Community Joint Ventures - Top 10 Best Selling Books This Week (Fiction)
HI gang, Rick here from Community Joint Ventures with a new feature we are going to do each week, the Top 10 Best Selling Books of the Week.
FICTION
“Building a remarkable degree of suspense…Grisham delivers his savviest book in years. His extended vacation from hard–hitting fiction is over.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“A novel that could become its own era–defining classic. John Grisham holds up that same mirror to our age as Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities.”—The Boston Globe
“Chilling and timeless.”—The Washington Post
“An intricately detailed, involving story…the ending may surprise you.”—People
“Stirring popular fiction that doubles as an important public–service announcement.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Packs a wallop…The timing, in the midst of all the presidential primaries, makes it all the more compelling.”–USA Today
“Fascinating…filled with deadly accurate characterizations by and author who knows both the law and politics from the inside.”–Los Angeles Times
“A clever story and thoughtful plot…Grisham confronts in stark relief the dangers of electing judges in an era of big–money politics.”—Seattle Times–Post Intelligencer
1. The Appeal, John Grisham.
2. World Without End, Ken Follett.
Ken Follett has 90 million readers worldwide. The Pillars of the Earth is his bestselling book of all time. Now, eighteen years after the publication of The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett has written the most-anticipated sequel of the year, World Without End.
Eighteen years after Pillars of the Earth weighed in with almost 1,000 pages of juicy historical fiction about the construction of a 12th-century cathedral in Kingsbridge, England, bestseller Follett returns to 14th-century Kingsbridge with an equally weighty tome that deftly braids the fate of several of the offspring of Pillars’ families with such momentous events of the era as the Black Death and the wars with France. 2. World Without End, Ken Follett.
3. People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks.
One of the earliest Jewish religious volumes to be illuminated with images, the Sarajevo Haggadah survived centuries of purges and wars thanks to people of all faiths who risked their lives to safeguard it. Geraldine Brooks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March, has turned the intriguing but sparely detailed history of this precious volume into an emotionally rich, thrilling fictionalization that retraces its turbulent journey.
In the hands of Hanna Heath, an impassioned rare-book expert restoring the manuscript in 1996 Sarajevo, it yields clues to its guardians and whereabouts: an insect wing, a wine stain, salt crystals, and a white hair. While readers experience crucial moments in the book’s history through a series of fascinating, fleshed-out short stories, Hanna pursues its secrets scientifically, and finds that some interests will still risk everything in the name of protecting this treasure. A complex love story, thrilling mystery, vivid history lesson, and celebration of the enduring power of ideas, People of the Book will surely be hailed as one of the best of 2008. 3. People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks.
4. A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini.
It’s difficult to imagine a harder first act to follow than The Kite Runner: a debut novel by an unknown writer about a country many readers knew little about that has gone on to have over four million copies in print worldwide. But when preview copies of Khaled Hosseini’s second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, started circulating at Amazon.com, readers reacted with a unanimous enthusiasm that few of us could remember seeing before. As special as The Kite Runner was, those readers said, A Thousand Splendid Suns is more so, bringing Hosseini’s compassionate storytelling and his sense of personal and national tragedy to a tale of two women that is weighted equally with despair and grave hope.
We wanted to spread the word on the book as widely, and as soon, as we could. See below for an exclusive excerpt from A Thousand Splendid Suns and early reviews of the book from some of our top customer reviewers.–The Editors
4. A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini.
5. Late Nights on Air, Elizabeth Hay.
It’s 1975 when beautiful Dido Paris arrives at the radio station in Yellowknife, a frontier town in the Canadian north. Her enchanting voice disarms hard-bitten broadcaster Harry Boyd and electrifies the station, setting into motion rivalries both professional and sexual. As the drama at the station unfolds, a proposed gas pipeline threatens to rip open the land, inspiring many people to find their voices for the first time.
This is the moment before television conquers the north’s attention, when the future of the Arctic hangs in the balance. After the snow melts, four members of the radio station take a long canoe trip into the Barrens, a mysterious landscape of lingering ice and 24-hour light. The unexpected turns lethal — is it too late for Dido and Harry? Stark, witty, and dynamically charged, this dazzling tale embodies the power of a place and of the human voice to breed love and haunt the memory.
This is a tremendous book, a moving invocation of the North and of the less-visited reaches of love. It gathers so much momentum that by mid-book you can no more stop reading than stop breathing.
5. Late Nights on Air, Elizabeth Hay.
6. Before Green Gables, Budge Wilson
A must-read for generations of book lovers. This remarkable, and heart-warming prequel to the classic Anne of Green Gables was specially authorized by L.M. Montgomery’s heirs to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of the original novel.
Before Green Gables is the story of Anne Shirley’s life before her arrival at Green Gables-a heartwarming tale of a precocious child whose lively imagination and relentless spirit help her to overcome difficult circumstances and of a young girl’s ability to love, learn, and above all, dream.
For the millions of readers who devoured the Green Gables series, Before Green Gables is an irresistible treat; the account of how one of literature’s most beloved heroines became the girl who captivated the world.
6. Before Green Gables, Budge Wilson
7. Gods Behaving Badly, Marie Phillips
British blogger Phillips’s delightful debut finds the Greek gods and goddesses living in a tumbledown house in modern-day London and facing a very serious problem: their powers are waning, and immortality does not seem guaranteed.
In between looking for work and keeping house, the ancient family is still up to its oldest pursuit: crossing and double-crossing each other.
Marie Phillips’s first novel, Gods Behaving Badly, hovers somewhere between Pride and Prejudice and an episode of “Bewitched.” I’m not complaining; I have an unusually high regard for Elizabeth Montgomery’s oeuvre. And Austen got off some good lines, too.
7. Gods Behaving Badly, Marie Phillips
8. My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead, Jeffrey Eugenides
“When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart.
All proceeds from My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead will go directly to fund the free youth writing programs offered by 826 Chicago. 826 Chicago is part of the network of seven writing centers across the United States affiliated with 826 National, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.
If you purchase “My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead” you not only obtain a wonderfully entertaining yet complex anthology of “love” stories, you also contribute to a worthy charity that supports budding writers. Win-Win! I picked up this anthology expecting to just dip in and out of it, but the selections are so engrossing and lively that I was instantly mesmerized.
8. My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead, Jeffrey Eugenides
9. A Fraction of the Whole, Steve Toltz
At the heart of this sprawling, dizzying debut from a quirky, assured Australian writer are two men: Jasper Dean, a judgmental but forgiving son, and Martin, his brilliant but dysfunctional father. Jasper, in an Australian prison in his early 20s, scribbles out the story of their picaresque adventures, noting cryptically early on that [m]y father’s body will never be found.
Martin’s ill-fated scheme to make every Australian a millionaire; and a feverish odyssey through Thailand’s menacing jungles. Toltz’s exuberant, looping narrative—thick with his characters’ outsized longings and with their crazy arguments—sometimes blows past plot entirely, but comic drive and Toltz’s far-out imagination carry the epic story, which puts the two (and Martin’s own nemesis, his outlaw brother, Terry) on an irreverent roller-coaster ride from obscurity to infamy.
“Comic drive and Steve Toltz’s far-out imagination carry the epic story . . . a nutty tour de force.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review“This hilarious, sneaky smart first novel is as big and rangy as Australia . . . Toltz salts it all with uproarious ruminations on freedom, the soul, love, death, and the meaning of life. This is one rampaging and irresistible debut.” —Booklist, starred review“A fantastic, rollicking adventure of a novel, both startlinglyoriginal and hysterically funny. Surely this isthe new picaresque, rivaling Ignatius Reilly and Billy Bathgate.”—David Francis, author of The Great Inland Sea
9. A Fraction of the Whole, Steve Toltz
10. Duma Key, Stephen King
It would be impossible to convey the wonder and the horror of Stephen King’s latest novel in just a few words. Suffice it to say that Duma Key, the story of Edgar Freemantle and his recovery from the terrible nightmare-inducing accident that stole his arm and ended his marriage, is Stephen King’s most brilliant novel to date.
This is one of the best books ever from one of the best American writers. Stephen King knows what scares us, and he’s been proving it for thirty years, but this new novel adds a layer of humanity to the fantasy that makes it all the more surprising. Though the protagonist of DUMA KEY is ostensibly a divorced construction engineer with a latent talent for drawing, he is also clearly a stand-in for the author himself, making this arguably his most personal narrative.
This is the Stephen King we all know and scared us out of our wits so well. “Duma Key” is more than just a horror novel, or pop fiction, it also has a lot to say about the human condition. 10. Duma Key, Stephen King
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