Text New Releases: July 15^th

Nora Roberts - High Noon If you're looking for some good beach reading for the shore of the Huangpu river this summer make sure to pick up Nora Roberts' latest novel, which is paced like a Lifetime movie. Police Lieutenant Phoebe MacNamara, a skilled hostage negotiator, has a home life as demanding as her work. With a mother who won't leave the house, a pre-teen daughter and a career that just won't quit, Phoebe is in serious need of some lovin'. Enter Duncan Swift, a handsome gentleman who refuses to leave Phoebe alone after she talks his friend down from a ledge. But even with a boyfriend, life refuses to run smoothly for Phoebe. At the "office" an anonymous man assaults her. Despite a rapid recovery, Phoebe then must deal with threatening messages that show up on her doorstep. So, armed with new beaux Duncan, Phoebe faces her cowardly tormentor in a final showdown that is sure the make the reader's eyes pop.

Daniel Wallace - Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician Set in 1950s America, circus sideshow freaks, magic, and violent racism pervade the new novel from the beloved author of Big Fish. One of the circus novelty acts, Henry Walker the Negro magician, mysteriously disappears one night after an encounter with three teenage hillbillies. Henry's friends, Jenny the Ossified Girl, Rudy the Strong Man, and JJ the Barker, a gang of circus misfits, band together in search of him only to find out a terrible secret of his childhood: at the tender age of ten Henry met the devil, who gave him the art of magic, but took something very valuable in return. This unusual cast of characters and their bizarre adventure make for a fantastical tale with emotional depth. Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician blazes with paradoxes: power and helplessness, reality and illusion, free will and determinism.

Colin Thubron - Shadow of the Silk Road Shadow of the Silk Road records a journey along the longest land route on earth. Beginning in the depths of China, the road winds through the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan, the plains of Iran and into Kurdish Turkey. Writer and seasoned traveler, Colin Thubron, covers these seven thousand miles in eight months by way of local bus, truck, car, donkey cart and camel; he treks from the tomb of the Yellow Emperor, "the mythic progenitor of the Chinese people," to the ancient port of Antioch. Along Tubron's passage he traces shadows—the history of Asian trade, armies, ideas and philosophies. However, in addition to unearthing the past, Shadow of the Silk Road suggests that modern Asia is "a continent of upheaval."

Günter Grass - Peeling the Onion Published in Germany in 2006 where it was met with heavy-handed controversy, Peeling the Onion has just been translated into English by Michael Henry Heim. The initial backlash that Grass's autobiography created was not due to the Nobel Prize winning author's disclosure of his involvement in the Waffan SS per se, but rather because he had concealed his past for so long, all the while remaining an outspoken critic of the German atrocities committed during WWII. The book itself offers an impressionistic account of the war and a meditation on memory; at the core of this onion lies Grass's admission that his story lacks accuracy, due to the tricks and disjunctive nature of the human mind. A New York Times review criticized the style as one that settles into "murky evasions and coy revisions of a past." In fact, Grass played a very limited role in the War and was by no means a leader of the Nazi party. Nevertheless, throughout the book, Grass denounces his "joint responsibility" for war crimes and travels into a literary space that is driven by self-hatred.