Six Picks...For Your Beach Bag

  • THE HELP  by Kathryn Stockett

    Kathryn Stockett’s phenomenal debut novel The Help, set in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962, is told from the perspectives of three very different women. Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan is fresh out of college and back at her parents’ home in Jackson, Mississippi. Her dream is to become a writer. Her mother’s dream is for her to find a well-to-do Southern boy from a good family with a healthy trust fund and get married. Bored with her friends and frustrated by the way they talk to and about their maids—the help—Skeeter dreams up an idea that could change life in Jackson for the better, but it is quite a dangerous proposition.
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  • THE PIANO TEACHER BY Janice Y.K.Lee

    The Piano Teacher is laced with intrigue concerning a hoard of Chinese artifacts called the Crown Collection that went missing during the war (like the artworks owned by the real-life Hong Kong businessman Paul Chater). But while the inevitable "who did what and when and why" that dominates the last third of the novel is satisfying because it answers all those questions, readers will be more enthralled by Lee's depiction of Will's relationships with his two lovers—"Claire, with her blond and familiar femininity, English rose to Trudy's exotic scorpion"—and the unsparing way Lee unravels them.
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  • MATRIMONY by Joshua Henkin

    From Independent Booksellers: "Joshua Henkin's new novel, Matrimony, tackles the complexities of love in all its myriad combinations and possibilities. The abiding love between Mia, a Canadian Jew, and Julian, wealthy New York Wasp is the core around which Henkin creates an utterly believable, richly populated web of family and friends, and all the inherent joys, sorrows and stupid mistakes that humans make in their never-ending quest to get it right. Matrimony is a pleasure all around; wonderfully written, deeply insightful and entertaining." --Cathy Langer, The Tattered Cover, Denver, CO
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  • MR. PIP  by Lloyd Jones

    In a novel that is at once intense, beautiful, and fablelike, Lloyd Jones weaves a transcendent story that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the power of narrative to transform our lives.  On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens's classic Great Expectations. So begins this rare, original story about the abiding strength that imagination, once ignited, can provide. As artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures of a young orphan named Pip in a city called London, a city whose contours soon become more real than their own blighted landscape. As Mr. Watts says, "A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe." Soon come the rest of the villagers, initially threatened, finally inspired to share tales of their own that bring alive the rich mythology of their past. But in a ravaged place where even children are forced to live by their wits and daily survival is the only objective, imagination can be a dangerous thing.
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  • THE BEST GAME EVER:  GIANTS VS COLTS, 1958, AND THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN NFL by Mark Bowden

    From Publishers Weekly: Bowden (Black Hawk Down; Guests of the Ayatollah) tells the story of the 1958 National Football League championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants, a legendary game that proved to be a harbinger of the enormous popularity of pro football over the next 50 years. Bowden writes that the game featured the greatest assemblage of talent ever on one field, including 17 future Hall of Fame inductees. He frames the picture with a wide lens, but then focuses on the roles and lives of a few key players, particularly the Colts' obsessive and methodical wide receiver Raymond Berry and the iconic quarterback Johnny Unitas, as well as the Giants' powerful linebacker Sam Huff. The game, played in frigid Yankee Stadium three days after Christmas, stretched into the evening, garnering the largest television audience in the history of the sport to that time. Bowden begins his entertaining and informative narration in the third quarter, and then delves into backstory on the league, players and the buildup, before returning to the gridiron to conclude with a detailed account of the final plays and an epilogue.
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  • THE LAST PATRIOT by Brad Thor

    From Publishers Weekly: In Brad Thor's highest-voltage thriller to date, Scot Harvath must race to locate an ancient secret that has the power to stop militant Islam dead in its tracks.
       - June 632 A.D.: Deep within the Uranah Valley of Mount Arafat in Mecca, the prophet Mohammed shares with his closest companions a final and startling revelation.  Within days, he is assassinated.
       - September 1789: U.S. minister to France Thomas Jefferson, charged with forging a truce with the violent Muslim pirates of the Barbary Coast, makes a shocking discovery - one that could forever impact the world's relationship with Islam.
       - Present day: When a car bomb explodes outside a Parisian cafe, Navy Seal turned covert Homeland Security Operative Scot Harvath is thrust back into the life he has tried so desperately to leave behind.
    Saving the intended victim of the attack, Harvath becomes party to an amazing and perilous race to uncover a secret so powerful that militant Islam could be defeated once and for all without firing another shot, dropping another bomb, or launching another covert action. But there are powerful men who are determined that Mohammed's mysterious final revelation continue to remain hidden forever.
    Hailed by the Chicago Tribune as "quite possibly the next coming of Robert Ludlum," Brad Thor takes listeners across the globe on a heart-pounding chase where the stakes are higher than they have ever been before.
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