Fall Book Preview: November 2015, Part I

I realized the other day that these fall preview books help make me aware of upcoming titles and really missed not doing one last month! The fact that November has already started is a bonus; less time to wait for these titles to release! So, listed below are November releases I’m excited about. It’s a nice mix of hardcover, paperback, of novels, non-fiction and short stories. I’ve included the publisher’s summary, but also a short explanation about why I’m interested in that particular title.

First up, the titles that released this week!

The Way Around : Finding My Mother and Myself Among the Yanomami by David Good (Nov.3)

Rooted in two vastly different cultures, a young man struggles to understand himself, find his place in the world, and reconnect with his mother—and her remote tribe in the deepest jungles of the Amazon rainforest—in this powerful memoir that combines adventure, history, and anthropology

“My Yanomami family called me by name. Anyopo-we. What it means, I soon learned, is ‘long way around’: I’d taken the long way around obstacles to be here among my people, back where I started. A twenty-year detour.”

For much of his young life, David Good was torn between two vastly different worlds. The son of an American anthropologist and a tribeswoman from a distant part of the Amazon, it took him twenty years to embrace his identity, reunite with the mother who left him when he was six, and claim his heritage.

The Way Around is Good’s amazing chronicle of self-discovery. Moving from the wilds of the Amazonian jungle to the paved confines of suburban New Jersey and back, it is the story of his parents, his American scientist-father and his mother who could not fully adapt to the Western lifestyle. Good writes sympathetically about his mother’s abandonment and the deleterious effect it had on his young self; of his rebellious teenage years marked by depression and drinking, and the near-fatal car accident that transformed him and gave him purpose to find a way back to his mother.

A compelling tale of recovery and discovery, The Way Around is a poignant, fascinating exploration of what family really means, and the way that the strongest bonds endure, even across decades and worlds.

I first heard David’s story on NPR; I became fascinated with it, forgetting that I was sitting in the parking lot of a shopping mall in the summer heat. When I heard his story was being published, I knew I needed to read it, knew I needed to know more. 

Dead Ringers by Christopher Golden (Nov. 3):

With a deep history that threads back to the days of Alistair Crowley and an ancient house, the spirits of some long dead magicians live on by possessing the lives of others in the present day.

When Tess Devlin runs into her ex-husband Nick on a Boston sidewalk, she’s furious at him for pretending he doesn’t know her. She calls his cell to have it out with him, only to discover that he’s in New Hampshire with his current girlfriend. But if Nick’s in New Hampshire…who did she encounter on the street?

Frank Lindbergh’s dreams have fallen apart. He wanted to get out of the grim neighborhood where he’d grown up and out of the shadow of his alcoholic father. Now both his parents are dead and he’s back in his childhood home, drinking too much himself. As he sets in motion his plans for the future, he’s assaulted by an intruder in his living room…an intruder who could be his twin.

In an elegant hotel, Tess will find mystery and terror in her own reflection. Outside a famed mansion on Beacon Hill, people are infected with a diabolical malice…while on the streets, an eyeless man, dressed in rags, searches for a woman who wears Tess’s face.

Christopher Golden is one of my “insta-buy” authors. Everything this man writes, I buy. I loved his previous title, Snowblind, and have no doubt I will adore this one as well. Uber creepy. My kind of book.

The Grownup by Gillian Flynn (Nov. 3):

Formerly a soft-core sex worker at avant-garde establishment Spiritual Palms, our unnamed narrator transitions to the front of the shop as a psychic, pretending to read auras, but actually using skills gained in her grifting childhood to read her clients. When she meets Susan Burke, a desperate suburbanite struggling to cope with her unnerving old house, Carterhook Manor, and its effects on her sinister stepson, Miles, our narrator jumps on the opportunity to set herself up as an entrepreneur, with her own aura-cleansing business for spooky houses. But Miles and Carterhook Manor might prove to be more than she bargained for, as bloodstains mysteriously appear on the walls, Miles threatens her and demands that she leave, and she discovers that the entire Carterhook family was brutally murdered there a hundred years ago by the eldest son, who, in photographs, looks uncannily like Miles. When she realizes that neither Miles nor Susan has been telling the whole truth, it might already be too late to get out.

Gillian Flynn is another one of my “insta-buy” authors. Long before Gone Girl,  I was a fan of her work. This is a short-story, first time published as a stand-alone book.

Avenue of Mysteries by John Irving (Nov.3)

Juan Diego—a fourteen-year-old boy, who was born and grew up in Mexico—has a thirteen-year-old sister. Her name is Lupe, and she thinks she sees what’s coming—specifically, her own future and her brother’s. Lupe is a mind reader; she doesn’t know what everyone is thinking, but she knows what most people are thinking. Regarding what has happened, as opposed to what will, Lupe is usually right about the past; without your telling her, she knows all the worst things that have happened to you.

Lupe doesn’t know the future as accurately. But consider what a terrible burden it is, if you believe you know the future—especially your own future, or, even worse, the future of someone you love. What might a thirteen-year-old girl be driven to do, if she thought she could change the future?

As an older man, Juan Diego will take a trip to the Philippines, but what travels with him are his dreams and memories; he is most alive in his childhood and early adolescence in Mexico. As we grow older—most of all, in what we remember and what we dream—we live in the past. Sometimes, we live more vividly in the past than in the present.

Avenue of Mysteries is the story of what happens to Juan Diego in the Philippines, where what happened to him in the past—in Mexico—collides with his future.

John Irving, need I say more? His writing styles seem to be all over the place (not necessarily a bad thing) so while he’s not an “insta-buy” author, he’s certainly one whose work I seek out.

The Bazaar of Bad Dreams: Stories  by Stephen King (Nov. 3)

Since his first collection, Nightshift, published thirty-five years ago, Stephen King has dazzled readers with his genius as a writer of short fiction. In this new collection he assembles, for the first time, recent stories that have never been published in a book. He introduces each with a passage about its origins or his motivations for writing it.

There are thrilling connections between stories; themes of morality, the afterlife, guilt, what we would do differently if we could see into the future or correct the mistakes of the past. “Afterlife” is about a man who died of colon cancer and keeps reliving the same life, repeating his mistakes over and over again. Several stories feature characters at the end of life, revisiting their crimes and misdemeanors. Other stories address what happens when someone discovers that he has supernatural powers—the columnist who kills people by writing their obituaries in “Obits;” the old judge in “The Dune” who, as a boy, canoed to a deserted island and saw names written in the sand, the names of people who then died in freak accidents. In “Morality,” King looks at how a marriage and two lives fall apart after the wife and husband enter into what seems, at first, a devil’s pact they can win.

Magnificent, eerie, utterly compelling, these stories comprise one of King’s finest gifts to his constant reader—“I made them especially for you,” says King. “Feel free to examine them, but please be careful. The best of them have teeth.”

I don’t think I need to explain my interest in this one. I’m listening to the audio now and loving every chilling moment!

 

The Girl with Ghost Eyes by M. H. Boroson (Nov. 3)

It’s the end of the nineteenth century in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and ghost hunters from the Maoshan traditions of Daoism keep malevolent spiritual forces at bay. Li-lin, the daughter of a renowned Daoshi exorcist, is a young widow burdened with yin eyes—the unique ability to see the spirit world. Her spiritual visions and the death of her husband bring shame to Li-lin and her father—and shame is not something this immigrant family can afford.

When a sorcerer cripples her father, terrible plans are set in motion, and only Li-lin can stop them. To aid her are her martial arts and a peachwood sword, her burning paper talismans, and a wisecracking spirit in the form of a human eyeball tucked away in her pocket. Navigating the dangerous alleys and backrooms of a male-dominated Chinatown, Li-lin must confront evil spirits, gangsters, and soulstealers before the sorcerer’s ritual summons an ancient evil that could burn Chinatown to the ground.

With a rich and inventive historical setting, nonstop martial arts action, authentic Chinese magic, and bizarre monsters from Asian folklore, The Girl with Ghost Eyes is also the poignant story of a young immigrant searching to find her place beside the long shadow of a demanding father and the stigma of widowhood. In a Chinatown caught between tradition and modernity, one woman may be the key to holding everything together.

The premise of this one is just different enough that it piqued my interest. When I read the author’s bio and discovered his love of Buffy, I knew I had to give this one a try. 

The Muralist: A Novel by B. A. Shapiro (Nov. 3):

When Alizée Benoit, a young American painter working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), vanishes in New York City in 1940, no one knows what happened to her. Not her Jewish family living in German-occupied France. Not her arts patron and political compatriot, Eleanor Roosevelt. Not her close-knit group of friends and fellow WPA painters, including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner. And, some seventy years later, not her great-niece, Danielle Abrams, who, while working at Christie’s auction house, uncovers enigmatic paintings hidden behind works by those now famous Abstract Expressionist artists. Do they hold answers to the questions surrounding her missing aunt?

Entwining the lives of both historical and fictional characters, and moving between the past and the present,The Muralist plunges readers into the divisiveness of prewar politics and the largely forgotten plight of European refugees refused entrance to the United States. It captures both the inner workings of New York’s art scene and the beginnings of the vibrant and quintessentially American school of Abstract Expressionism.

As she did in her bestselling novel The Art Forger, B. A. Shapiro tells a gripping story while exploring provocative themes. In Alizée and Danielle she has created two unforgettable women, artists both, who compel us to ask: What happens when luminous talent collides with unstoppable historical forces? Does great art have the power to change the world?

I adored Shapiro’s The Art Forger, so when I saw this coming up, I knew I needed to give it a try as well. 

That about wraps up the books that release this week. Did I miss any that you are particularly thrilled about? More to come in the next few days!