By Steven Erikson
Tor, $17.99, 816 pages
Dust of Dreams is book nine in Erikson’s massive fantasy series, The Malazan Book of the Fallen. Huge in scope, with hundreds of characters, places, events, and ages-old back story tying it all together. Fallen is both high and low fantasy, blending gods, kings, and magic, along with foot soldiers [...]
By Kim Stanley Robinson
Spectra, $26.00, 544 Pages
Galileo encounters a stranger, who introduces him to a glass apparatus that he later uses to fashion into a telescope. The stranger brings him to the future, where he walks the surface of Jupiter’s moons and finds himself involved in a complex development. In the past, Galileo struggles with [...]
By Gabrielle Burton
Voice, $22.99, 244 pages
Crafted from research, including 17 letters written by Tamsen Donner herself, Burton has created a fictional journal of Tamsen Donner and the Donner Party that is insightful and heart-wrenching. It is as if she has given the Donner Party a voice more than 150 years later, and that voice was [...]
By Henning Mankell
Knopf, $25.95, 384 pages
The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell begins with the murder of 19 people in a present day Swedish village. When Judge Birgitta Roslin realizes that her mother was raised in the village, she begins her own quiet investigation into the murder and connects the only clue at the crime [...]
By Jim Butcher
Berkley, $25.95, 465 pages
The world is rapidly succumbing to the Vord menace. In the land of Alera, the invincible First Lord and his entire capital city have already fallen and the survivors are fleeing to the few remaining refuges against the alien scourge. What hope that remains rests largely with Tavi, the man [...]
By Catie Rosemurgy
Graywolf Press, $15.00, 94 pages
The Stranger Manual, Catie Rosemurgy’s second book of poems, will make you smile. Most of us think of poems as solemn things, written to convey urgent messages to mankind; we open a book of poems and expect to weep. Thus, it was a delight for me to read Rosemurgy’s [...]
By Kage Baker and J. K. Potter
Subterranean Press, $35.00, 123 pages
The Women of Nell Gwynne’s is a story of the Lady Beatrice, the daughter of a general turned high-end prostitute, and also of Nell Gwynne’s, a sister organization to the Gentleman’s Speculative Society, a precursor to Dr. Zeus Inc from Kage Baker’s Company novels. The opening [...]
By Anastasia Hobbet
The Permanent Press, $29.00, 344 pages
At first glance, Small Kingdoms may seem like merely another book capitalizing on the current fascination with the Middle East, but Anastasia Hobbet can write extremely well, and this book is less about political forces in the region of Kuwait and more about the personal relationships of three [...]
By Mahmoud Darwish and Fady Joudah
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28.00, 203 pages
I am the grateful owner of If I Were Another, Mahmoud Darwish’s collection of poems translated by Fady Joudah. Darwish’s poems are lengthy: I have to retrace my steps through them. Their true power eludes me. A piece of their meaning is lost to [...]
Edited by Billy Collins; Illustrated by David Allen Sibley
Columbia University Press, $22.95, 268 pages
Bright Wings is a collection of poems and art that will appeal to poets and bird lovers. Edited by well-known poet Billy Collins and illustrated by author and ornithologist David Allen Sibley, Bright Wings makes an excellent addition to any bookshelf. It [...]
By Patricia Falvey
Center Street, $21.99, 329 pages
The setting is the highly dramatic revolutionary period in Northern Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century. Eileen O’Neill’s family is at the epicenter. The “Yellow House” in which she spent her childhood is lost to her through political upheaval, and regaining this house and the sense of [...]
By William Doonan
Glencannon Press, $22.95, 277 pages
In his book Grave Passage, author William Doonan gives us detective Henry Grave. During his many years on the planet Henry has acquired many traits, rude, obnoxious, obtrusive and funny. He uses all of these characteristics or rather Doonan uses these to make this a delightful and interesting read.
Henry [...]
