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| January 20 | 
The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson Dodo Press $15.99 | The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson Two half brothers look so similar as infants that no one can tell them apart. One, the legitimate son of a rich man, is destined for a life of comfort, while the other is condemned to be a slave as he is part black. The mother of the would be slave is also the nurse of the other; to give her son the best life possible she switches the two. Soon the boy who is given every advantage becomes spoiled and cruel. He takes sadistic pleasure in tormenting his half brother. As they grow older, the townspeople no longer notice that the boys look similar, and they readily accept that each is born to his station. | Mark Twain |
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| February 17 | 
Year of Wonders Penguin Books $15.00 | Year of Wonders In 1666, a young woman comes of age during an extraordinary year of love and death. Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a "plague village" in the rugged hill country of England, Year of Wonders is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history, written by the author of Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women. | Geraldine Brooks |
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| March 17 | 
The Forever War Vintage Books USA $15.00 | The Forever War "Dexter Filkins's The Forever War is the best piece of war journalism I've ever read. He paints a portrait of war that is so nuanced, so filled with absurdities and heartbreak and unexpected heroes and villains, that it makes most of what we see and hear about Iraq and Afghanistan seem shrill and two-dimensional by comparison. And yet, as tragic as the events he describes are, the book manages to be a thing of towering beauty."
-Dave Eggers, Guardian Best Books of the Year | Dexter Filkins |
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| April 21 |  The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood Penguin $15.00 | The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood With an extraordinary gift for detail and a keen sense of humor, Huxley recalls her childhood on the smart farm at a time when Europeans waged their fortunes on a land that was as harsh as it was beautiful. For a young girl it was a time of adventure and freedom, and Huxley paints an unforgettable portrait of growing up among the Masai and Kikuyu people, discovering both the beauty and the terrors of the jungle, and enduring the rugged realities of the pioneer life. | Elspeth Huxley |
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| May 19 |  Olive Kitteridge Random House Trade $14.00 | Olive Kitteridge Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition--its conflicts, tragedies, and joys. Strout constructs her stories with rich irony and moments of genuine surprise and intense emotion" --USA Today. | Elizabeth Strout |
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| June 16 |  The Geography of Bliss Twelve $13.99 | The Geography of Bliss Part foreign affairs discourse, part humor, and part twisted self-help guide, The Geography of Bliss takes the reader from America to Iceland to India in search of happiness, or, in the crabby author's case, moments of "un-unhappiness." | Eric Weiner |
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| July 21 | 
The Oxbow Incident Modern Library $5.95 | The Oxbow Incident Set in 1885, The Ox-Bow Incident is a searing and realistic portrait of frontier life and mob violence in the American West. First published in 1940, it focuses on the lynching of three innocent men and the tragedy that ensues when law and order are abandoned. The result is an emotionally powerful, vivid, and unforgettable re-creation of the Western novel, which Clark transmuted into a universal story about good and evil, individual and community, justice and human nature. As Wallace Stegner writes, [Clark's] theme was civilization, and he recorded, indelibly, its first steps in a new country. | Walter Van Tilberg Clark |
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| August 18 | 
The Blue Star Back Bay Books $13.99 | The Blue Star Jim Glass, the precocious 10-year-old at the heart of Earley's bestseller "Jim the Boy," is now a teenager, returning in another tender and wise story of young love set on the eve of World War II. | Tony Earley |
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| September 15 | 
Voyage of a Summer Sun: Canoeing the Columbia River Sasquatch Books $14.95 | Voyage of a Summer Sun: Canoeing the Columbia River On the morning of June 18, 1990, high up in the Canadian Rockies, Robin Cody pushed his sixteen-foot, forty-seven-pound Kevlar canoe through tall grass and mud to launch it on peaceful Columbia Lake, the nominal source of the river that heaves more water into the Pacific Ocean than any other in North or South America: the Columbia..... As he takes all this in, merely by putting his ear to the river for a good long time, Cody gains as rich an understanding of it as anyone has since 1811, when David Thompson made the first white man's trip along the Columbia, mapping it as he went. With a generous and infectious spirit, Cody draws us into the mysteries of a much altered river tamed, regulated, but still at heart a wilderness. | Robin Cody |
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| October 20 | 
Lord Jim Signet Classics $4.95 | Lord Jim A bold young English sailor has despised himself ever since an impulsive moment of cowardice. Jim moves East to Patusan, where natives worship him-and he may be able to find redemption. | Joseph Conrad |
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| November 17 |  Gilead Picador USA $14.00 | Gilead "At a moment in cultural history dominated by the shallow, the superficial, the quick fix, Marilynne Robinson is a miraculous anomaly: a writer who thoughtfully, carefully, and tenaciously explores some of the deepest questions confronting the human species. . . . Poignant, absorbing, lyrical...Robinson manages to convey the miracle of existence itself." --Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times Book Review | Marilynne Robinson |
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| December 15 | | | |
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