"FDR's Shadow"

New from Palgrave MacMillan: FDR's Shadow: Louis Howe, the Force That Shaped Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt by Julie M. Fenster.

About the book, from the publisher:

In 1921, FDR had just lost an election as VP candidate with Governor Cox against Harding, he was overcome by an illness that left him paralyzed from the waist down, and his marriage was on the rocks. He retired to his home in Hyde Park with his wife Eleanor and an ever-present advisor, Louis Howe. With her signature insight, Julie Fenster presents a vivid, behind-the-scenes portrait of the world of the Roosevelts in a critical time, taking readers inside this peculiar arrangement and revealing how this intimate friendship lead to the resurgence of FDR. Eleanor Roosevelt, too, would never be the same again.

Their son Elliott said, "The person who was most responsible for the development of my mother’s personality was Louis Howe, as he was of my father. He was a man that gave my father the iron will and the ability to move ahead politically, which I don’t think he would have ever done on his own. Louis Howe was probably the greatest influence on both my father and my mother’s lives.”

Visit Julie M. Fenster's website.

"New World Monkeys"

New from Shaye Areheart Books: New World Monkeys by Nancy Mauro.

About the book, from the publisher:

A savagely smart, darkly comic literary debut, New World Monkeys exposes the false idols of marital tranquillity, small-town idyll, and corporate Darwinism in the dazzling voice of a major new talent.

Duncan and Lily, young and adrift in a prickly marriage and lackluster careers, flee Manhattan for the peaceful allure of a recently inherited crumbling Victorian home. But the two are left with little time to ponder the traditional "he said, she said" failings of a relationship: On an upstate road miles shy of their house, a wild boar leaps to his death in front of their Saab–an accident whose consequences will haunt them throughout the summer.

That was no ordinary hog.

Lily and Duncan arrive in the eccentric town of Osterhagen to discover the boar had a name: The Sovereign of the Deep Wood. That it was the town mascot. And, as the hapless urbanites are coerced into the vortex of tea socials, cannon fire, and communal history, they realize that the residents of the bizarre hamlet intend to seek justice for their fallen hero.

Next come the bones.

Duncan, an adman whose controversial new campaign could make or break his career, wants a temporary escape from the pressures of urban life. But his pastoral retreat darkens when an attempt at gardening turns up a human femur in the lawn, a headstone inscribed simply Tinker, 1902, and a sense that Lily’s family may have violence in its aristocratic blood.

And then there’s Lloyd.

Lily, conflicted about her marriage and her career, spends her days at the local library researching her impossibly arcane dissertation topic but can’t seem to make any progress. One day she observes the town pervert in action and befriends him.

Lloyd, a Peeping Tom, invites her to follow him on a bird’s-eye tour of Osterhagen that may help her home in on her own flaws and failings.

Keep digging.

Thrown together in their complicity over the boar’s death, fueled to exhume Tinker’s bones from the garden, and inspired by Lloyd’s philosophical savoir faire, Duncan and Lily begin to excavate the profound truth about themselves and their marriage. But how deep can the two dig before the summer’s violent beginning catches up with them?

Visit Nancy Mauro's website.

"Ciao Bella"

New from Thomas Dunne Books: Ciao Bella by Gina Buonaguro and Janice Kirk.

About the book, from the publisher:

For Graziella, the quiet, cultured life she lived in Venice with her musician husband, Ugo, was everything she could have hoped for. But when Italy allied itself with Nazi Germany in 1940, her world changed forever. Ugo, trading in his violin for a gun, joined the Resistance, while Graziella was forced to seek refuge at his family’s farm in the nearby Euganean Hills. “Just until the war is over,” Ugo had promised, but it has been months now since the Nazis retreated, and no one has seen him since.

With Ugo gone, it seems as if she will be trapped forever on this remote farm with her lost husband’s difficult family. So when an American soldier named Frank is stranded on the mountain, Graziella embraces this unexpected chance at being happy again. But as tempting as it is to leave behind this war-torn country and her painful memories for a new life in America, can she go without learning her husband’s fate?

With quiet grace and humor, Ciao Bella explores the possibilities of love and redemption in the wake of war, showing that some of the hardest decisions come only after the fighting has stopped.

Visit the Ciao Bella blog.

"Flesh and Fire"

New from Pocket: Flesh and Fire by Laura Anne Gilman.

About the book, from the publisher:

Once, all power in the Vin Lands was held by the prince-mages, who alone could craft spellwines, and selfishly used them to increase their own wealth and influence. But their abuse of power caused a demigod to break the Vine, shattering the power of the mages. Now, fourteen centuries later, it is the humble Vinearts who hold the secret of crafting spells from wines, the source of magic, and they are prohibited from holding power.

But now rumors come of a new darkness rising in the vineyards. Strange, terrifying creatures, sudden plagues, and mysterious disappearances threaten the land. Only one Vineart senses the danger, and he has only one weapon to use against it: a young slave. His name is Jerzy, and his origins are unknown, even to him. Yet his uncanny sense of the Vinearts' craft offers a hint of greater magics within -- magics that his Master, the Vineart Malech, must cultivate and grow. But time is running out. If Malech cannot teach his new apprentice the secrets of the spellwines, and if Jerzy cannot master his own untapped powers, the Vin Lands shall surely be destroyed.

In Flesh and Fire, first in a spellbinding new trilogy, Laura Anne Gilman conjures a story as powerful as magic itself, as intoxicating as the finest of wines, and as timeless as the greatest legends ever told.

Visit Laura Anne Gilman's website.

"Mennonite in a Little Black Dress"

New from Henry Holt: Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home by Rhoda Janzen.

About the book, from the publisher:

A hilarious and moving memoir—in the spirit of Anne Lamott and Nora Ephron—about a woman who returns home to her close-knit Mennonite family after a personal crisis

Not long after Rhoda Janzen turned forty, her world turned upside down. It was bad enough that her brilliant husband of fifteen years left her for Bob, a guy he met on Gay.com, but that same week a car accident left her with serious injuries. What was a gal to do? Rhoda packed her bags and went home. This wasn’t just any home, though. This was a Mennonite home. While Rhoda had long ventured out on her own spiritual path, the conservative community welcomed her back with open arms and offbeat advice. (Rhoda’s good-natured mother suggested she date her first cousin—he owned a tractor, see.) It is in this safe place that Rhoda can come to terms with her failed marriage; her desire, as a young woman, to leave her sheltered world behind; and the choices that both freed and entrapped her.

Written with wry humor and huge personality—and tackling faith, love, family, and aging—Mennonite in a Little Black Dress is an immensely moving memoir of healing, certain to touch anyone who has ever had to look homeward in order to move ahead.

"Americans in Space"

New from Thomas Dunne Books: Americans in Space by Mary E. Mitchell.

About the book, from the publisher:

Life is a challenge for 36-year-old Kate Cavanaugh, high school guidance counselor to a motley group of at-risk students. Two years after finding her young husband dead in bed beside her, Kate’s storybook life has vanished, and she and her two children are still reeling. Her daughter Charlotte, once a sweet girl, has morphed into an angry, tattooed, tongue-studded teen; and Hunter, Kate’s four-year-old, keeps his feelings sealed tight inside and an empty ketchup bottle clasped to his heart. When a tragedy occurs at the Alan B. Shepard High School, it’s Kate who finds herself in need of counsel and guidance. What she does next catapults her and her family down an unfamiliar road, on a trajectory into space—toward understanding, forgiveness and healing.

Visit Mary E. Mitchell's website.

"Led Zeppelin"

New from It Books: Led Zeppelin: Shadows Taller Than Our Souls by Charles R. Cross.

About the book, from the publisher:

In celebration of the 40th anniversary of Zeppelin’s first album release, Led Zeppelin offers generations of fans a critical, retrospective re-evaluation of the band’s mystery-enshrouded saga, as told by New York Times bestselling biographer Charles R. Cross. Cross, the author of Heavier Than Heaven: The Biography of Kurt Cobain, analyzes each of Zeppelin’s nine albums, arguing that the Gods of Rock sold millions because of the intricate musical depth that they brought to so many genres—not just the thudding, metal aspect of their sound.

Visit Charles R. Cross' website.

"Manhood for Amateurs"

New from Harper: Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son by Michael Chabon.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author— "an immensely gifted writer and a magical prose stylist" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times)—offers his first major work of nonfiction, an autobiographical narrative as inventive, beautiful, and powerful as his acclaimed, award-winning fiction.

A shy manifesto, an impractical handbook, the true story of a fabulist, an entire life in parts and pieces, Manhood for Amateurs is the first sustained work of personal writing from Michael Chabon. In these insightful, provocative, slyly interlinked essays, one of our most brilliant and humane writers presents his autobiography and his vision of life in the way so many of us experience our own lives: as a series of reflections, regrets, and reexaminations, each sparked by an encounter, in the present, that holds some legacy of the past.

What does it mean to be a man today? Chabon invokes and interprets and struggles to reinvent for us, with characteristic warmth and lyric wit, the personal and family history that haunts him even as—simply because—it goes on being written every day. As a devoted son, as a passionate husband, and above all as the father of four young Americans, Chabon presents his memories of childhood, of his parents' marriage and divorce, of moments of painful adolescent comedy and giddy encounters with the popular art and literature of his own youth, as a theme played—on different instruments, with a fresh tempo and in a new key—by the mad quartet of which he now finds himself co-conductor.

At once dazzling, hilarious, and moving, Manhood for Amateurs is destined to become a classic.

"Children of Dust"

New from HarperOne: Children of Dust: A Memoir of Pakistan by Ali Eteraz.

About the book, from the publisher:

Ali Eteraz's Children of Dust is a spellbinding portrayal of a life that few Americans can imagine. From his schooling in a madrassa in Pakistan to his teenage years as a Muslim American in the Bible Belt, and back to Pakistan to find a pious Muslim wife, this lyrical, penetrating saga from a brilliant new literary voice captures the heart of our universal quest for identity.

Children of Dust begins in rural Islam at the lowest levels of Pakistani society in the turbulent eighties. This intimate portrayal of rustic village life is revealed through a young boy's eyes as he discovers magic, women, and friendship.

After immigrating with his family to the United States, Eteraz struggles to be a normal American teenager under the rules of a strict Muslim household.

In 1999, he returns to Pakistan to find the villages of his youth dominated by the ideology of the Taliban, filled with young men spouting militant rhetoric, and his extended family under threat. Eteraz becomes the target of a mysterious abduction plot when he is purported to be a CIA agent, and eventually has to escape under military escort.

Back in the United States, with his fundamentalist illusions now shattered, Eteraz tries to find a middle way within American Islam. At each stage of Eteraz's life, he takes on a different identity to signal his evolution. From being pledged to Islam in Mecca as an infant, through Salafi fundamentalism, to liberal reformer, Eteraz desperately struggles to come to terms with being a Pakistani and a Muslim.

Astonishingly honest, darkly comic, and beautifully told, Children of Dust is an extraordinary adventure that reveals the diversity of Islamic beliefs, the vastness of the Pakistani diaspora, and the very human search for home.

Visit Ali Eteraz's website.

"Death Will Help You Leave Him"

New from Minotaur/Thoms Dunne Books: Death Will Help You Leave Him by Elizabeth Zelvin.

About the book, from the publisher:

Recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler and his friends face new challenges when a friend becomes the prime suspect in her abusive boyfriend’s murder.

Watch a one-minute taste of Death Will Help You Leave Him.

Learn more about the author and her work at Elizabeth Zelvin's website, her MySpace page, and the group blog, Poe's Deadly Daughters.

Zelvin is a New York City psychotherapist who directed an alcoholism treatment program on the Bowery for more than six years. Death Will Get You Sober is her first mystery. A related story, “Death Will Clean Your Closet,” has been nominated for an Agatha award for Best Short Story. Another story, “Death Will Tie Your Kangaroo Down,” appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Her short story "Death Will Trim Your Tree" appears in The Gift of Murder, the fourth annual crime anthology to benefit Toys for Tots.

The Page 99 Test: Death Will Get You Sober.