Saturday, January 14, 2012

New This Week

The Odds by Stewart O’Nan (Viking)


In the new novel from the author of Last Night at the Lobster, a middle-age couple goes all in for love at a Niagara Falls casino. Valentine's weekend, Art and Marion Fowler flee their Cleveland suburb for Niagara Falls, desperate to recoup their losses. Jobless, with their home approaching foreclosure and their marriage on the brink of collapse, Art and Marion liquidate their savings account and book a bridal suite at the Falls' ritziest casino for a second honeymoon. While they sightsee like tourists during the day, at night they risk it all at the roulette wheel to fix their finances-and save their marriage. A tender yet honest exploration of faith, forgiveness and last chances, The Odds is a reminder that love, like life, is always a gamble.


Death of Kings by Bernard Cornwell (Harper Collins)

The story of Saxon claimants to the throne during the forming of England at the end of the ninth century continues as Alfred the Great lays dying and the fate of the Angles, Saxons, and Vikings hangs in the balance.


Shadows in Flight by Orson Scott Card (Tor)

Bean moves with three of his children into a derelict space colony ship where they hope for a cure to engineered genes that give them high intelligence and short lives, a situation that is complicated when space-time distortions cause them to be forgotten by humanity.

The Rope by Nevada Barr (Minotaur)

In The Rope, Nevada Barr gathers together the many strings of Anna Pigeon's past and finally reveals the story that her many fans have been long asking for. In 1995 and 35 years old, fresh off the bus from New York City and nursing a broken heart, Anna takes a decidedly unglamorous job as a seasonal employee of the Glen Canyon National Recreational Area. On her day off, Anna goes hiking into the park never to return. Her co-workers think she's simply moved on--her cabin is cleaned out and her things gone. But Anna herself wakes up, trapped at the bottom of a dry natural well, naked, without supplies and no clear memory of how she found herself in this situation. As she slowly pieces together her memory, it soon becomes clear that some one has trapped her there, in an inescapable prison, and no one knows that she is even missing. Plunged into a landscape and a plot she is unfit and untrained to handle, Anna Pigeon must muster the courage, determination and will to live that she didn't even know she still possessed to survive, outwit and triumph. This is where it all began.

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