A how-to writing guide, a dystopian thriller and a look back at World War II history: Yes, it's new-paperback time again. Surely there's something here for everyone?
"Death in the Air: The True Story of a Serial Killer, the Great London Smog, and the Strangling of a City" by Kate Winkler Dawson (Hachette, $15.99). If you watch "The Crown," you might remember the episode about London's notorious five days of toxic fog in 1952. Called "deeply researched and densely atmospheric" by The New York Times, the book explores both the environmental roots of the disaster and the horrific crime that it (temporarily) concealed.
"Future Home of the Living God" by Louise Erdrich (HarperCollins, $16.99). Erdrich, a National Book Award winner for "The Round House," structured this dystopian feminist thriller as a series of letters from the main character to her unborn child, during a time that pregnant women are being rounded up by a new religious government. The book, said NPR's critic, is "a tense and lyrical new work of speculative fiction," that stands "shoulder-to-braced-shoulder" alongside Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale."
"Do I Make Myself Clear? Why Writing Well Matters" by Harold Evans (Little, Brown, $16.99). Sir Harold, (yes, he's an actual knighted journalist) is the former editor of London's Sunday Times and The Times, and he's written an acclaimed common-sense guide to writing for all of us. Fog, he writes _ words that confuse and deceive us _ is everywhere these days, but "never come there fog too thick, never come there mud and mire too deep, never come there bureaucratic and marketing waffle so gross as to withstand the clean invigorating wind of a sound English sentence."
"Naked Men" by Alicia Gimenez-Bartlett (Europa, $18). Looking for a new voice in international crime fiction? The popular Spanish author Gimenez-Bartlett here spins a tale about an abandoned wife and a literature-teacher-turned-male-prostitute (why does fiction have so few of those?), which Publishers Weekly described as "a powerful story (with) an unpredictable, memorable ending."
"Munich" by Robert Harris (Knopf, $16.95). Harris, author of many novels of political history, here depicts one of history's great what-might-have-beens: September 1938, when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met with Adolf Hitler in the German city of Munich in the hopes of preserving peace in Europe. The Washington Post notes that "Once again, Harris has brought history to life with exceptional skill."
"Jerusalem" by Alan Moore (Liveright, $24.95). Moore, a legendary writer of comic books ("Watchmen," "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"), took inspiration for this, his second prose novel, from James Joyce. "Jerusalem" takes place over a single day _ May 26, 2006 _ in Moore's hometown of Northampton, England. The New York Times, calling it "brilliant, "sometimes maddening" and "monumentally ambitious," ultimately described it as "a vehicle for nothing less than Moore's personal cosmology of space, time and life after death."
