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|  | Alt, Madelyn A WITCH IN TIME
March 01, 2010 - Maggie has succeeded in hiding her hot romance with hunky Marcus Quinn from her inquisitive mother until she gets a call to rush to the local hospital. Her perfect sister Mel is about to give birth, turning Maggie's romantic night with Marcus into a
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| | Anthony, Piers CLIMATE OF CHANGE
March 01, 2010 - The author continues to tackle the story of the human race through the centuries—using a common set of characters with similar names and personalities. Here, characters named Hero, Crenelle, Rebel et al. deal with changes driven largely by natural
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| | Atkins, Ace INFAMOUS
March 01, 2010 - "Poor George Kelly,"commiserates the author in a sort of preamble to his novel. Overshadowed by such Depression-era icons of iniquity as John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson, he's been consigned to the dustbins of gangster history. But the truth is
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| | Belle, Jennifer THE SEVEN YEAR BITCH
March 01, 2010 - Getting laid off is bad enough, but financial planner Isolde Brilliant finds it particularly galling that she will now have to spend more time with husband Russell. Brutally honest and a little outrageous—she loves the smell of her baby son's dirty
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|  | Black, Robin IF I LOVED YOU, I WOULD TELL YOU THIS
March 01, 2010 - The death or impending loss of a loved one drives every narrative in this poignant collection. Jack Snyder's daughter Lila, blinded at six in a freak accident, is now 17 and poised for independence, but he's not really ready to give up being "The
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| | Braff, Joshua PEEP SHOW
March 01, 2010 - The Arbuses used to be the kind of affluent, assimilated suburban Jews that Braff anatomized in his brutally funny debut, The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green (2004)—except that Martin made a living running burlesque joints, and wife Miriam was
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| | Brown, Rita Mae CAT OF THE CENTURY
March 01, 2010 - Fresh from yet another local murder (The Purrfect Murder, 2008, etc.), Mary "Harry" Minor Haristeen, small-town postmistress turned farmer, eagerly anticipates getting out of town to celebrate Aunt Tally's 100th year at the old gal's alma mater,
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| | Carey, Peter PARROT AND OLIVIER IN AMERICA
March 01, 2010 - We start in the Old World. When the nobleman Olivier de Garmont is born in 1805, post-revolutionary France is still volatile. Olivier lost a grandfather to the guillotine. His parents remain in exile until the Bourbon Restoration. Olivier's liberal
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| | Cleage, Pearl TILL YOU HEAR FROM ME
March 01, 2010 - Ida B. Wells Dunbar, 34, was a tireless Obama campaign worker. Now, post-Inauguration, she's languishing in D.C. awaiting a White House job offer. Has something sunk her prospects with the new administration? Could that iceberg be her father,
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| | Drake, David THE LEGIONS OF FIRE
March 01, 2010 - Unfortunately, Drake's backdrop puts tedious emphasis on protocol and the niceties of servant-aristocrat interaction, seemingly to cover up a plot that's not even half thought-out. Rich, influential but gullible senator Gaius Alphenus Saxa closets
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| | Fagerholm, Monika THE AMERICAN GIRL
March 01, 2010 - Fagerholm (Wonderful Women By the Sea, 1997) openly challenges readers with a 12-page overture that suggests the mysterious effect of itinerant Eddie de Wire (the deceased, who evokes memories of Andy Warhol's unstable "superstar" Edie Sedgwick) on
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| | Fleming, Irene THE EDGE OF RUIN
March 01, 2010 - In 1909, Emily Weiss bids farewell to a pleasant life in Philadelphia when husband Adam, who owns a string of nickelodeons, announces that he's selling everything to set up as a movie producer. The contract he's signed with his old college pal Howie
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| | Frank, Rina EVERY HOUSE NEEDS A BALCONY
March 01, 2010 - Below the surface of a character-heavy tale of migration, resettlement and young marriage, Frank riffs on character, fortune, roots and above all home. Her narrator, Rina, is both a child amid a colorful group of impoverished immigrants in Haifa and
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| | Hoffman, Paul THE LEFT HAND OF GOD
March 01, 2010 - At the vast, labyrinthine Sanctuary arrives a seemingly endless supply of orphan boys. Here the religious-fanatic Redeemers attempt to inculcate the boys with their faith while turning them into holy warriors. So unremittingly brutal and sadistic
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| | Hood, Ann THE RED THREAD
March 01, 2010 - Maya walked away from her husband Adam and her formerly happy life in Hawaii after the accidental death of her infant daughter left her in emotional freefall. (The exact circumstances surrounding the accident are not revealed until halfway through
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| | Kaplan, Mitchell James BY FIRE, BY WATER
March 01, 2010 - Luis de Santángel's grandfather was a converso, one of the many Jews forced to convert to Christianity. The chancellor retains an interest in his Jewish heritage, a dangerous prospect given the "New Inquisition" that has recently come to Spain.
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| | Kramon, Justin FINNY
March 01, 2010 - Delphine Short, aka Finny, comes of age slowly in Kramon's quirky debut, a drawn-out story pervaded at times with a flavor of Alice in Wonderland. Growing up in Maryland, Finny falls in love at age 14 with Earl Henckel, the sensitive son of
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| | Kuhlken, Ken THE BIGGEST LIAR IN LOS ANGELES
March 01, 2010 - Los Angeles in 1926 has four supreme power brokers: rival newsmen Hearst and Chandler; rogue police chief Two Gun Davis; and charismatic, showboating evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. None of them is eager to acknowledge that Frank Gaines has been
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| | Lindskold, Jane FIVE ODD HOURS
March 01, 2010 - The novel continues the adventures of Brenda Morris, a magic-wielding present-day descendant of beings from a hidden, magical world steeped in Chinese myth. The previous book involved the creation of nine gates in order to enter this hidden world,
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| | Madden, Deirdre MOLLY FOX'S BIRTHDAY
March 01, 2010 - The unnamed 39-year-old narrator is in Dublin, housesitting for her best female friend Molly Fox, who's on vacation. Molly is considered the finest classical stage actor of her generation, and it is she, along with the dramatist herself and her best
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| | Marshall, Evan DARK ALLEY
March 01, 2010 - When Garry Thomason disappears on his early-morning trash run to New Amsterdam Mews, near West 48th Street, his ex-socialite boss, Anna Winthrop (Evil Justice, 2009, etc.) is more than a little worried. When his body turns up the next day in the
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| | McEvoy, John THE SIGNIFICANT SEVEN
March 01, 2010 - Thirty years after they began gathering to place their bets and watch the races, seven old college buddies hit the jackpot, winning the Pick Six for $1 million. Forming a syndicate dubbed The Significant Seven, they invest their winnings in horses
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| | McNees, Kelly O'Connor THE LOST SUMMER OF LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
March 01, 2010 - In her early 20s, Louisa moves to Walpole, N.H., for the summer with her financially strapped family: rigidly idealist father Bronson (portrayed with far more complexity in Geraldine Brooks's Pulitzer-winning March), loving mother Marmee and sisters
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| | McPhee, Martha DEAR MONEY
March 01, 2010 - No, the classic midlister is no household name, except in the households of some book reviewers, and perhaps in those of the few others who avidly monitor book reviews. Such a readership might represent a cult fandom and guarantee sales in the low
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| | McQueen, Holly THE FABULOUSLY FASHIONABLE LIFE OF ISABEL BOOKBINDER
March 01, 2010 - Isabel has now decided to follow her real dream (not the literary dream that occupied the last novel) of becoming a fashion designer. She is brainstorming names for her perfume and imagining Daniel Craig in the adverts. That she can't sew or draw
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| | Mendelsohn, Jane AMERICAN MUSIC
March 01, 2010 - Flown to the Bronx VA hospital after suffering a paralyzing spinal-cord injury, Milo Hatch won't lie on his back and doesn't much like to talk. But like it or not, he speaks in wondrous other ways to Honor, the young therapist who's been assigned to
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| | Monaghan, Nicola STARFISHING
March 01, 2010 - In late-1990s London, hard-nosed Frankie Cavanaugh lands her dream job as a trader in the open pit of the futures exchange. The setup is promising, in a Bret Easton Ellis way. Frankie, a tough girl who lost her mother young, is pretty,
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| | Nichols, Travis OFF WE GO INTO THE WILD BLUE YONDER
March 01, 2010 - The narrator is a 24-year-old pacifist who refers to himself only as Madame Psychosis and punctuates his tale with arcane pronouncements about the nature of time. Eventually he reveals that he's in the midst of a journey to Poland with his
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| | Nunn, Malla LET THE DEAD LIE
March 01, 2010 - Nunn teams Cooper with his former partner, the shrewd and stoical Zulu Shabalala, and with the calm but wounded Dr. Zweigman to confront an international cast of bad guys. The villains are primarily Indian and English, but as in A Beautiful Place to
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| | Oleksiw, Susan UNDER THE EYE OF KALI
March 01, 2010 - Tourists come and go at the South India resort town of Kovalam, regularly getting lost in the maze of lanes as they wander up the Lighthouse Road to the Balabhadrakali Temple. Anita Ray, who's come from the United States to help her Auntie Meena
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| | Patterson, Richard North HONOR
March 01, 2010 - Nobody disputes the fact that Lt. Brian McCarran killed Capt. Joe D'Abruzzo. Brian himself admits shooting at his old commanding officer when he came to Brian's quarters in Fort Bolton, Va., to demand the return of the pistol Brian had taken from
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| | Pitts, J.A. BLACK BLADE BLUES
March 01, 2010 - Sarah Beauhall has an unusual occupation for an urban-fantasy protagonist: She's a 26-year-old blacksmith who makes and repairs swords, sometimes for low-budget film productions. While working as a prop master on a movie called Elvis Versus the
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| | Pouncey, Maggie PERFECT READER
March 01, 2010 - The soul-searching of a willful daddy's girl who has just lost her father forms the core of Pouncey's accomplished novel, which weaves bookish themes into a getting-of-wisdom tale set in the fictional New England college town of Darwin. Only-child
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| | Reiken, Frederick DAY FOR NIGHT
March 01, 2010 - Criticized for his books' many plot coincidences, Charles Dickens claimed that those who don't notice coincidence in their lives simply don't have their eyes open. Reiken seems to hold similar views on concatenation, dexterously using "coincidence"
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| | Sharratt, Mary DAUGHTERS OF THE WITCHING HILL
March 01, 2010 - According to Bess Demdike's definition, she's not a witch because she uses her powers for good, not evil. Either way, in this latest version of a famous English historical episode, Sharratt (The Real Minerva, 2004, etc.) credits Bess with actual
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| | Solomita, Stephen MERCY KILLING
March 01, 2010 - Felled by a stroke five years ago, Joyce has lain in a vegetative state until someone sprinkles an arsenic compound in her feeding tube and she finally succumbs. By all accounts, her husband Charles was devoted to her, but along with three nurses,
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| | Stern, Steve THE FROZEN RABBI
March 01, 2010 - Stern (The Angel of Forgetfulness, 2005, etc.) uses his absurdist fantasy to explore issues of faith, secularism and redemption. Bernie, in particular, is in need of the latter, for he's a 15-year-old couch potato with no interest in or regard for
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| | Syjuco, Miguel ILUSTRADO
March 01, 2010 - This isn't the only recent debut that finds the author using his own name and drawing from his own life for his protagonist, but it dazzles as brightly as Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated (2002). The framing is simple, though nothing
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| | Taylor, M. Glenn THE MARROWBONE MARBLE COMPANY
March 01, 2010 - Taylor (English/Harper Coll.; The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, 2008) fluidly composes a portrait of a man whose sheer fortitude makes molehills out of mountains. The book's moral center is Loyal Ledford, a country orphan who sweats out a living
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| | Thirlwell, Adam THE ESCAPE
March 01, 2010 - Visiting an alpine spa town to reclaim the villa expropriated from his late wife's Jewish family in the 1930s, septuagenarian English banker Haffner muses over a lifetime of erotic self-absorption as he racks up a couple of new conquests in the
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| | Udall, Brady THE LONELY POLYGAMIST
March 01, 2010 - "There's hard things we have to do in this life," says a wizened desert rat to an existentially confused Golden Richards, the protagonist. "We bite our lip and do 'em. And we pray to God to help us along the way." Golden is in need of such guiding
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| | Vida, Vendela THE LOVERS
March 01, 2010 - Like Vida's previous book, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (2007), this novel concerns a woman eager to escape a host of emotional frustrations back home in the United States. But instead of Northern Lights' chilly Lapland, this story is set
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| | Woof, Emily THE WHOLE WIDE BEAUTY
March 01, 2010 - Former dancer Katherine, now 33, feels trapped by her roles as wife to lawyer Adam (underappreciated and long-suffering), mother to little Kieron and part-time music teacher at a school for troubled boys. Ironically she also resents her parents'
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| Online Exclusive
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| The Arabian Nights: A New Edition
March 01, 2010 - The most famous tales in The Arabian Nights have flown far beyond the confines of the night-shrouded bedroom in which Scheherazade spins stories to the vengeful king who will kill her come morning (unless she makes sure he just has to know what happens next). "There is no such thing as a canonical text of the Nights with a fixed number of stories," writes Middle East scholar Robert Irwin in his introduction to Volume 2 of Penguin Classics' new three-volume edition. So should we care that Cambridge University scholars Malcolm and Ursula Lyons, for the first time since Sir Richard Burton in the 1880s, have based this English translation on the 1839-42 Arabic edition that contains more stories than any other, usually in fuller versions? We should
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