
Overbooked specializes in providing timely information about fiction (all genres) and readable nonfiction. Overbooked has been online since 1994.
Overbooked is the winner of the 2008 Louis Shores - Greenwood Publishing Award: to recognize excellence in book reviewing and other media for libraries. The award recipient is selected for significant achievement related to a reviewing process that helps librarians make selection decisions.

Virginia
Stars
Page Modified:
September 9, 2008
Fiction and Nonfiction Titles with a Virginia Setting. All genres are included.
Annotations are from Advance, the
Ingram
Book Magazine, unless noted.
Fiction
- Gypsy Man
Author: Bausch, Robert
Publisher: Harcourt $ 25 ISBN: 0151001723 Date: 2002
Library Journal
Penny Bone is terrified of the town's local legend of a child-stealing phantom.
Penny's husband, John, is in prison for an accidental murder. An eerie succession
of events will take these people into the bull's-eye of risk that everyday
life presents, and illuminates how an elusive truth lives behind every legend.
Updated 10.08.02
- Hello
to the Cannibals
Author: Bausch, Richard
Publisher: HarperCollins $ 27.95 ISBN: 006019295x Date: 2002
Booklist
At the end of the 20th century, Lily Austin is writing a play about the famed
British explorer and travel writer Mary Kingsley. Through Kingsley's writings,
Lily finds in Kingsley's courage and resourcefulness the inspiration she needs
to navigate the complicated waters of intimacy and betrayal, kindness and
love. Hello to the Cannibals is Bausch's most dazzling and beautifully
crafted novel to date.
Updated 10.15.02
- Hotspur
Author: Brown, Rita Mae
Publisher: Ballantine $ 24.95 ISBN: 0345428226 Date: 2002
PW
In her marvelous new work, bestselling novelist Brown returns to the fascinating
world of foxhunting she brought so vividly to life in Outfoxed.
Updated 11.05.02
- Palladio
Author: Dee, Jonathan
Publisher: Doubleday $ 24.95 ISBN: 038550179x Date: 2002
Booklist
In this masterful novel, critically acclaimed writer Jonathan Dee explores
the price of compromise, the pain of lost love, and whether it pays to have
a conscience in our cynical age.
Updated 1/2/02
- Meet John Trow
Author: Dyja, Tom
Publisher: Viking $ 24.95 ISBN: 0670030996 Date: 2002
Kirkus
Steven Armour, fighting off a mid-life crisis, joins a group of Civil War
reenactors, and his life suddenly turns around. A haunting narrative of a
man caught between his own life and a life he might have lived, Meet John
Trow will take its place as a classic novel of history.
Updated 5/9/02
- The Mammoth
Cheese
Author: Holman, Sheri
Publisher: Atlantic $ 24 ISBN: 0871139006 Date: 2003
LJ
PW
Kirkus
On publication of her last novel, The Dress Lodger, The New York Times
declared Holman an author with "an outstanding, generous, and fertile
imagination." Now Holman delivers a sharp, contemporary story steeped
in history that will captivate a new audience while gratifying readers of
her earlier work.
Suggested Reading: All Stars
Updated 6.19.03
- Stealing with Style
Author: Jenkins, Emyl
Publisher: Algonquin $ 22.95 ISBN: 1565124456 Date: 2005
Booklist
Antiques appraiser Jenkins turns her talents to fiction in the first of a series of mysteries that follow the heroine behind the scenes of the sometimes murky world of antiques, sophisticated scammers, and shifty associates.
Suggested Reading: Debuts | Antiques Mysteries
Updated 5.9.05
- The Known World
Author: Jones, Edward P.
Publisher: Amistad $ 24.95 ISBN: 0060557540 Date: 2003
Kirkus
LJ
Booklist
Henry Townsend, a black bootmaker and former slave in antebellum Virginia,
becomes a proprietor of his own plantation--as well as his own slaves. This
modern masterpiece explores what happens when he dies and "the known
world" unravels.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
| African American Stars | All
Stars
Updated 10.2.03
- Jacob's Ladder: A Story of Virginia During the War
Author: McCaig, Donald
Publisher: Norton List Price: $ 25.95 ISBN: 039304629x
Date: 1998
PW
LJ
A novel that resonates with the bitter glory and deep human shame of the Confederacy.
Against the epic canvas of the Civil War, the people, black and white, of
one Virginia plantation fulfill their unforgettable destinies.
Suggested Reading: Civil
War Fiction
- Miss Ophelia
Smith, Mary Burnett
Publisher: Morrow List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0688152341 Date: 1997
LJ
Set in rural Virginia during 1948, Miss Ophelia is a remarkable debut
novel that explores the issues of abortion, illegitmacy, adultry, and skin color.
Belly Anderson, now in the autumn of her life, reminisces about the last summer
of her childhood, a time when she learns a terrible secret about a close friend
- a secret that forces Belly to grow up and learn what it really means to be
an adult.
- Argall
Author: Vollmann, William
T.
Publisher: Viking $ 40 ISBN: 0670910309 Date: 2001
Booklist
PW
Library Journal
In the newest novel in his Seven Dreams series, Vollmann alternates between extravagant Elizabethan language and gritty realism in an attempt to dig beneath the legend surrounding Pocahontas, John Smith, and the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia--as well as the betrayals, disappointments, and atrocities behind it.
Suggested Reading: All Stars
Updated 9/17/01
- The Wolf Pit
Author: Youmans, Marly
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux $ 24 ISBN: 0374291950 Date: 2001
PW
The Wolf Pit offers a gripping portrait of two young Virginians forever
altered by violence and civil war: Robin, a Confederate soldier, enduring
life at the Elmira prison camp, and Agate, the daughter of a hired-out slave,
who struggles to survive loss and degradation and to pit knowledge and truth
against evil.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction
Stars | Civil War Stars
Updated 7/19/01
Nonfiction
- In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in
the Heart of America, 1859-1863
Author: Ayers, Edward L.
Publisher: Norton $ 27.95 ISBN: 0393057860 Date: 2003
Kirkus
PW
LJ
Booklist
Through a gripping narrative based on massive new research, a leading
historian tells a reassuring story of the triumph, in an inevitable conflict,
of the dynamic, free-labor North over the traditional, slave-based South,
vindicating the freedom principles built into the nation's foundations.
Suggested Reading: All Stars
Updated 7.17.03
- Five Sisters: The Langhorne Sisters
of Virginia
by Fox, James
Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 30 ISBN: 0684808129 Date: 2000
Library Journal
The author of the bestselling White Mischief tells the
story of the beautiful Langhorne sisters who lived at the center
of high and powerful society from the end of the Civil War through
the Second World War. As they made their way across two continents,
the five women acquired rich husbands, fame, and scandals.
- Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories from a Decade Gone Mad
Author: Holman, Virginia
Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 23 ISBN: 0743222857 Date: 2003
Kirkus
PW
LJ
In a dexterous portrait of madness and shadows, Pushcart Prize winner Holman
recounts the dark days her family was held hostage by her mother's delusions
and her country was beset with the folly of the Watergate era.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | Memoir Stars
Updated 1.3.03
- Landon Carter's Uneasy
Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation
Author: Isaac, Rhys
Publisher: Oxford $ 30 ISBN: 0195159268 Date: 2004
PW
Kirkus
In this long-awaited work, Isaac mines the diary of a Revolutionary War-era
Virginia planter--and many other sources--to reconstruct his interior world
as it plunged into turmoil.
Suggested Reading: 1776 Stars
Updated 6.1.04
- The First Emancipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter the Founding Father Who Freed His Slaves
Author: Levy, Andrew
Publisher: Random $ 25.95 ISBN: 0375508651 Date: 2005
Booklist
Updated 4.22.05
- Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocohontas, and the Heart of a New Nation
Author: Price, David A.
Publisher: Knopf $ 25.95 ISBN: 0375415416 Date: 2003
Kirkus
PW
Unraveling the crucial roles of Pocahontas, Captain John Smith, and Chief
Powhatan, Pagels offers a dramatic retelling of one of the great survival
stories of American history--the opening of the first permanent English settlement
in the New World.
Updated 7.21.03
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