The NPR list is compiled from surveys of nearly 500 independent booksellers nationwide. Unlike many lists, it excludes mass-market titles and sales by supermarkets, online retailers, big-box stores and the like... and i'm sharing it with you! happy reading!!
Island Beneath the Sea
By Isabel Allende (translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden, hardcover, 464 pages,
In the continuing aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, it's fitting to be reminded of the early years of this first black independent state in the Caribbean. Allende's new historic novel, set in the sugar plantations of 18th-century Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) and New Orleans, is enriched by the writer's trademark sensuality and narrative brio.
The Lake Shore Limited
By Sue Miller, hardcover, 298 pages
In this elegiac and emotionally sophisticated novel, a quartet of vividly realized characters sort out the aftermath of one man's death on Sept. 11. Leslie's beloved younger brother Gus was in one of the planes that hit the towers on that day. Some years after the tragedy, Gus' girlfriend Billy writes a play about a terrorist attack on a train (the Lake Shore Limited) running through Chicago. The play, being staged in Boston, stars Rafe, whose beloved wife is dying from ALS. Leslie has had a fling with an architect named Sam, whose first wife died of breast cancer, leaving him with three young sons to raise. The action begins when Leslie invites Sam to see Billy's play.
House Rules
By Jodi Picoult, hardcover, 532 pages
A master of topical fiction, Jodi Picoult focuses her latest novel on Jacob Hunt, an 18-year-old with Asperger's syndrome, who is also a CSI fanatic. (He watches the television series compulsively and, using a police scanner for information, makes appearances at local crime scenes.) When the graduate student who is his social skills tutor goes missing, he sets out, it seems, to solve the crime, but ends up as the chief suspect. To the police he appears guilty because of his remote, Asperger's-related behavior. Jacob's frazzled mother, Emma, does her best to explain, but the outside world judges him in ways she can't control.
The Imperfectionists
By Tom Rachman, hardcover, 288 pages
This tragicomic first novel by a former foreign correspondent for The Associated Press features a raft of idiosyncratic characters working for an unnamed newspaper in Rome in the waning days of print. Rachman brings an insider's savvy and a soupcon of sympathy to his tale. By the time each player has been introduced, and the history of the paper from its origins in the 1950s to 2007 has been rendered in italic sections, Rachman has meticulously essayed the past half-century of print journalism.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
By Rebecca Skloot, hardcover, 384 pages
The explosive ingredients in this nonfiction book — a scientific thriller, an untold family story, an exploration of race and class — add up to riveting social commentary. Released in February, the book (which is slated to be an Oprah-produced HBO film) remains one of 2010's most-talked-about titles. Skloot's dramatic narrative follows three tracks. The first traces the life of Henrietta Lacks, the great-great-granddaughter of slaves, who died in 1951 from aggressive cervical cancer, leaving behind a husband and five children. Skloot parallels that with the story of the cells (codename: HeLa) drawn from Lacks' tumor, which became the world's first "immortal" human cells cultivated in a laboratory. The writer's third narrative thread weaves in her own relationship with Lacks' children in the years after they find out about the highly lucrative medical uses of their mother's cells (which were taken without her permission). In a final act of authorial grace, Skloot is donating a portion of the book's proceeds to the nonprofit foundation she set up to provide scholarships and medical coverage to Lacks' descendants.
