‘Tis the season of New Novels!
Below you’ll find a concise list of just a few of the beautiful new Fiction books awaiting you on our shelves. Please click on to discover more about the book and the author, read excerpts and reviews– then head on over. We’ll have a cup of coffee together and send you off with the next novel that will be your new favorite! For more ideas and information, discover BookBrowse, edited by our very own Lucia Silva.
Rosie Ferguson is seventeen and ready to enjoy the summer before her senior year of high school. She’s intelligent, athletic, and beautiful, and she even gets along with her stepfather, James. But as the school year draws to a close, there are disturbing signs that the life Rosie claims to be leading is a sham, and her mother Elizabeth’s hopes for her daughter to remain immune to the pull of drugs and alcohol are dashed. Slowly and against their will, Elizabeth and James are forced to confront the fact that Rosie has been lying to them-and that her deceptions will have profound consequences.
Maggie O’Farrell’s The Hand That First Held Mine
A stunning portrait of motherhood and the artist’s life in all their terror and glory, Maggie O’Farrell’s newest novel is a gorgeous inquiry into the ways we make and unmake our lives, who we know ourselves to be, and how even our most accidental legacies connect us. (BookBrowse.com) [‘d love to read this book for the first time, again.]
Paolo Griordano’s The Solitude of Prime Numbers
A prime number can only be divided by itself or by one—it never truly fits with another. Alice and Mattia, both “primes,” are misfits who seem destined to be alone. Haunted by childhood tragedies that mark their lives, they cannot reach out to anyone else. When Alice and Mattia meet as teenagers, they recognize in each other a kindred, damaged spirit. But the mathematically gifted Mattia accepts a research position that takes him thousands of miles away, and the two are forced to separate. Then a chance occurrence reunites them and forces a lifetime of concealed emotion to the surface. (BookBrowse.com)
Solar is an engrossing and satirical novel which focuses on climate change. It is a stylish new work by one of the world’s greatest living writers about one man’s ambitions and self-deceptions.
Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War
Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’s The Thin Red Line. It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. (BookBrowse.com)
Dexter Palmer’s The Dream of Perpetual Motion
A wonderfully imagined debut novel about a greeting card writer who must come to terms with the madness of a genius inventor and his quest to create the perpetual motion machine. Imprisoned aboard a zeppelin that floats above a city reminiscent of those of the classic films Metropolis and Brazil, the greeting card writer Harold Winslow is composing his memoirs. His companions are the only woman he has ever loved, who has gone insane, and the cryogenically frozen body of her father, the devilish genius who drove her mad. [I’m sold!]
Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand
When Major Pettigrew, a retired British army major in a small English village, embarks on an unexpected friendship with the widowed Mrs. Ali, who runs the local shop, trouble erupts to disturb the bucolic serenity of the village and of the Major’s carefully regimented life. As the Major and Mrs. Ali discover just how much they have in common, including an educated background and a shared love of books, they must struggle to understand what it means to belong and how far the obligations of family and tradition can be set aside for personal freedom. Meanwhile, the village itself, lost in its petty prejudices and traditions, may not see its own destruction coming.
Always attuned to the moment of epiphany, these twelve stories are profound, intimate observations of men and women whose lives ache with possibility – each story a dramatisation of the instant in a life that exposes it all; love and the lack of love, hope and the lack of hope.
Jennifer Gilmore’s Something Red
It’s 1979 in Washington D.C. and life inside the Goldstein home is as tumultuous as the shifting landscape of the times. Benjamin is heading off to college and sixteen-year-old Vanessa is in the throes of a rocky adolescence. Sharon, a caterer for the Washington elite, ventures into a cult-like organization. And Dennis, whose government job takes him often to Moscow, tries to live up to his father’s legacy as a union organizer and community leader. The rise of communism and the execution of the Rosenbergs is behind them, and the Cold War is waning.
Did you know? We don’t sell books that we wouldn’t read ourselves. And we don’t recommend apples to people who like oranges. So if you like raspberries, you know where to find us!
The Other Day at Portrait... 
I am sooooo impressed! You take my breath away Portrait of a Bookstore!
In fact, we are so far ahead of the curve, we can also recommend books for people who like kumquats!!!