New On Our Shelves, 1st week of June

Our weekly feature highlighting some of the new books we've just added to our shelves (and maybe some used ones we're excited to have around)

My Name Is Memory By Ann Brashares
(Riverhead Hardcover, Hardcover, 9781594487583, 336pp.)
From the New York Times-bestselling author of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and The Last Summer (of You and Me) comes an imaginative, inspired, magical book-a love story that lasts more than a lifetime.  Daniel has spent centuries falling in love with the same girl. Life after life, crossing continents and dynasties, he and Sophia (despite her changing name and form) have been drawn together-and he remembers it all. Daniel has "the memory", the ability to recall past lives and recognize souls of those he's previously known. It is a gift and a curse. For all the times that he and Sophia have been drawn together throughout history, they have also been torn painfully, fatally, apart. A love always too short.  Interwoven through Sophia and Daniel's unfolding present day relationship are glimpses of their expansive history together. From 552 Asia Minor to 1918 England and 1972 Virginia, the two souls share a long and sometimes torturous path of seeking each other time and time again. But just when young Sophia (now "Lucy" in the present) finally begins to awaken to the secret of their shared past, to understand the true reason for the strength of their attraction, the mysterious force that has always torn them apart reappears. Ultimately, they must come to understand what stands in the way of their love if they are ever to spend a lifetime together.

NEW IN PAPERBACK THIS WEEK

That Old Cape Magic
By Richard Russo
(Vintage, Paperback, 9781400030910, 272pp.)
Selected by Indie Booksellers for the August 2009 Indie Notables

“Jack Griffin doesn't have fond memories of his parents, two college professors who were too often careless of one another's feelings and dismissive of the world at large. Now a middle-age married man himself, Griffin wants to be anything but like them, yet now his own marriage is disintegrating. Russo's latest novel captures exactly the ways we fool ourselves and make fools of ourselves as we grope for truth, and it shows the grace truth can provide should we ever manage to recognize it.” -- Betsy Burton, The King's English, Salt Lake City, UT

Richard Russo was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls in 2002

Half the Sky; Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
By Sheryl Wudunn; Nicholas D. Kristof
(Vintage, Paperback, 9780307387097, 320pp.)
From two of our most fiercely moral voices, a passionate call to arms against our era’s most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women and girls in the developing world. With Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn as our guides, we undertake an odyssey through Africa and Asia to meet the extraordinary women struggling there, among them a Cambodian teenager sold into sex slavery and an Ethiopian woman who suffered devastating injuries in childbirth. Drawing on the breadth of their combined reporting experience, Kristof and WuDunn depict our world with anger, sadness, clarity, and, ultimately, hope.