The Book Show on WAMC

  Ann Hood’s 13th novel is The Obituary Writer.

The story goes back and forth in time between 1919 San Francisco, when obituary writer Vivien Lowe searches for the man she lost in the Great Earthquake of 1906, and 1961 Washington, DC, when Claire, a young wife and mother, struggles to decide whether to follow the man she loves or stay in her secure marriage.

    An extraordinary literary event, All That Is, is a major new novel by the PEN/Faulkner winner and acclaimed master, James Salter.

It is a sweeping, seductive, deeply moving story set in the years after World War II.

    Cheryl Strayed is the author of #1 New York Times bestseller Wild, her essay collection, Tiny Beautiful Things, and the novel Torch.

Wild was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as her first selection for Oprah's Book Club 2.0. It tells Cheryl’s story of hitting the Pacific Crest Trail at age 22, following the death of her mother.

    Manil Suri's new novel, The City of Devi, opens with India and Pakistan on the verge of nuclear war. India is roiled by factional violence between Hindus and Muslims. Bombers strafe citizens, vigilantes settle scores, and terrorists set off dirty bombs around the country as Mumbai boils over with fear and fury. But, at its heart, it is a love story.

  Novelist Meg Wolitzer has written several popular novels including, The Wife, The Ten-Year Nap, and The Uncoupling. Her new novel is an exploration of friendship, coming-of-age, talent and success. The Interestings follows six artistic friends who meet as teenagers one pivotal summer at a camp called Spirit-in-the-Woods.

    Elizabeth Graver’s new novel, The End of the Point , is set in a summer community on Buzzard’s Bay from 1942 to 1999 and traces one family’s journey through the latter half of the 20th Century.

It examines the legacy of family and place and explores what we’re born into and what we pass down.

    In Tara Conklin's debut novel, The House Girl: A Novel, two remarkable women, separated by more than a century, live lives that unexpectedly intertwine.

2004: Lina Sparrow is an ambitious young lawyer working on a historic class-action lawsuit seeking reparations for the descendants of American slaves.

1852: Josephine is a seventeen-year-old house slave who tends to the mistress of a Virginia tobacco farm—an aspiring artist named Lu Anne Bell.

    Jodi Picoult is the author of a string of best-selling novels with heavy themes ripped from the headlines.

Her latest book is The Storyteller, which is about a young woman who finds herself wrestling with a moral dilemma after she befriends an elderly man at a grief group who turns out to have been a Nazi war criminal.

  Award-winning novelist and poet, Stephen Dobyns, returns to the thriller genre after a fifteen-year hiatus with The Burn Palace.

The novel is a blend of suspense, supernatural underpinnings and sexual shenanigans set in a provincial New England town. Dobyns creates an insular community sideswiped by madness when a series of odd, violent crimes occur in rapid succession.

    In his early 70s, author Daniel Klein came to terms with aging. Klein returned to the Greek village and philosophers he has visited for decades to discover authentic ways of aging.

In Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life , he concludes that old age is a privilege to be savored, rather than a disease to be cured or a condition to be denied.