Fiction

Babycakes

by Armistead Maupin

When an ordinary househusband and his ambitious wife decide to start a family, they discover there's more to making a baby than meets the eye.

Magic for Beginners

by Kelly Link

"A tremendously entertaining collection. Smart, clever, magical stories. Lots of fun." —Steve P., Harvard Book Store

A Passage to India

by E. M. Forster

Among the greatest novels of the twentieth century, A Passage to India tells of the clash of cultures in British India after the turn of the century.

Eva Moves the Furniture

by Margot Livesey

"Though much loved, Eva is lonely, and when a woman who 'shone as if she had been dipped in silver' and a young girl with long braids and freckles appear one afternoon in the garden, she is at first unaware that they are not corporeal." —Publishers Weekly

The Diving Pool

by Yoko Ogawa

"These three quiet novellas, composing the first of Yoko Ogawa's books to be translated into English, share an eerie quality of nightmare, the precarious sense that beauty and distress are equally possible at any moment." —Publishers Weekly

Straight Man

by Richard Russo

"Hank Devereaux Jr. is . . . the interim chair of a squabbling English department at a small rural college. Big budget cuts are rumored. Each department chair has been told to provide a list of those who will lose their jobs. His department believes that Hank has prepared such a list, but he hasn't and won't." —Library Journal

The Ministry of Special Cases

by Nathan Englander

"Kaddish Poznan . . . earns a meager living defacing gravestones of Jewish whores and pimps . . . When [Kaddish's son] Pato is taken from home, Kaddish learns what it really means to erase identity, because no one in authority will admit Pato has been arrested." —Publishers Weekly

The Map of Love

by Ahdaf Soueif

At either end of the twentieth century, two women fall in love with men outside their familiar worlds.

Angelica

by Arthur Phillips

"Joseph Barton, a London biological researcher, orders his four-year-old daughter, Angelica, who's been sleeping in her parents' bedroom, to her own room. Joseph's wife, Constance, [s]oon . . . notices foul odors, furniture cracks and a blue specter that appears to attack Angelica while she sleeps." —Publishers Weekly

Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernieres

"Engrossing . . . Everyone in this cast of characters is someone memorable, and their lives and fates intertwine to make a marvelously engaging story of a village." —Chicago Tribune

Non Fiction

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

by Thomas E. Ricks

The definitive military chronicle of the Iraq war and a searing judgment on the strategic blindness with which America has conducted it, drawing on the accounts of senior military officers giving voice to their anger for the first time.

Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

by Tony Horwitz

James Cook's three epic journeys in the eighteenth century were the last great voyages of discovery. When he embarked for the Pacific in 1768, a third of the globe remained blank. By the time he died in 1779, Cook had explored more of the earth's surface than anyone in history.

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

by Alexandra Fuller

"This memoir of a stubborn, down-on-their-luck, often drunk white family making a last stand against African independence reads like a hard ride over unsafe roads: hair-raising, horrific, and thrilling." —The New Yorker

Into Thin Air

by Jon Krakauer

A bank of clouds was assembling on the not-so-distant horizon, but journalist-mountaineer Jon Krakauer, standing on the summit of Mt. Everest, saw nothing that "suggested that a murderous storm was bearing down." He was wrong.

Flower Confidential

by Amy Stewart

Amy Stewart takes readers on an around-the-world, behind-the-scenes look at the flower industry and how it has sought—for better or worse—to achieve perfection.