Le Carre Stages Coup, Albom's Froth at Starbucks: New Novels

Le Carre Stages Coup, Albom's Froth at Starbucks: New Novels

By Edward Nawotka

Sept. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Books by some big names in fiction head into stores this month, including John le Carre, Alice McDermott, Cormac McCarthy, Claire Messud, Sebastian Faulks, Mark Haddon, Mark Z. Danielewski, Bruce Wagner and Ward Just. Here are some of the month's highlights.

``The Mission Song'' by John le Carre (Little, Brown). The author's 20th novel returns to Africa, the setting of ``The Constant Gardener,'' and the Congo, where a mixed-race Congolese interpreter married to a famous British tabloid journalist becomes embroiled in a possible coup.

``The Road'' by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf). McCarthy channels Samuel Beckett in this story of a father and son who traverse a blasted landscape of post-apocalyptic America in search of the sea. They dodge gangs of murderous thugs and scavenge for food, while the father reminisces about a civilization the son has never known.

``World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War'' by Max Brooks (Crown). Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio got into a bidding war over the film rights to this entertaining, tongue-in- cheek chronicle -- by the son of Mel Brooks -- of the decimation of the world by a plague of zombies.

``The Emperor's Children'' by Claire Messud (Knopf). This group portrait shows a trio of spoiled, over-educated, 30-year- old New Yorkers living in the orbit of their friend's famous father -- a celebrated journalist -- whose reputation is threatened when a malicious Australian magazine publisher plans to take him down.

``Human Traces'' by Sebastian Faulks (Random House). The British master of high-toned historical fiction depicts the Victorian-era birth of psychiatry through a pair of globe- trotting doctors who travel from academe to insane asylums and from Gold Rush California to unexplored regions of Africa.

``A Spot of Bother'' by Mark Haddon (Doubleday). Haddon's ``The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,'' about an autistic boy, was a surprise hit. His new novel, an English social comedy, delivers more dysfunction in the form of a retired family patriarch who is mistakenly convinced he's dying of cancer and ignores his wife and adult children's pleas for attention.

``After This'' by Alice McDermott (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The author of ``Charming Billy,'' which won a National Book Award, tells of Irish-Catholic Long Islanders Mary and John Keane as they contend with the changing social mores of post-WWII America and grapple with their four children in the cultural ferment of the Vietnam War era.

``When Madeline Was Young'' by Jane Hamilton (Doubleday). The Oprah-blessed author returns with another affecting family saga, in which a young husband copes with caring for his brain- damaged first wife while trying to raise two children with his second.

``For One More Day'' by Mitch Albom (Hyperion). The Detroit sportswriter-turned-sensitive-scribe agreed to sell this novel in Starbucks, where he hopes coffee addicts will imbibe the tall, frothy tale of a drunk getting a second chance to bond with his dead mother as she haunts his childhood home.

``Paint It Black'' by Janet Fitch (Little, Brown). Another Oprah anointee, Fitch took seven years to write this doleful novel about a druggy Los Angeles punk rocker whose artist boyfriend kills himself and then finds her life intertwined with that of the man's mother, a world-class concert pianist with her own issues.

``Only Revolutions'' by Mark Z. Danielewski (Pantheon). The fall's most inventive novel, Danielewski's typographically tricky tale -- half the book is printed upside-down -- portrays a pair of lovers on a time-traveling road trip across America in which they literally try to outrun history in a progression of ever- faster autos.

``Memorial'' by Bruce Wagner (Simon & Schuster). This latest outing from a maestro of the Hollywood satire tells of a shattered Angelino family that includes an architect daughter designing a memorial to the victims of the 2004 Asian tsunami, a mother lured into a wicked confidence scheme and a father who has sued the LAPD for shooting his dog.

``Forgetfulness'' by Ward Just (Houghton Mifflin). In this elegant thriller, a retired CIA spy who has turned to portrait painting realizes he can't outrun his past when his wife is killed by Moroccan terrorists as payback for an earlier job and he's forced to seek revenge.

``The Last Town on Earth'' by Thomas Mullen (Random House). Part history, part horror, this debut novel describes the tumult that ensues in the utopian logging community of Commonwealth, Washington, after it enacts a self-imposed quarantine during the 1918 influenza pandemic and a sick soldier is shot dead at the town's gates.

``The Book of Fate'' by Brad Meltzer (Warner). ``The Da Vinci Code'' meets ``The West Wing'' and the Masons in Meltzer's latest, which requires the hero, a Washington politico, to decipher a 200-year-old code written by Thomas Jefferson to solve the mystery of what really happened during a failed presidential assassination eight years earlier.

``The Meaning of Night'' by Michael Cox (Norton). A Victorian-era page-turner starring an ambitious, blood-thirsty bibliophile, Edward Glyver, who murders an anonymous ``red-haired man'' as prelude to dispatching his despised literary rival, a man who threatens to inherit wealth intended for Glyver. Unfortunately, an unseen witness has complicated Glyver's plans and must be confronted first.

``The Interpretation of Murder'' by Jed Rubenfeld (Holt). In the latest worthwhile mystery to feature historical heroes, the year is 1909 and Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung are enlisted to assist in the investigation of the torture and murder of a young Manhattan heiress. Only the master himself has the skills to coax the clues from the memory of one hysterical near-victim and help catch the culprit.

``The Thirteenth Tale'' by Diane Setterfield (Atria). In this sprawling modern gothic tale, intentionally echoing the Bronte sisters, a young author is summoned to a creepy mansion to write the death-bed biography of a world-famous writer and discovers her own secret history in the process.

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)