The Westport Library Resource Guides: Sybil's List: May 2018

Sybil Steinberg's New Book Picks

Date: Friday, May 18, 2018 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Location: Suzuki Music School of Westport, 246 Post Rd East, Lower Level (below Webster Bank)

Westporter Sybil Steinberg, contributing editor and former book review section editor for Publishers Weekly, returns with more ideas for your summer reading with her ever-popular talk on the best new reads.

Fiction (In Order of Presentation)

Circe by Madeline Miller
Publication Date: 2018-04-10
This wondrous revisionist version of Homer’s Odyssey is sheer magic-- compellingly readable and full of surprises.
Warlight by Michael Ondaatje
Publication Date: 2018-05-08
Secrets and deceptions, the search for emotional safety and the coincidences of star-crossed lives radiate through this achingly beautiful novel set in post-WW II England.
Transcription by Kate Atkinson
Publication Date: 2018-09-25
During WW II, a naive 18-year-old girl is conscripted into the MI5 espionage agency where she becomes a spy who cannot escape her past.
The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
Publication Date: 2018-05-01
A neglected child in a tough part of San Francisco becomes a young woman who lap-dances in a bar, kills a stalker and is sentenced to life prison.
Improvement by Joan Silber
Publication Date: 2017-11-14
An amazing range of deftly drawn characters in six interrelated stories coalesce into an engrossing novel about chance, fate, and bonds of love.
The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer
Publication Date: 2018-04-03
The characters in this timely novel embody the complex aspects of feminism that can both liberate and ensnare contemporary women.
The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman
Publication Date: 2018-03-20
This is a haunting father/son story embedded in the atmosphere of the contemporary art world.
The Maze at Windermere by Gregory Blake Smith
Publication Date: 2018-01-09
With insights about love, ambition, art, and money, this clever novel is set in Newport, RI from the 1700s to the present day.
The Verdun Affair by Nick Dybek
Publication Date: 2018-06-12
Three characters animate a bittersweet romance as each searches for an American soldier missing in WW I.
Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday
Publication Date: 2018-02-06
In this unconventional novel, a thinly disguised Philip Roth is the lover of a much younger woman. A Muslim-American detained in Heathrow Airport typifies the ways that lives can differ.
Varina by Charles Frazier
Publication Date: 2018-04-03
The wife of Jefferson Davis, who was president of the Confederacy during the Civil War, is the eponymous heroine.
Alternate Side by Anna Quindlen
Publication Date: 2018-03-20
Set in Manhattan, Quindlen’s perceptive novel pictures the stages of a long marriage and the changes that life can bring.
Brass by Xhenet Aliu
Publication Date: 2018-01-23
The heroine of this impressive first novel, set in Waterbury, CT, is the daughter of a Lithuanian mother and a father from Albania, whose secrets haunt her future.
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund
Publication Date: 2017-01-03
Living in an abandoned commune in Minnesota, a lonely adolescent girl becomes emotionally involved with a young mother and her four-year-old son.
The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
Publication Date: 2018-01-09
In the 1960s, a psychic tells four siblings growing up in New York City’s lower East side the date each of them will die. Will they?
The Only Story by Julian Barnes
Publication Date: 2018-04-17
The narrator of novel says that the only story worth telling is a love story. His story is unusual and heartbreaking.
The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst
Publication Date: 2018-03-13
A superbly written novel that explores the social attitudes towards homosexuality in England during the last 10 decades.
Winter by Ali Smith
Publication Date: 2018-01-09
The hypocrisy of the British government post-Brexit, the threat of nuclear annihilation, the ways that art and nature intersect, and the difficulty of family relationships infuse this potent novel.

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Fiction Continued (In Order of Presentation)

A State of Freedom by Neel Mukherjee
Publication Date: 2018-01-02
This is a scalding picture of the gap between wealthy city dwellers and abjectly poor domestic servants and village dwellers in India.
Census by Jesse Ball
Publication Date: 2018-03-06
A father with a terminal illness takes a trip with his beloved Down syndrome son and prepares him for the future.
Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell
Publication Date: 2013-06-18
An Anglo Irish family faces a crisis in a warm hearted story that catches each character on the cusp of life-change.
The Magnificent Esme Wells by Adrienne Sharp
Publication Date: 2018-04-10
The daughter of a would-be film star and a conman grows up in Hollywood and Las Vegas in the crime-ridden early 1940s.
Red Clocks by Leni Zumas
Publication Date: 2018-01-16
In the near future, Congress passes new laws prohibiting abortion, banning in vitro fertilization and adoption by a single parent.
Prussian Blue by Philip Kerr
Publication Date: 2017-04-04
Kerr’s detective Bernie Gunther is called to Berchtesgaden as Hitler prepares for war, in this brilliant literary thriller.
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
Publication Date: 2018-02-06
A writer who mourns the suicide of her lifelong friend must adopt his dog, a huge Great Dane, to live in her tiny apartment.
Still Life with Monkey by Katharine Weber
Publication Date: 2018-09-04
Rendered a paraplegic after a car accident, a New Haven architect acquires an aide in the form of a highly intelligent chimpanzee.
The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar
Publication Date: 2018-09-11
Brilliantly realized portrait of 18th century London in which two mermaids and a bevy of prostitutes change the life of a prosperous merchant.

Nonfiction

Grant by Ron Chernow
Publication Date: 2017-10-10
A blockbuster at 937 pages, this is a fascinating must-read, a character study of a misunderstood hero of American history.
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
Publication Date: 2015-02-10
This readable, fascinating, brief history of humankind traces the development of our species from anthropological sources.
Revolution Song by Russell Shorto
Publication Date: 2017-11-07
Epic in scope but intimate in its details, the book focuses on the lives of six people who were involved in the American Revolution.
Code Girls by Liza Mundy
Publication Date: 2017-10-10
A fascinating piece of forgotten history about the American women who worked as code breakers in World War II.
The Woman's Hour by Elaine Weiss
Publication Date: 2018-03-06
It took seven decades for the women’s suffrage movement to win the ratification. An eye-opening view of the crisis in 1920.
Educated by Tara Westover
Publication Date: 2018-02-20
The author fled a Mormon community and a rabidly religious, paranoiac, fanatic father obsessed with the end of the world.
I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O'Farrell
Publication Date: 2018-02-06
Subtitled “17 Brushes with Death,” this a mesmerizing chronicle of the author’s experiences.
Conan Doyle for the Defense by Margalit Fox
The creator of Sherlock Holmes used his skills to exonerate a man wrongly convicted of murder.
Famous Father Girl by Jamie Bernstein
Publication Date: 2018-06-12
Leonard Bernstein and his family lived for many summers in a large house in Fairfield. Famous people visited. This is his daughter’s tell-all.