Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple. With the success of her last novel, Where'd You Go, Bernadette?, featuring a madcap lead character and wickedly puncturing Seattle's tech culture, Semple greatly ex panded her fan club. With her new book, she has proved that she can write about modern family dysfunction with the best of them while doling out humor and  compassion with equal skill. Semple's television writing credits for the likes of Arrested Development and the 90's sitcom Mad About You no doubt helped prepare her for creating flawed but affecting characters. Her new protagonist, wife, mother, and graphic artist Eleanor Flood, is a more realistic figure than Bernadette, which means fewer howls and more poignancy. But not to worry - the book's plot covers one 24-hour period of Eleanor's harried and messy life, and it's a pretty bad day that makes for pretty good laughs.

It starts off with the best of intentions, as Eleanor vows to make this a different (better) day. She will have her poetry and yoga lessons after dropping off her son, Timby, at school. She won't swear. She will initiate sex with her husband, Joe. So right off the bat, you know none of that is happening today. Timby pretends to be sick to spend the day with mom, and hubby Joe is apparently taking a vacation day that he failed to mention to Eleanor. Things go off the rails from there, and Semple has fun with it all.

The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes. A prolific and literary writer, Barnes has published collections of short stories and essays and written several novels over his illustrious career. Three of his books have been shortlisted for the Man B ooker Prize (Flaubert's Parrot in 1984, England, England in 1998, and Arthur & George in 2005) and his last novel, The Sense of an Ending, won the  prize in 2011. With this short new narrative, Barnes turns to themes of art and power to examine (and imagine) the life of real-life Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. This review from an independent bookseller at Annie Bloom's Books in Portland, Oregon, offers a nice synopsis:

"In stunning, crisp, methodical prose, The Noise of Time is divided into three sections, each focusing on a defining moment in Shostakovich's life - the first in 1936 after he finds himself denounced by Stalin, and the final in the 1960s, as he reflects on the relative time of peace in Russia and his appointment to the Chairmanship of the Russian Federation Union of Composers. Barnes charts Shostakovich's turbulent career, falling in and out of favor with Stalin, forced to balance the whims of a dictator while staying true to his art. A disquieting, beautiful, atmospheric novel, this powerful book will have you pondering the role of art and artist long after you've put it down."  

Selection Day by  Aravind Adiga. He won the Mann Booker Prize for The White Tiger, so Adiga's new novel bears attention. It's about two brothers in a Mumbai slum who are raised by their obsessive father to become cricket stars, and whose coming of age threatens their relationship, futur e, and sense of themselves. Much of the focus is on the younger sibling, Manju, who knows that he fears and resents his domineering dad, but doesn't know much else about himself. When Manju meets his brother's soccer rival, a mysterious Muslim boy privileged and confident in all the ways Manju is not, things begin to change. 

In reviewing the book for NPR, Annalisa Quinn wrote, " Each sentence flickers like a match with life. Adiga swoops in and out of his characters' inner voices with frightening precision and speed, laying out the paranoia, obsessions, tokens, idols, and self-made prisons of each man in a few bright, laserlike sentences. But he resists caricature. Even the violent, mad father has his inner life - even he has a moment as a kid in the forest, when he 'looked up at all the stars, and felt himself a boy apart from all the other boys in the world, an uncrowned Adam.' "