Current Year's Books

The Scent of a Distant Family: A Novel by sid sibo

Set against the backdrop of a remote location in the throes of rapid development, Nik Delaney leaves a respected career in wildlife biology to return home to Wyoming. In the Rocky Mountain winter, every relationship Nik has wears even thinner as she cares for her aging father, faces a crumbling marriage, and parents Finn, the son of her antagonistic brother. Then Zolo, her foster dog, runs away. Nik’s search for Zolo in the vast and unforgiving landscape introduces her to the eccentric residents of the high sagebrush, including a rancher trying to run an ecolodge in oil country and a displaced herd of wild mustangs led by a mare called Tess. Zolo and Tess learn to rely on each other to thrive, but even with her father’s life at stake, Nik resists relying on the desert’s scattered community. This story of loyalty and deception in western Wyoming expands our sense of who we choose to consider family.

 

Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West by Justin Farrell 

A revealing look at the intersection of wealth, philanthropy, and conservation,  Billionaire Wilderness takes you inside the exclusive world of the ultra-wealthy, showing how today's richest people are using the natural environment to solve the existential dilemmas they face. Justin Farrell spent five years in Teton County, Wyoming, the richest county in the United States, and a community where income inequality is the worst in the nation. He conducted hundreds of in-depth interviews, gaining unprecedented access to tech CEOs, Wall Street financiers, and other prominent figures in business and politics. He also talked with the rural poor who live among the ultra-wealthy and often work for them. The result is a penetrating account of the far-reaching consequences of the massive accrual of wealth and a troubling portrait of a changing American West where romanticizing rural poverty and conserving nature can be lucrative, socially as well as financially.

 

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

National Book Award winner McBride tells a vibrant tale of Chicken Hill, a working-class neighborhood of Jewish, Black, and European immigrant families in Pottstown, PA, where the 1972 discovery of a human skeleton unearths events that took place several decades earlier. In 1925, Moshe Ludlow owns the town's first integrated dance hall and theater with his wife, Chona, a beautiful woman who's undeterred by her polio-related disability and driven by her deep Jewish faith. Chona also runs the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, where she extends kindness and indefinite credit to her Jewish and Black customers alike. When Nate and Addie Tamblin, friends and employees of the Ludlows who are Black, approach the couple for help keeping their nephew, Dodo, from becoming a ward of the state, Chona doesn't hesitate to open her home to hide the boy from the authorities. As the racist white "good Christians" from down the hill begin to interfere, claiming to be worried about Dodo's welfare, a two-fold tragedy occurs that brings the community together to exact justice, which leads to the dead body discovered years later. McBride's pages burst with life, whether in descriptions of Moshe's dance hall, where folks get down to Chick Webb's "gorgeous, stomping, low-down, rip-roaring, heart-racing jazz," or a fortune teller who dances and cries out to God before registering her premonitions on a typewriter. This endlessly rich saga highlights the different ways in which people look out for one another. 

 

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Emmuska Orczy
Sir Percy Blakeney lives a double life in the England of 1792: at home he is an idle fop and a leader of fashion, but abroad he is the Scarlet Pimpernel, a master of disguise who saves aristocrats from the guillotine. When the revolutionary French state seeks to unmask him, Percy's estranged, independent wife, Marguerite, unwittingly sets their agent on her husband's track. Percy's escapades, and Marguerite's daring journey to France to save him from the guillotine, keep the reader turning the pages of Baroness Orczy's well-paced romantic adventure.

 

Whiskey When We're Dry by John Larison 

Teenage Jessilyn, motherless since birth and suddenly fatherless, too, abandons her family's ranch in 1885 to find her outlaw older brother, Noah. So limited are Jessilyn's possibilities as a girl that she disguises herself as a man for the journey west, a transition made smoother by her ace shooting skills. Larison gifts Jess with a strong voice to narrate her own story: "I ain't never been the kind to pity myself, ain't no profit in it." Jess' treacherous mission brings out survival instincts that are barely stronger than her horror over the brutality it requires. When she, as Jesse Straight, is hired as a guardsman for a powerful governor with a personal vendetta against Noah, Jess' identities could collide in a dangerous way; and if she finds him, will Noah even see his little sister in her anymore? Larison (Holding Lies, 2011) writes the novel's many action scenes with restraint, and adds considerations of race, class, and religion to Jess' realizations about gender. Larison's western epic has wide appeal and is already in development for film. 

 

James: A Novel by Percival Everett
James is a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. While many narrative set pieces of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river's banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin...), Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion are shown in a radically new light. 

 

All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker
From the New York Times bestselling author of We Begin at the End comes an epic novel about a man fixated on finding a missing woman and the FBI agent on his tail, who might be even more obsessed than he is. 1975 is a time of change in America. The Vietnam War is ending. Muhammad Ali is fighting Joe Frazier. And in the small town of Monta Clare, Missouri, girls are disappearing. When the daughter of a wealthy family is targeted, the most unlikely hero emerges--Patch, a local boy, who saves the girl, and, in doing so, leaves heartache in his wake. Patch and those who love him soon discover that the line between triumph and tragedy has never been finer. And that their search for answers will lead them to truths that could mean losing one another. A missing person mystery, a serial killer thriller, a love story, a unique twist on each, Chris Whitaker has written a novel about what lurks in the shadows of obsession and the blinding light of hope.

Print | Sitemap
© ~DKBB~ Web Sites & More