengeful pursuit of his wife and the peddler she ran off with. His third son, Brady, is still home, but he’s an addled soothsayer given to voodoo and bent on doing whatever it takes to keep E.F. from seeing the wife he abandoned. Only Fleming, E.F.’s grandson, is pleased with the old man’s homecoming, but Fleming’s life is soon to careen down an unpredictable path hewn by the beautiful Raven Lee Halfacre.

In the great Southern tradition of Faulkner, Styron, and Cormac McCarthy, William Gay wields a prose as evocative and lush as the haunted and humid world it depicts. Provinces of Night is a tale redolent of violence and redemption–a whiskey-scented, knife-scarred novel whose indelible finale is not an ending nearly so much as it is an apotheosis.