Bestselling author Cecelia Ahern returns with her third novel, If You Could See Me Now, a poignant take on an otherwise common Irish tale. Thirty-five-year-old Elizabeth Egan lives in a small Irish town and makes sure to keep her life perfectly ordered: no complications, no mess, and especially, no love. Taking over maternal duties for her 23-year-old sister Saoirse, an alcoholic who is beginning to show signs of being cut from the same cloth as the sisters’ mother, Elizabeth cares for her six-year-old nephew, Luke, as well, trying to get him to come out of his silent shell, but hardly realizing that she remains trapped within one herself. Things begin to change with the arrival of Ivan, a goofy, fun-loving man who is intent on breaking aunt and nephew’s rigid personas, giving them back their much-needed childhoods, and most important of all, giving them back the ability to forgive those who’ve wronged them in the past. The catch? Only Elizabeth and Luke can see Ivan.

Griffin. first winning acclaim among fans and critics alike with his first installment in his Presidential Agent series, is back with his latest novel The Hostage. Charlie Castillo, who works with the Department of Homeland Security, is becoming the man the President turns to more and more when investigations need to be conducted discretely. The latest crisis to land in Castillo’s lap is the kidnapping of an American diplomat’s wife in Argentina, who watched her husband get killed before her eyes and is being threatened with a similar fate for her children if she doesn’t give away the location of her brother,, a UN diplomat involved in a Iraqi food-for-oil scandal that touches more than a few higher-ups in government.

Curtis Sittenfeld’s debut novel Prep is a poignantly coming-of-age story of a young girl named Lee Fiora of South Bend, Indiana who wins a scholarship to the prestigious east-coast Ault prep school. Lee tries to navigate the money-dominated campus as an outsider and find her own sense of identity during the tumultuous years of adolescence. A cast of characters, often prescribing to stereotypes, from the alienated gay student to the perfect blonde, but it is Sittenfeld’s achingly sincere voice that accurately describe’s Lee’s neurotic obsessions and fears that will ring true with many readers.

Read a review of the book here.

In Frank Turner Hollon’s The Point of Fracture, failed novelist Michael Brace and his wife Suzanne are trapped in a loveless relationship after 15 years of marriage, he’s plagued by the inability to write a novel and a dwindling inheritance while she locks herself if their bedroom, suffering from debilitating migraines and haunting memories of her disturbing and abusive childhood. When Suzanne discovers that Michael has found the beginnings of the perfect novel in pysychologically profiling her past, her lifetime worth of rage culminates in devising and executing the perfect crime.

Read a review of the book here.

In the psychedelic, heavily stylized novel Dermaphoria by Craig Clevenger weaves the hallucinogenic tale of an amnesiac man who wakes up in a jail with the name “Desiree” on his lips and fragments of memories that are surreal as one would expect to find in a drug-addled brain. Released on bail, Eric Ashworth (the name he’s been told is his) has to sort out illusion from reality, with the aid of a powerful new drug called Skin or Derma. The process to understanding is filed with exotic imagery and enough twists and turns (whether real or not) to hold the reader’s interest to the novel’s stunning climax as Eric discovers who he is and the terrible thing he’s done.

The Wreck of Batavia by Simon Leys
It’s a little known story to those outside of Australia, but the story of the Batavia is one of Australian history’s most tragic events, a veritable Lord of the Flies come to life. In The Wreck of the Batavia, author Simon Leys gives his take on the ship Batavia, pride of the Dutch East India Company who was wrecked on the edge of a coral archipelago some fifty miles from the western coast of Australia on her maiden voyage. While most of the three hundred men, women, and children aboard escape drowning, they are soon subjected to the terrorization and methodical massacre by a psychopathic Jeronimus Cornelisz, who escaped the Netherlands on charges of heresy. Cornelisz plans to start his own kingdom and control it through fear, subjecting his victims to routine rape and murder. He ends up killing over 120 people before his reign of terror comes to an end. Leys also pairs this story with his essay Prosper, detailing his summer when he joined a crew of a tuna-fishing boat that was one of the last boats still working under a sail.

Interested in reading more about this subject? Try:

Company: The Story of Murderer by Arabella Edge
Author Arabella Edge takes a different perspective with her novel revolving around the real-life event, this time from the mind of the madmen himself, Jeronimus Cornelisz. Cornelisz, a corrupt man who considers himself God’s equal and the rightful heir to Batavia’s gold and silver, incites a mutiny aboard the Dutch East India Company flaship only to have it run aground on a reef and sink, taking all of its treasures with it. Most of the crew and passengers survive, and look to the trained apothecary as their savior, but soon begin to realize the extent of Cornelisz’s madness. For forty days, Cornelisz instigates campaigns of murder to both instill fear in his victims and stretch out the ship’s meager rescued resources.

In The Jungle Law, first time novelist Victoria Vinton elaborates upon the life of Rudyard Kipling, who, in 1892, moved from London to Vermont with his wife Caroline, penniless but awaiting the royalties of his books. There, Kipling strikes up a friendship with 11-year-old Joe, a boy from a stunted family with an aggressive, oftentimes drunken father and a timid mother. Kipling manages to draw the boy out of his shell with storytelling, specifically one about a boy named Mowgli, abandoned in the jungle and raised by animals. Conflict arises when Joe’s father, Jack, begins to dismiss Kipling, fearing the loss of his son to the writer’s magical world.

Victoria Vinton brings Kipling’s story – and that of Mowgli, Kaa, Baloo, and Shere Khan – to life. As Kipling writes The Jungle Book he befriends his young neighbor, Joe Connolly, opening the boy’s eyes to a world where Jungle Law reigns supreme.

- Julie Burton, from MacAdam/Cage

Can a middle-aged writer, Jordan Sonnenblick, really get into the head of a 13-year-old boy? The answer is yes as Sonnenblick gives us Steven Alper in Drums, Girls, And Dangerous Pie. Steven’s a typical eighth grader, perhaps a little smarter than some and a better drummer than most, but still burdened with the same adolescent problems of dealing with family and girls.

Things take a turn for the worse when Steven’s younger brother Jeffrey is diagnosed with leukemia. His mother spends all hours of the day making sure Jeffrey gets his chemotherapy treatments, his father retreats into a shell of his own making, worrying about the mounting medical costs. Soon, Steven becomes the forgotten son, throwing himself into drumming even as he lets his homework go downhill and tries to keep his friends from learning the truth about Jeffrey.

Sonnenblick keeps this tale from turning into melodrama with the sheer rawness and emotion of Steven’s realistic, witty voice. The novel also doesn’t shy away from the graphic details of leukemia, including vomiting, white cell blood counts, and chemotherapy ports. Yet, Sonnenblick weaves a masterful tale with plenty of heartwarming lessons about how if you cannot change life, you can learn to change yourself.

Good interfaces are more difficult to successfully design that designers think. Users demand that interfaces be easy to use, efficient, and good-looking while managers demand they be original and developed quickly. The designer has plenty of tools and technology at his or her disposal, but rarely does he or she know what to do with them.

This is where Jenifer Tidwell’s Designing Interfaces comes to the rescue, crafting a book that not only combines some of the most timeless tricks and designs successful UI designers have been using and evolving through the years, but also an understanding of just why and how they work. You’ll get recommendations, design alternatives, explanations of complicated design topics, and warnings of when good designs don’t work.

This isn’t a book that will design an interface for you, but it will give you plenty of sound guidance and inspiration for creating something that is innovated, sleek, and useful.

In popular author Judith Mcnaught’s latest novel, Every Breath You Take, Kate Donovan’s dreams come true when she becomes romantically involved with the darkly charismatic Mitchell Wyatt, hailing from the high society Wyatts of Chicago, while on vacation on a tropical paradise island. But such dreams come with a price when she becomes a suspect in the controversy over Mitchell’s half-brother William’s mysterious disappearance. Now as the Wyatt family, journalists, and media climb all over the story to try and find out what happened to the young man, Kate has to strive and clear her name as well as find out if Mitchell had a hand in the foul events.