Best Books of the Month
Browse our editors' picks for August, plus more new releases not to miss
| Spotlight Title: Galore by Michael Crummey | 
Sprawling and intimate, stark and fantastical, Galore is a novel about the power of stories to shape and sustain us. This is Michael Crummey's most ambitious and accomplished work to date. An intricate family saga and love story spanning two centuries, Galore is a portrait of the improbable medieval world that was rural Newfoundland, a place almost too harrowing and extravagant to be real. Remote and isolated, exposed to savage extremes of climate and fate, the people of Paradise Deep persist in a realm where the line between the everyday and the otherworldly is impossible to distinguish. Propelled by the disputes and alliances, grievances and trade-offs that bind the Sellers and Devine families through generations, Galore is alive with singular characters, and an uncommon insight into the complexities of human nature.
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| Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges | | The Wife's Tale by Lori Lansens | 
In Empire of Illusion, Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges charts the dramatic and disturbing rise of a post-literate society that craves fantasy, ecstasy and illusion. Hedges argues that we now live in two societies: One, the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world, that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other, a growing majority, is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. In this "other society," serious film and theatre, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins. In the tradition of Christopher Lasch's Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, Hedges navigates this culture--attending WWF contests as well as Ivy League graduation ceremonies--exposing an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion.
| |  The Wife's Tale is a brilliant new novel--deeply humane and entirely convincing--from Lori Lansens, author of two previous bestsellers and a writer who can be counted on to deliver an amazing story and characters to fall in love with. In Leaford, Ontario--home of Rose and Ruby Darlen, the sorrowing parents of Larry Merkel, and not far from Rusholme where Addy Shadd once looked after an abandoned child--love and grief combine to awaken an obese woman from her loneliness. When her husband doesn't come home on the eve of their 25th wedding anniversary, Mary Gooch, who has never learned to be self-sufficient, sets out on a truly remarkable journey of self-discovery that takes her first to the big city, and then to another country.
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| The Magicians by Lev Grossman | | This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper | 
Quentin Coldwater is brilliant but miserable. A senior in high school, he's still secretly preoccupied with a series of fantasy novels he read as a child, set in a magical land called Fillory. Imagine his surprise when he finds himself unexpectedly admitted to a very secret, exclusive college of magic in upstate New York, where he receives a rigorous education in the craft of modern sorcery. He also discovers other things people learn in college: friendship, love, sex, booze, and boredom. But magic doesn't bring Quentin the happiness he dreamed it would. After graduation, he and his friends make a stunning discovery: Fillory is real. But the land of Quentin's fantasies turns out to be much more dangerous than he imagined. Psychologically piercing and magnificently absorbing, The Magicians boldly moves into uncharted literary territory, imagining magic as practiced by real people, with their capricious desires and volatile emotions.
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The death of Judd Foxman's father marks the first time that the entire Foxman family--including Judd's mother, brothers, and sister--have been together in years. Conspicuously absent: Judd's wife, Jen, whose fourteen-month affair with Judd's radio-shock-jock boss has recently become painfully public. Simultaneously mourning the death of his father and the demise of his marriage, Judd joins the rest of the Foxmans as they reluctantly submit to their patriarch's dying request: to spend the seven days following the funeral together. In the same house. Like a family. As the week quickly spins out of control, longstanding grudges resurface, secrets are revealed, and old passions reawakened. All of which would be hard enough without the bomb Jen dropped the day Judd's father died: She's pregnant. This Is Where I Leave You is Jonathan Tropper's most accomplished work to date, a riotously funny, emotionally raw novel about love, marriage, divorce, family, and the ties that bind, whether we like it or not.
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| Waiting for Columbus by Thomas Trofimuk | | The Hemingway Patrols by Terry Mort | 
Highly acclaimed Canadian novelist Thomas Trofimuk bursts onto the international literary stage with this dazzling, emotional intense novel. In a Spanish mental institution in 2004, a man who believes he is Christopher Columbus begins to tell his story. Nurse Consuela listens, hoping to discover what tragedy drove this educated, cultured man to retreat from reality. This Columbus is not heroic: he falls in love with every woman he meets, and, on land, he has absolutely no sense of direction. More troublingly, he is convinced a terrible tragedy is coming. Yet with each tale, Consuela draws closer to this lost navigator. Waiting for Columbus is a richly imagined, cinematic, and often playful novel about truth, loss, love, and hope by a writer at the height of his powers.
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From the summer of 1942 until the end of 1943, Ernest Hemingway actively patrolled the Gulf Stream and the waters off Cuba's north shore in his wooden fishing boat, Pilar, looking for German submarines. His patrols were supervised by the U.S. Navy and served as a part of antisubmarine warfare at a time when U-boat attacks were decimating Allied merchant shipping in the region. The huge, long-distance subs ultimately sank hundreds of ships in the Atlantic theater, killing thousands of seamen. They were deadly and efficient, and to confront them in a small wooden fishing vessel was to court instant annihilation. Yet Hemingway and his crew of friends were prepared to do just that. Armed with only grenades and submachine guns, they planned to attack any U-boat they encountered. While almost no attention has been paid to these patrols other than casual mentions in standard biographies, they became the foundation of some of Hemingway's future work. Terry Mort's incisive portrait of Hemingway in The Hemingway Patrols is a combination of biography, military history, and literary commentary, a provocative portrait of one of America's greatest writers reveals why he went to sea and courted death in the high season of his most remarkable life.
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| | Best Paperbacks of August |
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| | August Picks for Kids and Teens |
Once Upon a Twice by Denise Doyen, Illustrated by Barry Moser
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What will happen to the brave mouse Jam when he breaks the rules and goes for a moonlit adventure against the advice of the elder mice?
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The Story Of Cirrus Flux by Matthew Skelton
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Cirrus is a crazy-haired orphan boy who has grown up in the care of the Hospital, in the company of his best friend, Bottle Top. But Bottle Top and Cirrus are soon to be apprenticed to new masters--cunning practitioners of a strange kind of science....
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The Bride's Farewell by Meg Rosoff
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On the morning of her wedding, Pell Ridley creeps out of bed in the dark, kisses her sisters goodbye and flees, determined to escape a future that offers nothing but hard work and sorrow. She takes the only thing that truly belongs to her: Jack, a white horse....
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