Check out the New Fiction page
(click the Books, Movies, Music tab on the main Regina Public Library page. Then click on New Book Releases to see a selection of the newest books added to the collection.)

From the New Fiction selections:

In the Shadow of the Banyan
by Vaddey Ratner

Here's what the Booklist review had to say:

Ratner’s first novel recounts the harrowing experiences of Raami, the seven-year-old daughter of a prince, during the rise ofthe Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and her family’s capture and internment in work camps. What makes her novel especially remarkable is that it’s based on Ratner’s real experiences as a young girl of the Cambodian aristocracy under the Khmer Rouge. Her heartrending, mournful tale depicts the horrors ofthe killing fields and the senselessness ofthe violence there while still managing to capture small, beautiful moments. Raami is an imaginative girl, captivated by her father’s poetry, and it is through his words that she comes to understand the way stories become not only a vehicle for memory but also a source of power. By countering the stark reality of her experience with lyrical descriptions ofthe natural beauty ofthe country and its people, Ratner has crafted an elegiac tribute ofthe country she knew and loved. A note from and interview with Ratner further details her childhood in Cambodia and escape to the U.S.

Afterwards by Rosamund Lupton

Novelist: From the author of the acclaimed bestseller Sister comes a gripping, thrilling story of a mother who will do anything to protect her child.....

Here's what the Booklist reveiw had to say:
/* Starred Review */ When her children’s school catches on fire, Grace runs headlong into the inferno, determined to rescue her 17-year-old daughter, Jenny. But both end up unconscious and in critical condition in the hospital. It’s there that the two find themselves unfettered from their bodies and able to travel the hospital hallways, where they learn that the fire was set deliberately and that Jenny was the target. Grace discovers a newfound appreciation for her sister-in-law, Sarah, a smart and determined detective whom Grace had previously thought to be cold and judgmental. As the gutsy Sarah homes in on the arsonist and provides Grace’s devastated husband with emotional support, Grace rues the fact that they were never really friends. Grace must also comfort her daughter, who can barely stand to look at her severely burned face and whose chances of survival are only 50/50. Lupton takes her readers on a totally harrowing ride as she melds a suspenseful procedural with an emotionally fraught family drama. Within a taut and sinuous narrative, heartbreak over a broken family vies with fear that the arsonist will return to complete the job of killing Jenny. Masterful pacing and a highly charged atmosphere combine to make this an exceptionally gripping read.

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If you like this book by Rosamund Lupton, NoveList recommends the following:

Started early, took my dog by Kate Atkinson
Tracy Waterhouse, a retired police detective leading a quiet life, makes a snap decision to relieve habitual offender Kelly Cross of a young child he's been dragging around town. Tracy soon learns her parental inexperience is actually the least of her problems, as much larger ones loom for her and her young charge. Meanwhile, detective Jackson Brodie embarks on a different sort of rescue--that of an abused dog. NoveList

Losing you by Nicci French
Preparing to leave for a vacation, Nina Landry awaits the return of her fifteen-year-old daughter, Charlie, who had spent the night at a friend's house, but Nina begins to worry when Charlie does not come home and no one takes the disappearance seriously. NoveList

The lovely bones by Alice Sebold
Looking down from heaven, 14-year-old Susie Salmon recounts her rape and murder and watches her family as they cope with their grief and "the lovely bones" growing around her absence. NoveList

The Dressmaker by Kate Alcott

Here's what Booklist has to say:
Alcott’s debut brims with engrossing storytelling, marred by occasionally clunky writing. Tess Collins is an ambitious young woman who dreams of stepping out of her 1912 class restrictions and becoming more than a maid. She wants the world to know her talent as a dressmaker. Her fate is forever altered when she encounters the mercurial, imperious designer, Lady Lucile Duff Gordon and becomes that lady’s personal assistant on the ocean liner Titanic. The actual sinking of the great ship is treated briefly (which may disappoint some Titanic buffs). Tess is willing to do almost anything to realize her designing dreams, even if it means bowing to the increasingly irrational, grandiose whims of her over-privileged employer. As Tess’ personal dramas unfold, the ugly aftermath of the ocean tragedy and the roles passengers and crew members played are revealed by the disturbing official investigation, which Alcott takes almost verbatim from the transcripts of the U.S. Senate hearings. For fans of Sarah Jio, Susanna Kearsley, and immigrant tales.

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Click here to see other fiction titles about the Titanic.

This list includes my favourite Titanic novel:
From Time to Time by Jack Finney

Summary: Simon Morley, whose logic-defying trip from the present day back to the New York City of the 1880s in Time and Again has enchanted readers for twenty-five years, embarks on another trip across the borders of time.
This time Reuben Prien at the secret government-sponsored Project wants Simon to visit New York in 1912. Simon's mission: to protect a man who is traveling across the Atlantic with vital documents that could avert World War I. So one fateful day in 1912, Simon finds himself aboard the world's most famous ship...the Titanic.

posted by Sharon

There will be many of these lists in the next few weeks.

Click on the following links to see the Amazon, Kirkus and Oprah lists:

Amazon's Best Fiction of 2011 - Top 40 countdown

Kirkus Best Fiction of 2011

Oprah's list of the Best Fiction 2011

Here's a sample:

The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht

Summary: Struggling to understand why her beloved grandfather left his family to die alone in a field hospital far from home, a young doctor in a war-torn Balkan country takes over her grandfather's search for a mythical ageless vagabond while referring to a worn copy of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book.
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Buzz Aldrin, what happened to you in all the confusion? by Johan Harstad ; translated by Deborah Dawkin

Summary: Mattias, a thirty-something gardener living in Stavanger, Norway, suffers a series of personal and professional disasters and then finds himself on a road in the desolate Faroe Islands with no memory of how he arrived there.

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11/22/63 : a novel by Stephen King

Summary: Receiving a horrific essay from a GED student with a traumatic past, high-school English teacher Jake Epping is enlisted by a friend to travel back in time to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a mission for which he must befriend troubled loner Lee Harvey Oswald..
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The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (2011)

A fierce competition is underway, a contest between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood to compete in "a game," in which each must use their powers of illusion to best the other. Unbeknownst to them, this game is a duel to the death, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. NoveList

Here's what Booklist had to say:
/* Starred Review */ This big and — no, not bulky — compelling first novel ushers in a menacing tone with its first sentence: The circus arrives without warning. Why would a circus arrive so quietly in town, and why would anyone need warning about this particular one? The time span here is 30 years, from 1873 to 1903, and the settings range from America to Europe. To a famous magician is delivered a little girl who, as it turns out, is his child, and fortunately for his future, she is possessed of magical powers. As it also happens, this magician has an archrival, who, in the face of the first magician’s jackpot in the form of his little girl, seeks a young person for him to train to rival her. What the two magicians did not anticipate, as the years pass and the two young people, the girl and the boy whom the second magician found, are honed in their specialty for performance’s sake and to outplay the other one, is that the young persons, when of an age, would meet and, surprising or not to the reader, fall in love. How will their destiny play out now? With appeal for readers not particularly geared to fantasy but who plainly enjoy an unusual and well-drawn story, this one will make a good crossover suggestion.

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Want more fiction about magicians?
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Carter Beats the Devil
by Glen David Gold

In 1920, Charles Carter, known as Carter the Great, who became a master illustionist out of loneliness and desperation, creates the most outrageous stunt of all, involving President Harding--one that could cause his downfall. NoveList
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Check out the New Releases page on the Regina Public Library website.

Here is one of the books mentioned in the New Fiction Releases:

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

Summary: A researcher at a pharmaceutical company, Marina Singh journeys into the heart of the Amazonian delta to check on a field team that has been silent for two years--a dangerous assignment that forces Marina to confront the ghosts of her past.

Publisher's Weekly review:
Patchett (Bel Canto) is a master storyteller who has an entertaining habit of dropping ordinary people into extraordinary and exotic circumstances to see what they're made of. In this expansive page-turner, Marina Singh, a big pharma researcher, is sent by her married boss/lover to the deepest, darkest corner of the Amazon to investigate the death of her colleague, Anders Eckman, who had been dispatched to check on the progress of the incommunicado Dr. Annick Swenson, a rogue scientist on the cusp of developing a fertility drug that could rock the medical profession (and reap enormous profits). After arriving in Manaus, Marina travels into her own heart of darkness, finding Dr. Swenson's camp among the Lakashi, a gentle but enigmatic tribe whose women go on bearing children until the end of their lives. As Marina settles in, she goes native, losing everything she had held on to so dearly in her prescribed Midwestern life, shedding clothing, technology, old loves, and modern medicine in order to find herself. Patchett's fluid prose dissolves in the suspense of this out-there adventure, a juggernaut of a trip to the crossroads of science, ethics, and commerce that readers will hate to see end.

Check out the New Book Releases Page on the RPL website.

New Fiction for July includes:

Folly Beach by Dorothea Benton Frank

Here's what the Publisher's Weekly review had to say:
Frank's latest novel displays a rare talent that fans will welcome. Cate's philandering husband has died, leaving her nothing, and the entire contents of her sizable home have been repossessed. She returns to her relatives in Charleston hoping to get a grip on what has happened and on what comes next. Cate's new life with her firecracker of an aunt in the South is told primarily through hilarious and engaging dialogue with family and friends, with a smattering of seriousness along the way. The recently widowed protagonist's journey to rediscovering joy and love will thrill readers, especially with the addition of a suavely integrated story-within-a-story involving a one-woman play about the lovers who wrote Porgy and Bess. There's a certain authenticity to the lives Frank tells that will resonate with many women. Frank's telling of this tale will help readers celebrate love and sexuality after 60.

Check out the New Book Releases Page on the RPL website.

New Fiction for June includes:

Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

Here's what the Booklist review had to say:
* Starred Review */ Brooks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her Civil War novel, March(2006), here imagines the life of Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, the first Native American to graduate from Harvard.
The story is told by Bethia Mayfield, the daughter of a preacher who traveled from England to Martha’s Vineyard to try and “bring Christ to the Indians.” In 1660, when Bethia is 12, the family takes Caleb, a Wampanoag Indian, into their home to prepare him for boarding school. Bethia is a bright scholar herself, and though education for women is discouraged, she absorbs the lessons taught to Caleb and her brother Makepeace like a sponge. She struggles through the deaths of her mother, a younger sister, another brother, and her father.
When Caleb and Makepeace are sent to Cambridge, Bethia accompanies them as an indentured servant to a professor. She marries a Harvard scholar, journeys with him to Padua, and finally returns to her beloved island.
In flashbacks, Brooks relates the woes of the Indian Wars, the smallpox epidemic, and Caleb’s untimely death shortly after his graduation with honors. Brooks has an uncanny ability to reconstruct each moment of the history she so thoroughly researched in stunningly lyrical prose, and her characters are to be cherished.

Even though we're told we never should, I love judging books by their covers, and here's one that caught my immediate attention! When I first saw that antique "English" carriage, all I could think of was Rosemary's Baby. When I read what it was about -- changelings and the dark underworld called "Gentry" I was reminded of the film Labyrinth. Either way, I definitely want to read this!!

The Replacement (2010)

by Brenna Yovanoff

Mackie Doyle is not one of us. Though he lives in the small town of Gentry, he comes from a world of tunnels and black murky water, a world of living dead girls ruled by a little tattooed princess. He is a Replacement, left in the crib of a human baby sixteen years ago. Now, because of fatal allergies to iron, blood, and consecrated ground, Mackie is fighting to survive in the human world.

Mackie would give anything to live among us, to practice on his bass or spend time with his crush, Tate. But when Tate's baby sister goes missing, Mackie is drawn irrevocably into the underworld of Gentry, known as Mayhem. He must face the dark creatures of the Slag Heaps and find his rightful place, in our world, or theirs

-Trudi

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
The idyllic lives of civic-minded environmentalists Patty and Walter Berglund come into question when their son moves in with aggressive Republican neighbors, green lawyer Walter takes a job in the coal industry, and go-getter Patty becomes increasingly unstable and enraged.

The three Weissmanns of Westport by Cathleen Schine
A modern tale inspired by "Sense and Sensibility" finds financially strapped literary sisters Miranda and Annie moving in with divorcee Betty in a run-down Connecticut beach cottage, where they find love among the suburban aristocracy.

Shadow tag by Louise Erdrich
After she discovers that her husband has been reading her diary, Irene America turns it into a manipulative farce, while secretly keeping a second diary that includes her true thoughts about her shaky marriage, its affect on her children, and her struggles with alcohol.

Synopses from Novelist.