Death in Holy Orders by P.D. James (Ballantine, $9.95). From the award-winning master of literary crime fiction, a classic work rich in tense drama and psychological insight. On the East Anglian seacoast, a small theological college hangs precariously on an eroding shoreline and an equally precarious future. When the body of a student is found buried in the sand, the boy’s influential father demands that Scotland Yard investigate. Enter Adam Dalgliesh, a detective who loves poetry, a man who has known loss and discovery. The son of a parson, and having spent many happy boyhood summers at the school, Dalgliesh is the perfect candidate to look for the truth in this remote, rarified community of the faithful–and the frightened. And when one death leads to another, Dalgliesh finds himself steeped in a world of good and evil, of stifled passions and hidden pasts, where someone has cause not just to commit one crime but to begin an unholy order of murder. . . .

The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier (Vintage, $13.95). From Kevin Brockmeier, one of this generation's most inventive young writers, comes a striking new novel about death, life, and the mysterious place in between. The City is inhabited by those who have departed Earth but are still remembered by the living. They will reside in this afterlife until they are completely forgotten. But the City is shrinking, and the residents clearing out. Some of the holdouts, like Luka Sims, who produces the City’s only newspaper, are wondering what exactly is going on. Others, like Coleman Kinzler, believe it is the beginning of the end. Meanwhile, Laura Byrd is trapped in an Antarctic research station, her supplies are running low, her radio finds only static, and the power is failing. With little choice, Laura sets out across the ice to look for help, but time is running out. Kevin Brockmeier alternates these two storylines to create a lyrical and haunting story about love, loss and the power of memory.

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai (Grove, $14). Published to extraordinary acclaim, The Inheritance of Loss heralds Kiran Desai as one of our most insightful novelists. She illuminates the pain of exile and the ambiguities of postcolonialism with a tapestry of colorful characters: an embittered old judge; Sai, his sixteen-year-old orphaned grand­daughter; a chatty cook; and the cook’s son, Biju, who is hopscotching from one miserable New York restaurant to another, trying to stay a step ahead of the INS. When a Nepalese insurgency in the mountains threatens Sai’s new-sprung romance with her handsome tutor, their lives descend into chaos. The cook wit­nesses India’s hierarchy being overturned and discarded. The judge revisits his past and his role in Sai and Biju’s intertwining lives. A story of depth and emotion, hilarity and imagination, The Inheritance of Loss tells “of love, longing, futility, and loss that is Desai’s true territory” (O: The Oprah Magazine).

Malgudi Days by R.K. Narayan (Penguin, $14). Introducing this collection of stories, R. K. Narayan describes how in India "the writer has only to look out of the window to pick up a character and thereby a story." Powerful, magical portraits of all kinds of people, and comprising stories written over almost forty years, Malgudi Days presents Narayan's imaginary city in full color, revealing the essence of India and of human experience.

I, City by Pavel Brycz, translated from the Czech by Joshua Cohen & Marketa Hofmeisterova (Twisted Spoon Press, $14.50). I, City is a novel about the northern Czech city of Most, an ancient city founded on a primeval wetland that was literally "relocated" to get to the brown coal beneath it. The city is the narrator, telling its own story through its inhabitants, who make their "appearances" in fleeting, ghost-like vignettes, Joycean epiphanies straight out of a Bohemian Dubliners. The "I" that purports to be Most seems to be an entire consciousness, at enough of a remove from the town itself that he, she or it can see and can know seemingly everything, past and present. As Most's inhabitants emerge from the pollution, or from the swamp of the town's founding, we find not individuals but representatives. Theirs are historical lives that mistrust history, or that live it at least with typical Czech irony. This abstraction, Brycz's making of archetypes, isn't accomplished in a spirit of abuse. Brycz obviously loves his "small" people, and has more than sympathy—he is one of them. As Brycz makes fictional people say factual things and factual people (Kafka, the Pope, the last president of Communist Czechoslovakia Gustav Husak) say fictional things, post-modernity via Marquez and other so-called Magical Realists makes its almost requisite—though noiseless—appearance. I, City is many things: a novel-in-stories, a series of lyrical prose sketches in the best easterly European tradition of Danilo Kis, or Isaac Babel.

A Dream in Polar Fog by Yuri Rytkheu translated from the Russian by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse (Archipelago Books, $14). A Dream in Polar Fog is at once a cross-cultural journey, an ethnographic chronicle of the Chukchi people, and a politically and emotionally charged Arctic adventure story. It is the story of John MacLennan, a Canadian sailor who is left behind by his ship, stranded on the northeastern tip of Siberia. It is the story of one native Siberian community that adopts a wounded stranger and teaches him to live as a true human being. Over time, John comes to know his new companions as a real people who share the best and worst of human traits with his own kind. Tragedy strikes, and wounds are healed with compassion and honesty as tensions rise and fall. Rytkheu's empathy, humor, and provocative voice guide us across the magnificent landscape of the North and reveal all the complexity and beauty of a vanishing world.

Mothers and Sons by Colm Toibin (Scribner, $24). Each of the nine stories in this beautifully written, intensely intimate collection centers on a transformative moment that alters the delicate balance of power between mother and son, or changes the way they perceive one another. With exquisite grace and eloquence, Tóibín writes of men and women bound by convention, by unspoken emotions, by the stronghold of the past. Many are trapped in lives they would not choose again, if they ever chose at all. A man buries his mother and converts his grief to desire in one night. A famous singer captivates an audience, yet cannot beguile her own estranged son. And in "A Long Winter," Colm Tóibín's finest piece of cction to date, a young man searches for his mother in the snow-covered mountains where she has sought escape from the husband who controls and confines her. Winner of numerous awards for his fifth novel, The Master -- including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award -- Tóibín brings to this stunning first collection an acute understanding of human frailty and longing. These are haunting, profoundly moving stories by a writer who is himself a master.

Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk (Farrar Straus & Giroux, $23). Arlington Park, a modern-day English suburb, is a place devoted to the profitable ordinariness of life. Amidst its leafy avenues and comfortable houses, its residents live out the dubious accomplishments of civilisation: material prosperity, personal freedom, and moral indifference. For all that, Arlington Park is strikingly conventional. Men work, women look after children, and people generally do what’s expected of them. Theirs is a world awash with contentment but empty of belief, and riven with strange anxieties. Set over the course of a single rainy day, the novel moves from one household to another, and through the passing hours conducts a deep examination of its characters’ lives: of Juliet, enraged at the victory of men over women in family life; of Amanda, warding off thoughts of death with obsessive housework; of Solly, who confronts her own buried femininity in the person of her Italian lodger; of Maisie, despairing at the inevitability with which beauty is destroyed; and of Christine, whose troubled, hilarious spirit presides over Arlington Park and the way of life it represents. Rachel Cusk's sixth novel is her best yet. Full of compassion and wit, each page laden with truth, she writes about her characters' domestic lives, their private thoughts and fears with an intelligence and insight that will leave readers reeling.

Zoli by Colum McCann (Random House, $24.95). A unique love story, a tale of loss, a parable of Europe, this haunting novel is an examination of intimacy and betrayal in a community rarely captured so vibrantly in contemporary literature. Zoli Novotna, a young woman raised in the traveling Gypsy tradition, is a poet by accident as much as desire. As 1930s fascism spreads over Czechoslovakia, Zoli and her grandfather flee to join a clan of fellow Romani harpists. Sharpened by the world of books, which is often frowned upon in the Romani tradition, Zoli becomes the poster girl for a brave new world. As she shapes the ancient songs to her times, she finds her gift embraced by the Gypsy people and savored by a young English expatriate, Stephen Swann. But Zoli soon finds that when she falls she cannot fall halfway–neither in love nor in politics. While Zoli’s fame and poetic skills deepen, the ruling Communists begin to use her for their own favor. Cast out from her family, Zoli abandons her past to journey to the West, in a novel that spans the 20th century and travels the breadth of Europe.
 

Alamo resident John Schinnerer talks about his new book A Guide to Self on Thursday, 18 January 2007 at 7:00 PM.

We are happy to sponsor an event with historian Albert Hurtado at the Moraga Rotary Club on Tuesday, 23 January 2007 at noon. Dr. Hurtado will be presenting his latest book, John Sutter: A Life on the North American Frontier. Please let us know if you would like us to have a copy signed for you.

National award-winning teacher Rafe Esquith presents his new book Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire: The Methods and Madness Inside Room 56. Esquith's presentation will be enhanced by performances by some of his students. This event will take place in the theater at the Athenian School. Tickets are $10. This event will take place on Tuesday, 6 February 2007 at 7:00 PM. Please read the article in this issue of "Bookpost" for more information.

Irish novelist Eoin McNamee presents his debut children's fantasy novel The Navigator on Monday, 12 February 2007 at 9:15 AM. Class reservations are essential.

National bestseller and Rakestraw favorite Ayelet Waldman returns as we celebrate the paperback publication of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits on Thursday, 15 February 2007 at 7:00 PM. We will be hosting a special discussion for book groups that have read the book starting at 6:00 PM. Please let us know if you plan to attend the discussion by calling the shop at (925) 837-7337.

Berkeley writer Peggy Orenstein presents her new book Waiting for Daisy : A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, and One Woman's Quest to Become a Mother on Thursday, 22 February 2007 at 7:00 PM.

Essayist Nora Gallagher visits Rakestraw Books on Wednesday, 7 March 2007 at 7:00 PM as we celebrate the publication of her debut novel Changing Light. Many of you have loved her earlier books Practicing Resurrection : A Memoir of Work, Doubt, Discernment, and Moments of Grace and Things Seen and Unseen : A Year Lived in Faith. We are delighted to bring her to Danville.

Bestselling historian Alison Weir makes her fiction debut with a tale that vividly recreates the life Lady Jane Grey, Innocent Traitor. We are excited to host a special evening with her on Thursday, 15 March 2007 at 7:00 PM.

North coast writer Amy Stewart presents Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers, a penetrating and captivating examination of the commerical flower industry, on Friday, 23 March 2007 at 7:00 PM. Kris Simpson from East Bay Flowers in Danville will be demonstrating how to create a beautiful arrangement of flowers. More details to come.

Australian novelist Max Barry visits Rakestraw Books on Monday, 2 April 2007 at 7:00 PM to present his hysterical new novel, The Company. Barry's work has been a favorite here since the publication of Syrup several years ago. It's a treat to bring him to Rakestraw.

We are honored to invite you to an evening with Kiran Desai, winner of the 2006 Man Booker Prize for her fine novel The Inheritance of Loss. This event will take place on Wednesday, 4 April 2007 at 7:00 PM. Desai's first visit to Rakestraw is one we still look back on with particular fondness. We are thrilled that so many more of you will have a chance to meet her. This will be a special evening. Advance reservations are necessary. Book groups are particularly invited to attend.

All y'all are invited to join us for lunch on Friday, 13 April 2007 at noon to meet Sara Foster of Foster's Market of North Carolina. We will be celebrating the publication of Casual Cooking from Foster's Market with a menu of southern favorites. Reservations will be necessary.

Writer A. M. Homes visits Rakestraw on Monday, 16 April 2007 at noon to present her new memoir The Mistress's Daughter. Lunch will be served.

Bestselling novelist, and longtime Rakestraw favorite, Susan Vreeland returns to the bookshop as we celebrate the publication of her new novel, Luncheon of the Boating Party. We are planning a special garden and picnic lunch for this event on Saturday, 19 May 2007 at 2:00 PM. Please save the date! More details will be available soon.

It is our honor to invite you to an evening with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon on Wednesday, 13 June 2007 at 7:00 PM. Michael will be reading from and signing copies of his new novel The Yiddish Policeman's Union. We will be producing one of our special broadsides in commemoration of this memorable event. Reservations will be necessary.

Please note that these events are subject to change but that as of this writing all details are correct. We encourage you to call us at (925) 837-7337 to confirm. In addition, you should remember that more events will be added to this calendar so be sure to check each newsletter for additions.