fiction / general

Badger Girl is delighted to find the biggest turnip she has ever seen growing in her vegetable garden, but when the time comes to harvest the giant root, she is unable to pull it up without help from family and friends.

"A ... novel about a reclusive young woman saving up for weight loss surgery when she gets drawn into a shadowy feminist guerilla group called "Jennifer"--equal parts Bridget Jones's Diary and Fight Club"--Provided by publisher.

At the end of a long winter in well-to-do Ridgedale, New Jersey, the body of an infant is discovered in the woods near the town's prestigious university campus. No one knows who the baby is, or how the body ended up out there. But there is no shortage of opinions. When freelance journalist, and recent Ridgedale transplant, Molly Sanderson, is unexpectedly called upon to cover the story, it's a risk, given the severe depression that followed the loss of her own baby. But the bigger threat comes when Molly unearths some of Ridgedale's darkest secrets, including a string of unreported sexual assaults going back twenty years. Meanwhile, Sandy, a high school dropout, searches for her volatile and now missing mother, and PTA president Barbara struggles to help her young son, who's suddenly having disturbing outbursts. Told from the perspectives of Molly, Barbara, and Sandy, the story of the baby's death is revealed and the three women find they have far more in common than they realized.

Dave is fourteen years old, entering high school, and living with his family in a cabin on Oregon's Mount Hood. But he isn't the only one approaching adulthood and its freedoms that summer. Martin, a pine marten (a small animal of the deep woods, of the otter/mink family), is leaving his own mother and siblings and setting off on his own as well. As Martin and Dave's paths cross on forest trails and rocky mountaintops, they and we witness the full, unknowable breadth and vast sweep of life, and the awe inspiring interconnectedness of the world and its many inhabitants, human and otherwise.

"Trampoline, a debut novel by Robert Gipe, is set in the coalfields of Kentucky. Its narrator is Dawn Jewell, a teenager who recounts the turbulent time when her grandmother Cora led her into a fight to stop a mountaintop removal coal mine. Dawn's father, Delbert, is dead, killed in the mines, leaving her mother, Tricia, a grieving drunk. Trampoline follows Dawn as she decides whether to save a mountain or save herself; be ruled by love or ruled by anger; remain in the land of her birth or run for her life"--Provided by publisher.

"An uncanny child born to brilliant parents, befriended by a prince, mentored by a wise woman, pursued by a powerful man, Secret Riven has no idea what destiny will demand of her or the courage she must have to confront it"--Provided by publisher.

Alex Meier, a young Jewish writer, fled his native Berlin, Germany, before World War II, but when McCarthyism threatens his new life in America in 1948, Alex makes a desperate bargain with the CIA: he will go back to Berlin and act as their agent in the political hotspot as a way of earning his way back to his new home and family. But almost immediately, things start to go wrong, and Alex finds himself a wanted man. Even worse, he discovers that his real mission is to spy on the woman he left behind, the only woman he has ever really loved.

"Born in 1941, Eileen Tumulty is raised by her Irish immigrant parents in Woodside, Queens, in an apartment where the mood swings between heartbreak and hilarity, depending on whether guests are over and how much alcohol has been consumed. Eileen can't help but dream of a calmer life, in a better neighborhood. When Eileen meets Ed Leary, a scientist whose bearing is nothing like those of the men she grew up with, she thinks she's found the perfect partner to deliver her to the cosmopolitan world she longs to inhabit. They marry, and Eileen quickly discovers Ed doesn't aspire to the same, ever bigger, stakes in the American Dream. Eileen encourages her husband to want more: a better job, better friends, a better house, but as years pass it becomes clear that his growing reluctance is part of a deeper psychological shift. An inescapable darkness enters their lives, and Eileen and Ed and their son Connell try desperately to hold together a semblance of the reality they have known, and to preserve, against long odds, an idea they have cherished of the future. Through the Learys, novelist Matthew Thomas charts the story of the American Century, particularly the promise of domestic bliss and economic prosperity that captured hearts and minds after WWII. The result is a powerfully affecting work of art; one that reminds us that life is more than a tally of victories and defeats, that we live to love and be loved, and that we should tell each other so before the moment slips away. Epic in scope, heroic in character, masterful in prose, We Are Not Ourselves is a testament to our greatest desires and our greatest frailties."--.

Seasoned, respected Boston police officer Joe O'Brien discovers that he has Huntington's disease and that each of his four adult children have a fifty percent chance of inheriting it, and as they watch the disease progress in their father, the children must find the courage to live with a life at risk or to learn their fate.

"From the PEN/Faulkner finalist and critically acclaimed author of Hold it 'Til it Hurts comes a dark and socially provocative southern-fried comedy about four liberal UC Berkeley students who stage a mock lynching during a Civil War reenactment--a fierce, funny, tragic work from a bold new writer"--.