As the daylight hours shorten at this time of year, our need for a good read grows larger! This week's New Book Newsletter highlights a mystery, a novel by a rock star, two tales of far-away cities, and plenty of pop culture nostalgia. When the sun goes down you can curl up with a good book from Fulton County Libraries.
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Paying homage to the works of forebears such as
Didion,
Sontag,
Flaubert and
Tolstoy and filled with a rough-hewn poetry of regret, rage, and finally resignation,
The Mutations offers a profound but funny cross section of modern Mexican life, as well as a bold treatment of an unspeakable yet universal reality.
Ramón Martinez is a militant atheist, successful lawyer, and conventional family man. But all of that changes when cancer of the tongue deprives him of the source of his power and livelihood: speech.
The Mutations is a comedy tracing the metastasis of Ramón's cancer through his body and in the lives of his family members, colleagues, and doctors, dissecting the experience of illness and mapping the relationships both strengthened and frayed by its wake. Mateo and Paulina, his teenage children, struggle with the temptations of masturbation and binge eating, respectively. Ramón's melancholic oncologist is haunted by the memory of a young patient whom he was unable to save. His selfish pathologist believes Ramón's tumor holds the key to a major scientific breakthrough. And then there's Elodia, Ramón's pious maid, who brings him a foulmouthed parrot as a birthday gift. This lewd bird becomes Ramón's companion, confidant, and unlikely double.
Reserve a copy of this work sure to make 2019's best-of lists in
hardcover or
ebook format. As soon as the audiobook is made available to libraries to purchase, we'll happily add it to our catalog.
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In his debut novel, rock legend
Pete Townshend explores the anxiety of modern life and madness in a story that stretches across two generations of a London family, their lovers, collaborators, and friends.
A former rock star disappears on the Cumberland moors. When his wife finds him, she discovers he has become a hermit and a painter of apocalyptic visions.
An art dealer has drug-induced visions of demonic faces swirling in a bedstead and soon his wife disappears, nowhere to be found. A beautiful Irish girl, who has stabbed her father to death is determined to seduce her best friend's husband. A young composer begins to experience aural hallucinations, expressions of the fear and anxiety of the people of London. He constructs a maze in his back garden.
Driven by passion and musical ambition, events spiral out of control-good drugs and bad drugs, loves lost and found, families broken apart and reunited.
Conceived jointly as an opera, The Age of Anxiety deals with mythic and operatic themes. Hallucinations and soundscapes haunt this novel, which on one level is an extended meditation on manic genius and the dark art of creativity.
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After fifteen years of growing up in the Ozark hills with his widowed mother, high-school freshman Boady Sanden is beyond ready to move on. He dreams of glass towers and cityscapes, driven by his desire to be anywhere other than Jessup, Missouri.
Then Thomas Elgin moves in across the road, and Boady's life begins to twist and turn. Coming to know the Elgins -- a black family settling into a community where notions of "us" and "them" carry the weight of history -- forces Boady to rethink his understanding of the world he's taken for granted.
But the biggest secret of all is the disappearance of Lida Poe, the African-American woman who keeps the books at the local plastics factory. Word has it that Ms. Poe left town, along with a hundred thousand dollars of company money. Although Boady has never met the missing woman, he discovers that the threads of her life are woven into the deepest fabric of his world.
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In the latest continuation of the series that began with
Gorky Park, author Martin Cruz Smith brings us to the inside world of shadowy political figures and big wig oil oligarchs providing us with an authentic view of contemporary Russia, infused with his trademark wit.
Journalist Tatiana Petrovna is on the move. Arkady Renko, iconic Moscow investigator and Tatiana's part-time lover, hasn't seen her since she left on assignment over a month ago. When she doesn't arrive on her scheduled train, he's positive something is wrong. No one else thinks Renko should be worried—Tatiana is known to disappear during deep assignments—but he knows her enemies all too well and the criminal lengths they'll go to keep her quiet.
Renko embarks on a dangerous journey to find Tatiana and bring her back. From the banks of Lake Baikal to rundown Chita, Renko slowly learns that Tatiana has been profiling the rise of political dissident Mikhail Kuznetsov, a golden boy of modern oil wealth and the first to pose a true threat to Putin's rule in over a decade. Though Kuznetsov seems like the perfect candidate to take on the corruption in Russian politics, his reputation becomes clouded when Boris Benz, his business partner and best friend, turns up dead. In a land of shamans and brutally cold nights, oligarchs wealthy on northern oil, and sea monsters that are said to prowl the deepest lake in the world, Renko needs all his wits about him to get Tatiana out alive.
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Author Daniel Wilson confidently captures the voice of the late Crichton (1942–2008) in this chilling sequel to the 1969 blockbuster
The Andromeda Strain.
Over 50 years ago, the deadly, alien Andromeda Strain nearly wiped out a small Arizona town. When Project Eternal Vigilance, put in place in the wake of the first breakout, detects an anomaly in the Amazon, a team of five scientists is sent to investigate. The scientists—among them astronaut Sophie Kline, who has paraplegia, and roboticist James Stone, whose famous father was involved in the first Andromeda incident—trek into the Brazilian jungle to study the outbreak and contain it as quickly as possible, only to discover that the Andromeda Strain has evolved into something even more deadly. The investigation, told partially via reconstructed transcripts, interviews, and descriptions of video footage, unfurls over the course of five action-packed days. Wilson, a roboticist himself, employs his expertise to add depth and credibility to the advanced technology the scientists use, trusting the reader to keep up with his technical terminology. Fans of the
original techno-thriller won’t be disappointed.
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Did you catch all the Atlanta locations used in
The new HBO show Watchmen? This original work expands the universe of the graphic novel by
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, and was filmed locally. Take a close look any time you see an interior with vertically textured concrete backgrounds - those scenes were filmed inside our Central Library location! (Don't worry,
when the renovation is complete in 2020, we'll have beautiful new windows and
a floor plan guaranteed to be inviting and useful as a public space).
Already familiar with Watchmen? Why not try try Moore's more lighthearted take on Superheroes with
Top 10.
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Fulton County Library System | afpls.org
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