Malla Nunn
A brief but revealing Q&A with Malla Nunn, author of A Beautiful Place to Die, the first in a new series set in 1950s South Africa starring Detective Emmanuel Cooper.
Kate DiCamillo
Kate DiCamillo and Yoko Tanaka, the illustrator of The Magician's Elephant, discuss the writing and illustrating of the book. In a separate Q&A, Kate discusses The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane.
Brigid Pasulka
Brigid Pasulka explains why she wrote her first novel, A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True, which is set in Poland during World War II, and in Kraków 50 years later.
What determines your identity? Is it the clothes you wear?
The way other people treat you? The stories, anecdotes and experiences you
have stored in your memory? When Nick Petrov wakes up in a hospital room,
his clothes are two sizes too big. Everyone treats him like a victim. And he
can't remember how he got there in the first place.
Nick Petrov is a
brilliant private investigator with a reputation for bringing missing
children safely home. Launched to tabloid stardom when he apprehended a
brutal serial killer named Gerald Reasoner, Petrov has become something of a
celebrity. When a woman approaches him, begging him to use his unique gifts
to find her missing daughter, Petrov's instincts sound an alarm. He senses
that she's concealing something. But is she lying to get Petrov's help or to
set him up? Three days later, just as he has amassed all the answers he
needs to close the case, they are swept away into oblivion.
Petrov awakes in a hospital bed, his memory of the past two weeks a
complete blank, his personality altered. He is tempted to just put the
trauma behind him and move on with his life, but there are too many things
holding him back. When he returns home, he discovers a photograph full of
strangers. In his office is a greeting card with a cryptic message inside,
both the receiver and the sender completely unknown. His bank account has
been augmented by a $450 check from a woman he can't remember. All of it
points to a case he cannot recall.
Digging for answers when he doesn't even know the questions, Petrov
begins to fear he is searching for the most elusive quarry he has ever
hunted: himself. Uncomfortable truths about his past rise up from this
haunting investigation, truths that force him to reinterpret the events of
the notorious Reasoner case from years before. But the closer Petrov comes
to solving the mystery, the more likely it seems that the monster he's
looking for is staring back at him in the mirror.
Book Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
Starred Review. Abrahams creates palpable empathy for the bruised Nick and his pitch-perfect prose is a joy.
The New York Times Oblivion is so circuitously plotted that the reader's memory gets as much of a workout as Nick's does.
The New Yorker
Unforgetable...Oblivion is composed in spare yet often poetic prose...a new thriller from an unheralded master of suspense.
The Chicago Tribune - Dick Adler
...Could it be because Abrahams makes it seem so natural and easy that not enough people recognize the effort and the talent at work in his books? His 14th novel, the stunning thriller Oblivion, should--in a perfect world--put an end to that.
Entertainment Weekly - Jennifer Reese
Fantastic Grade A Review! - You know you're holding a first-rate thriller when you take it with you in the car to read at stoplights. Peter Abrahams' marvelous Oblivion tweaks the conventions of the Michael Connelly-style whodunit to create a novel that is at once classically suspenseful and completely fresh.
Joyce Carol Oates
Neurological impairment is something we're all too likely to know firsthand, and Peter Abrahams's suspense novel Oblivion makes of this condition something rich and strange: an investigation into "lost time, like some dark forest in a fairy tale."
A spellbinding novel that spans the Victorian era through the World War I years, and centers around a famous children's book author and the passions, betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves.
A novel on the anxiety and disconnection of post-9/11 America, on the insidiousness of racism, the blind-sidedness of war, and the recklessness thrust on others in the name of love.
Jeannette Walls's memoir The Glass Castle was "nothing short of spectacular" (Entertainment Weekly). Now, in Half Broke Horses, she brings us the story of her grandmother, told in a first-person voice that is authentic, irresistible, and triumphant.
A gripping and fascinating adventure of one young girl's obsession with knowing who her parents really were/are. The delving into the idea of ...
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I borrowed Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell from the library, hoping it would be a lively story of two feuding wizards. Instead, the author spends ...
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Borders to close 200 Waldenbooks outlets(Nov 06 2009) As Barnes & Noble prepares to close all but two of their B. Dalton mall stores by January 2010, Borders announced that they will close about 200 of the...
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NPR & ABA Partner to Share Book Coverage(Nov 05 2009) In a joining of like minds, NPR and ABA have partnered to provide thoughtful bestsellers and unique book coverage to readers, both on NPR.org and...
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Oblivion
Kirkus Reviews
The New York Times
Joyce Carol Oates
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