Preview Shelf: New and Notable Books by CDPL Volunteer Janice Clauser

Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate author of Night, offers a moving new novel, Hostage, about the legacy of the Holocaust in today’s troubled world and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 1975, a professional story teller is taken hostage, isolated, and told his life will be bartered for the freedom of three Palestinian prisoners. He tells his captors stories about his memories, especially World War II, illustrating the power of memory to connect us with the past and our shared need for resolution. 

Drawing from her career as a district attorney and TV judge, Jeanine Pirro’s debut novel Sly Fox is set in 1976 in New York City, where a young district attorney wants to bring domestic abusers to justice. Then there’s Sutton, by J. R. Moehringer, a story about the career of America’s most successful bank robber, rooted for by the public because he never fired a shot. 

A young daughter wants to escape from her parents’ ugly divorce and the cyberbullying of an ex-best friend, and her salvation comes when she loses herself in the diary of a 1920s Irish domestic writing about the same concerns in So Far Away, by Meg Moore.

Chris Bohjalian’s The Sandcastle Girls is a tale of Aleppo, Syria, in 1915 when a young nurse volunteers to help refugees from Armenian genocide; then the story switches to Bronxville, New York, in 2012 where a novelist searches his family history. Beggar’sFeast by Randy Boyagoda tells of the 100-year life of an abandoned youngster born in 1899 Ceylon, who after many adventures becomes the wealthy headman of his village. Brody, a western romance by Emma Lang, presents the year 1836 when surviving siblings are trying to put their lives back together in East Texas; their young brother disappears and the older sister follows a Texas Ranger across the state to find him.  

In Beijing in the 18^th century, the lives of three unforgettable women collide in the inner chambers of the Jia mansion; The Red Chamber is Pauline Chen’s re-imagining of the Chinese classic Dream of the Red Chamber.  In utter contrast is John Scalzi’s Redshirts, in which an Ensign has been assigned to Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since the year 2456. He soon finds that his mission involves lethal confrontation with alien forces. 

  

Benjamin Black’s mystery, Vengeance, starts with a very successful businessman in Ireland killing himself on his boat; the plot thickens when another, even more shocking, death occurs. In A Foreign Country, by Charles Cumming, a disgraced former MI6 officer is tasked with finding the disappeared first female Chief of the Agency; he uncovers a conspiracy which promises unimaginable repercussions for Britain and its allies.   

A woman takes part in an online study called “Marriage in the 21^st Century,” and the questions she answers anonymously force her to reconsider her whole life in Wife 22 by Melanie Gideon. Black Fridays, by Michael Sears, features a former Wall Street hotshot who made bad moves, had prison time, and is now asked to look into irregularities left by another trader who just died.   

Karen Kingsbury writes Christian stories with inspired results; her new one about the Baxter family is Coming Home. In Mitch Albom’s The Time Keeper, Father Time is banished to a cave for trying to measure God’s greatest gift; finally granted his freedom, he receives the mission to teach two earthly people the true meaning of time.