literary desintations

Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead

First stop: the Hamptons, affectionately dubbed "Out" in Colson Whitehead's coming-of-age tale, Sag Harbor. "Out" of New York City, teenager Benji and his brother spend a mostly parent-free summer getting into low-key mischief with BB guns, fake IDs and beer. The guys while away long afternoons swimming in the bay, lounging on the sand and prowling for the fabled stretch of nude beach. When Benji gets a part-time job in the tourist town's popular ice cream shop, his attention turns to girls — or rather his inability to attract the attention of girls. His adolescent fumblings make for funny and cringe-inducing moments. Who knew your elbow could be an erogenous zone?

The Hundred-Foot Journey by Richard C. Morais

In this delicious fairy-tale-like read, our young hero, Hassan Haji, journeys to the picturesque French countryside where he begins his quest to become an international celebrity chef. But first, author Robert Morais introduces us to the scents and sounds of Mumbai, where the Muslim Hassan — born in an apartment above the family's popular roadside restaurant — gets his first cooking lessons. Dishes like spicy fish curry and chicken tandoori with hints of cinnamon and cardamom seem destined to become the staples of his bourgeoning culinary skills. But then on one unforgettable day, Hassan's mother introduces him to fine French cuisine. Hassan knows then that his tastes have been forever altered.

The Spice Necklace by Ann Vanderhoof

Vanderhoof, along with her husband, sets sail to the Caribbean in search of spices and, as a result, finds a real spice for life among new friends and acquaintances who teach the couple how to live at a sweet, slower island pace. The couple travels by a boat — tellingly named Receta (which means "recipe") — visiting more than a dozen islands including Grenada, Trinidad, St. Martin and St. Lucia. The two spend their days market shopping, fishing, cooking, eating and most of all celebrating each island's specialties.

The Lovers by Vendela Vida

On her wedding anniversary, the recently widowed Yvonne travels solo to a beautiful coastal town in Turkey, where she honeymooned with her husband 28 years ago. Still numb from her husband's unexpected death, Yvonne hopes to bask in the memory of their newlywed days.

Picturing Hemingway’s Michigan by Michael R. Federspiel

In this hybrid coffee table/literary history book, Federspiel provides a rich history of the Lake area that first developed as a vacation destination in the late 1800s and served as the Hemingway family's summer getaway for many years starting when Hemingway was just 6 weeks old. With gorgeous illustrations, photographs, documents and brief narrative accounts from Hemingway's childhood scrapbooks, Federspiel offers a wonderful portrait of the area through Hemingway's eyes.

list compiled by NPR

swedish crime novels...

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO by Stieg Larsson

It's about Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently at the wrong end of a libel case, hired to get to the bottom of Harriet's disappearance...and about Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old pierced and tattooed genius hacker possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age — and a terrifying capacity for ruthlessness to go with it — who assists Blomkvist with the investigation. This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, astonishing corruption in the highest echelons of Swedish industrialism — and an unexpected connection between themselves.

THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE by Stieg Larsson

Mikael Blomkvist, crusading publisher of the magazine Millennium, has decided to run a story that will expose an extensive sex trafficking operation. On the eve of its publication, the two reporters responsible for the article are murdered, and the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to his friend, the troubled genius hacker Lisbeth Salander. Blomkvist, convinced of Salander's innocence, plunges into an investigation. Meanwhile, Salander herself is drawn into a murderous game of cat and mouse, which forces her to face her dark past.

THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST by Stieg Larsson

Lisbeth Salander — the heart of Larsson's two previous novels — lies in critical condition, a bullet wound to her head, in the intensive care unit of a Swedish city hospital. She's fighting for her life in more ways than one: if and when she recovers, she'll be taken back to Stockholm to stand trial for three murders. With the help of her friend, journalist Mikael Blomkvist, she will not only have to prove her innocence, but also identify and denounce those in authority who have allowed the vulnerable, like herself, to suffer abuse and violence. And, on her own, she will plot revenge — against the man who tried to kill her, and the corrupt government institutions that very nearly destroyed her life.

THE FIFTH WOMAN: A Kurt Wallander Mystery by Henning Mankell

In an African convent, four nuns and a unidentified fifth woman are brutally murdered — the death of the unknown woman covered up by the local police. A year later in Sweden, Inspector Kurt Wallander is baffled and appalled by two murders. Holger Eriksson, a retired car dealer and bird watcher, is impaled on sharpened bamboo poles in a ditch behind his secluded home, and the body of a missing florist is discovered — strangled and tied to a tree. The only clues Wallander has to go on are a skull, a diary, and a photo of three men. What ensues is a case that will test Wallander's strength and patience, because in order to discover the reason behind these murders, he will also need to uncover the elusive connection between these deaths and the earlier unsolved murder in Africa of the fifth woman.

BLACKWATER by Kerstin Ekman

On her way to a commune in northern Sweden, a woman and her young daughter discover two bodies in a tent, stabbed to death in their sleeping bags. Many years later she sees her now grown up daughter with the man she believes to be responsible, forcing events surrounding the crime to a dark and unexpected conclusion. Atmospheric literary thriller in the Barbara Vine/"Miss Smilla" mould. "The best novel I have read this year" Rose Tremaine. "No thriller was ever so hard-boiled as this, no city streets as mean as these sub-Arctic woodland rides... mesmerising in its glances into the psychic abyss" "Scotsman".

MISSING by Karin Alvtegen

Karin Alvtegen — without any training or thought of becoming a novelist — resolved to write her way out of some family tradedies: The result was her first novel, Guilt (Skuld), which was published in Sweden in 1998, to rave reviews. This was followed in 2000 by Missing (Saknad), which won Scandinavia's prestigious Glass Key award for Best Crime Novel of the Year, and went on to win an award for bestselling Scandinavian paperback. Her third novel, Betrayal (Svek) — coming next year from Felony & Mayhem — was shortlisted for the Glass Key award, and also for the Swedish Crime Writers Academy award for Best Swedish Crime Novel of the year. And Swedish reviewers have called Alvtegen's most recent novel, Shame (Skam) (also to come from Felony & Mayhem) her finest novel to date — the work, in the words of one critic, of a modern-day Strindberg. Karin Alvtegen is the great-niece of Astrid Lundgren, author of the ever-popular Pippi Longstocking books.

based on a true story...

The Song is You

· Abbott, Megan E.

Historical Hard-Boiled

Summary: In 1949, a beautiful Hollywood starlet and mother of a five-year-old, Jean Spangler, heads to a nighttime film shoot … but she never makes it there. Jean, who has the kind of smile that makes you smile back even if you have a splitting headache, is never seen again — except by her presumed killer. Gil "Hop" Hopkins, a journalist turned publicity flack who'd briefly known Jean, finds himself investigating her disappearance two years later. If you're a fan of James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia, you'll want to pick up The Song Is You, which is set in the same time and place.

· Arthur & George

· Barnes, Julian

NPR's best of the bestsellers

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.