7 Books to Watch for in March 2010
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Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
By Helen Simonson
368 pages; Random House The shy romance between a retired British officer and a local Pakistani shopkeeper is the main plotline of Helen Simonson's
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. But this delightful debut novel is as much a gently p.c. look at the British class system tucked inside a sly comedy of manners as it is a love story...
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Making Toast
By Roger Rosenblatt
176 pages; Ecco Comparing heartbreaks is a zero-sum game. Between the loss of a child and the childhood loss of a parent, there is no determining which hurts more. But as veteran journalist and essayist Roger Rosenblatt reveals in
Making Toast, a deeply affecting and unsparing memoir of moving in with his three grandchildren after his daughter's sudden death, sharing grief can double the chance of survival...
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How to Escape from a Leper Colony
By Tiphanie Yanique
240 pages; Graywolf To wrap your mind around life on an island, you need to understand insularity, restlessness, the way it feels to have a fluid sense of identity. All this and more is what you get from Tiphanie Yanique's haunting and vibrant debut fiction collection,
How to Escape from a Leper Colony. Set in the Caribbean—in places with lilting names like Dominica, Tortola, Gasparee—the stories and novella are told in disparate voices...
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Someone Will Be with You Shortly: Notes from a Perfectly Imperfect Life
By Lisa Kogan
208 pages; HarperStudio Fans of Lisa Kogan's column in this very magazine will revel in the characteristic deadpan wit on display in her first book,
Someone Will Be with You Shortly. Like the bit of banter you don't think of until ten minutes after the dinner party has broken up...
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The Surrendered
By Chang-rae Lee
480 pages; Riverhead It might not sound like a fun read—467 pages of graphic descriptions of the physical and emotional cruelties inflicted by war—yet Chang-rae Lee's
The Surrendered, an exploration of the corrosiveness of survivor guilt, is impossible to put down...
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The Hole We're In
By Gabrielle Zevin
288 pages; Black Cat What kind of mother, facing a cash crunch, steals her son's identity and maxes out his credit card? In the provocative novel
The Hole We're In, Georgia Pomeroy is a stealth monster, masquerading (even to herself) as a devoted, middle-American mom...
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I'm Sorry You Feel That Way
The Astonishing but True Story of a Daughter, Sister, Slut, Wife, Mother, and Friend to Man and Dog
By Diana Joseph
224 pages; Amy Einhorn Diana Joseph is one scrappy, wisecracking memoirist whose brazen sexuality, golden heart, and hard-boiled sense of humor will have readers snorting and shaking their heads. In
I'm Sorry You Feel That Way, Joseph pulls no punches in describing her roughneck upbringing, disastrous relationships, and difficulties raising her son as a single mom...
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From the
March 2010 issue of
O, The Oprah Magazine
