Take a Journey with These Books

We hope you will travel to a new place this week with our three new book suggestions. These titles are sure to please readers looking for an escape.  Happy reading!

Contents May Have Shifted By Pam Houston, February 2012, 320 pages.  

Stuck in a dead-end relationship, this fearless narrator leaves her metaphorical baggage behind and finds a comfort zone in the air, “feeling safest with one plane ticket in her hand and another in her underwear drawer.” She flies around the world, finding reasons to love life in dozens of far-flung places from Alaska to Bhutan. Along the way she weathers unplanned losses of altitude, air pressure, and landing gear. With the help of a squad of loyal, funny, wise friends and massage therapists, she learns to sort truth from self-deception, self-involvement from self-possession. Readers will enjoy this emotional story that takes you around the world. 

In Flight Entertainment: Stories By Helen Simpson, February 2012, 176 pages.

A new collection of 13 stories by the Award-winning author of Four Bare Legs in a Bed invokes the experiences of contemporary women who tackle such challenges as midlife, marriage, parenting and young love. There is also the title story, in which two men on a flight from London to Chicago discuss climate change and what flying is doing to “our shrunken planet.” These darkly comic, brave stories brilliantly evoke life's truest sensations — love, pain, joy, and grief—and give us, with precision and complex economy, a shrewd and painfully true glimpse into our time.

The Next One to Fall By Hilary Davidson, February 2012, 352 pages.

Travel writer Lily Moore has been persuaded by her closest friend, photographer Jesse Robb, to visit Peru with him.  At Machu Picchu, the famous Lost City of the Incas, they discover a woman clinging to life at the bottom of an ancient stone staircase. Just before the woman dies, she tells Lily the name of the man who pushed her. When the local police investigate, the forensic evidence they find doesn't match what Lily knows. Unable to accept the official ruling of accidental death, Lily hunts down the wealthy man who was the dead woman's traveling companion and discovers a pattern of dead and missing women in his wake. This is a great new book for mystery fans.

Reviews brought to you each week by librarians Jennifer Niederhausen, Dona Stein and Heather Timko, Adult Services Division, .