New in Paperback
Blood Highway by Gina Wohlsdorf is “a sensational hard-boiled thriller as tough and uncompromising as its main character, Rainy Cain. Don’t miss this.” So says super-bestselling author Lee Child.
Rainy Cain is a tough, smart seventeen-year-old whose primary instinct is survival. That instinct is tested when her life is upended by the sudden appearance of her father, Sam, who she thought was long dead, but instead had been in prison for his part in an armored truck robbery gone murderously wrong. Now escaped and on the run, he kidnaps Rainy, who he is convinced knows where the money from the robbery, never recovered, is hidden.
Accompanied by a henchman with secret motives of his own, they set off on a cross-country dash to Big Sur, where Sam suspects his late wife stashed the cash. On their heels is a Minneapolis cop intent on bringing Rainy safely home.
It is an odyssey that will push Rainy to the limits of endurance, and that will keep readers guessing until the very end. What does Rainy really know—and what is she willing to sacrifice in order to live?
Other People’s Love Affairs by D. Wystan Owen, a collection of ten linked stories, is “a book to treasure,” Ploughshares said, and “signals a rare new literary voice,” according to Nylon magazine.
In the ten luminous stories of D. Wystan Owen’s debut collection, the people of Glass, a picturesque village on the rugged English coast, are haunted by longings and deeply held secrets, captive to pasts that remain as alive as the present. Each story takes us into the lives of characters reaching earnestly and often courageously for connection to the people they have loved. Owen observes their heartbreaks, their small triumphs, and their generous capacity for grace.
A young nurse, reeling from the disappearance of her mother, forges an unlikely friendship with a local vagrant. A young boy is by turns dazzled and disillusioned by a trip to the circus with a family friend. A widower revisits the cinema where, as a teenager, he and an older woman shared trysts that both thrilled and baffled him. A woman is offered fragile, uneasy forgiveness for a cruel act from years ago. And in the title story, a shopkeeper’s vision of the woman she loved is upended by the startling revelation of a secret life. Surprising and powerful, and in the classic tradition of fiction by James Joyce, William Trevor, and Elizabeth Strout, Owen’s interconnected stories strike a deep and resounding emotional chord.
The Floating World by C. Morgan Babst is “important and powerful” (People) and “poetic and suspenseful” (NPR.org). Set in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, this stunning debut novel shares a vivid, intimate understanding of this unique city and its tangled past.
As the storm is fast approaching the Louisiana coast, Cora Boisdoré refuses to leave the city. Her parents, Joe Boisdoré, an artist descended from freed slaves who became the city’s preeminent furniture makers, and his white “Uptown” wife, Dr. Tess Eshleman, are forced to evacuate without her, setting off a chain of events that leaves their marriage in shambles and Cora catatonic—the victim or perpetrator of some violence mysterious even to herself.
This mystery is at the center of Babst’s haunting and profound novel. Cora’s sister, Del, returns to New Orleans from the successful life she built in New York City to find her hometown in ruins and her family deeply alienated from one another. As Del attempts to figure out what happened to her sister, she must also reckon with the racial history of the city and the trauma of a disaster that was not, in fact, some random act of God but an avoidable tragedy visited on New Orleans’s most vulnerable citizens. Separately and together, each member of the Boisdoré clan must find the strength to remake home in a city forever changed.
The Floating World is the Katrina story that needed to be told—one with a piercing, unforgettable loveliness and a vivid, intimate understanding of this particular place and its tangled past.
Savage Country by Robert Olmstead is “an unforgettable, unflinching, yet distinctly moving story of human greed and desire,” said BookPage. And you can enter for a chance to win an autographed paperback copy of this wonderful book. See below.
The year is 1873 and the place is the American West. Michael Coughlin, a Civil War veteran with an enigmatic past, comes to town to settle his dead brother’s debt. Together with his widowed sister-in-law, Elizabeth, bankrupted by her husband’s folly and death, they embark on a massive, and hugely dangerous, buffalo hunt. Elizabeth hopes to salvage something of her former life and the lives of the hired men and their families who now depend on her; the buffalo hunt that her husband had planned, she now realizes, was his last hope for saving the land.
Elizabeth and Michael plunge south across the aptly named “dead line” demarcating Indian Territory from their home state of Kansas. Nothing could have prepared them for the dangers: rattlesnakes, rabies, wildfire, lightning strikes, blue northers, flash floods—and human treachery. With the Comanche in winter quarters, Elizabeth and Michael are on borrowed time, and the cruel work of harvesting the buffalo is unraveling their souls.
Bracing, direct, and quintessentially American, Olmstead’s gripping narrative follows that infamous hunt, which drove the buffalo to near extinction. Savage Country is the story of a moment in our history in which mass destruction of an animal population was seen as a road to economic salvation. But it’s also the intimate story of how that hunt changed Michael and Elizabeth forever.
