Bookshelf: New books to read
August 29, 2024
Our list of notable new releases
compiled by Sally Brewster
Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty
On an ordinary, short, domestic flight, something extraordinary happens. People learn how and when they are going to die. For some, their death is far in the future — age 103! — and they laugh. But for six passengers, their predicted deaths are not far away. No one will later recall noticing “The Death Lady” boarding the plane. Her appearance and demeanor were unremarkable. But what she did on that flight was truly remarkable. Months later, three passengers die, exactly as she predicted. Soon, no one is thinking this is simply an entertaining story at a cocktail party. If you were told you only had a certain amount of time left to live, would you do things differently? Would you try to dodge your destiny?
The Siege by Ben Macintyre
As the American hostage crisis in Iran boiled into its seventh month in spring 1980, six heavily armed gunmen barged into the Iranian embassy in London, taking 26 hostages. What followed over the next six days was an increasingly tense standoff, one that threatened at any moment to spill into a bloodbath. Policeman Trevor Lock was supposed to have gone to the theater that night. Instead, he found himself overpowered and whisked into the embassy. The terrorists never noticed the gun hidden in his jacket. The drama that ensued would force him to find reserves of courage he didn’t know he had. The Siege takes readers minute-by-thrilling-minute through an event that would echo across the next two decades and provide a direct historical link to the tragedy on 9/11.
Night Magic by Leigh Ann Henion
New York Times bestselling nature writer Leigh Ann Henion invites us to leave our well-lit homes, step outside and embrace the dark as a profoundly beautiful part of the world we inhabit. Because no matter where we live, we are surrounded by animals that rise with the moon and blooms that reveal themselves as light fades. Henion explores her home region of Appalachia, where she attends a synchronous firefly event in Tennessee, a bat outing in Alabama, and a moth festival in Ohio. In North Carolina, she finds forests alight with bioluminescent mushrooms, neighborhood trees full of screech owls and valleys teeming with migratory salamanders. Along the way, Henion encounters naturalists, biologists and others who’ve dedicated their lives to cultivating relationships with darkness. In an age of increasing artificial light, Night Magic focuses on the amazing biodiversity that still surrounds us after sunset.
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
Brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties — successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women — his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. Ivan is a 22-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined. For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude — a period of desire, despair and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
In Crosby, Maine, the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with writer Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories about people they have known — “unrecorded lives,” Olive calls them — reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning. SP
Sally Brewster is the proprietor of Park Road Books, 4139 Park Rd.
