6 Books to Watch for in August 2010

By Jennifer Vanderbes
352 pages; Scribner

Family conflict, fascinating social commentary, and a riveting plot converge in Jennifer Vanderbes' stunning Strangers at the Feast, a thriller that also raises large and haunting questions about the meaning of guilt, innocence, and justice...Read more

By Beverly Jensen
320 pages; Viking

The Cookbook Collector
By Allegra Goodman
416 pages; Random House

No matter the setting—impoverished rural Canada in the early 20th century or 1990s Bay Area—the bond between sisters is always an odd and special one. So suggest both Beverly Jensen's posthumous The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay and Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector...Read more

By Amy Boesky
320 pages; Gotham

"This story is about what it's been like for one family—mine—to live with risk," says Amy Boesky in What We Have, her memoir about being a previvor, one of the increasing number of women with cancer-ridden family histories who find themselves deciding whether to have genetic testing or preventive surgery...Read more

By Kate Racculia
368 pages; Henry Holt

When his wife, Amy, accidentally electrocutes herself, Arthur Rook realizes he doesn't know whether she "wanted to rest in the ground or flame out into a million tiny particles." What else, he wonders, didn't he know about her? That question drives Kate Racculia's engaging novel, This Must Be the Place, in which a cryptic message on a never-sent postcard leads Arthur to his late wife's hometown in rural upstate New York...Read more

By Gary Shteyngart
352 pages; Random House

Do we ever truly know each other? Is intimacy possible in a culture where every interaction can be tracked and quantified by constantly updated data streams? These are the questions at the heart of Gary Shteyngart's postapocalyptic black comedy, Super Sad True Love Story. Taking place a few decades in the future, in an America where the war on terror has led to financial and ethical bankruptcy...Read more

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