Let the Regionals Roll: Regional Trade Shows Fall 2012

Sherman Alexie
Blasphemy (Grove Atlantic, Oct.)
His latest collection of stories about life among Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest brings together 15 tales from his 20-year career and 15 new ones.
PNBA

Jami Attenberg
The Middlesteins (Hachette, Oct.)
The Middlesteins enjoy a happy marriage, until Edie’s obsession with food and her resulting obesity drive away Richard. In a starred review, PW praised this as “a wonderfully messy and layered family portrait.”
Heartland, NAIBA, NEIBA

C. J. Box
Breaking Point (Putnam, Mar. 2013)
The latest Joe Pickett thriller involves a manhunt for a seemingly hard-working local business owner who runs away.
PNBA

Susannah Cahalan
Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness (Free Press, Nov.)
A New York Post reporter chronicles her month-long stay in a psychiatric ward in a case of “demonic possession.”
NAIBA, NEIBA

Christopher Castellani
All This Talk of Love (Algonquin, Feb. 2013)
The head instructor at Boston’s nonprofit creative writing center, Grub Street, writes about an Italian immigrant to America who tries to forget the family she left behind 50 years earlier.
NAIBA, NEIBA

Justin Cronin
The Twelve (Book Two of The Passage Trilogy) (Random House, Oct.)
This is the only regional appearance for Cronin in conjunction with the publication of his second literary thriller set in a post-apocalyptic world.
Heartland

Jared Diamond
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (Viking, Jan. 2013)
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel examines traditional societies and discovers that their solutions to universal human problems have much to teach us.
NCIBA

Jonathan Evison
Revised Fundamentals of
Caregiving (Algonquin, Sept.)
From the author of West of Here comes a novel about an unconventional road trip that blurs the boundaries between patient and caregiver.
PNBA, MPIBA

Lisa Genova
Love Anthony (S&S/Gallery, Sept.)
The author of Still Alice tackles autism in this tale of a woman who tries to find meaning in the short life and death of her autistic son.
MPIBA, NEIBA

Peter Geye
Lighthouse Road (Unbridled, Oct.)
In his sophomore novel after Safe from the Sea, Geye writes about a dysfunctional family shaped by the harsh landscape surrounding them.
Heartland, SIBA, PNBA

Kent Haruf
Benediction (Knopf, Mar. 2013)
After a nine-year hiatus, Haruf continues the story of life in the fictional town of Holt, in eastern Colorado.
MPIBA

Rhoda Janzen
Does This Church Make Me Look Fat? A Mennonite Finds Faith, Meets Mr. Right, and Solves Her Lady Problems (Grand Central, Oct.)
The author of the surprise seller Mennonite in a Little Black Dress follows with another memoir about love and Mennonitism.
SIBA, MPIBA

Dennis Lehane
Live by Night (HarperCollins/Wm. Morrow, Oct.)
In this tale of psychological suspense set during the Prohibition era, a gangster rises from a petty thief in Boston to become the Gulf Coast’s most successful rum runner.
NEIBA

Anthony Marra
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (Random House, May 2013)
In this debut novel set in Chechnya, an eight-year-old girl flees with her neighbor to a bombed-out hospital with one remaining doctor.
MPIBA

J. R. Moehringer
Sutton (Hyperion)
From the author of The Tender Bar comes a fictionalized biography Willie Sutton, who famously said that he robbed banks “because that’s where the money is.”
MPIBA

Whitney Otto
Eight Girls Taking Pictures (Scribner, Nov.)
The author of How to Make an American Quilt stitches together vignettes of eight famous 20th-century female photographers into a sweeping novel.
NCIBA

Christina Schwarz
The Edge of the Earth (Atria, April 2013)
A young woman moves with her husband to an isolated lighthouse, where she discovers a life-changing secret. Schwarz’s debut novel, Drowning Ruth, was an Oprah pick in 2000.
Heartland, NCIBA

Barbara A. Shapiro
The Art Forger (Algonquin, Oct.)
Love, Degas, forgery, and the still unsolved 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist in Boston come together in this novel.
SIBA, NEIBA, MPIBA

Bookseller/Authors

Louise Erdrich
The Round House (HarperCollins, Oct.)
The owner of Birchbark Books in Minneapolis continues the trilogy she began with The Plague of Doves, the story of an Objibwe woman who is ruthlessly attacked one summer morning in 1988. In this sequel, a boy seeks justice in the wake of a crime that has transformed his family.
Heartland

Cliff Graubart
The Curious Vision of Sammy Levitt and Other Stories (Mercer University Press, Oct.)
In this collection of short stories, the owner of the Old New York Book Shop, a used bookstore in Atlanta, writes about the American Jewish experience.
SIBA

Eowyn Ivey
The Snow Child (Back Bay, Nov.)
The hardcover of this fairy tale for adults, the debut novel of a bookseller at Fireside Books in Palmer, Alaska, was one of the big books at Winter Institute.
PNBA

Maureen Lee
Sissieretta Jones (University of South Carolina Press, May)
The owner of Lee’s Book Attic, a used bookstore in Columbia, S.C., offers a definitive biography of the late-19th, early 20th-century African-American opera singer, dubbed “The Black Patti” for her resemblance to singer Adelina Patti.
SIBA

Emma Straub
Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures (Riverhead, Sept.)
In her highly anticipated debut novel, the short story writer and bookseller at BookCourt in Brooklyn, N.Y., tells the story of a Midwestern girl in 1920s Michigan, who ends up fleeing her home for Los Angeles, where she becomes an Academy Award-winning actress.
Heartland, NAIBA

Wendy Welch
The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap
(St. Martin’s Press. Oct.)
This memoir describes how a couple Welch and her husband left their urban lives to move to rural Virginia, where they opened Tales of the Lonesome Pine Bookstore in Big Stone Gap, a depressed Appalachian coal town.
SIBA

Children’s Authors at the Shows: Regional Trade Shows Fall 2012