New York, NY: Pantheon (2009)

From the author of All Souls' Rising ("A serious historical novel that reads like a dream."-The Washington Post Book World)-a powerful new novel about Nathan Bedford Forrest, the most reviled and celebrated, loathed and legendary, of Civil War generals.

With the same eloquence, dramatic energy, and grasp of history that marked his acclaimed trilogy of novels about Toussaint Louverture, Madison Smartt Bell gives us a wholly new vantage point from which to view a complicated American icon.

We see Forrest off the battlefield, in the more hidden but no less telling moments of his life: wooing the woman who would become his wife; battling an addiction to gambling; overcoming his abhorrence of the bureaucracy of the army to rise to its highest ranks. We see him taking part in the business of slave trading, but treating his own slaves humanely. We see him with his slave mistress, with whom he fathered several children, and we see him reveal his gift for inspiring courage but not change.

As the novel unfolds, a vivid portrait comes into focus: a man whose fierceness was marked by fairness, a life filled with contradiction and integrity. In Bell's telling, it is also an evocation of genius and reticence.

New York, NY: Doubleday (2009)

Grisham returns to Ford County, Mississippi, the setting of his immensely popular first novel, A Time to Kill. This wholly surprising collection reminds readers once again why Grisham is one of America's favorite storytellers.

San Francisco, CA: MacAdam Cage (2009)

The magnificent Ghosthead Oak has stood watch over coastal Alabama's mysterious backwater bays and slow-running rivers, where bull alligators rumble the nerves of lesser creatures and every living thing has the capacity to kill, for five hundred years. Some say the fabled giant tree was once a knee-high seedling brushed by the black boot of Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez. No other tree along the entire coastal crescent from New Orleans to Apalachicola can rival its majesty or its power to draw people to it.
In silence and with dignity, the Ghosthead has served as sentinel to the widow's family land for countless generations. It was a childhood friend and a spirit guide in troubled times. Her father is buried in its shade.
So why would the widow walk into a biker bar and hire a man to fire his chainsaw and inflict fatal gashes around its trunk, ending in a few minutes what took five centuries to create?
"The Widow and the Tree" is a tale of dark deeds committed with mercy in mind, provoking the reader to ask: Would I have done the same thing? This book is based on a true story. Cover art by Barry Moser.

New York, NY: Ballantine (2009)

The lives of three strangers interconnect in unforeseen ways-and with unexpected consequences-in acclaimed author Dan Chaon's gripping, brilliantly written new novel.
Longing to get on with his life, Miles Cheshire nevertheless can't stop searching for his troubled twin brother, Hayden, who has been missing for ten years. Hayden has covered his tracks skillfully, moving stealthily from place to place, managing along the way to hold down various jobs and seem, to the people he meets, entirely normal. But some version of the truth is always concealed.
A few days after graduating from high school, Lucy Lattimore sneaks away from the small town of Pompey, Ohio, with her charismatic former history teacher. They arrive in Nebraska, in the middle of nowhere, at a long-deserted motel next to a dried-up reservoir, to figure out the next move on their path to a new life. But soon Lucy begins to feel quietly uneasy.
My whole life is a lie, thinks Ryan Schuyler, who has recently learned some shocking news. In response, he walks off the Northwestern University campus, hops on a bus, and breaks loose from his existence, which suddenly seems abstract and tenuous. Presumed dead, Ryan decides to remake himself-through unconventional and precarious means.
Await Your Reply is a literary masterwork with the momentum of a thriller, an unforgettable novel in which pasts are invented and reinvented and the future is both seductively uncharted and perilously unmoored.

Sorry. This title is out of stock.

Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press (2009)

Fanning the Spark is the story of Mary Ward Brown's life as a writer—her upbringing in rural Alabama; the joys of college, marriage, and motherhood; the sorrows of becoming a widow; and a lifelong devotion to writing, writers, and literature, and the company of those who shared those loves, nurturing and feeding her interior life in the face of many challenges, losses, and obstacles, both emotional and material.

New York, NY: Scribner (2009)

Near fine in dust jacket.

From "New York Times" bestselling author Greg Iles comes his most electrifying thriller yet. "The Devil's Punchbowl" reveals a world of depravity, sex, violence, and the corruption of a Southern town.

As a prosecuting attorney in Houston, Penn Cage sent hardened killers to death row. But it is as mayor of his hometown -- Natchez, Mississippi -- that Penn will face his most dangerous threat. Urged by old friends to try to restore this fading jewel of the Old South, Penn has ridden into office on a tide of support for change. But in its quest for new jobs and fresh money, Natchez, like other Mississippi towns, has turned to casino gambling, and now five fantastical steamboats float on the river beside the old slave market at Natchez like props from "Gone With the Wind."

But one boat isn't like the others.

Rumor has it that the Magnolia Queen has found a way to pull the big players from Las Vegas to its Mississippi backwater. And with them -- on sleek private jets that slip in and out of town like whispers in the night -- come pro football players, rap stars, and international gamblers, all sharing an unquenchable taste for one thing: blood sport -- and the dark vices that go with it. When a childhood friend of Penn's who brings him evidence of these crimes is brutally murdered, the full weight of Penn's failure to protect his city hits home. So begins his quest to find the men responsible. But it's a hunt he begins alone, for the local authorities have been corrupted by the money and power of his hidden enemy. With his family's lives at stake, Penn realizes his only allies in his one-man war are those bound to him by blood or honor: Caitlin Masters, the lover Penn found in "The Quiet Game" and lost in "Turning Angel" Danny McDavitt, the heroic helicopter pilot from "Third Degree" Tom Cage, Penn's father and legendary local family physician Walt Garrity, a retired Texas Ranger who served with Penn's father during the Korean War

Together they must defeat a sophisticated killer who has an almost preternatural ability to anticipate -- and counter -- their every move. Ultimately, victory will depend on a bold stroke that will leave one of Penn's allies dead -- and Natchez changed forever.

After appearing in two of Iles's most popular novels, Penn Cage makes his triumphant return as a brilliant, honorable, and courageous hero. Rich with Southern atmosphere and marked by one jaw-dropping plot turn after another, "The Devil's Punchbowl" confirms that Greg Iles is America's master of suspense.

New York, NY: William Morrow (2009)

Legendary "New York Times" bestselling author Elmore Leonard returns with three of his favorite characters: Jack Foley from "Out of Sight," Cundo Rey from "LaBrava," and Dawn Navarro from "Riding the Rap."

Jack Foley, the charming bank robber from "Out of Sight," is serving a thirty-year sentence in a Miami penitentiary, but he's made an unlikely friend on the inside who just might be able to do something about that. Fellow inmate Cundo Rey, an extremely wealthy Cuban criminal, arranges for Foley's sentence to be reduced from thirty years to three months, and when Jack is released just two weeks ahead of Cundo, he agrees to wait for him in Venice Beach, California.

Also waiting for Cundo is his common-law wife, Dawn Navarro, a professional psychic with a slightly ulterior motive for staying with Cundo: namely, she wants his money. And with the arrival of Jack, she sees the perfect partner in a plan to relieve Cundo of his fortune. Cundo may be Jack's friend, but does that mean he can trust him? And can either of them trust Dawn?

"Road Dogs" is Elmore Leonard at his best--with his trademark tight plotting and pitch-perfect dialogue--and readers will love seeing Cundo, Jack, and Dawn back in action and working together . . . or are they?

New York, NY: Little & Brown (2009)

Forced out of the "Los Angeles Times" amid the latest budget cuts, newspaperman Jack McEvoy decides to go out with a bang, using his final days at the paper to write the definitive murder story of his career.
He focuses on Alonzo Winslow, a 16-year-old drug dealer in jail after confessing to a brutal murder. But as he delves into the story, Jack realizes that Winslow's so-called confession is bogus. The kid might actually be innocent.
Jack is soon running with his biggest story since The Poet""made his career years ago. He is tracking a killer who operates completely below police radar--and with perfect knowledge of any move against him. Including Jack's.

Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin (2009)

Set in 1916, "Far Bright Star" follows Napoleon Childs, an aging cavalryman, as he leads an expedition of inexperienced soldiers into the mountains of Mexico to hunt down Pancho Villa and bring him to justice. Though he is seasoned at such missions, things go terribly wrong and the patrol is brutally attacked. After witnessing the demise of his troops, Napoleon is left by his captors to die in the desert.
Through him we enter the conflicted mind of a warrior as he tries to survive against all odds, as he seeks to make sense of a lifetime of senseless wars and to reckon with the reasons a man would choose a life on the battlefield. Olmstead, an award-winning writer, uses his precise, descriptive prose to explore the endurance and fate of the last horse soldiers. The result is a tightly wound novel that is as moving as it is terrifying.

New York, NY: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday (2009)

"Woodsburner "springs from a little-known event in the life of one of America's most iconic figures, Henry David Thoreau. On April 30, 1844, a year before he built his cabin on Walden Pond, Thoreau accidentally started a forest fire that destroyed three hundred acres of the Concord woods--an event that altered the landscape of American thought in a single day.
Against the background of Thoreau's fire, Pipkin's ambitious debut penetrates the mind of the young philosopher while also painting a panorama of the young nation at a formative moment. Pipkin's Thoreau is a lost soul, plagued by indecision, resigned to a career designing pencils for his father's factory while dreaming of better things. On the day of the fire, his path will intersect with three very different local citizens, each of whom also harbors a secret dream. Oddmund Hus, a lovable Norwegian farmhand, pines for the wife of his brutal employer. Elliott Calvert, a prosperous bookseller, is also a hilariously inept aspiring playwright. And Caleb Dowdy preaches fire and brimstone to his congregation through an opium haze. Each of their lives, like Thoreau's, is changed forever by the fire.
Like Geraldine Brooks's "March" and Colm Toibin's "The Master," "Woodsburner" illuminates America's literary and cultural past with insight, wit, and deep affection for its unforgettable characters, as it brings to vivid life the complex man whose writings have inspired generations.

New York, NY: Knopf (2009)

Fine in dust jacket.

The author of The Clearing ("the finest American novel in a long, long time"--Annie Proulx) now surpasses himself with a story whose range and cast of characters is even broader, with the fate of a stolen child looming throughout.

Sam Simoneaux's troopship docked in France just as World War I came to an end. Still, what he saw of the devastation there sent him back to New Orleans eager for a normal life and a job as a floorwalker in the city's biggest department store, and to start anew with his wife years after losing a son to illness. But when a little girl disappears from the store on his shift, he loses his job and soon joins her parents working on a steamboat plying the Mississippi and providing musical entertainment en route. Sam comes to suspect that on the downriver journey someone had seen this magical child and arranged to steal her away, and this quest leads him not only into this raucous new life on the river and in the towns along its banks but also on a journey deep into the Arkansas wilderness. Here he begins to piece together what had happened to the girl--a discovery that endangers everyone involved and sheds new light on the massacre of his own family decades before.

Tim Gautreaux brings to vivid life the exotic world of steamboats and shifting currents and rough crowds, of the music of the twenties, of a nation lurching away from war into an uneasy peace at a time when civilization was only beginning to penetrate a hinterlands in which law was often an unknown force.

The Missing is the story of a man fighting to redeem himself, of parents coping with horrific loss with only a whisper of hope to sustain them, of others for whom kidnapping is either only a job or a dream come true. The suspense--and the complicated web of violence that eventually links Sam to complete strangers--is relentless, urgently engaging and, ultimately, profoundly moving, the finest demonstration yet of Gautreaux's understanding of landscape, history, human travail, and hope.

New York: Doubleday (2009)

Kyle McAvoy grew up in his father's small-town law office in York, Pennsylvania. He excelled in college, was elected editor-in-chief of "The Yale Law Journal," and his future has limitless potential.
But Kyle has a secret, a dark one, an episode from college that he has tried to forget. The secret, though, falls into the hands of the wrong people, and Kyle is forced to take a job he doesn't want--even though it's a job most law students can only dream about.
Three months after leaving Yale, Kyle becomes an associate at the largest law firm in the world, where, in addition to practicing law, he is expected to lie, steal, and take part in a scheme that could send him to prison, if not get him killed.
With an unforgettable cast of characters and villains--from Baxter Tate, a drug-addled trust fund kid and possible rapist, to Dale, a pretty but seemingly quiet former math teacher who shares Kyle's "cubicle" at the law firm, to two of the most powerful and fiercely competitive defense contractors in the country--and featuring all the twists and turns that have made John Grisham the most popular storyteller in the world, THE ASSOCIATE is vintage Grisham.

New York, NY: Amy Einhorn/Penguin Putnam (2009)

Near fine in dust jacket. Signed on the title page.

Be prepared to meet three unforgettable women:

Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.

Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.

Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.

Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women, mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, "The Help" is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we do not.