Hummingbirdsby Joshua Gaylord
A salacious tale of elite Manhattan prep-schoolers by one of their teachers.
Hummingbirds is a salacious novel about an elite Manhattan prep school—written by a teacher at an elite Manhattan prep school. In Joshua Gaylord’s literary debut, chronicling a year at the Carmine-Casey School for Girls, female students compete against each other in a Gossip Girl-esque battle for attention. Pigtailed, lollipop-sucking Queen Bee Dixie Doyle tries to use her popularity to outdo Liz Warren, a bookworm who writes plays inspired by the Oresteia. As senior year unfolds, the teachers begin to act like their pupils: English teacher Leo Binhammer wars with the newest addition to the faculty, English teacher Ted Hughes, who slept with Binhammer’s wife and threatens his role as the most popular male teacher among the female faculty. Through girls who flirt with adulthood and adults who act like kids, Gaylord creates what the Kirkus Review calls “a very grownup novel about adolescence and the folly of adults, by an impressive new voice in American fiction.”
The Sisters Who Would Be Queen: Mary, Katherine, and Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Tragedyby Leanda de Lisle
A compelling biography of the woman behind the martyr.
Heralded as the first significant and relevant book about Lady Jane Grey in decades, de Lisle’s new biography seeks to reveal how Jane, who died a martyr at 16, was not simply a pious and naïve member of the Tudor aristocracy but also a serious religious thinker who had an impact on establishing Protestantism both locally and abroad. De Lisle also provides the first thorough account of how Jane’s two younger sisters, Katherine and Mary, whom the author calls Jane’s “spiritual and political heirs,” maintained a complicated relationship with Queen Elizabeth I. Exploring myths about the three sisters and questioning the time’s objections to women in power, The Sisters Who Would Be Queen is an “excellent, assiduously researched account of dynastic politics at its worst, focusing on three fascinating and often overlooked women,” Publishers Weekly reports.
Descent Into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asiaby Ahmed Rashid
With Af-Pak back in the news, a leading journalist offers an essential primer on the region.
While the Iraq War has engaged the public and policymakers for years, Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid outlines how the conflict and instability in Afghanistan and Central Asia have been overlooked in what Publishers Weekly calls a “thicket of ominous threats and lost opportunities“ that Rashid blames on “the unwillingness of American policymakers to shoulder the burden of nation building.” Rashid, who especially faults Bush and Rumsfeld for how tumultuous the region has become, probes militants, drugs, the Taliban, weak government, and corrupt relationships between the U.S. and warlords as just some of the sources behind the area’s continued “degeneration.” The New York Times writes, “ Descent Into Chaos can help the next administration understand the mistakes of the past.”
Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandalby Tristram Stuart
A startling look at the enormous disparity between hunger and food waste, and what every person can do about it today.
In Waste, Tristram Stuart, an acclaimed journalist and a longtime critic of the food industry, serves up an intelligent look at the broken global food system, which allows millions to go hungry while wealthy nations throw away up to half of the food they produce. After exposing the ways in which food and resources go to waste at every step, from farm to the refrigerator, and the damage this does to the environment, Stuart ends on a positive note with his action plan, outlining the simple ways in which individuals and businesses can make the most of what they have, making Waste “one of those books that everybody should read,” according to The Independent. In the battle to avoid waste, Stuart puts his money where his mouth is—he is a freegan, meaning he eats only food that’s been discarded by others or that he’s produced himself. The author’s commitment to his subject is as compelling as his research is exhaustive: “ Waste is certainly one of the most important environmental books to come out in years,” writes The Financial Times.
Nine Dragonsby Michael Connelly
Detective Harry Bosch heads to Hong Kong to find his daughter.
This latest Harry Bosch novel opens with the stoic Los Angeles detective being assigned to investigate the murder of a local Chinese liquor store owner. The evidence points to a Los Angeles member of a Hong Kong triad, but before he can make an arrest, Harry gets word that his daughter, who lives in Hong Kong, is missing. Like the Liam Neeson character in last year’s movie Taken, Bosch embarks on an all-or-nothing mission to find his daughter. And with such personal stakes, he begins to wonder whether it might not be a coincidence that his daughter disappeared just after he undertook the high-stakes homicide investigation. The Chicago Tribune calls Nine Dragons, the 15th entry in the Harry Bosch series, “a thing of cool beauty, meticulously plotted, rigorously controlled.”
