Recommendations

MORGAN HILL BOOKSTORE A Fine Selection of Books
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Here are some books we've read and recommend!

How It All Began (Hardcover)

$26.95
ISBN-13: 9780670023448
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Viking Adult, 1/2012
When Charlotte Rainsford, a retired schoolteacher, is mugged by an unseen assailant, the consequences ripple outward, affecting family, friends, and strangers in astonishing ways. This book is simply a pleasure to savor. Lively gives us characters we genuinely care about, whose ordinary, fascinating lives give us plenty to ponder. We have all read and loved this book and agree it may be Lively’s best novel yet!

A Good American (Hardcover)

$25.95
ISBN-13: 9780399157592
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, 2/2012
Always there was music. So begins this wonderful story of a young couple who flee Prussia in 1904 to end up making their home in Missouri. Their story is told by their grandson, James, and like the best family stories, is filled with the coincidences, missed connections, and both the tragedy and magic of ordinary life. George breaks your heart with the quiet sacrifices and secrets of his characters, while he never forgets the wonder and humor of life. Carrying the reader across the generations with music and food, religion and prohibition, racism and patriotism, A Good American is a book to savor. (This is excerpted from a review in the February edition of The Indie Next List - and we couldn't improve it!)

Rules of Civility (Hardcover)

$26.95
ISBN-13: 9780670022694
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Viking Adult, 7/2011

On New Year's Eve, 1938, two young women pool their funds to enjoy an evening of fine jazz in Manhattan.  Their $3 doesn't last long, but a chance encounter opens the door to a year of encounters that reshapes their lives.  This elegantly written novel brings Depression era New York and the glittering world of its most fortunate to vividly drawn, almost cinematic life, but also balances that glamour with the reality of other lives.  Despite the ghosts of Great Gatsby who inevitably gather round such a plot, there is not a trite word in this book.  It is a richly wonderful period piece.  Dust off that old Benny Goodman CD for a soundtrack and sink into a really good story!


The Night Circus (Hardcover)

$26.95
ISBN-13: 9780385534635
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Doubleday, 9/2011
In this wondrous, playful, magical book, the Cirque des Reves arrives without notice. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Amidst its labyrinth of black and white tents is a world of wonder where two young artists fall deeply in love. Unbeknownst to them however, they are competitors in a fierce game defined by their sponsors. Intensely imagined and elegantly constructed, this is a mesmerizing tale that will appeal to a broad range of readers!

Caleb's Crossing (Hardcover)

$26.95
ISBN-13: 9780670021048
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Viking Adult, 5/2011

This is a deeply satisfying book on so many levels. Brooks perfectly expresses the voice of twelve year old Bethia Mayfield, who narrates this story of life on Martha's Vineyard (and later in Cambridge town) in the 1660s. The story opens during the last summer of her childhood's freedom, when Bethia roams the island's wild lands under the pretext of gathering food for her family's larder. She encounters a young Wampanoag boy who later crosses into Puritan society and comes to be known as Caleb. Their unusual, often hidden friendship forms a thread between their shared lives, which are repeatedly beset by tragedy and great challenge. Once again, as she did in earlier books, Brooks pulls us into the richly imagined lives of her characters and then creates an even richer and more nuanced story with her confident command of the historical setting. This is historical fiction at its very best!


State of Wonder (Hardcover)

$26.99
ISBN-13: 9780062049803
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Harper, 6/2011

Patchett's new novel, set mostly in the Amazon basin, lures the reader into her story - and invites inevitable mention of Heart of Darkness.  When Dr. Marina Singh is sent to Brazil on a mission to discover a colleague's fate there, she enters a land of ambiguity that she must struggle to understand, and in doing so, slowly comes to terms with the relationships of her own life.  Patchett is such a luminous writer and her descriptions are so vivid that this novel takes on a special pleasure in its reading.


Father of the Rain (Paperback)

$14.95
ISBN-13: 9780802145345
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Grove Press, 5/2011
Read a few pages of this novel and you are likely to be pulled right into it. King won the New England Book Award for Fiction for this, along with many other accolades, and rightly so. Her writing is mesmerizing. Amid snippets of Nixon’s presidential resignation and glimpses of a society becoming unmoored from its traditional values, 11 year old Daley is trapped by the dissolution of her parent’s marriage, caught between the charismatic foolery of her father and her mother’s social liberalism. Throughout her life, she shrewdly observes this dysfunctional family through a lens of loyalty, wit and, above all else, love.

Cutting for Stone (Paperback)

$15.95
ISBN-13: 9780375714368
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Vintage, 1/2010

This long, layered novel leaves the reader haunted by the love stories it tells, the beautiful drama of medicine and countless surgical procedures, the tastes, smells and sounds of Addis Ababa and Ethiopia and the Bronx in New York, and the flawed and noble characters whose lives are revealed.  It is, simply, a wonderful book that every one of us has read and loved, and it comes with our collective highest recommendation!


The Book Thief (Paperback)

$12.99
ISBN-13: 9780375842207
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Knopf Books for Young Readers, 9/2007
Liesel Meminger will enter your heart. She is a pale, skinny 9 year old when we first meet her, a foster child left in a small town outside Munich in 1939. We join her life for the next 4 years. Her story is written in words of indelible beauty that describe a life of pain, friendship, trust and love. It is a story about what humans are capable of, narrated in an extraordinary voice of tenderness and sardonic humor. This is an unusual, powerful story that will linger long after you have read the last page.

$15.95
ISBN-13: 9781400034376
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Vintage, 1/2011

This is a deeply satisfying story of friendship, family, love and responsibility.  When Andras Lévi arrives in Paris from Hungary as an architecture student in 1937, the world seems almost normal.  His brother Tibor is a medical student in Italy, while their youngest brother seeks a life on stage.  Orringer builds these lives meticulously, with relationships and details that feel real. Slowly, the worm of horrors that became World War II edges into their existence and changes each of them irredeemably.  Yet, that terrible time at last comes to an end and life and love and even family continue.


Gilead (Paperback)

$14.00
ISBN-13: 9780312424404
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Picador, 1/2006
In this extraordinary novel, an old man writes a reminiscence of his life and heritage for his young son. This is a story that is thoughtful and complex, written with language often so beautiful that it demands to be read aloud. It is a moving, spiritually compelling story - a rare and wonderful book .

The Weird Sisters (Hardcover)

$24.95
ISBN-13: 9780399157226
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, 2/2011

This story of a book-obsessed, Shakespeare-quoting band of sisters (and their parents) is filled with pith and wit and the bare, raw honesty of their lives and relationships.  Events conspire to draw the three sisters back to their childhood home.  They are fabulously out-of-step with the world (and one another), and it seems impossible that they can ever add friendship to the love that binds them.
 


Russian Winter (Paperback)

$14.99
ISBN-13: 9780061962172
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Harper Perennial, 5/2011

This long, involved story revolves around the long life of a woman.  Once a ballerina with the fabled Russian Bolshoi, now crippled in old age and living in Boston, she decides to offer her collection of amber and other jewels to auction for charity.  This momentous decision stirs her to a fascinating, sometimes painful reexamination of her youth and the early years of her ballet career  in Stalinist Russia.  Her altruistic decision also has enormous, but unintended impact on the lives of others.


The Help (Paperback)

$16.00
ISBN-13: 9780425232200
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Berkley Trade, 4/2011

Here is another novel so  good that it is just about impossible to put down!   If you missed this in the hardcover, give yourself a treat this summer and pick up the new paperback edition.  The three women of this story, set in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962, are simply good company.  They are smart, lively, decent people, and it is a pleasure to spend the hours of reading this book in their company.  Two of them are black servants in the town, the third is white, a new grad of Ole' Miss with a yen to write.  The narrative of what their lives are like and how they intersect will stay in your mind long after the last page is finished.


$15.00
ISBN-13: 9780812981223
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2/2011

The petty but picturesque village of Edgecombe St. Mary is the setting for this wry, unsentimental, amusing novel.  When Major Pettigrew (retired) and Mrs. Ali (shopkeeper) find growing comfort in their shared life circumstances and love of literature, they scandalize more than their respective families.  This smart romantic comedy is also an exploration of decency and tradition - and it's happy ending is a
pure delight!


A Land Remembered (Paperback)

$14.95
ISBN-13: 9781561641161
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Pineapple Press, 9/1996
This old fashioned frontier saga begins in 1858, when Tobias MacIvey settles with his wife and baby in Florida’s palmetto scrub. They battle fierce hardships, from deadly mosquito swarms to hurricanes and outlaws. With love and support for one another and implacable determination, their toil gradually brings a precious cookstove and adequate food - and, in just three generations, a suffering land that is wildly overpopulated and exploited far beyond the needs of those living on it.

City of Thieves (Paperback)

$15.00
ISBN-13: 9780452295292
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Plume, 4/2009
Trapped in World War II Leningrad, Lev is a gawky teenager who tells his tale with wry humor. It is an enormously appealing story of a strange quest for fresh eggs amidst a starving city under siege. Lev meets Kolya in the frightening darkness of a prison cell, where the two tentatively connect in a joint determination to survive. When they are randomly given a chance for reprieve and sent out on a quixotic journey, their relationship deepens to form a touching, odd couple friendship as they navigate the violent, unpredictable landscape of communist partisans, Nazis occupiers and the Red Army.

$15.95
ISBN-13: 9780802145314
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Grove Press, 5/2011
Critical praise for Matterhorn has been extraordinary,and this a a book likely to be read generations from now. Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down, gives perhaps the best and most succinct description. There have been, he says, "some very good novels about the Vietnam War, but this is the first great one, and I doubt it will ever be surpassed . . . Here is story telling so authentic, so moving and so intense, so relentlessly dramatic, that there were times I wasn't sure I could stand to turn the page. As with the best fiction, I was sad to reach the end." In the annals of writings on the U.S. War in Vietnam, Matterhorn is sure to be linked with Michael Herr's nonfiction account, Dispatches and Philip Caputo's memoir, Rumor of War.

$13.95
ISBN-13: 9780547085753
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Mariner Books, 12/2008
Howard Frank Mosher writes in a comment on this book that the young horse whisperer Martha Lessen is the most memorable character to come out of the west since Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call of Lonesome Dove. That is high praise indeed! In the winter of 1917, Martha Lessen sets out to earn a living 'gentling' horses in eastern Oregon. With most of the young men off to war, she is able to find the work she craves. This quietly profound and beautiful novel is written with a deep understanding of place and people and most of all, of horses.

Run (Paperback)

$14.99
ISBN-13: 9780061340642
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Harper Perennial, 8/2008
This is a beautiful novel. As in Bel Canto and her other books, Patchett writes of lives that become real, nuanced and genuine. This story takes place mostly over the course of one long day and evolves from the consequences of an accident on a snowy street in Boston. Through the lives of this small collection of people, Patchett explores the meaning of family and love and the responsibility that connects us to community and even to country.

A Town Like Alice (Paperback)

$15.00
ISBN-13: 9780307474001
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Vintage, 2/2010
First published in 1950, this is still a favorite book for many readers. After surviving as a POW of the Japanese in WWII, Jean Paget is determined to use an inheritance to build a well for the Malaysian village that sheltered her group. In making this a reality, she discovers that an Australian soldier she encountered during the war and who had been tortured and, she believed, killed, had actually survived. This discovery leads Jean to a new life and new challenges in Australia’s rugged outback. Despite the romance and drama of the plot, this is an old fashioned book that moves slowly, filled with intricate detail. And that is its very appeal. A Town Like Alice feels like real life.

Consequences (Paperback)

$15.00
ISBN-13: 9780143113430
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Penguin (Non-Classics), 6/2008
A chance meeting on a London park bench just a few years before World War II sparks a beautiful love affair and marriage. The consequences of that encounter are chronicled as they move through three generations and half a century of history. Lively’s characters are engrossing and quirky and feel true.

$12.00
ISBN-13: 9780312427641
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Picador, 9/2008
This witty little novel explores the subversive pleasures of reading. When the Queen’s corgis stray into a mobile library, she feels duty bound to check something out, and so discovers the joy of reading. Her new pleasure soon upsets the royal applecart, disturbs the palace staff and has far reaching and funny consequences.

$13.00
ISBN-13: 9780618619030
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Mariner Books, 8/2005
Mosher writes of the Red Sox, local baseball, childhood and the flinty, colorful people of the Northeast Kingdom with humor, insight and the deep pathos of a long-suffering and undying Red Sox fan. From young Ethan “E.A.” Allen to a macaw named Curse of the Bambino, this novel is filled with great characters and a story that is just plain good. It is absolutely not necessary to be a baseball (or even sports) fan to love this book!

$14.99
ISBN-13: 9780060559151
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: William Morrow Paperbacks, 1/2007
This richly atmospheric literary thriller will keep you guessing to the end! As the new year begins, there are odd and unsettling incidents at the elite St. Oswald's School for boys. Before long, a wicked game of 'chess' evolves between a beloved classics teacher nearing retirement and his unknown, formidable opponent who has a bitter grudge and a master strategy planned to the final, deadly move.

Something Missing (Paperback)

$14.00
ISBN-13: 9780767930888
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Broadway, 7/2009
Martin Railsback, Jr. plans his every action with endearing care and precision, and that is what makes him such a successful housebreaker. Except that he's not exactly a thief - well, he is, but he only takes small items that he needs for himself from the over stocked pantries of his 'clients'. When he accidentally drops a toothbrush into an open toilet during a ‘visit’, Martin’s carefully designed life unravels . . . and rewinds!

$14.00
ISBN-13: 9781439172377
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Simon & Schuster, 4/2010
Tarquin Hall deftly captures the essence of modern India in all its vivid, aromatic complexity. Vish Puri, the portly head of India’s Most Private Investigators, Ltd., usually conducts discreet inquiries into the backgrounds of matrimonial partners. Once in a while, however, a ‘real’ case challenges his deductive genius and the chase is on! This is a galloping good read filled with authentic detail and gentle humor.

$14.95
ISBN-13: 9780307454690
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Vintage, 4/2010
After a tour with the French army in Bosnia, Bruno Courreges is content with his restored farm house and quiet life in the idyllic village of St. Denis. Beyond that lovely image, however, memories of the past are long, and Bruno soon realizes that a strange murder has its root in France's World War II history. As the village's Chief of Police (actually their only police), Bruno launchs an investigation that reaches deep into the fabric of their society. The richly described cultural and physical details of the Dordogne make this an especially appealing novel.

$15.00
ISBN-13: 9780312427368
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Picador, 10/2007
This is the first of a particularly satisfying detective series. These books are set in England (and elsewhere) during the years following World War I, and follow the adventures of Mary Russell, a quirky, intelligent young woman who gradually becomes friend, partner and wife of Sherlock Holmes. Every book in the series is well written and well plotted, and it is especially fun to see peripheral characters emerge to greater significance as the series moves along. These books share the same time period and characteristic tone of the Maisy Dobbs books by Jacqueline Winspear, which we also recommend highly.

Coroner's Lunch (Paperback)

$13.00
ISBN-13: 9781569474181
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Soho Crime, 11/2005
This begins a mystery series unlike any other. Dr. Siri Paiboun is an unlikely and very appealing hero. Against his wishes, Siri becomes the National Coroner of Laos under the new communist regime in 1975. Untrained and unsuited for the position, nonetheless he and his staff grow to embrace their roles and to solve the mysteries they encounter with the same droll wit and mordant humor with which they face all the deprivations and bureaucratic absurdity of life under communism.

$23.00
ISBN-13: 9780385342322
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Delacorte Press, 2/2011
This is the third in a series that introduced Flavia de Luce, a wickedly funny, brilliant and unflappable young chemist and budding detective. Bradley has won an impressive number of prestigous awards for these books, and it seems that each successive story somehow manages to be even better than its predecessor. The 'red herrings' pile up in this latest episode, as Bradley deftly wields layers of mystery. Told with a saucy irreverence, these are tales to make you smile.

$17.99
ISBN-13: 9781581952308
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Zoland Books, 1/2009
Publisher’s Weekly captures the essence of this very funny tale as it is told by its mild-mannered narrator, Norman de Ratour. Sly and spicy from start to finish, this unexpected hybrid blends academic spoofery, cannibalism and a murder mystery, serving it up with a just-right balance of innocence, subtle malevolence and cheeky irony. We particularly like the cheeky irony!

$15.00
ISBN-13: 9780307453280
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Broadway, 4/2011
Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction! This is the tale of a dead body, false invasion plans, a gullible Nazi, a gold prospector, and a brilliant lawyer with a plan who all combined to tip the balance of victory in World War II. Ben McIntyre obtained fascinating new information to add to this story that was originally told in 1953 as The Man Who Never Was. It really was an extraordinary plot - and best of all, the Allies really did pull it off!

$25.95
ISBN-13: 9780307594068
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Knopf, 2/2011
When her husband (who speaks Mandarin with "pure tones") was offered a two year job in Beijing, Conley was hesitant to move their young sons. Before long, however, their family was readily navigating a strange society and spending their weekends exploring the countryside, where they feasted on dumplings and found adventures in small villages and on the Great Wall. But their lives abruptly changed again when Susan discovered she had breast cancer. This is a deeply appealing, beautifully written memoir of a wonderful family, written with love, humor and even wisdom.

$16.00
ISBN-13: 9780812973013
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 1/2004
We have been recommending this book since it was first published in 2003. Since the earthquake hit Haiti, this amazing story of the mission and achievements of Dr. Farmer, as well as his colleagues, Jim Yong Kim (now the president of Dartmouth College) and Ophelia Dahl, with their organization, Partners in Health, is more important than ever. More than any news article, this book helps us understand and appreciate Haiti and its people, and to feel that there is hope for their future.

$29.99
ISBN-13: 9781413310344
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Nolo, 5/2009
The subtitle to this is A Guide to Succession Planning for your Cottage, Cabin, Camp or Vacation Home, and that aptly summarizes the contents. This is a well organized, easy to read and understand guide to issues that face many families in our beautiful area, and it offers a creative method to solving a situation that all too often becomes hurtful and contentious.

$15.00
ISBN-13: 9780307474414
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Vintage, 2/2010
Here is an absolute gem of a book! First pubished in 1988, this collection of highly opinionated personal essays on cooking and life remains an all time favorite, and it is a book that should be reread periodically. Colwin's common sense in the kitchen, her refreshing humor and lively stories will send you back into the kitchen refreshed and challenged. Be sure to try her gingerbread recipes.