The Girl with No Shadow
by Joanne Harris
Published 2008 by William Morrow & Company

Hardcover, English. ISBN: 9780061431623

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The "New York Times"-bestselling author returns with an exquisite treat that continues the story begun in her novel, "Chocolat."

REVIEW: Publisher's Weekly 01/21/2008

Harris revisits characters from 1999's bestselling Chocolat in this equally delectable modern fairy tale. More than four years have passed since Vianne Rocher pitted her enchanted chocolate confections against the local clergy's interpretation of Lent in smalltown France; since then, Vianne has renounced magic, changed her name to Yanne Charbonneau and moved with her two daughters to Paris's Montmartre district. There, Yanne embraces conformity and safety, much to the dismay of her increasingly troubled older daughter, Anouk. When Anouk becomes entranced with Zozie de l'Alba, an exotic itinerant who happens upon a job at the new shop, and the relationship grows increasingly sinister, Yanne must call up all of Vianne's powers, culinary and mystical, to save her family. Harris again structures the narrative (told in alternate chapters by Zozie, Yanne and Anouk) around a liturgical season (in this case Advent). Harris gives fans much to savor in this multilayered novel, from the descriptions (including Yanne's mouthwatering chocolate confections, Zozie's whimsical footwear and Anouk's artistic efforts) to the novel's classic, enduring theme of good vs. evil-and the difficulty of telling the difference. (Apr.)

The Drop Edge of Yonder
by Rudolph Wurlitzer
Published 2008 by Two Dollar Radio

Paperback, English. ISBN: 9780976389552

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"Rudolph Wurlitzer takes no prisoners. An uncompromising, wild, and woolly tale."--Sam Shepard "Mesmerizing. A Western as Celine might have written one."--The Times Literary Supplement (London) "Tender, hair-raising, obscene. A somber joy to read."--John Ashbery "Sam Beckett with a six-gun and a sack of rattlesnakes."--Gary Indiana "A subversive modern novel about the bounds of love and the discontents of civilized life."--Judith Thurman "Where has Rudy Wurlitzer been for the last fifteen years? The mental traveler who gave us Nog and the Two-Lane Blacktop screenplay takes another vision quest, this time into the Old American West. His mapping of mythic and sacred landscapes and his ability to distinguish between different tribal world-views makes this a truly revealing conversation."--KCRW's Bookworm In his fifth novel, Rudolph Wurlitzer has written a classic tale of the Western frontier and created one of his most memorable characters in Zebulon, a mountain man whose view of life has been challenged by a curse from a mysterious Native American woman whose lover he inadvertently murdered. The Drop Edge of Yonder begins in the mountains of Colorado and ends in the far reaches of the Northwest, a journey that includes the beginnings of a Mexican revolution, a voyage across the Gulf of Mexico to Panama, and up the coast of California to San Francisco and the gold fields. Along the trail, Zebulon becomes involved in a series of tragic love triangles, witnesses the death of his mother and father, and confronts the age-old questions of life, love, and death. Rudolph Wurlitzer is the author of the novels Nog, Flats, Quake, and Slow Fade, and the nonfiction book, Hard Travel to Sacred Places. Among his twelve produced screenplays are Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Two Lane Blacktop, Voyager, Walker, and Little Buddha.

REVIEW: Publisher's Weekly 02/25/2008

Known for 1969's Nog and the 1973 script for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Wurlitzer delivers a mystic western possessed of anarchic charms and incantatory beauty. Mountain-man, trapper and opportunistic beast Zebulon Shook starts the tale by getting cursed by a half-Shoshoni half-Irish woman. Doomed never to know whether he is in the spirit world, the real world or just dreaming, he departs from his homestead along the Gila River in New Mexico to sell pelts. After meeting up with his adopted brother, Hatchet Jack, and losing at cards to Delilah, a beautiful Abyssinian courtesan, Zebulon is shot during a barroom dustup and sets out for California, where the gold rush is gathering steam, bringing with it the law and order that threatens the "mountain doin's" that he loves so dearly. Zebulon is pulled ever deeper into the era's bizarre historical footnotes: immortalized as a notorious outlaw by a reporter; narrowly missing joining the Walker expedition to colonize Nicaragua; reconnecting with Delilah at a San Francisco opium den; and finding the law and order forces dogging his heels to the last. This furiously told legend weaves history and myth into a riotous tale. (Apr.)

Dictation: A Quartet
by Cynthia Ozick
Published 2008 by Houghton Mifflin Company

Hardcover, English. ISBN: 9780547054001

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Jacket Notes:

From the acclaimed author of "Heir to the Glimmering World" comes this new work of fiction that brings together four long stories, including the novella-length "Dictation," all of which showcase this incomparable writer's sly humor and piercing insight into the human heart.

REVIEW: Publisher's Weekly 01/14/2008

A carefully honed, sharply intelligent new collection of four stories shows Ozick (The Heir to the Glimmering World) at the height of her stylistic powers. The title story, by far the strongest tale, follows the female secretaries of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, both of whom take dictation from the two egoist titans. When the authors meet in London, their two amanuenses collude to make their own mark on their masters' work; in so doing, they exalt, with an undeniably sexual glee, that they will thus attain immortality. "Actors" looks on wryly as TV character actor Matt Sorley, né Mose Sadacca and nearing 60, reluctantly takes a role that will either cap his career or defeat him. "At Fumicaro" follows an American Catholic literary critic in Mussolini's Italy as he falls head over heels in love with a pregnant 16-year-old peasant girl: "She was more hospitable to God than anyone who hoped to find God in books." The exuberant "What Happened to the Baby?" follows a young college student and her eccentric Esperanto-spouting uncle to his mid-20th-century meetings of the League for a Unified Humanity. Ozick's stories ingeniously put scholarship in the service of human flowerings. (Apr.)

Fall of Frost
by Brian Hall
Published 2008 by Viking Books

Hardcover, English. ISBN: 9780670018666

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A fascinating and exquisitely written novel about the art and life of Robert Frost

In his most recent novel, "I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company," Brian Hall won acclaim for the way he used the intimate, revelatory voice of fiction to capture the half- hidden personal stories of the Lewis and Clark expedition. In his new novel Hall turns to the life of Robert Frost, arguably Americaas most well-known poet. Frost, as both man and artist, was toughened by a hard life. His own father died when Frost was eleven; his only sibling, a sister, had to be institutionalized; of his five children, one died before the age of four, one committed suicide, one went insane, and one died in childbirth.

Told in short chapters, each of which presents an emblematic incident with intensity and immediacy, Hallas novel deftly weaves together the earlier parts of Frostas life with his final year, 1962, when, at age eighty- eight, and under the looming threat of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he made a visit to Russia and met with Khrushchev.

As Hall shows, Frost determined early on that he would not succumb to the tragedies life threw at him. The deaths of his children were forms of his own death from which he resurrected himself through poetryafor him, the preeminent symbol of manas form-giving power.

A searing, exquisitely constructed portrait of one manas rages, guilt, paranoia, and sheer, defiant persistence, as well as an exploration of why good people suffer unjustly and how art is born from that unanswerable question, "Fall of Frost" is a magnificent work that further confirms Hallas status as one of the most talented novelists at work today.

REVIEW: Publisher's Weekly 01/14/2008

This defiantly nonlinear fictionalization of the life of poet Robert Frost (1874-1963) alternates between Frost's late-life visit to Communist Russia, where he met with Khrushchev, and dozens of vignettes and scenes from the rest of his long life, as well as his work's posthumous reception. Hall (I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company) takes readers from Frost's troubled childhood in San Francisco to his creative flowering in Great Britain at the onset of WWI, to the fraught relationship between Frost-as-widower and his married secretary. The narrative returns again and again to the cold winters in New England farm country that permeated his poetry and his 20s and 30s, but the book's real weight comes from the tragedy of Frost's children's deaths: four of six preceded their father. The deep sorrow and disappointment embedded in Frost's story come through particularly in the included fragments of verse. None of what's here enlarges on the extraordinary amount of biographical material on Frost, but Hall gets deep into Frost's head, an approach that brings a startling immediacy to a complex figure many know only as the author of classics like "The Road Not Taken." (Mar.)