By Julia Stuart
Doubleday | 320pgs
Relase Date: August 10, 2010

Summary:
Julia Stuart creates a whimsical and amusing menagerie of humans and animals alike, in The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise: A Novel. Modern day Beefeater Balthazar Jones and his wife Hebe live in the Tower of London, along with an unusual assortment of staff members that man the historical monument. Dealing all day with tourists, both curious and cranky, distracts him from greiving the loss of his 11-year-old son, Milo. The boy’s death lies heavily on the couple, and Hebe is desperate to talk about their loss and share her grief. But, Balthazar attempts to further avoid the subject by becoming engrossed in the odd hobby of collecting rainwater in Egyptian perfume bottles. When the Beefeater is unexpectedly assigned the job of creating a menagerie to house all the exotic animals gifted to the Queen, the population of the Tower grows even more strange and colorful. The folly and foibles of two-legged and four-legged creatures combine to tell an endearing love story.
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By Gail Caldwell
Random House | 208pgs
Release Date: August 10, 2010

Summary:
Pulitzer Prize winning critic Gail Caldwell writes a deeply touching testament to her best friend in Let’s Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship. Caldwell and fellow writer Caroline Knapp (Drinking: A Love Story) shared an intensely close connection, and when Knapp was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in April of 2002, the pair shared Knapp’s struggle in the final days of her life. The women had come into this valuable friendship in mid-life. They met in Boston and quickly bonded over their mutual love of dogs, active lifestyles and past struggles with alcoholism. Neither were married, and turned to each other for advice, companionship and emotional support. Caldwell openly discusses Knapp’s decline in health and death two months after the diagnosis, as a way to deal with her grief and memorialize their friendship by sharing their story.
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By Carl Hiaasen
Knopf | 352 pages
Release Date: July 27, 2010

Summary:
The always entertaining and irreverent Carl Hiaasen offers up a great beach read in the form of his latest novel Star Island. The career of Cheryl Bunterman, known to the world as wayward pop-princes Cherry Pye, has hit a downward spiral owed mostly to her serious shortage of talent and voracious consumption of drugs, alcohol and men. Working furiously to stage the singer’s comeback tour is her oddball entourage, which includes a stage mother from hell, a lecherous music producer and (unknown to Cherry) “undercover stunt double”, Ann DeLusia, who makes public appearances whenever the real pop star is passed out and/or in rehab. When Ann is mistakenly kidnapped by sleazy paparazzo Bang Abbott, Cherry’s career edges ever closer to the brink of disaster, and the singer’s handlers rush furiously to find her double. The plot takes another bizarre twist when former Florida governor (now eco-guerrilla), Clinton “Skink” Tyree, who grew enamored with Ann after one brief meeting, also races to save her. Who will find Ann first? Will the press find out the double’s secret? Even worse, will Cherry herself?
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By Rachel Shukert
Paperback
Harper Perennial | 336pgs
Release Date: July 27, 2010

Summary:
Performer and playwright Rachel Shukert recounts her experiences and misadventures during a coming of age tour of Europe in the witty Everything Is Going to Be Great: An Underfunded and Overexposed European Grand Tour. With a freshly minted acting degree from NYU, Shukert wins a role as an extra in a play booked on a European tour. An error in customs leaves her passport unstamped, allowing her to travel freely throughout Vienna, Zurich and Amsterdam, experiencing booze, boys and culture shock in transit. Written in a style that Entertainment Weekly‘s Tina Jordan describes as “a cross between David Sedaris and Chuck Palahniuk”, Shukert’s irreverent observations offer an entertaining portrait of a young woman finding her way to adulthood.
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By Chevy Stevens
St. Martin’s Press | 352pgs
Release Date: July 6, 2010

Summary:
Annie O’Sullivan, a young realtor on Vancouver Island, deals with the aftermath of her brutal abduction in Still Missing, the debut novel by Chevy Stevens. On a warm day in August, Annie has a lot on her mind during a slow open house, but when a friendly man shows up at the end of the day, her hopes of a sale begin to rise. Instead of brokering a real estate deal, Annie is kidnapped, held captive for a year in a desolate cabin in the wilderness, and repeatedly raped by her captor. The plot interlaces details of her year in hell, told through Annie’s therapy sessions, with her fight to regain normalcy after the ordeal has ended. She may have physically escaped her horrific prison, but is still searching for a vital part of her being that is still missing.
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"The Birth of Old Glory" by Percy Moran

In the spirit of patriotism surrounding the 4th of July, history professor Marla Miller has written a new book about Betsy Ross, the iconic patriot best known for sewing the first American flag. In Betsy Ross and the Making of America (Henry Holt, 467pgs) Miller investigates the story of Ross and her most famous creation, drawing some very interesting conclusions. Working as an upholsterer, Ross’ skill and quality of craftsmanship was well known, and it is documented that she made numerous flags, pennants and standards for the government during the Revolutionary War. But, there is no written historical record proving the seamstress made America’s first flag by herself. “Miller reminds us, the flag, ‘like the Revolution it represents, was the work of many hands,’” writes Marjoleine Kars in a review for The Washington Post.
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By Tess Gerritsen
Ballantine Books | 336pgs
Release Date: June 29, 2010

Summary:
Tess Gerritsen’s dynamic duo, detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles, return in Ice Cold the eighth installment of the bestselling Rizzoli & Isles series. The novel opens with Isles attending a medical conference in Wyoming, and embarking on an impromptu ski trip with friends. The leisurely outing takes a dangerous turn as their SUV breaks down in the midst of a snow storm, and the group enters the tiny village of Kingdom Come looking for shelter. Isles and friends come upon an unsettling scene; the remote community appears to be hastily abandoned, though there are chilling signs that someone remains, watching. In Boston, a few days later, Rizzoli is notified that Isles’ burned body has been found. This shocking news incites the detective to conduct her own investigation into Kingdom Come, uncovering the village’s malevolent secrets, and learning the truth about Isles’ death. Could this be the end of a beautiful friendship?
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By Alex Butterworth
Pantheon | 528pgs
Release Date: June 15, 2010

Summary:
Historian Alex Butterworth studies the years spanning the late 19th and early 20th centuries when unstable global economies and social upheavals turned some young people into anarchist terrorists, in The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and Secret Agents. The intense, captivating narrative follows the anarchist movement from its beginnings in a struggling Paris Commune in 1871, to the bloody Russian Revolution in 1905, and finally to the movement’s decline in the 1930′s. The story line moves between, Europe, Russia and the U.S. and prominent anarchist leaders such as Kropotkin, Rochefort, and Bakunin, are discussed. As the disenchanted social idealists resort to increasingly violent acts of terrorism in pursuit of a utopian way of life, governments react by creating secret police forces to investigate and prosecute the anarchists. Drawing parallels with today’s turbulent political landscape, Butterworth offers this history as a cautionary tale in hopes that new generations will not repeat the bloody mistakes of the past.
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This year marks the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize winning book To Kill a Mockingbird. To commemorate the milestone, Mary McDonagh Murphy has written Scout, Atticus & Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper, 240pgs) in which twenty-six people are interviewed about their love of the book. Some of the interviewees are very well known, such as Oprah Winfrey, Anna Quindlen and Tom Brokaw, others like the author’s sister, Alice Finch Lee are less so. After 50 years in print, the novel is considered an American classic and still sells almost one million copies a year. “No other twentieth-century American novel is more widely read. Even British librarians, who were polled in 2006 and asked, “Which book should every adult read before they die?” voted To Kill a Mockingbird number one. The Bible was number two,” writes Murphy in an excerpt published on the The New Yorker‘s website. Murphy, who is also a filmmaker, has produced a documentary titled Hey, Boo to coincide with the book.
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By Bret Easton Ellis
Knopf | 192pgs
Release date: June 15, 2010

Summary:
Twenty-five years later, Bret Easton Ellis revisits the characters that put him on the literary map in Imperial Bedrooms, the sequel to his breakout debut novel Less Than Zero. The rich, drug-fueled, young hipsters may have grown into middle age, but older doesn’t necessarily mean wiser. When narrator Clay, now a well known screenwriter working in New York, returns to L.A. to cast his movie about teens in the 1980′s, he quickly falls in with his old crowd. On the surface the glitz and glamor of the City of Angels appears unchanged from Clay’s youth, but a current of quiet desperation flows underneath. His ex-girlfriend Blair is now married to the ever unfaithful Trent, Julian runs an escort service specializing in teenage girls and Rip is almost unrecognizable due to all the plastic surgery that has mangled his face. Things take a decidedly noir turn as Clay begins a destructive affair with a talentless starlet. Mysterious text messages and strange cars parked menacingly outside his apartment push him into a paranoid panic that forces him to look into the darkness of his own soul.
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