Notable new releases
compiled by Sally Brewster
On Air: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR by Steve Oney
Founded in 1970, NPR is America’s most powerful broadcast news network. Despite being overshadowed by the larger and more glamorous PBS, public radio has long been home to shows such as All Things Considered, Morning Edition and This American Life that captivate millions of listeners in homes, cars, and workplaces across the nation. In On Air, a book 14 years in the making, journalist Steve Oney tells the dramatic history of this institution, tracing the comings and goings of legendary on-air talents and the rise and fall — and occasional rise again — of brilliant and sometimes venal executives. Fascinating, revelatory and irresistibly dishy, this is a riveting account of NPR’s unlikely launch, chaotic ascent and ultimate triumph.
The Story She Left Behind by Patti Callahan Henry
In 1927, 8-year-old Clara Harrington’s magical childhood shatters when her mother, renowned author Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham, disappears off the coast of South Carolina. Bronwyn stunned the world with a book written in an invented language that became a national sensation when she was just 12. Her departure leaves behind not only a devoted husband and heartbroken daughter, but also the hope of ever translating the sequel to her landmark work. As the headlines focus on the missing author, Clara yearns for her beautiful mother. By 1952, Clara is an illustrator raising her own daughter, Wynnie. When a stranger named Charlie Jameson contacts her from London claiming to have discovered a handwritten dictionary of her mother’s lost language, Clara crosses the Atlantic with Wynnie during one of London’s most deadly natural disasters — the Great Smog. With asthmatic Wynnie in peril, they escape to the Jamesons’ family retreat, where Clara must find the courage to uncover the truth about her mother and the story she left behind. Inspired by a true literary mystery.
The Antidote by Karen Russell
The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing — not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust-bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a “prairie witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate. Russell’s novel is a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting — enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities.
When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi
The moon has turned into cheese. Now humanity has to deal with it. For some, it’s an opportunity. For others, it’s a moment to question their faith: in God, in science, in everything. Still others try to keep the world running in the face of absurdity and uncertainty. And then there are the billions looking to the sky and wondering how a thing that was always just there is now… something absolutely impossible. Astronauts and billionaires, comedians and bank executives, professors and presidents, teenagers and terminal patients at the end of their lives — over the length of an entire lunar cycle, each get their moment in the moonlight. To panic, to plan, to wonder and to pray, to laugh and to grieve.
Twist by Colum McCann
Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence — words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses — travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth. Fennell’s journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable-repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a free diver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. SP
Sally Brewster is the proprietor of Park Road Books, 4139 Park Rd..
