[Grand Central Publishing, $29.00]

John Puller may be the US Army's most tenacious investigator, but he is not equipped to face the truth about his mother's disappearance thirty years ago. New evidence has come to light suggesting that Puller's father - a highly decorated army veteran - may have murdered his wife. When Puller's friend, intelligence operative Veronica Knox, arrives on the scene, he realizes that there is far more to this case than he first thought. He knows that nothing will prevent him from discovering what really happened to his mother - even proving that his father is a killer. Meanwhile, Paul Rogers has just been paroled after spending ten years in a high-security prison for murder - and with his freedom comes a desire to pay back old debts. As both men uncover a trail of deception that stretches back decades, they realize that the truth will bind them together in ways they could never have imagined.

[Harper, $28.99; Nov. 22]

In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother's home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon's grandfather shared recollections and told stories the younger man had never heard before, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten. That dreamlike week of revelations forms the basis for this novel.

[Random House, $28.00; Nov. 29]

Elmwood Springs, Missouri, is a small town like any other, but something strange is happening at the cemetery. Still Meadows, as it's called, is anything but still.

Original and profound, The Whole Town's Talking, a novel in the tradition of Thornton Wilder's Our Town and Flagg's own Can't Wait to Get to Heaven, tells the story of Lordor Nordstrom, his Swedish mail-order bride, Katrina, and their neighbors and descendants as they live, love, die, and carry on in mysterious and surprising ways.

[Delacorte Press, $28.99]

The incomparable hero of Never Go Back takes readers to school in his most explosive novel yet. After eleven straight global #1 bestsellers, discover the thrillers that The New York Times calls utterly addictive.

[read more]


Swing Time by Zadie Smith
Tracey makes it to the chorus line but struggles with adult life, while her friend leaves the old neighborhood behind, traveling the world as an assistant to a famous singer, Aimee, observing close up how the one percent live.
But when Aimee develops grand philanthropic ambitions, the story moves from London to West Africa, where diaspora tourists travel back in time to find their roots, young men risk their lives to escape into a different future, the women dance just like Tracey - the same twists, the same shakes - and the origins of a profound inequality are not a matter of distant history, but a present dance to the music of time.

[St. Martin's Press, $26.99; Nov. 22]

Drawing on Queen Victoria's diaries, which she first started reading when she was a student at Cambridge University, Daisy Goodwin - creator and writer of the new PBS/Masterpiece drama Victoria and author of the bestselling novels The American Heiress and The Fortune Hunter - brings the young nineteenth-century monarch, who would go on to reign for 63 years, richly to life in this magnificent novel.