The Unnamed

by Joshua Ferris
During their 20-year marriage, Tim and Jane Farnsworth have savored the fruits of his labor as a high-powered lawyer: they live in a beautiful home, they travel on exotic vacations, they don’t worry about money. Tim has battled a bizarre, inexplicable illness, but those episodes, while not exactly forgotten, have passed. Then it comes back, causing him to behave in a frighteningly new way, driving him out of his life and into a world and a self that he can’t recognize and Jane is helpless to control. How far will he go to fight his body’s incomprehensible desires, and what will they both risk to find the way back to the people they love?

A heartbreaking story of family and marriage, a meditation on the unseen forces of nature and desire, The Unnamed is a deeply felt, luminous novel about modern life, ancient yearnings, and the power of human connection.

From The Unnamed:

Somewhere, out to sea or in the South, it might not be snowing. Here it slanted into the windshield like white ash from a starburst. The frostbite had returned to his fingers and toes. He unbuckled the seatbelt and leaned over, stretching his long torso across the backseat, and what the driver thought he didn’t care. He hadn’t called to tell them. He had lost his phone. They were waiting for him but they didn’t know it.

The driver woke him when they reached the house.

He was going to lose the house and everything in it. The rare pleasure of a bath, the copper pots hanging above the kitchen island, his family—again he would lose his family. He stood inside the house and took stock. Everything in it had been taken for granted. How had that happened again? He had promised himself not to take anything for granted and now he couldn’t recall the moment that promise had given way to the everyday.

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Marriage and Other Acts of Charity

by Kate Braestrup
In her award-winning memoir Here If You Need Me, Kate Braestrup inspired readers with her deeply moving and deftly humorous stories of faith, hope, and family. As a minister, she regularly performs weddings. She’s been married twice and widowed once, and accordingly has much to say about life after the ceremony. In Marriage and Other Acts of Charity she turns her attention to the subjects of love and commitment. Part observation of modern marriage, and part meditation on how God and love figure in all our relationships, the book proves yet again why Braestrup’s writing is “inspirational in the best sense” (New York Daily News).

From Marriage and Other Acts of Charity:

I like this definition of love, or caritas: To earnestly desire the achievement of wholeness by the beloved. Notice that it doesn’t say “to give the gift of wholeness to the beloved” or “to impose wholeness on the beloved.” This can be hard to remember when it comes to one’s own children who are, as Kahlil Gibran said, “the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.” Kahlil Gibran didn’t actually have any children, incidentally, he just wrote lovely things about them.

“How do you do it all?” a woman who doesn’t know me asked, when she heard that in addition to being a law enforcement chaplain and a writer, I am mother to six children (counting steps).

“I do quite a lot of it badly,” I said.

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Doors Open

by Ian Rankin
Three friends, sharing a bond of passion for art and collecting, conspire together to pull off a heist of several paintings from the National Gallery in Edinburgh. With the help of hired muscle and a forger to replace the stolen paintings, they are successful—and then learn that the aftermath is more complicated and treacherous than the crime.

From Doors Open:

“Gayfield square,” he told the driver.
     “Lucky you caught me,” the man responded. “I’d just about made up my mind to call it a night.” He was having trouble finding his passenger in the rearview mirror. Mike had slumped as far down into his seat as he could. “Had an evening of it, by the look of things,” the driver rattled on. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that. We’ve all got to let off steam sometime, haven’t we? Whole country would explode otherwise.”
     “I’m sure that’s true.” Mike was on the lookout for a cruising BMW; either that or two hulking figures on foot. But the streets were empty.
     “City’s been a bit dead,” the cabbie was saying. “Only real problem I’ve got with the place—nothing ever happens in Edinburgh, does it?”

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Black Hills

by Dan Simmons
Paha Sapa, a young Sioux warrior, first encounters General George Armstrong Custer as Custer lies dying on the battlefield at Little Bighorn. He believes that the legendary general’s ghost entered him at that moment and will remain with him until Sapa convinces him to leave. Weaving the two men’s stories together, Dan Simmons depicts a tumultuous time in American history, culminating in an explosive finale at Mount Rushmore.

From Black Hills:

     Paha sapa pulls his hand back sharply but not before he feels the rattlesnake-strike shock of the dying Wasicun’s ghost leaping into his fingers and flowing up his arm and into his chest. The boy lurches back in horror as the ghost burns its way up through his veins and bones like so much surging venom. The Wasicun’s spirit scalds a painful path through the nerves of Paha Sapa’s shoulder and then pours out into his chest and throat, roiling and churning like an oily thick smoke. Paha Sapa can taste it. And it tastes like death. Still expanding, the ghost spreads through Paha Sapa’s torso and down and out, making the boy’s arms and legs feel both weak and heavy at the same time. As the Wasicun’s ghost fills his lungs with a terrible, expanding, thick-filling heaviness that shuts off all breath, Paha Sapa is reminded of the time some years earlier, barely able to toddle, when he almost drowned in the tongue. Yet even through his current terror, this boy just short of ten summers senses that this—invasion—is something infinitely more terrible than mere death by drowning.

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Still Midnight

by Denise Mina
Alex Morrow is not new to the police force—or to crime—but there is nothing familiar about the murder and kidnapping she is investigating. Is this an amateur crime gone horribly wrong or something much more unexpected?

From Still Midnight:

“Sir,” she tipped a nod at MacKechnie but couldn’t bring herself to look at Gibson. “Lonnie.”

     Lonnie Gibson nodded back, “All right, Morrow? What’s happening?”

     She could feel the blood draining from her face. ‘Hello’ wouldn’t do for Lonnie. ‘Good evening’ wouldn’t do. It had to be some fucking cheese greeting, a bit of a song, a line from Elvis, or some fucking thing. He strove to be different because he wasn’t. Her ambition was to fit in and she couldn’t. Jealousy made her focus on him, notice small details like the slight sunbed flush in his skin, how he often implied credit to himself for other people’s work, how lost he sometimes looked in the company of other men.

     Heat rose in her cheeks and she knew she had to cover up quickly. “There’s evidence getting wet around there,” she said, “Two cigarette butts needing bagged up.”

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Next

by James Hynes
Kevin Quinn is an average, middle-aged, liberal-leaning, self-centered, emotionally-damaged American. As he travels to Austin, Texas, for a job interview, he contemplates lost opportunities in romance, apocalyptic visions, and how to reinvent himself. Next is a funny, moving, sexy, and surprising novel that takes place over the course of a day that begins unusually and will end dramatically, when Kevin learns, at last, what happens next.

From Next:

             “Love where you shop”
      Or what? thinks Kevin. His stomach clenches. The peevish professional in him wants to put a period at the end of that sentence, but his inner, angry, suburban child—the guy who goes to Gaia Market in Ann Arbor only when his girlfriend drags him there, the defensively proud patron of real grocery stores like Kroger and Meijer’s—that guy immediately resents the poster’s imperative voice, its implicit superiority, its barely disguised snob appeal. You’re not just shopping for groceries at Gaia, you’re making a political statement, a moral choice—no artificial colors, flavors, or sweeteners, say the signs, no exploited farmworkers—and you’re also proving that you’re not one of the lumpen, morbidly obese proles in synthetic fibers waddling under unflattering lights up the aisle of Farmer Jack’s, filling your vast cart with family-sized packages of chicken, five-pound bags of frozen french fries, big plastic tubs of chunky peanut butter. Because if you don’t love where you shop, then where you’re shopping isn’t good enough. In fact, if loving where you shop doesn’t matter to you, then maybe you shouldn’t shop here.

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