Art of hearing heartbeats

Recommended by a Hewlett patron.

Kirkus: German journalist Sendker's first novel, originally published in German in 2002, is a love story set in Burma and imbued with Eastern spirituality and fairy-tale romanticism. Fans of Nicholas Sparks and/or Elizabeth Gilbert should eat this up.

Taken

A patron at Peninsula raved about Robert Crais, and said this is his latest work. Kirkus is not thrilled: For some reason, the normally reliable Crais (The Sentry, 2011, etc.) doesn't trust his story, loaded with the promise of vigilante heroics and nonstop violence, to deliver the goods. So he jazzes it by pulverizing it into sections that leap back and forth in time and among different points of view (e.g., "ELVIS COLE: four days before he is taken"). The result is to loosen the logical links that connect one set piece to another and recast the whole story as if it were a string of trailers for a dozen hellacious summer movies.

Barcelona, 1945

(2004). New York; Penguin.  Carlos Ruiz Zafón. Lucia Graves (translator).

Kirkus: The histories of a mysterious book and its enigmatic author are painstakingly disentangled in this yeasty Dickensian romance: a first novel by a Spanish novelist now living in the US.We meet its engaging narrator Daniel Sempere in 1945, when he's an 11-year-old boy brought by his father, a Barcelona rare-book dealer, to a secret library known as the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Enthralled, Daniel "chooses" an obscure novel, The Shadow of the Wind, a complex quest tale whose author, Julian Carax, reputedly fled Spain at the outbreak of its Civil War, and later died in Paris. Carax and his book obsess Daniel for a decade, as he grows to manhood, falls in and out of fascination, if not love with three beguiling women, and comes ever closer to understanding who Carax was and how he was connected to the family of tyrannical Don Ricardo Aldaya-and why a sinister, "faceless" stranger who identifies himself as Carax's fictional creation ("demonic") "Lain Coubert" has seemingly "got out of the pages of a book so that he could burn it." Daniel's investigations are aided, and sometimes impeded, by a lively gallery of vividly evoked supporting characters. Prominent among them are secretive translator Nuria Monfort (who knows more about Carax's Paris years than she initially reveals); Aldaya family maid Jacinta Coronada, consigned to a lunatic asylum to conceal what she knows; Daniel's ebullient Sancho Panza Fermin Romero de Torres, a wily vagrant working as "bibliographic detective" in the Semperes' bookstore; and vengeful police inspector Fumero, a Javert-like stalker whose refusal to believe Carax is dead precipitates the climax-at which Daniel realizes he's much more than just a reader of Carax's intricate, sorrowful story.The Shadow of the Wind will keep you up nights-and it'll be time well spent. Absolutely marvelous.

Borges and the eternal ornagutangs

Not sure how I came across this; I'd guess Book-a-day calendar.

Borges e os orangotangos eternos

John Turner, deputy sheriff of a small town near Memphis, confronts trouble in the persons of the sheriff's long-lost son, who arrives in what appears to be a stolen car, and old friend Eldon Brown, who is a suspect in a murder he does not know if he committed.

The devil's company

Liss, David. (2009). The Devil's company. New York: Random House.

Stone's fall

Kirkus: A learned, witty and splendidly entertaining descent into the demimondes of international espionage, arms dealing, financial hanky-panky and other favorite pastimes of those without conscience.

Resurrection men

Rankin, Ian. (2003). Resurrection men : an Inspector Rebus novel. Boston : Little, Brown.

In pale battalions

Goddard, Robert. (1988).  In pale battalions. London ; New York : Bantam Press.

When will there be good news? Kate Atkinson. New York : Little, Brown and Co. 2008.

The author of One Good Turn presents a mystery of suspense involving the unexpected intersection of three lives, including a woman whose life had been shattered thirty years earlier, an ex-detective on a crowded train, and a teenage girl who is called upon to test her preparedness.

52 B.C.

Saylor, Steven. (1996). A murder on the Appian Way. New York: St. Martin's.

a "surreal transmogrification of a genre"

 Berry, Jedediah. (2009). The manual of detection. New York: Penguin.


Kirkus Reviews An unlikely sleuth anchors an unlikely investigation in Berry's fantastical melding of Kafka, Hitchcock and The Man Who Was Thursday. Though its nonsense logic eventually lags behind its breakneck pace, Berry's debut is a boldly inventive deconstruction of Cartesian metaphysics, the criminal-justice system and the well-oiled detective story.

The Chinaman

Book of the day on Book-a-Day calendar.


Friedrich Glauser (February 4, 1896 in Vienna – December 8, 1938 in Nervi) was a German-language Swiss writer. He was a morphine and opium addict for most of his life. In his first novel Gourrama, written between 1928 and 1930, he treated his own experiences at the French Foreign Legion. The evening before his wedding day, he suffered a stroke caused by cerebral infarction, and died two days later. One of Germany's best-known crime writing awards is the Glauser prize.