New Fiction

(Click here for a full list of every title on the New Fiction Shelf).

Angelology by Danielle Trussoni

From Booklist: Through the door opened by The DaVinci Code comes Trussoni’s entry in the hugger-mugger religious-society suspense subgenre, its textured prose as seamless as the never-ending stream of prayers offered up by St. Rose Convent’s Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. In that institution, celebrated for its angelic texts, lives Sister Evangeline, who prays, tends to library matters, and has become “a creature of obedience and duty” since her father brought her there when she was 12, two years after her mother’s death.

The scholar Verlaine seeks concrete evidence linking the convent to Abigail Rockefeller, and before you can say, “I found this letter,” the multilayered process of Evangeline’s transformation has begun. The story takes flight in eminently readable fashion, effortlessly folding in technical information about things angelic and the religious life. It’s hard not to enjoy the secrets unearthed and appreciate what wings are to the angels who secretly walk among us—“a symbol of their blood, their breeding, . . . their position in the community. Displaying them properly brought power and prestige.” Powerfully entertaining. --Whitney Scott

Call Number: F TRU

Rat by Fernanda Eberstadt

From Booklist: Growing up with her loving single-parent mom in a rough neighborhood in the South of France, Celia names herself Rat, and when Mom adopts Algerian orphan Morgan, 15-year-old Rat acts as his fierce older sister, protecting him first against racism in the community (“It stinks being Arab in France”) and then against sexual abuse at home, when Mom refuses to believe her sleazy boyfriend is abusing Morgan.

Always haunted by the mystery of the father she has never met, Rat runs away with Morgan to London to find her dad––and herself. Eberstadt’s contemporary take on the elemental identity quest is rich, wry, and heartbreaking, complete with e-mails, security cameras, cell phones, and “globish” talk. Whether it is the immediate drama of Rat’s loss of innocence (“her blithe assumption that other people were basically well-intentioned”) or her sometimes painful independence from the mother she loves (“from worship to apartness to wary but still infintely tender”), the plainspoken, direct prose and the beautiful storytelling combine to produce a novel that is mythic, gritty, and unforgettable. --Hazel Rochm

Call Number: F EBE

A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks

From Kirkus Reviews: Two plots—one financial, the other terrorist—are being hatched, but there’s much more going on in this absorbing big-canvas view of contemporary London from Faulks (Engleby, 2007, etc.).

John Veals, a middle-aged hedge fund manager and the coldest of cold fish, is planning the collapse of a major British bank. His goal? To pump even more billions of dollars into his fund. Hassan al-Rashid, a young Muslim raised in Scotland, belongs to a jihadist cell. By chance, their schemes will climax simultaneously in December 2007. Faulks uses the tried-and-true countdown device as a backbeat. In the foreground is lucid if rather too lengthy exposition. To explain Veals’s strategy, Faulks leads us through the labyrinth of puts, calls, trades and more, while for Hassan he limns a credible step-by-step recruitment process.

As a counterweight to the blandishments of the Koran, Faulks offers the reader the rational humanism of Gabriel Northwood, an impoverished barrister; the strident voice of the Koran reminds Gabriel uncomfortably of the voices plaguing his schizophrenic brother Adam. Gabriel’s somber hospital visits are a corrective to a shockingly cruel, hugely lucrative reality show that pillories the participants, all crazies. (Veals’s teenage son, a fan of the show, will join Adam after a drug-induced psychotic episode.) The light in Gabriel’s sad life is a new client, Jenni Fortune, the mixed-race driver of a subway train and devotee of video games.

Unlike digital seductions (another Faulks theme), the love that grows between Gabriel and Jenni is piercingly real. For light relief, there’s Hassan’s wealthy businessman father, panicked before an audience with the Queen, soliciting advice on Great Books from an embittered reviewer, a veteran of the literary racket. Remarkably, Faulks retains control of his material as he shows us a world in which money rules, tunnel vision destroys and love remains the touchstone and redeemer.
With its inexhaustible curiosity about the way the world works, this funny, exciting work is another milestone in a distinguished career.

Call Number: F FAU

Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes

From Amazon.com: Matterhorn is a marvel--a living, breathing book with Lieutenant Waino Mellas and the men of Bravo Company at its raw and battered heart. Karl Marlantes doesn't introduce you to Vietnam in his brilliant war epic--he unceremoniously drops you into the jungle, disoriented and dripping with leeches, with only the newbie lieutenant as your guide. Mellas is a bundle of anxiety and ambition, a college kid who never imagined being part of a "war that none of his friends thought was worth fighting," who realized too late that "because of his desire to look good coming home from a war, he might never come home at all."

A highly decorated Vietnam veteran himself, Marlantes brings the horrors and heroism of war to life with the finesse of a seasoned writer, exposing not just the things they carry, but the fears they bury, the friends they lose, and the men they follow. Matterhorn is as much about the development of Mellas from boy to man, from the kind of man you fight beside to the man you fight for, as it is about the war itself. Through his untrained eyes, readers gain a new perspective on the ravages of war, the politics and bureaucracy of the military, and the peculiar beauty of brotherhood. --Daphne Durham

Call Number: F MAR

Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende

From Publishers Weekly: *Starred Review* Allende, an entrancing and astute storyteller cherished the world over, returns to historical fiction to portray another resilient woman whose life embodies the complex forces at work in the bloody forging of the New World. Zarité, called Tété, is born into slavery in the colony of Saint-Domingue, where enslaved Africans are worked to death by the thousands, and European men prey on women of color.

So it is with Tété and her “master,” the deeply conflicted plantation owner Toulouse Valmorain, who relies on her for everything from coerced sex to caring for his demented first wife, his legitimate son, and their off-the-record daughter. When the slave uprising that gives birth to the free black republic of Haiti erupts, Toulouse, Tété, and the children flee to Cuba, then to New Orleans. In a many-faceted plot, Allende animates irresistible characters authentic in their emotional turmoil and pragmatic adaptability.

She also captures the racial, sexual, and entrepreneurial dynamics of each society in sensuous detail while masterfully dramatizing the psychic wounds of slavery. Sexually explicit, Allende is grace incarnate in her evocations of the spiritual energy that still sustains the beleaguered people of Haiti and New Orleans. Demand will be high for this transporting, remarkably topical novel of men and women of courage risking all for liberty. --Donna Seaman

Call Number: F ALL