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Hotlists 2008
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Booklists
Lists of books, many of which received at least one starred review (indicating a work of unusual merit) from the following review sources: Booklist , Publisher's Weekly (PW), Kirkus and Library Journal (LJ). Additional titles of interest may be included on the lists. Titles are generally listed alphabetically by author.
Overbooked specializes in providing timely information about fiction (all genres) and readable nonfiction. Overbooked has been online since 1994. Overbooked is a work in progress . . .
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.
Booklists and Suggested Reading
Photographer Stars
Page Modified: August 19, 2008
Books about photographs and photographers. All genres.
Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine, unless noted.
- Triage
Author: Anderson, Scott
Publisher: Scribner List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0684846950 Date: 1998
LJ Kirkus
Reminiscent of In the Lake of the Woods and For Whom the Bell Tolls, Triage is an exploration of the pressures exerted on love by extraordinary circumstances, and a page-turner about the payment that always comes due on secrets and lies. - Master Georgie
Author: Bainbridge, Beryl
Publisher: Carroll & Graf List Price: $ 21 ISBN: 0786705639 Date: 1998
PW Kirkus
Booker Prize short list title.
The magnificent new novel by the acclaimed author of The Birthday Boys and Every Man for Himself goes back to the mid-19th century to accompany the travels of a group of Liverpool characters to the Crimea, bringing the horrors of a significant battle shockingly to life.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Photography - Blind Side
Author: Bayer, William
Publisher: Villard $ 18.95 ISBN: 0394572572 Date: 1989
A famous photographer--unable, due to a trauma, to photograph people--gets caught in a web of blackmail, romance and double-crosses in this taut psychological thriller by the bestselling author of Switch and Pattern Crimes.
Updated 6.11.07 - The Effects of Light
Author: Beverly-Whittemore, Miranda
Publisher: Warner $ 23.95 ISBN: 0446533297 Date:2005
Blending themes of lost innocence, sexual awakening, and triumph over loss, this evocative debut novel features two sisters whose lives are forever altered by a series of photos.
Updated 6.11.07 - The Double Bind
Author: Bohjalian, Christopher A.
Publisher: Crown $ 25 ISBN: 9781400047468 Date: 2007
LJ Kirkus
From the bestselling author of Midwives and Before You Know Kindness comes a psychological novel of obsession and consequences. When college sophomore Laural Estabook is attacked while riding her bike through Vermont's back roads, her life is forever changed.
Suggested Reading: Photography
Updated 1.27.07 - The Error of Our Ways : A Novel
Carkeet, David
Henry Holt & Co List Price: 25.00 ISBN: 0805045023 Date: 1997
Publishers Weekly Kirkus
NYTBR Notable
For Ben Hudnut, life has been good, but Ben is about to become a modern-day suburban Job. A casual affair that ended a decade ago is returns to haunt him; his business is on the verge of bankruptcy, and his eldest daughter may be involved with one of her high-school teachers. Enter Jeremy cook, fellow sufferer and determined linguist, and what follows is a rich, literary comedy of errors. - Winter Journey
Author: Colegate, Isabel
Publisher: Counterpoint $ 23 ISBN: 1582431221 Date: 2001
PW Kirkus
His wild years at last behind him, Alfred Ashby, a celebrated photographer now in his late fifties, has returned to where he was raised, the family farm in rural England. The old house in the valley, little changed by the years, provides him an agreeable darkroom, necessary solitude, and a link to a more tranquil past. His reverie is broken by a January visit from his older sister, Edith, a former Member of Parliament and the survivor of two disastrous marriages. To her Alfred's bachelor life is undesirable, his appearance careless, his current work -- a series of manipulated images of his late lover, Lydia -- obsessive and disturbing. She has plans for Alfred, for the farm and for the future, plans she hopes will help the two of them mend their frayed relationship and forget their past sorrows, past mistakes. - Publishers Marketing.
Updated 11/15/00 - The Art of Arrow Cutting
Author: Dedman, Stephen
Publisher: Tor $ 22.95 ISBN: 0312863209 Date: 2007
Kirkus
In his first full-length work, acclaimed short fiction sci-fi writer Stephen Dedman seamlessly blends taut suspense, myth and magic, and the violence of organized crime into the story of a jaded itinerant photographer who's thrown into the role of hero when he suddenly finds his bleak modern world full of ancient Japanese enchantment.
Updated 5.21.07 - Zero to the Bone
Author: Eversz, Robert
Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 24 ISBN: 0743250176 Date: 2006
PW
Robert Eversz's edgy and endearing heroine Nina Zero is back...and this time she's embroiled in her most dangerous case ever -- investigating L.A.'s underground S&M scene while getting caught up in sex, lies, and babysitting. - Publisher Marketing.
Suggested Reading: If You Like Nina Zero
Updated 12.27.05 - Service of Clouds
Author: Falconer, Delia
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0374261059 Date: 1998
Kirkus
In 1907, in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, Eureka Jones, a young pharmacist's assistant with "historical eyes", falls in love with Harry Phillips, a man from elsewhere who photographs clouds and the shadows they cast on the land. Australian writer Delia Falconer's first novel tells the story of their romance, which unfolds in a small town of colorful eccentrics.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars - Caught in the Light
Author: Goddard, Robert
Publisher: Henry Holt Price: $ 26 ISBN: 080506155x Date: 1999
Booklist
Photographer Ian Jarrett sets out to solve a mystery that may be 170 years old. At the end of his search, a trap awaits him.
Suggested Reading: Psychological Suspense Stars - White Ghost Girls
Author: Greenaway, Alice
Publisher: Grove $ 13 ISBN: 0802170188 Date: 2006
Kirkus Booklist
In her astonishing literary debut, Greenway tells a tale of sacrifice and solidarity between two American sisters who tumble into their teenage years in 1967 Hong Kong, against an extraordinary backdrop that is both sensuous and dangerous.
Suggested Reading: Debuts | Historical Fiction | Adult Books for Teens
Updated 11.14.05 - Body Language
Author: Hall, James W.
Publisher: St. Martins List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0312192436 Date: 1998
LJ PW
From the nationally bestselling author of Under Cover of Daylight and Red Sky at Night comes an electrifying suspense novel about a female forensic photographer on the trail of a brutal killer with ties to her past. "James Hall's prose runs clean and fast as Gulf Stream waters" - The New York Times Book Review. - Generation Loss
Author: Hand, Elizabeth
Publisher: Small Beer 24 $ ISBN: 9781931520218 Date: 2007
PW Booklist
Cass Neary made her name in the 1970s as a photographer in New York City. But 30 years later she is adrift, on her way down, and almost out. Out on one last gig, Cass stumbles across a decades-old mystery that is still claiming victims, and into one final shot at redemption.
Suggested Reading: Photography
Updated 5.11.07 - Exposure
Author: Harrison, Kathryn
Publisher: Random $ 20 ISBN: 0679409424 Date: 1993
PW
A spellbinding, brilliantly written novel of psychological suspense, about a young woman's self-destructive double life, by the author of the acclaimed Thicker Than Water. A talented photographer, Ann appears to be a successful, attractive young woman, but her psychological patterns from the past threaten to destroy her present.
Updated 6.11.07 - Afterimage
Author: Humphreys, Helen
Publisher: Metropolitan $ 23 ISBN: 0805066667 Date: 2001
Booklist
When Annie Phelan arrives at the Dashells' Victorian England farm to work as a maid, she finds the master dreaming of explorations, and the mistress struggling with the new technology of photography for her art. Drawn into a fateful love triangle, Annie nearly loses herself until disaster reveals her power over the Dashells' work and hearts.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
Updated 3/13/01 - The Earthquake Bird
Author: Jones, Susanna
Publisher: Mysterious $ 22.95 ISBN: 0892967420 Date: 2001
Kirkus Library Journal
A haunting first novel set in Tokyo, The Earthquake Bird reveals a murder on its first page and takes its readers into the mind of the chief suspect, Lucy Fly, a young vulnerable English girl living and working in Tokyo as a translator.
Suggested Reading: Psychological Suspense Stars | Debuts
Updated 9/17/01 - Last Summer in the World
Author: Mitchell, Emily
Publisher: Norton $ 24.95 ISBN: 9780393064872 Date: 2007
Booklist PW
An absorbing debut novel about the photograher Edward Steichen's wartime return to France and his reckoning with his painful past. Told with the elegance of Michael Cunningham's The Hours and the historical rendering of Colm Toibin's The Master, The Last Summer of the World captures the life and heart of a great photographer and of a world beset by war. - Publisher Marketing
Suggested Reading: Photography
Updated 5.1.07 - Double Image
Author: Morrell, David
Publisher: Warner $ 32 ISBN: 0446519634Date: 1998
After a harrowing experience in Bosnia, war photographer Mitch Coltrane vows to take pictures that celebrate hope instead of despair. But the horrors of his previous assignment continue to haunt him. Taking refuge in the past, he becomes obsessed with a beautiful woman in an old photograph from 1930s Hollywood. Seeking her identity, he discovers a young woman with a remarkable resemblance to the photo, and the past intrudes on the present with terrifying consequences.
Updated 6.11.07 - The Haunting of L
Author: Norman, Howard A.
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux $ 24 ISBN: 0374168253 Date: 2002
PW
In 1927 Manitoba, young Peter Duvett accepts a job as assistant to elusive portraitist Vienna Linn, and helps him photograph gruesome accidents for a private collection in London. Duvett falls under the spell of Linn's brilliant wife and starts to see more and more terrifying scenes come to life in the darkroom.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
Updated 1/4/02 - The Dogs of Winter
Author: Nunn, Kem
Publisher: Scribner $ 24 ISBN: 068482647X Date: 1997
Heart Attacks is California's last secret spot - the premier mysto surf haunt, the stuff of rumor and legend. The rumors say you must cross Indian land to get there. They tell of hostile locals and shark-infested waters where waves in excess of thirty feet break a mile from shore. For down-and-out photographer Jack Fletcher, the chance to shoot these waves in the company of surfing legend Drew Harmon offers the promise of new beginnings. But Drew is not alone in the northern reaches of the state. His young wife, Kendra, lives there with him. Obsessed with the unsolved murder of a local girl, Kendra has embarked upon a quest of her own, a search for truth - however dark that truth may prove to be. The Dogs of Winter is a portrait of two men and an appealing yet troubled young woman set against an unforgettable background of stark and violent beauty.
Updated 6.11.07 - The Skin Palace
Author: O'Connell, Jack
Publisher:Mysterious $ 21.95 ISBN: 0892965479 Date: 1996
PW
The author of the widely acclaimed, highly original Wireless and Box Nine presents a third novel set in the town of Quinsigamond, where fate brings together a photographer, a filmmaker, and a porn theater owner in the deadly carnal heart of the city.
Updated 6.11.07 - Still She Haunts
Me
Author: Roiphe, Katie
Publisher: Dial $ 23.95 ISBN: 038533527x Date: 2001
Booklist
One of America's most provocative young writers takes a dazzling turn in this richly imagined literary tour de force inspired by the relationship between Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell, the girl who was his muse.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
Updated 9/17/01 - Exposure
Author: Russell, Alan
Publisher: Minotaur $ 24.95 ISBN: 0312289243 Date: 2002
PW
A photographer accidentally causes the death of two celebrities, setting off a chain of events in this thriller about the life-threatening difference between what is seen and what is to be believed.
Updated 3/21/02 - The Cage
Author: Schulman, Audrey
Publisher: Algonquin $ 17.95 ISBN: 1565120353 Date: 1994
PW
A gripping adventure of a woman who goes on an otherwise all-male documentary expedition to the Canadian tundra to photograph bears from within a small iron cage. As she tests her limits on the frozen tundra, disaster strikes and she must draw on her every strength in order to survive.
Updated 6.11.07 - The Dark Room
Author: Seiffert, Rachel
Publisher: Pantheon $ 24 ISBN: 0375421041Date: 2001
Kirkus LJ
A debut work of major importance, this novel retells the history of 20th-century Germany through the experiences of three ordinary Germans before, during and after World War II.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | World Wars Stars | Debuts
Updated 5/10/01 - The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Author: Smith, Dominic
Publisher: Atria $ 24 ISBN: 0743271149 Date: 2006
Kirkus
This unforgettable debut novel re-imagines the life of Louis Daguerre, one of the early inventors of photography, whose mind unravels from mercury poisoning as he strives to find the love of his youth before the world comes to an end.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction | Biograpical Fiction
Updated 12.7.05 - Forgive Me
Author: Ward, Amanda Eyre
Publisher: Random $ 23.95 ISBN:9780345494467 Date: 2007
Booklist
From the beloved author of How to Be Lost, comes this gripping, ambitious novel about a journalist chasing stories around the world, the photographer she loves and betrays, and the boy whose story begins to eclipse her own.
Updated 5.1.07 - The Shadow Catcher
Author: Wiggins, Marianne
Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 25 ISBN: 9780743265201 Date: 2007
LJ PW Booklist
Following her National Book Award finalist Evidence of Things Unseen, Wiggins turns her literary imagination to the American West, where the life of legendary photographer Edward S. Curtis is the basis for a resonant exploration of history and family, landscape and legacy.
Suggested Reading: All Stars | Photography
Updated 5.3.07
Hotlists
African American Fiction | Christian Fiction
2008 Excel Files: (download - print, sort, etc.)
Crime Fiction | Fiction | African American Fiction | Christian Fiction | Nonfiction Notables
Stars
Fiction: Jan-June | July-Dec Crime Fiction: Jan-June | July-Dec
Speculative Fiction Romance Historical Nonfiction | YA
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