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The best selling Indie fiction for the week of August 26th: |
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 1. The Girl Who Kicked
The Hornets' Nest,Stieg Larsson Salander is plotting her revenge – against the man who tried to kill her, and against the government institutions that very nearly destroyed her life. But it is not going to be a straightforward campaign. After taking a bullet to the head, Salander is under close supervision in Intensive Care, and is set to face trial for three murders and one attempted murder on her eventual release. With the help of journalist Mikael Blomkvist and his researchers at Millennium magazine, Salander must not only prove her innocence, but identify and denounce the corrupt politicians that have allowed the vulnerable to become victims of abuse and violence. Once a victim herself, Salander is now ready to fight back.   2. The Help,Kathryn Stockett In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, there are lines that are not crossed. Black maids raise the white children, but no one trusts them not to steal the silver. Black maids clean the toilets, but they have their own at the back of the house. There are lines, and no one crosses them. Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home from college: she may have a degree, but her mother won't be happy until Skeeter has a ring on her finger. She would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared. Aibileen is a black maid, a smart woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her since the death of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. Aibileen's best friend is Minny, short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue. Seemingly as different as can be, these women will come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? For what? The Help is about how women, whether mothers or daughters, the help or the boss, relate to each other. It's about the emotions of domestic life: pride, competition on the cooking and home front, and the horrible feeling that those who look after your children may understand them and deal with them - love them, even - better than you ... With pitch-perfect writing, Kathryn Stockett introduces us to three extraordinary women. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humour and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't.   3. Star Island,Carl Hiaasen 22-year-old pop star Cherry Pye is attempting a comeback from her latest drug and alcohol disaster. Ann DeLusia is Cherry’s 'undercover stunt double', standing in for Cherry whenever the singer is too wasted to go out in public. But, one night, Ann-as-Cherry is mistakenly kidnapped from a Miami hotel by an obsessed paparazzo named Bang Abbott. Now the challenge for Cherry’s handlers (comprising the world’s pushiest stage mother; perverted record producer; nipped-and-tucked twin publicists; weed-strimmer-wielding bodyguard) is to rescue Ann while keeping her existence secret from the public. Will Bang achieve his fantasy of a private photo session with Cherry? Will Cherry sober up in time to lip-synch her concert tour and promote her new album, Skantily Klad? And will Ann escape from Cherry’s shadow?   4. The Thousand
Autumns
Of Jacob De Zoet,David Mitchell Imagine an empire that has shut out the world for a century and a half. No one can leave, foreigners are excluded, their religions banned and their ideas deeply mistrusted. Yet a narrow window onto this nation-fortress still exists: an artificial walled island connected to a mainland port, and manned by a handful of European traders. And locked as the land-gate may be, it cannot prevent the meeting of minds – or hearts. The nation was Japan, the port was Nagasaki and the island was Dejima, to where David Mitchell's panoramic novel transports us in the year 1799. For one Dutch clerk, Jacob de Zoet, a dark adventure of duplicity, love, guilt, faith and murder is about to begin – and all the while, unbeknownst to him and his feuding compatriots, the axis of global power is turning...  5. Three Stations,Martin Cruz Smith A passenger train hurtling through the night. An unwed teenage mother headed to Moscow to seek a new life. A cruel-hearted soldier looking furtively, forcibly, for sex. An infant disappearing without a trace. So begins Martin Cruz Smith's masterful Three Stations, a suspenseful, intricately constructed novel featuring Investigator Arkady Renko. For the last three decades, beginning with the trailblazing Gorky Park, Renko (and Smith) have captivated readers with detective tales set in Russia. Renko is the ironic, brilliantly observant cop who finds solutions to heinous crimes when other lawmen refuse to even acknowledge that crimes have occurred. He uses his biting humor and intuitive leaps to fight not only wrongdoers but the corrupt state apparatus as well. In Three Stations, Renko's skills are put to their most severe test. Though he has been technically suspended from the prosecutor's office for once again turning up unpleasant truths, he strives to solve a last case: the death of an elegant young woman whose body is found in a construction trailer on the perimeter of Moscow's main rail hub. It looks like a simple drug overdose to everyone—except to Renko, whose examination of the crime scene turns up some inexplicable clues, most notably an invitation to Russia's premier charity ball, the billionaires' Nijinksy Fair. Thus a sordid death becomes interwoven with the lifestyles of Moscow's rich and famous, many of whom are clinging to their cash in the face of Putin's crackdown on the very oligarchs who placed him in power. Renko uncovers a web of death, money, madness and a kidnapping that threatens the woman he is coming to love and the lives of children he is desperate to protect. In Three Stations, Smith produces a complex and haunting vision of an emergent Russia's secret underclass of street urchins, greedy thugs and a bureaucracy still paralyzed by power and fear.  6. The
Cookbook Collector,Allegra Goodman Emily and Jessamine Bach are opposites in every way: Twenty-eight-year-old Emily is the CEO of Veritech, twenty-three-year-old Jess is an environmental activist and graduate student in philosophy. Pragmatic Emily is making a fortune in Silicon Valley, romantic Jess works in an antiquarian bookstore. Emily is rational and driven, while Jess is dreamy and whimsical. Emily’s boyfriend, Jonathan, is fantastically successful. Jess’s boyfriends, not so much—as her employer George points out in what he hopes is a completely disinterested way. Bicoastal, surprising, rich in ideas and characters, The Cookbook Collector is a novel about getting and spending, and about the substitutions we make when we can’t find what we’re looking for: reading cookbooks instead of cooking, speculating instead of creating, collecting instead of living. But above all it is about holding on to what is real in a virtual world: love that stays.  7. Super Sad True Love
Story,Gary Shteyngart The author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart has risen to the top of the fiction world. Now, in his hilarious and heartfelt new novel, he envisions a deliciously dark tale of America’s dysfunctional coming years—and the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink. In a very near future—oh, let’s say next Tuesday—a functionally illiterate America is about to collapse. But don’t that tell that to poor Lenny Abramov, the thirty-nine-year-old son of an angry Russian immigrant janitor, proud author of what may well be the world’s last diary, and less-proud owner of a bald spot shaped like the great state of Ohio. Despite his job at an outfit called Post-Human Services, which attempts to provide immortality for its super-rich clientele, death is clearly stalking this cholesterol-rich morsel of a man. And why shouldn’t it? Lenny’s from a different century—he totally loves books (or “printed, bound media artifacts,” as they’re now known), even though most of his peers find them smelly and annoying. But even more than books, Lenny loves Eunice Park, an impossibly cute and impossibly cruel twenty-four-year-old Korean American woman who just graduated from Elderbird College with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness. After meeting Lenny on an extended Roman holiday, blistering Eunice puts that Assertiveness minor to work, teaching our “ancient dork” effective new ways to brush his teeth and making him buy a cottony nonflammable wardrobe. But America proves less flame-resistant than Lenny’s new threads. The country is crushed by a credit crisis, riots break out in New York’s Central Park, the city’s streets are lined with National Guard tanks on every corner, the dollar is so over, and our patient Chinese creditors may just be ready to foreclose on the whole mess. Undeterred, Lenny vows to love both Eunice and his homeland. He’s going to convince his fickle new love that in a time without standards or stability, in a world where single people can determine a dating prospect’s “hotness” and “sustainability” with the click of a button, in a society where the privileged may live forever but the unfortunate will die all too soon, there is still value in being a real human being. Wildly funny, rich, and humane, Super Sad True Love Story is a knockout novel by a young master, a book in which falling in love just may redeem a planet falling apart.   8. The Rembrandt
Affair,Daniel Silva Two families, one terrible secret, and a painting to die for . . . Glastonbury, an art restorer, has been brutally murdered, and the newly discovered Rembrandt he was working on has disappeared. For spy turned art restorer Gabriel Allon, it has been six months since his final showdown with the murderous Russian oligarch and arms dealer Ivan Kharkov. He has severed his ties with the Office with only one thing in mind: recovery. But this unspeakable act of violence once again draws Allon into a world of danger he thought he had left behind for ever. Allon is persuaded to use his unique skills to trace the painting and those responsible for the crimes. As he investigates, he discovers there are terrible secrets connected to the painting, and terrible men behind them. Before he is done, he will have undertaken a journey through some of the twentieth century's darkest history - and come face to face with some of the same darkness within himself. Liza Marklund & James Patterson NYPD detective Jacob Kanon is on a tour of Europe's most gorgeous cities. But the sights aren't what draw him – he sees each museum, each cathedral, and each cafe through the eyes of his daughter’s killer. Kanon's daughter, Kimmy, and her fiance were murdered while on holiday in Rome. Since then, young couples in Madrid, Salzburg, Athens and Paris have been found dead. Little connects the murders, other than a postcard to the local newspaper that precedes each new victim. Now Kanon teams up with the Swedish reporter, Dessie Larsson, who has just received a postcard in Stockholm – and they think they know where the next victims will be.  10. The Red Queen, Philippa Gregory The second book in Philippa's stunning new trilogy, The Cousins War, brings to life the story of Margaret Beaufort, a shadowy and mysterious character in the first book of the series, The White Queen, but who now takes centre stage in the bitter struggle of The War of the Roses. The Red Queen tells the story of the child-bride of Edmund Tudor, who, although widowed in her early teens, uses her determination of character and wily plotting to infiltrate the house of York under the guise of loyal friend and servant, undermine the support for Richard III and ultimately ensure that her only son, Henry Tudor, triumphs as King of England. Through collaboration with the dowager Queen Elizabeth Woodville, Margaret agrees a betrothal between Henry and Elizabeth's daughter, thereby uniting the families and resolving the Cousins War once and for all by founding of the Tudor dynasty. like Margaret Beaufort, Gregory puts her many imitators to shame by dint of unequalled energy, focus, and unwavering execution. ~ Publishers Weekly Per Petterson It is 1989 and all over Europe Communism is crumbling. Arvid Jansen, 37, is in the throes of a divorce. At the same time, his mother is diagnosed with cancer. Over a few intense autumn days, we follow Arvid as he struggles to find a new footing in his life, while all the established patterns around him are changing at staggering speed. As he attempts to negotiate the present, he casts his mind back to holidays on the beach with his brothers, to courtship, and to his early working life, when as a young Communist he abandoned his studies to work on a production line. I Curse the River of Time is an honest, heartbreaking yet humorous portrayal of a complicated mother-son relationship told in Petterson’s precise and beautiful prose.  12. The Particular
Sadness
Of Lemon Cake,Aimee Bender On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents’ attention, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother—her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother—tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose. The curse her gift has bestowed is the secret knowledge all families keep hidden—her mother’s life outside the home, her father’s detachment, her brother’s clash with the world. Yet as Rose grows up she learns to harness her gift and becomes aware that there are secrets even her taste buds cannot discern. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a luminous tale about the enormous difficulty of loving someone fully when you know too much about them. Read an extract.  13. The Passage,Justin Cronin First, the unthinkable: a security breach at a secret U.S. government facility unleashes the monstrous product of a chilling military experiment. Then, the unspeakable: a night of chaos and carnage gives way to sunrise on a nation, and ultimately a world, forever altered. All that remains for the stunned survivors is the long fight ahead and a future ruled by fear—of darkness, of death, of a fate far worse. As civilization swiftly crumbles into a primal landscape of predators and prey, two people flee in search of sanctuary. FBI agent Brad Wolgast is a good man haunted by what he’s done in the line of duty. Six-year-old orphan Amy Harper Bellafonte is a refugee from the doomed scientific project that has triggered apocalypse. He is determined to protect her from the horror set loose by her captors. But for Amy, escaping the bloody fallout is only the beginning of a much longer odyssey—spanning miles and decades—towards the time and place where she must finish what should never have begun. Fans of vampire fiction who are bored by the endless hordes of sensitive, misunderstood Byronesque bloodsuckers will revel in Cronin's engrossingly horrific account of a post-apocalyptic America overrun by the gruesome reality behind the wish-fulfillment fantasies ~ Publishers Weekly   14. The
Tower, The Zoo & The Tortoise,Julia Stuart Balthazar Jones has lived in the Tower of London with his loving wife, Hebe, and his 120-year-old pet tortoise for the past eight years. That’s right, he is a Beefeater (they really do live there). It’s no easy job living and working in the tourist attraction in present-day London. Among the eccentric characters who call the Tower’s maze of ancient buildings and spiral staircases home are the Tower’s Rack & Ruin barmaid, Ruby Dore, who just found out she’s pregnant; portly Valerie Jennings, who is falling for ticket inspector Arthur Catnip; the lifelong bachelor Reverend Septimus Drew, who secretly pens a series of principled erotica; and the philandering Ravenmaster, aiming to avenge the death of one of his insufferable ravens. When Balthazar is tasked with setting up an elaborate menagerie within the Tower walls to house the many exotic animals gifted to the Queen, life at the Tower gets all the more interesting. Penguins escape, giraffes are stolen, and the Komodo dragon sends innocent people running for their lives. Balthazar is in charge and things are not exactly running smoothly. Then Hebe decides to leave him and his beloved tortoise “runs” away.  15. Crossfire,Dick & Felix Francis Captain Thomas Forsyth's tour of Afghanistan is cut brutally short when he's badly wounded by an IED - an Improvised Explosive Device, a roadside bomb. Tom's world is torn apart by the injury: the Army is his life. Six months of recuperation leave is a daunting prospect - but not as bleak as the probability of never rejoining his regiment. Tom returns to Lambourn, to his childhood home, where his mother is a racehorse trainer and the 'First Lady' of racing. Never having seen eye to eye with his parent, Tom doesn't expect a hero's welcome - but even he's not prepared for the reception that awaits him. When his mother's prize horse finishes a vastly disappointing third in a race it should have won, Tom discovers that the training business is on the edge, and facing a threat far more dangerous than a run of bad form. Tom finds himself on a very different, but just as deadly, battlefield where his military skills are tested . . . kill or be killed? |
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