By Antonia Fraser
Nan A. Talese | 336 pages
Release Date: November 2, 2010

Summary:
In the heartfelt memoir Must You Go?: My Life with Harold Pinter, celebrated historical biographer Antonia Fraser shares intimate moments with her husband Pinter, the renowned playwright. The two Brits met at a party in 1975, though both were married to other people at the time. Fraser was wife to Tory member of Parliament and mother to six children, while Pinter was wed to an actress and had one child. Their romantic relationship had a somewhat scandalous beginning, but deepened into a love that spanned more than three decades. The couple lived together from August of 1975 until the end of 2008 when the Nobel Prize winning dramatist succumbed to cancer. The narrative, mainly culled from events recorded in Fraser’s diaries, offers private glimpses into the lives of two very public people, and reveals a marriage blessed with success and joy, yet tempered near the end with the challenge of illness. Read more…

Screenshots from "Dracula: The Official Stoker Family Edition" interactive eBook app for the iPad.

A thoroughly modern approach to Bram Stoker’s classic spooky tale, Dracula, makes its debut on Apple’s App Store today, just in time for Halloween. Dracula: The Official Stoker Family Edition, a fully interactive eBook, blends nearly 300 pages of text with 600 illustrations and implements the iPad’s touch screen functionality to create a user experience similar to video game play. Readers can use a lantern to light up words on a page, reveal information on tombstones by blowing away leaves and use their virtual blood to uncover hidden messages. The interactive book was developed by Padworx Digital Media using the company’s proprietary game engine. “It really is a different kind of reading experience,” Jeffrey Schechter of Padworx Digital Media tells USA TODAY. “…Not only can we do everything other interactive books can do, but we can also bring in 3-D graphics and game-play elements.” Read more…

By Lee Child
Delacorte Press | 400pgs
Release Date: October 19, 2010

Summary:
Former military policeman Jack Reacher returns in Worth Dying For, the 15th book of Lee Child’s bestselling Reacher series. On the move again after narrowly escaping the deadly events of the previous novel 61 Hours, the battle-scarred hero finds himself in a small town in Nebraska. There, Reacher encounters a scene very different from the idealized mid-western farming communities. The Duncan clan, a small time crime family specializing in smuggling and human trafficking runs the town, and a confrontation with one of the members puts Reacher directly in their cross hairs. When he learns of a years-old case involving a missing eight-year-old girl, his deepening investigation puts the arrival of one of the Duncans’ valuable shipments in jeopardy. The family may be small fish in a big pond, but their partners who are in want of the shipment, are vicious sharks. In order to find justice for the long lost child and stop the Duncans’ intimidation of the town, the wandering hero must square off with a pack of the clan’s well-muscled henchmen, recruited directly from the defensive line of the University of Nebraska football team. Read more…

By Ron Chernow
Penguin Press HC | 904pgs
Release Date: October 5, 2010

Summary:
Award-winning author Ron Chernow delves into the life of another iconic figure of American history in Washington: A Life. George Washington, the most revered of our nation’s founders, is portrayed as a man of volatile temper, deep passions and incredible political genius. Drawing on vast amounts of historical research, Chernow goes beyond the fables of cherry trees and wooden teeth to show a living, breathing human being rather than a two-dimensional reference in a history book. The tome spans the entirety of Washington’s life, following his difficult childhood, victories as a young soldier in the French and Indian War, participation in the Constitutional Convention, and his terms as the first President of the United States. Chernow also sheds light on Washington’s personal relationships, touching on his youthful romance with Sally Fairfax, the prickly relationship with his mother, and his marriage to Martha. The author examines the first President’s interior life through all of his professional and personal challenges and triumphs and reveals him to be a man of “deep feelings” who struggles to control his emotions throughout his life. Read more…

By David Sedaris
Little, Brown and Company | 176pgs
Release Date: September 28, 2010

Summary:
Humorist David Sedaris, best known for mining his family life and slightly misspent youth for his wildly entertaining memoir collections, takes a cue from Aesop in his latest book Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modern Bestiary. This thin volume of fables, accompanied with illustrations by Ian Falconer, features a menagerie of winged and furry creatures that share the same frustrations and malaise of life that we humans do. In the The Faithful Setter, the marriage of an Irish hound and his mutt wife is strained by her breed insecurities, while Hello Kitty features a disgruntled cat ordered to mandatory AA meetings. But, make no mistake, these are not kiddie fables. The dark humor that is characteristic of Sedaris’ style weaves through most of the plots. In an interview with USA TODAY, the author describes the book “as bedtime stories for children who drink.” Read more…

By Darin Strauss
McSweeney’s | 204pgs
Release Date: September 15, 2010

Summary:
In this honest and painful memoir, novelist Darin Strauss lays bare the life-shattering events surrounding the accidental death of his high school classmate in Half a Life. Eighteen-year-old Strauss was just weeks away from graduating high school on the day he was driving with some friends and collided with a young girl on a bike, who had unexpectedly swerved in front of his car. The girl, 16-year-old Celine Zilke, was killed and Strauss was left with a tremendous guilt that would weigh on him for years to come. In that instant, the hopeful young man with a bright future was forever changed, and a promise to Celine’s mother to live his life for two people, kept the girl a constant presence in his mind. The tragic loss of life, the dramatic court case that followed, and years of piercing introspection made Strauss the man very different from his younger self, and provided the foundation for his work in fiction. Through his personal story, the author touches on universal themes of guilt, accountability and acceptance of life’s traumas. Read more…

By Anne Fortier
Ballantine Books | 464 pages
Release Date: August 24, 2010

Summary:
The heartbreak that Julie Jacobs feels over the loss of her cherished aunt Rose soon turns to puzzled dismay as she learns the entire estate has been left to Julie’s twin sister, while she herself has only been bequeathed a single key. The mystery and adventure of Anne Fortier’s Juliet, begins with this small key, once owned by Julie’s dead mother, that fits a safety-deposit box in the city of Siena, Italy. The Twenty-five-year-old American travels to Siena and unlocks not only the box, but dangerous secrets about her Italian ancestors. She discovers a familial link to Giulietta Tolomei, a girl who fell in love with a young man from a rival family named Romeo in 1340, all to disastrous effect. This tragic love story went on to be immortalized through the ages by artists and writers, most famously by Shakespeare himself. The letters that Julie finds in the safety-deposit box point to the long hidden treasure of “Juliet’s Eyes,” beautiful jewels that adorn a gold statue. In her quest to find the valuable artifact, she encounters a mysterious contessa as well as intimidating mobsters, and realizes the blood feud that started between ancient families still exists in modern Siena. Alternating between the 21st and 14th centuries, Fortier weaves a story of intrigue and romance centered around one of the world’s most famous couples.
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Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, Freedom hits shelves tomorrow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 576pgs), though the media has been furiously buzzing about the title for weeks. The New York Times has published two rave reviews about the tale of a dysfunctional family; Sam Tanenhaus proclaims the books “a masterpiece of American fiction”, while Michiko Kakutani applauds Franzen’s “ability to throw open a big, Updikean picture window on American middle-class life.”  Earlier this month, the author was featured on the cover of Time magazine as a “Great American Novelist”, and President Barack Obama got an early copy of the book to take on a recent vacation. Yet, with all this love, there are some, like authors Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner, who feel the “Franzenfrenzy” coverage, especially in the New York Times, is overblown and biased. They also feel that the media would do better by focusing on the works of a wide range of authors, with varied backgrounds, instead of one literary star. The pair have turned to Twitter to voice their opinions on the subject using the hashtag #franzenfreude. “Would love to see the NYT rave about authors who aren’t white male literary darlings,” tweeted Picoult. Weiner asked her Twitter followers to suggest “non-Franzen novels about love, identity, families”, such as her pick, Digging to America by Anne Tyler. Read more…

Scott Simon writes openly and lovingly about the adoption process that he and his wife went through in order to bring their two daughters home from China in Baby, We Were Meant For Each Other: In Praise of Adoption (Random House, 180pgs). The author, known on the airwaves as the host of NPR‘s Weekend Edition, and his wife Caroline, had tried for years to conceive before deciding to adopt a child from overseas. Simon tells of their first “adopto-tourism” trip to China, anxiously seeing the sights with a group of adoptive parents, nervously waiting for the big moment when they’ll finally meet their child. The fulfillment of a dream, becoming parents, is both joyful and terrifying. At first sight, they immediately fall in love with the little girl they name Elise, though the euphoria is tempered with moments of panic and fear. “What have we done? What were we thinking? We’ve ripped a baby away from the only place she’s ever known, to bring her some place on the other side of the world that might as well be the moon. What kind of people are we?”
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By Kathy Reichs
Scribner | 320pgs
Release Date: August 24, 2010

Summary:
An unusual death in Quebec drives Dr. Temperance Brennan to dig forty years into the past for answers in Spider Bones, Kathy Reichs’ 13th outing with the forensic anthropologist. Fingerprints identify the victim of drowning, with strange S&M overtones, as John Lowery. But, records show that John Lowery died in Vietnam in 1968, and was buried by his family in North Carolina. How could one man die twice? Brennan exhumes Lowery’s grave and takes the remains to the U.S. military’s Joint POW/ MIA Accounting Command, in Hawaii to find answers. Things are further complicated when yet another set of remains is discovered, this one entangled with Lowery’s dog tags, and Brennan is also asked to consult on the body of a possible shark attack victim. The good Doctor teams up with Detective Andrew Ryan, her on-again off-again lover, and Honolulu medical examiner Hadley Perry to unravel the twisted mysteries behind all these deaths. Read more…