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Starred Reviews

All Stars of 1998

August 19, 2008

Fiction titles which received three or more starred reviews from major review sources.

Childhood
Author: Alexis, Andre
Publisher: Henry Holt List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0805059814
Kirkus LJ PW
In a stirring meditation on the elusiveness of the past and humanity's yearning for emotional closure, Thomas MacMillan, a Canadian with ties to Trinidad, pieces together - from memory and from related stories - the early years of his life.
Cavedweller
Author: Allison, Dorothy
Publisher: Dutton List Price: $24.95 ISBN: 0525941673
PW Kirkus Booklist LJ
NYTBR Notable List
From the bestselling author of Bastard Out of Carolina comes a novel of the lives of four women and redemption of the human heart. Ten years ago, Delia Byrd left her home in Georgia for Los Angeles, leaving behind the husband who abused her and abandoning her two daughters, one an infant. Now, as she heads back to Georgia to make a deal with the man to whom she has paid such a high price, Delia's past uncoils into the present with a ferocity that will test her very being.
The Voyage of the Narwhal
Author: Barrett, Andrea
Publisher: W.W. Norton List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 039304632x
PW Kirkus LJ
A major novel by the author of Ship Fever, winner of the 1996 National Book Award for fiction. Part adventure, part love story, this unforgettable novel captures a crucial moment in the history of exploration. Combining fact and fiction, the story focuses on Erasmus Darwin Wells, a 19th-century scholar/naturalist and his expedition to search for an open polar sea.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Sea Stories
The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty
Author: Barry, Sebastian
Publisher: Viking List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0670878286
PW LJ Kirkus Booklist
An acclaimed playwrights novel - the heartbreaking epic of a fugitive everyman. When a Irish romantic innocent signs up to fight with the British in World War I, he is branded a traitor by his countrymen - and the IRA orders his assassination to be carried out by a childhood friend.
Suggested Reading:Historical Fiction Stars
Where the Sea Used To Be
Author: Bass, Rick
Publisher: Houghton List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0395770157
LJ PW Kirkus
LJ Best First Novel
This first full-length novel by the author of the Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness and the Book of Yaak tells the story of a struggle between a father and daughter for the souls of two men - his proteges, her lovers.
Riven Rock
Author: Boyle, T. Coraghessan
Publisher: Viking List Price: $24.95 ISBN: 0670878812
Booklist Kirkus LJ
NYTBR Notable List
In his most fully realized and compassionate novel to date, T.C. Boyle transforms two characters straight out of history into rich, mythic creations whose tortured love and epic story is intimate enough to break our hearts. Wed to Stanley McCormick, a schizophrenic sexual maniac, Katherine Dexter struggles to cure him while he is locked up in his Santa Barbara mansion and forbidden the mere sight of a woman- above all, his wife.
Jack Maggs
Author: Carey, Peter
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0679440089
PW Booklist LJ
NYTBR Notable List. LJ Best Books, PW Best Books
From the prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda comes a novel of Dickensian London - filled with mystery, science, and passion. After he is deported to Australia for stealing, Jack Maggs returns to London, under threat of execution, where he inveigles his way into a handsome household and is quickly embroiled in various emotional entanglements.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
The Hours
Author: Cunningham, Michael
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 0374172897
PW Kirkus Booklist
The author of At Home at the End of the World and Flesh and Blood draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
The Farming of Bones
Author: Danticat, Edwidge
Publisher: Soho List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 1569471266
PW LJ Booklist
From the acclaimed author of Krik? Krak!. 1937: On the Dominican side of the Haiti border, Amabelle, a maid to the young wife of an army colonel falls in love with sugarcane cutter Sebastian. She longs to become his wife and walk into their future. Instead, terror enfolds them. But the story does not end here: it begins.
Eccentric Neighborhoods
Author: Ferre, Rosario
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0374146381
PW Kirkus LJ
This brilliantly imagined memoir by the author of The House on the Lagoon tells the story of Elvira Vernet, a young woman who must come to terms with her dead mother - before she can understand her father, a man caught up in the event as Puerto Rico is transformed into a spearhead of the Caribbean.
Bridget Jones's Diary
Author: Fielding, Helen
Publisher: Viking List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0670880728
PW Kirkus Booklist
LJ Best First Novel, Booklist Notable First Novel, NYTBR Notable List
This laugh-out-loud chronicle charts a year in the life of Bridget Jones, a single thirty-something on a permanent doomed quest for self-improvement. Caught between her Singleton friends, who are all convinced they will end up dying alone and found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian, and the Smug Marrieds, whose dinner parties offer ever new opportunities for humiliation, Bridget struggles to keep her life on an even keel (or at least afloat). - From the Advance Uncorrected Proofs.
Read-alike suggestions: The Adrian Mole Diaries by Sue Townsend and Stately Pursuits by Katie Fforde. More B.J. readalikes from FictionL
Suggested Reading: Chicklit Stars
The House Gun
Author: Gordimer, Nadine
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Price: $ ISBN:
Booklist PW LJ
NYTBR Notable List
A house gun, like a house cat: a fact of ordinary life, today. How else can you defend yourself against losing your stereo, TV set, and computer? In this powerful new novel, Nadine Gordimer presents a parable of present violence that is also an affirmation of the will to reconciliation.
Road Home
Author: Harrison, Jim
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0871137240
Booklist LJ Kirkus
The sequel to Harrison's bestselling Dalva, written ten years ago, and a magnificent story of the American West, The Road Home tells the story of a family drenched in suffering and joy, imbued with fierce independence and love, rooted in the Nebraska soil and intertwined with the destiny of whites and Native Americans.
The Fall of the Sparrow
Author: Hellenga, Robert
Publisher: Scribner List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0684850265
PW LJ Kirkus
The critically acclaimed author of The Sixteen Pleasures establishes himself as a major literary talent with his beautifully crafted second novel - the story of a family's struggle to heal itself after the violent death of its oldest daughter. From the Advance Reading Copy.
Oyster
Author: Hospital, Janet Turner
Publisher: Norton List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0393046184
PW Kirkus LJ Booklist
NYTBR Notable List, PW Best Books List
"One of the best female novelists currently writing in English" (The Observer, London) offers a brilliant novel which evokes the holocaust of Waco, but is also about the destructive power of greed, the racism of rural Australia, and the nature of good and evil.
The Poisonwood Bible
Author: Kingsolver, Barbara
Publisher: Harpercollins List Price: $ 27.50 ISBN: 0060175400
PW LJ Booklist Kirkus
In her first novel since Pigs in Heaven, Kingsolver offers a compelling exploration of religion, conscience, imperialist arrogance, and the many paths to redemption. The Poisonwood Bible tells the story of an American Family that travels to the Congo in 1959, a time of tremendous political and social upheaval.
The Fisherman's Son
Author: Koepf, Michael
Publisher: Broadway List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0767902440
LJ Booklist Kirkus
The Fisherman's Son is at once an intimate story of a troubled family and an evocative memorial to the fast-disappearing world of commercial fishermen. From its arresting first paragraphs to its shattering ending, this enthralling tale combines the lyrical storytelling of The English Patient with the muscular excitement of The Perfect Storm. A haunting, lyrical novel that combines bracing adventure and turbulent family drama in an unforgettable tale of the sea. - From the Advance Reading Copy.
Read-alike suggestions: The Storm by Frederick Buecher.
Suggested Reading: Sea Stories
Cubra Libre
Author: Leonard, Elmore
Publisher: Delacorte $ 28.95 ISBN: 0385323832
PW Kirkus LJ
Set in Cuba just before the Spanish-American War, Elmore Leonard's latest novel is filled with high adventure, history, romance, and, of course, nefarious undertakings. Circumstance, nonchalance, and a remarkable streak of bad luck have turned Ben Tyler from cowboy to bank robber to convict, without ever changing his genial disposition. On yet another crooked attempt to return to the straight and narrow, Tyler finds himself in Havana agreeing to complete a series of deals that will completely turn his luck around.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
The Cockfighter
Author: Manley, Frank
Publisher: Coffeehouse List Price: $ 19.95 ISBN: 156689073x
Kirkus PW LJ
In this exquisite debut novel, Manley presents an integral part of the rural American experience where the human spirit, young as it may be, prevails against seemingly overwhelming odds. At the age of 13, Sonny's father, presents him with his own rooster, causing Sonny to make one of the biggest decisions of his young life - one that will change him forever.
Canone Inverso
Author: Maurensig, Paolo
Publisher: Henry Holt List Price: $ 21.95 ISBN: 080505538x
PW LJ Kirkus Booklist
A strangely carved violin that has accompanied two generations of artists throughout Europe mysteriously reappears in an auction in Christie's in present-day London, as imortality, history and an all-consuming passion intertwine in a magical fugue.
Suggested Reading: Music/Fiction
Also - Maurensig's Lunenberg Variations.
Mendel's Dwarf
Author: Mawer, Simon
Publisher: Harmony List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0609601067
PW LJ Booklist Kirkus
NYTBR Notable List
In the tradition of A Prayer for Owen Meany, this riveting , thought-provoking book takes readers into the brave new world of genetic science, as seen through the eyes and heart of a man who knows that his own particular strain of humanity will have no place within it.
Final Vinyl Days and Other Stories
Author: McCorkle, Jill
Publisher: Algonquin List Price: $ 18.95 ISBN: 1565122046
LJ Kirkus PW
NYTBR Notable List
Another extraordinary collection of short stories by the author of "Carolina Moon" and "Crash Diet". "(McCorkle's) characters . . . ring as true as lead crystal".--"The Commercial Appeal" (Memphis).
Enduring Love
Author: McEwan, Ian
Publisher: Doubleday Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0385491123
PW LJ Kirkus
NYTBR Notable List, LJ Best Books, PW Best Books
The bestselling author of The Innocent once again spins a tale of life intruded upon - and discovers profound truths about the nature of love and the power of forgiveness. After he is involved in a rescue effort when a hot-air balloon takes off with a small child trapped in the gondola, Joe Rose finds himself part of a living nightmare of suspicion and obsession - and ultimately and assassination attempt.
Hyssop
Author: McIlvoy, Kevin
Publisher: Northwestern Univ Pr List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0810150859
PW Kirkus Booklist
The friendship of a bishop and a self-proclaimed thief spans over 70 years in this stunning novel full of magic. Hyssop is an inquiry into the nature of religion, faith and belief, and into the power of moral dilemmas embedded in loving friendships and in spiritually rich but materially impoverished lives.
The Ventriloquist's Tale
Author: Melville, Pauline
Publisher: Bloomsbury List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 1582340099
LJ Kirkus Booklist
Winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award, The Ventriloquist's Tale embraces nearly a century large in scope but intimate as a whisper, telling the story of a brother and sister who have a passionate affair at the time of the solar eclipse.
The Knife Thrower
Author: Millhauser, Steven
Publisher: Crown List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0609600702
PW Kirkus Booklist
NYTBR Notable List
"The most innovative, wistful, sexy, and dryly comic American writer of our time" (Washington Post Book World) returns with an eclectic yet unmistakably Millhauser collection of stories, his first book since the publication of his Pulitzer prize-winning novel, Martin Dressler.
Evening
Author: Minot, Susan
Publisher: Knopf List P rice: $ 23 ISBN: 0375400370
PW Booklist Kirkus
Forty years ago, over a single, glorious summer weekend, Ann Grant Lord met and lost the love of her life. Now, in the grip of illness and surrounded by her children, she relives the affair with the clarity and intensity of a fever-dream, moving back in time, to her 25th year, to those three glittering days on the New England coast.
The Magician's Wife
Author: Moore, Brian
Publisher: Dutton Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0525944001
PW LJ Booklist Kirkus
From the bestselling author of The Statement comes an ambitious novel of action, suspense, and twisted complexity. Summoned to the country estate of Napoleon III, the famed illusionist Henri Lambert and his wife, Emmeline, are drawn into an elaborate plot to further the French imperialist drive into North Africa and subdue the rebellious Arab tribes threatening jihad.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
Cereus Blooms at Night
Author: Mootoo, Shani
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0802116337
PW LJ Kirkus Booklist
Set on a fictional Caribbean island in the town of Paradise, Cereus Blooms at Night unveils the mystery surrounding Mala Ramchandin and the tempestuous history of her family. In luminious, sensual prose that "employs myth and magic reminiscent of Isabel Allende" (Out magazine), Mootoo joins diverse storytelling traditions to explore identity, gender, and violence in a celebration of our capacity to love despite cruelity and despair. "A swirling cauldron of cross-generational history filled with violence, romance, aching beauty, and heart-breaking mystery" - Sojourner. From the Advance Proof.
Paradise
Author: Morrison, Toni
Publisher: Random List Price: $25 ISBN: 0679433740
Booklist PW Kirkus LJ
NYTBR Notable List
Morrison's eagerly awaited new novel - her first since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 - is extraordinary for its breathtaking drive, stylistic panache, and enlivening moral gravitas. Spanning the time from the Reconstruction to the 1970's, this powerful work deftly manipulates past, present and future as it reveals the interior lives of the citizens of a fictional, all-black town called Paradise.
Love of a Good Woman: Stories
Author: Munro, Alice
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0375403957
PW LJ Booklist
In eight new stories, a master of the form extends and magnifies her great themes: the vagaries of love, the passion that leads down unexpected paths, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart.
Europa
Author: Parks, Tim
Publisher: Arcade List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 155970446
PW Kirkus LJ Booklist
A finalist for the Booker Prize, this ferociously comic tale of love gone sour is the finest novel to date from the author of the national bestsellers An Italian Education and Italian Neighbors. First serial to The New Yorker.
Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae
Author: Pressfield, Steven
Publisher: Doubleday List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0385492510
PW LJ Kirkus
With an epic vision and a dynamic cast of characters, this literary page-turner, set in 480 B.C. , brings the Homeric tradition into the 21st century with the tale of the historic battle between the Greeks and the two-million-man strong Persian army.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
Freedomland
Author: Price, Richard
Publisher: Broadway List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0767900243
PW LJ Booklist
NYTBR Notable List, Booklist Editors' Choice, PW Best Books List
The bestselling author of Clockers tells his most compelling and emotionally charged story yet, in the tale of an injured woman who claims that a carjacker has kidnapped her son, and the shrewd police officer and ambitious young reporter who smell a hoax.
Barney's Version
Author: Richler, Mordecai
Publisher: Knopf Price: $ 25 ISBN: 067940418x
Booklist PW LJ
NYTBR Notable List
In what is perhaps the most personal and feeling book of Richler's career, Barney Panofsky whose trashy TV compay has made him a small fortune- recalls with nostalgia and pain his young manhood in the Paris of the early 50's, and his lifelong passion for wine, women, and the Montreal Canadiens.
Antartica
Author: Robinson, Kim Stanley
Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0553100637
PW Kirkus LJ
It is a stark and inhospitable place, where the landscape itself poses a challenge to survival; yet its strange, silent beauty has long fascinated scientists and adventurers. Now Antartica faces an uncertain future. The international treaty that protects the continent is about to dissolve, clearing the way for Antartica's resources to be plundered, its eerie beauty to be savaged. As politicians and huge corporations move to determine its fate from half a world away, radical environmentalists carry out a covert campaign of sabatoge to reclaim the land from those who would destroy it for profit. The winner of this critical battle will set the future for this last great wilderness... From the Advance Reading Copy.
Lady Moses
Author: Roy, Lucinda
Publisher: Harper Flamingo List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 006018244x
PW LJ Booklist
LJ Best First Novel
One of today's most exciting African-American literary voices makes her fiction debut in this captivating novel. The daughter of a black African writer and a white British actress, Jacinta Moses encounters prejudice all her life. But is only when her own daughter, Lady is born with a physical disability that Jacinta is able to rise above her pain and find true happiness.
Reservation Road
Author: Schwartz, John Burnham
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0375402632
PW Kirkus Booklist
A compulsively readable novel of feeling and suspense about two men and their families, and the hit-and-run death of a young boy. "A nonstop read about people locked in a terrible embrace" (Ward Just), Reservation Road is powerful, wrenching, impossible to put down.
Read-alike suggestions: The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks and Before and After by Rosellen Brown.
The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton
Author: Smiley, Jane
Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 26 ISBN: 0679450742
PW Booklist LJ
NYTBR Notable List, PW Best Books List
Four years after her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres, and two years after her hilarious novel of Academe, Moo, the brilliantly protean Jane Smiley once again demonstrates the variety and range of her talent. In her new books Smiley gives readers the wonderfully observed memoirs of a woman who marries an abolitionist from New England and with him settles in Kansas in the fateful year of 1855 to help ensure that the territory will enter the Union as a free state.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
Damascus Gate
Author: Stone, Robert
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin List Price: $ 26 ISBN: 0395665698
PW Booklist LJ
National Book Award Finalist, NYTBR Notable List, Booklist Editors' Choice, PW Best Books List
Set in Jerusalem, where violence, ecstasy, heresy, and salvation are all to be found, the latest novel by the author of Outerbridge Reach is simultaneously the story of a man's search for truth - or some version of it - and the story of a city where sanity is casually traded for faith. Christopher Lucas's investigation of religious lunatics who have fallen victim to "Jerusalem Syndrome" leads him to a series of colorful characters - and places him at the center of the world's next flashpoint.
Karoo
Author: Tesich, Steve
Publisher: Harcourt Brace List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0151002959
PW Kirkus LJ
NYTBR Notable List
Saul Karoo is a successful Hollywood script doctor, a fixer of flawed film. The unnecessary scenes that he has effortlessly cut form other people's screenplays seems to threaten his own life. But Karoo is the ultimate fixer and must find an emotional and intellectual solution to the problems of his own life.
Suggested Reading: Hollywood & Film Stars
The Way I Found Her
Author: Tremain, Rose
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 0374286663
PW LJ Kirkus Booklist
NYTBR Notable List, PW Best Books List
A 13-year-old boy, spending the summer in Paris while his mother translates the latest medieval romance by an exotic Russian emigre novelist, finds himself falling victim to the enigmatic lady's charms.
Two Cities
Author: Wideman, Edgar
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin List Price: $24 ISBN: 0395857309
PW Kirkus LJ
As Kassima mourns the loss of her husband and sons, victims of Philadephia's violent streets, she allows no on to get close to her until she meets gentle Robert Jones.

More All Stars Lists

2008

Hotlists

Fiction | Zoho DB

Crime Fiction | Zoho DB

Nonfiction Notables

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

Summer Reading

2009

2009 Hotlists

Fiction - excel file more coming soon...

Crime Fiction - excel file more coming soon...

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