Her Fearful Symmetry, by Audrey Niffenegger [$15.00 Paper] – Julia and Valentina Poole are twenty-year-old sisters with an intense attachment to each other. One morning the mailman delivers a thick envelope to their house in the suburbs of Chicago. Their English aunt Elspeth Noblin has died of cancer and left them her London apartment. There are two conditions for this inheritance: that they live in the flat for a year before they sell it and that their parents not enter it. Julia and Valentina are twins. So were the girls' aunt Elspeth and their mother, Edie. The girls move to Elspeth's flat, which borders the vast Highgate Cemetery, where Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Stella Gibbons, and other luminaries are buried. Julia and Valentina become involved with their living neighbors: Martin, a composer of crossword puzzles who suffers from crippling OCD, and Robert, Elspeth's elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. They also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including -- perhaps -- their aunt.
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee [$15.99 paper] – Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep South — and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatred. One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty million copies worldwide, served as the basis of an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father — a crusading local lawyer — risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.
The Bird Catcher, by Laura Jacobs [$15.00 hardcover] – Margret, a thirty-one-year-old artist, and Charles, a professor, are a happily married couple who enjoy a lifelong hobby of bird watching against the landscape of Central Park, the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue, an endless round of gallery openings and weekends at their Chesapeake Bay home. Margret's well-ordered Manhattan life, however, suffers a violent upheaval that pushes her beyond the boundaries of her hobby and she begins illegally collecting the bodies of dead birds to create elaborate dioramas. Overnight, she becomes an art world sensation and just as suddenly has fame ripped from her. In The Bird Catcher, Laura Jacobs gives us a novel with a quietly explosive soul about women in New York.
