Librarian notes ‘best picks’

The kids aren’t the only ones who should be reading this summer.  When you bring the special children in your life to the library to stock up on books, be sure to get an armful for yourself.  These latest new fiction titles are great summer reads!

Our Pick of the Week is Lush Life, by Richard Price, one of the masters of the urban crime drama and one of the most skilled dialogue writers around. 

“So, what do you do?” Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers – Artist, actor, screenwriter. But now, he’s 35 and still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not like Ike Marcus. Ike was young, good-looking, people liked him. Ask him what he did, he wouldn’t say “tending bar.” He was going places, until two street kids stepped up to him and Eric one night and pulled a gun. At least, that’s Eric’s version. In Lush Life, Richard Price tears the shiny veneer off the “new” New York to show us the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour. This is an X-ray of the street in the age of no broken windows and “quality of life” squads, from a writer whose “tough, gritty brand of social realism . . . reads like a movie in prose” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).

Fall of Frost, by Brian Hal, is a fascinating and exquisitely written novel about the art and life of Robert Frost.

In his most recent novel, I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company, Brian Hall won acclaim for the way he used the intimate, revealing voice of fiction to capture the half- hidden personal stories of the Lewis and Clark expedition. In his new novel, Hall turns to the life of Robert Frost, perhaps America’s most well-known poet. Frost, as both man and artist, was toughened by a hard life. His own father died when Frost was eleven; his only sibling, a sister, had to be institutionalized; of his five children, one died before the age of four, one committed suicide, one went insane, and one died in childbirth.
Told in short chapters, each of which presents a characteristic incident with intensity and immediacy, Hall’s novel neatly weaves together the earlier parts of Frost’s life with his final year, 1962, when, at age eighty- eight, and under the looming threat of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he made a visit to Russia and met with Khrushchev. As Hall shows, Frost determined early on that he would not succumb to the tragedies life threw at him. The deaths of his children were forms of his own death from which he resurrected himself through poetry, for him the finest symbol of man’s form-giving power. Fall of Frost is an intense, elegantly constructed portrait of one man’s rages, guilt, paranoia, and sheer, defiant persistence.  It also explores the question of why good people suffer unjustly and how art is born from that unanswerable question.  This outstanding work further confirms Hall’s standing as one of the most talented novelists at work today.

The Forgery of Venus, by Michael Gruber, is going to be hard to put down.

Chaz Wilmot is a painter born outside his time. He possesses a virtuosic command of the techniques of the old masters. He can paint like Leonardo, Goya, Gainsborough, artists whose works sell for millions, but this style of painting is no longer popular, and he refuses to shape his talent to fit the fashion of the day. So Wilmot makes his living cranking out parodies for ads and magazine covers. A break comes when he is awarded a commission to restore a Venetian palace fresco by the eighteenth-century master Tiepolo, for a disreputable Italian businessman. Once there, Wilmot discovers that it is not a restoration but a re-creation, indeed a forgery. At first skeptical of the job, he then throws himself into the creative challenge and succeeds brilliantly. No one can tell the modern work from something done more than two hundred years ago. This feat attracts the attention of Werner Krebs, an art dealer with a dark past and shadier present who becomes Wilmot’s friend and patron. Wilmot is suddenly working with a fervor he hasn’t felt in years, but his burst of creative activity is accompanied by strange interludes: Without warning, he finds himself reliving moments from his past—not as “memories” but as if they are happening all over again. Soon, he believes he can travel back to the seventeenth century, where he lived as the Spanish artist Diego Rodriguez de Silva Velazquez, one of the most famous painters in history. Wilmot begins to fantasize that as Velazquez, he has created a masterpiece, a stunning portrait of a nude. When the painting actually turns up, he doesn’t know if he painted it or if he imagined the whole thing. Wilmot comes amazingly alive for the reader, and his dangerous journey toward the truth becomes our own.

The Finder, by Colin Harrison, the author of The Havana Room and Afterburn, raises the stakes with an electrifying new thriller. 

A master storyteller, Harrison spins the story of a young, beautiful, secretive Chinese woman, Jin-Li, who gets involved in a brilliant scheme to steal valuable information from corporations in New York City. When the plan is discovered by powerful New Yorkers who stand to lose enormous sums of money, Jin-Li goes on the run. Meanwhile, her former lover, Ray Grant, a man who was out of the country for years but has recently returned, is caught up in the search for her. Ray has not been forthcoming to Jin-Li about why he left New York or what he was doing overseas, but his training and strengths will be put to the ultimate test against those who are unmerciful in their desire to regain a fortune lost. Ray is going to have to find Jin-Li, and he is going to have to find her fast.

Sail, by James Patterson, is written with the blistering pace and shocking twists that only James Patterson can master, Sail takes “Lost” and “Survivor” to a new level of terror.

Since the death of her husband, Anne Dunne and her three children have struggled in every way. In a last ditch effort to save the family, Anne plans an elaborate sailing vacation to bring everyone together once again. But only an hour out of port, everything is going wrong. The teenage daughter, Carrie, is planning to drown herself. The teenage son, Mark, is high on drugs and ten-year-old Ernie is nearly catatonic. This is the worst vacation ever. Anne manages to pull things together bit by bit, but just as they begin feeling like a family again, something catastrophic happens. Survival may be the least of their concerns.

Death and Honor, by W. E. B. Griffin, is the crackling new novel in the bestselling Honor Bound series by this bestselling master of the military thriller.

The Honor Bound saga of World War II espionage in Germany and Argentina has long been immensely popular. The year is 1943, and Argentina is officially neutral, but crawling with every kind of spy, sympathizer, and military official imaginable. The hero is Cletus Frade, a Marine pilot recruited by the OSS, with strong family ties to Argentina. “OSS chief Wild Bill Donovan has asked him to set up his own official-but-really-OSS airline in Argentina, using “loaned” Lockheed Lodestars and Constellations. Of even more concern are two interwoven German operations. The first is a government scheme for Jews outside the Fatherland to purchase the freedom of their relatives in concentration camps, who will then be transported to Argentina and Uruguay. The second has to do with where that money is going: a plan called Operation Phoenix, which will establish safe havens for senior Nazi officials in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Needless to say, the OSS is very interested in both of them, and they want Frade to find out a little more without getting killed.