Amazon.ca Books Best of the Month: June 2009

Spotlight Title: Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Colum McCann has worked some exquisite magic with Let the Great World Spin, conjuring a novel of electromagnetic force that defies gravity. It's August of 1974, a summer "hot and serious and full of death and betrayal," and Watergate and the Vietnam War make the world feel precarious. A stunned hush pauses the cacophonous universe of New York City as a man on a cable walks (repeatedly) between World Trade Center towers. This extraordinary, real-life feat by French funambulist Philippe Petit becomes the touchstone for stories that briefly submerge you in ten varied and intense lives--a street priest, heroin-addicted hookers, mothers mourning sons lost in war, a Park Avenue judge, a young artist. All their lives are ordinary and unforgettable, overlapping at the edges, occasionally converging. And when they coalesce in the final pages, the moment hums with such grace that its memory might tighten your throat weeks later. You might find yourself paused, considering the universe of lives one city contains in any slice of time, each of us our singular world, sometimes passing close enough to touch or collide, to make a new generation or kill it, sending out ripples, leaving residue, an imprint, marking each other, our city, the very air--compassionately or callously, unable to see all the damage we do or heal, and most of us stumbling, just trying not to trip, or step in something awful.

But then someone does something extraordinary, like dancing on a cable strung 110 stories in the air, or imagining a magnificent novel that lifts us up for a sky-scraping, dizzy glimpse of something greater: the sordid grandeur of this whirling world, "bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants." --Mari Malcolm

Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire by Margot Berwin		Fordlandia by Greg Grandin
Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire tells the wildly entertaining story of Lila Nova's journey from Manhattan to the lush jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula, as she hunts down a legendary garden. Recovering from a heartbreaking divorce, Lila's life is like her home: simple, new, and empty. But then she meets handsome plantseller David Exley, and an entire world opens up before her eyes. When she learns of the existence of nine mystical, valuable plants that bring fame, fortune, immortality, and passion, and she strikes out alone in search of their origin, entering a world of shamans and spirit animals, snake charmers, and sexy, heart-stopping Huichols. Her exhilarating journey of love and self-discovery will thrill readers with mystery, adventure, and heat.		Proving that truth can indeed be stranger than fiction, Fordlandia chronicles Henry Ford's ill-advised attempt to transform raw Brazilian rainforest into a slice of Americana. With sales of his Model-T booming, the automotive tycoon saw an opportunity to expand his reach by exploiting a downtrodden Brazilian rubber industry. His laughably named Amazonian outpost of Fordlandia would become an enviable model of efficiency and mark the Ford Motor Company as a player on the global stage--or so he thought. Greg Grandin explores the astounding oversights (no botanists were consulted) and arrogance (little thought was paid to how native Brazilians would react) that hamstrung the project from the start, turning Fordlandia into a fascinating cautionary tale.
• Read more about Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire		• Read more about Fordlandia

Border Songs by Jim Lynch		The City and the City by China Mieville
Preternaturally tall and innocent, Brandon Vanderkool is more bird than border patrol agent, prone to mimicking birdsong and building nests. But he's also a remarkably acute defender of a North American border that Jim Lynch describes as "multiple-choice...with incoming settlers finding an American, a Canadian, and a compromise in-between" in Border Songs. A rookie agent, Brandon's on a streak of successful smuggling busts as border traffic hits an all-time high, bringing a swift and seismic stroke of change to a corner of the continent that once felt settled and secure. It takes a special kind of wordsmith to create a character like Brandon--and indeed, to craft the whole supporting cast, who are by turns ordinary and ornery (in a way that might remind you of the best moments of Northern Exposure). Jim Lynch writes with enviable restraint, and he sees in a most unexpected way how a person's life clicks and tumbles into (or out of) place. His turns of phrase are as light as a feather, but so precise and purposeful that you'll quickly find yourself buoyed by the vistas they show you.		The city is Beszel, a rundown metropolis on the eastern edge of Europe. The other city is Ul Qoma, a modern Eastern European boomtown and a bit of an international pariah. What the two cities share, and what they don't, is the deliciously evocative conundrum at the heart of China Mieville's The City and the City. Mieville is well known as a modern fantasist, but here he's fully hard-boiled, stripping down to a seen-it-all detective's voice that's wonderfully appropriate. His detective is Inspector Tyador Borlu, a cop in Beszel whose investigation of the murder of a young foreign woman takes him back and forth across the highly policed border to Ul Qoma to uncover a crime that threatens the delicate balance between the cities and, perhaps more so, Borlu's own dissolving sense of identity. In his tale of two cities, Mieville creates a world both fantastic and unsettlingly familiar.
• Read more about Border Songs		• Read more about The City and the City

The Price of Love and Other Stories by Peter Robinson		The Strain by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan
Robinson's versatile talent is on full display in this riveting new collection. Offering a dozen new mystery stories--including one brand-new Inspector Banks story--The Price of Love and Other Stories combines spellbinding plots, suspense that grips and won't let go, utterly unpredictable twists, psychological truths both sweet and scary, characters you'd like to meet (and some you'd hope never to encounter), and settings that are characters in themselves. Robinson proves himself as a virtuoso of short crime fiction.		Who better to reinvent the vampire genre than Guillermo del Toro, the genius behind Pan's Labyrinth, and Chuck Hogan, master of character-driven thrillers like Prince of Thieves? The first of a trilogy, The Strain is dark, bloody, and full of mayhem and mythology. These vampires aren't sexy or star-crossed or "vegetarians"--they're hungry, connected, and multiplying. The vampire virus sweeps across New York, and all that stands between us and a grotesque end are a couple of scientists, an old man with a decades-old vendetta, and a young boy. This first instalment moves fast and sets up the major players, counting down to the beginning of the end.
• Read more about The Price of Love and Other Stories		• Read more about The Strain

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