Everyone Knows But You
Thomas E. Ricks
Pegasus Crime
After his wife and two children are killed in a car crash, Ryan Tapia starts a new life in Maine. But his first case there is a puzzling oddball–the corpse of a fisherman washes up on federal land, while the man’s boat drifts into waters that are part of an Indian reservation. Ryan quickly learns the nuances of Maine life as he delves into two illicit coastal trades: hard drugs and rare fish. Many of the locals are happy to see that particular fisherman dead. What’s more, they are not shy about noting that Ryan must have screwed up pretty badly to be posted to such a remote location as Bangor, Maine.
Undaunted, Ryan works to understand the unforgiving way of life on Liberty Island, where people live by an older, harsher code. Adrift on a sailboat one day, he encounters a man from the Malpense tribe, living as a hermit on a remote island, who witnessed something that fateful day.
In his riveting crime debut, New York Times bestselling author Thomas E. Ricks turns his literary talents to land he knows deeply, from working in the Maine woods and trapping lobsters year-round. Everyone Knows But You is a rich and dynamic crime novel that brings a unique part of America to vivid, thrilling life.
The Prints of Siri Beckman: Engraving a Sense of Place
Siri Beckman & Carl Little
Down East Books
Siri Beckman made her way to Maine in the late 1970s, where she was “called” to wood engraving quite by accident. She has been practicing this art form for over forty years and this volume, featuring more than 100 of her images, is a celebration of her life’s work and legacy. Text by Beckman discusses the process of wood engraving and her passion for printmaking and book arts. Carl Little ties her work to place and establishes its place in the canon of Maine art.
How to Read a Book
Monica Wood
Mariner Books
Our Reasons meet us in the morning and whisper to us at night. Mine is an innocent, unsuspecting, eternally sixty-one-year-old woman named Lorraine Daigle…
Violet Powell, a twenty-two-year-old from rural Abbott Falls, Maine, is being released from prison after serving twenty-two months for a drunk-driving crash that killed a local kindergarten teacher.
Harriet Larson, a retired English teacher who runs the prison book club, is facing the unsettling prospect of an empty nest.
Frank Daigle, a retired machinist, hasn’t yet come to grips with the complications of his marriage to the woman Violet killed.
When the three encounter each other one morning in a bookstore in Portland–Violet to buy the novel she was reading in the prison book club before her release, Harriet to choose the next title for the women who remain, and Frank to dispatch his duties as the store handyman–their lives begin to intersect in transformative ways.
How to Read a Book is an unsparingly honest and profoundly hopeful story about letting go of guilt, seizing second chances, and the power of books to change our lives. With the heart, wit, grace, and depth of understanding that has characterized her work, Monica Wood illuminates the decisions that define a life and the kindnesses that make life worth living.
Art of Penobscot Bay
Carl Little & David Little
Islandport Press
Glorious Penobscot Bay, on the coast of Maine, with its quaint mainland towns, bustling tourist centers, and island fishing villages, stands as the backdrop of daydreams. The bay’s sheer beauty has attracted generation after generation of artists to its shores. For Art of Penobscot Bay, brothers David and Carl Little, well-known stewards of Maine art, have selected art and artists, from history and today, that celebrate the myriad of inlets, islands, coves, and peninsulas–the “nooks and corners” of the region. Above all, they sought out art infused with a remarkable representation of place by more than 120 artists who have embraced the area and its people. Art of Penobscot Bay includes artists from the 19th century through the 21st century, including Fitz Henry Lane, Waldo Peirce, Edward Hopper, William Zorach, John Marin, Emily Muir, Greta Van Campen, Alex Katz, Eric Hopkins, and Amy Peters Wood. Combined with text by the Little brothers, the art takes readers on a wondrous visual journey around, across, and through a breathtaking bay.
James
Percival Everett
Doubleday Books
When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.
Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a “literary icon” ( Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.
All Fours
Miranda July
Riverhead Books
A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, checks into a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in an entirely different journey.
Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.
The Cliffs
J. Courtney Sullivan
Knopf Publishing Group
On a secluded bluff overlooking the ocean sits a Victorian house, lavender with gingerbread trim, a home that contains a century’s worth of secrets. By the time Jane Flanagan discovers the house as a teenager, it has long been abandoned. The place is an irresistible mystery to Jane. There are still clothes in the closets, marbles rolling across the floors, and dishes in the cupboards, even though no one has set foot there in decades. The house becomes a hideaway for Jane, a place to escape her volatile mother.
Twenty years later, now a Harvard archivist, she returns home to Maine following a terrible mistake that threatens both her career and her marriage. Jane is horrified to find the Victorian is now barely recognizable. The new owner, Genevieve, a summer person from Beacon Hill, has gutted it, transforming the house into a glossy white monstrosity straight out of a shelter magazine. Strangely, Genevieve is convinced that the house is haunted–perhaps the product of something troubling Genevieve herself has done. She hires Jane to research the history of the place and the women who lived there. The story Jane uncovers–of lovers lost at sea, romantic longing, shattering loss, artistic awakening, historical artifacts stolen and sold, and the long shadow of colonialism–is even older than Maine itself.
Enthralling, richly imagined, filled with psychic mediums and charlatans, spirits and past lives, mothers, marriage, and the legacy of alcoholism, this is a deeply moving novel about the land we inhabit, the women who came before us, and the ways in which none of us will ever truly leave this earth.
North Woods
Daniel Mason
Random House
When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to growing apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths an ancient mass grave–only to discover that the earth refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a sinister con man, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle: As the inhabitants confront the wonder and mystery around them, they begin to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.
This magisterial and highly inventive novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason brims with love and madness, humor and hope. Following the cycles of history, nature, and even language, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment, to history, and to one another. It is not just an unforgettable novel about secrets and destinies, but a way of looking at the world that asks the timeless question: How do we live on, even after we’re gone?
The God of the Woods
Liz Moore
Riverhead Books
Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.
As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.
The History of Sound
Ben Shattuck
Viking
In twelve luminous stories set across three centuries, The History of Sound examines the unexpected ways the past returns to us and how love and loss are entwined and transformed over generations. In Ben Shattuck’s ingenious collection, each story has a companion story, which contains a revelation about the previous, paired story. Mysteries and murders are revealed, history is refracted, and deep emotional connections are woven through characters and families.
The haunting title story recalls the journey of two men who meet around a piano in a smoky, dim bar, only to spend a summer walking the Maine woods collecting folk songs in the shadow of the First World War, forever marked by the odyssey. Decades later, in another story, a woman discovers the wax cylinders recorded that fateful summer while cleaning out her new house in Maine. Shattuck’s inventive, exquisite stories transport readers from 1700s Nantucket to the contemporary woods of New Hampshire and beyond–into landscapes both enduring and unmistakably modern. Memories, artifacts, paintings, and journals resurface in surprising and poignant ways among evocative beaches, forests, and orchards, revealing the secrets, misunderstandings, and love that linger across centuries.
Written with breathtaking humanity and humor, The History of Sound is a love letter to New England, a radiant conversation between past and present, and a moving meditation on the abiding search for home.
The Bright Sword
Lev Grossman
Viking
A gifted young knight named Collum arrives at Camelot to compete for a place at the Round Table, only to find that he’s too late. King Arthur died two weeks ago at the Battle of Camlann, and only a handful of the knights of the Round Table are left.
The survivors aren’t the heroes of legend like Lancelot or Gawain. They’re the oddballs of the Round Table, like Sir Palomides, the Saracen Knight, and Sir Dagonet, Arthur’s fool, who was knighted as a joke. They’re joined by Nimue, who was Merlin’s apprentice until she turned on him and buried him under a hill.
But it’s up to them to rebuild Camelot in a world that has lost its balance, even as God abandons Britain and the fairies and old gods return, led by Morgan le Fay. They must reclaim Excalibur and make this ruined world whole again–but first they’ll have to solve the mystery of why the lonely, brilliant King Arthur fell.
The first major Arthurian epic of the new millennium, The Bright Sword is steeped in tradition, complete with duels and quests, battles and tournaments, magic swords and Fisher Kings. It’s also a story about imperfect men and women, full of strength and pain, trying to reforge a broken land in spite of being broken themselves.