After the death of their patriarch, Stella Mortland and her three charismatic daughters, Julia, Finn, and Maisie, move into a medieval abbey at the beginning of the summer of 1967. Stella, still grieving for her late husband, hires a starving artist by the name of Lucas Feld to paint a portrait of her three daughters. What transpires is an idyllic summer where the sisters, their childhood friend Daniel Nunn and his pre-med friend Nick Marlow, and Lucas embark on passionate summer entanglements rife with many affairs of the heart. Julia is considering running away to London, Finn is entangled in trysts with all three boys, and 13-year-old Maisie is haunted by her imaginings of her father and the nuns who no longer live in the alley. The result is a painting that beautifully captures the mystery, romance, and heartbreak of the sisters while the summer ends in devastating tragedy. Fast forward to 1991 where Lucas has become a famous artist whose breakthrough painting, “TheSisters Mortland,” is soon to show at a retrospective exhibit, but Daniel, not middle-aged and fully embroiled in all the mid-life crises it entails, is still obsessed with the events of that fateful summer.

Long ago in ancient times, the Golden Capstone, placed on top of the Great Pyramid at Giza during a rare solar event called the Tartarus Rotation, would prevent the world from coming to destruction by worldwide flooding and solar scorching. However, according to the legend, whosoever accomplished the task would gain absolute power over the world for a thousand years, prompting Alexander the Great to break the Capstone into seven pieces and hide them in the Seven Wonders of the World. Now, in 2006, the event of the Tartarus Rotation is about to roll around again, and race is on for the nations of the world to find and assemble the Capstone in order to gain ultimate power, including the U.S., Europe and the Vatican, greedy terrorists, and a coalition of seven small nations who think that no single country ought to have power of that magnitude. This coalition assembles an eight-person team led by Australian Indiana Jones-type Jack West Jr. to not only find the seven Capstone pieces, but outwit their other contenders in the process.

Read a review of this book here.

Nathan Glass is many things: a retired life insurance salesman, burdened with an unfavorable cancer prognosis, divorced, and estranged from his son. He’s come to Brooklyn to find a quiet, solitary place to die, but instead finds his long-lost nephew Tom working in a local bookstore, a far cry from from the beginnings of a brilliant academic career when Nathan saw him last. With Tom’s boss Harry, Nathan’s world slowly begins to expand, leading him on a journey of self-rediscovery. Things become, of course, far from quiet, including incidents of forgery, disturbing revelations in a sperm bank, and the unattainable dream of a rural refuge. Nathan begins a book called The Book of Human Folly to recount every blunder, mistake, and pratfall he has made in his life, but instead finds his despair being swept away in the joy and sorrow of others.

Read The Guardian review of this novel here.

Lauren Willig’s sequel, The Masque of the Black Tulip to her smash debut The Secret History of the Pink Carnation revives its predecessor’s sense of fun, history, intrigue, romance and swashbuckling adventure. Modern day American graduate student Eloise Kelly is continuing her research into the Selwick archive, this time uncovering the story of Lady Henrietta Selwick who has her own adventure with Miles Dorrington in helping to protect her cousin Jane, England’s only hope against a Napoleonic invasion, the Pink Carnation, against the Black Tulip, France’s deadliest spy whose mission is to kill his (or her) English adversary.

Lilian Jackson Braun has defined the cat caper with her Cat Who … series, and the 28th installment, The Cat Who Dropped A Bombshell sees Koko and Yum Yum, James “Call me Qwill” Qwilleran’s famous Siamese feline duo back to solve another mystery. While the small town of Pickax is preparing sesquicentennial celebrations, Koko has developed a habit for dropping himself off balconies and occasionally landing in strange places, one such fall ending up on a strange young man visiting his relatives in town. As it turns out, the young man is the greedy nephew of wealthy Nathan and Doris Ledfield, and stands to inherit their entire vast fortune. Needless to say, when the couple fall deathly ill, all while a hurricane threatens to pummel Pickax and cut the festivities short, Qwill and his furry companions are on the case.

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.

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.