Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers For Nov.12, 2009

1. The Lacuna

By Barbara Kingsolver

Weeks on list: 1  •  Barbara Kingsolver's first novel in nine years mixes fiction and history to tell the story of Harrison Shepherd. Born of a Mexican mother and American father, Shepherd spends his life straddling the two cultures. After chance meetings with artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, he gets a job working for them and lives in their colorful and dramatic household. There, he gets to know Leon Trotsky, then exiled in Mexico. Shepherd's friendships with these larger-than-life characters set him on his own course toward a confrontation with history.

Hardcover, 528pp, $26.99, Harper, Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2009

2. The Help

By Kathryn Stockett

Weeks on list: 39  •  Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy until Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone. Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her 17th white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken. Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own. Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk.

Hardcover, 464pp, $24.95, Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009

3. The Lost Symbol

By Dan Brown

Weeks on list: 8  •  As The Lost Symbol opens, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned unexpectedly to deliver an evening lecture in the U.S. Capitol Building. Within minutes of his arrival, however, the night takes a bizarre turn. A disturbing object -- artfully encoded with five symbols -- is discovered in the Capitol Building. Langdon recognizes the object as an ancient invitation ... one meant to usher its recipient into a long-lost world of esoteric wisdom. When Langdon's beloved mentor, Peter Solomon -- a prominent Mason and philanthropist -- is brutally kidnapped, Langdon realizes his only hope of saving Peter is to accept this mystical invitation and follow wherever it leads him. Langdon is instantly plunged into a clandestine world of Masonic secrets, hidden history, and never-before-seen locations -- all of which seem to be dragging him toward a single, inconceivable truth.

Hardcover, 528pp, $29.95, Doubleday, Pub Date: Sep. 15, 2009

4. Last Night in Twisted River

By John Irving

Weeks on list: 2  •  In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious 12-year-old boy mistakes the local constable's girlfriend for a bear. Both the 12-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County -- to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto -- pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them. In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River -- John Irving's 12th novel -- depicts the recent half-century in the United States as "a living replica of Coos County, where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course."

Hardcover, 576pp, $28.00, Random House, Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2009

5. Wolf Hall

By Hilary Mantel

Weeks on list: 4  •  England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of 20 years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king’s freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph? 

Hardcover, 560pp, $27.00, Henry Holt and Co., Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009

6. Half Broke Horses

A True-Life Novel

By Jeannette Walls

Weeks on list: 5  •  "Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did." So begins the story of Lily Casey Smith, in Jeannette Walls' true-life novel based on her no-nonsense, resourceful, hard-working, compelling grandmother. By age six, Lily was helping her father break horses. At 15, she left home to teach in a frontier town -- riding 500 miles on her pony, all alone, to get to her job. She learned to drive a car ("I loved cars even more than I loved horses. They didn't need to be fed if they weren't working, and they didn't leave big piles of manure all over the place") and fly a plane, and, with her husband, ran a vast ranch in Arizona. Lily survived tornadoes, droughts, floods, the Great Depression, and the most heartbreaking personal tragedy. She bristled at prejudice of all kinds -- against women, Native Americans, and anyone else who didn't fit the mold.

Hardcover, 288pp, $26.00, Scribner, Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2009

7. The Gathering Storm

By Robert Jordan; Brandon Sanderson

Weeks on list: 2  •  Rand al'Thor, the Dragon Reborn, struggles to unite a fractured network of kingdoms and alliances in preparation for the Last Battle. As he attempts to halt the Seanchan encroachment northward -- wishing he could form at least a temporary truce with the invaders -- his allies watch in terror the shadow that seems to be growing within the heart of the Dragon Reborn himself. Egwene al'Vere, the Amyrlin Seat of the rebel Aes Sedai, is a captive of the White Tower and subject to the whims of their tyrannical leader. As days tick toward the Seanchan attack she knows is imminent, Egwene works to hold together the disparate factions of Aes Sedai while providing leadership in the face of increasing uncertainty and despair. Her fight will prove the mettle of the Aes Sedai, and her conflict will decide the future of the White Tower -- and possibly the world itself.

Hardcover, 784pp, $29.99, Tor Books, Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2009

8. Ford County

Stories

By John Grisham

Weeks on list: 1  •   In his first collection of short stories John Grisham takes us back to Ford County, Mississippi, the setting of his first novel, A Time to Kill. The stories include: Wheelchair-bound Inez Graney and her two older sons, Leon and Butch, take a bizarre road trip through the Mississippi Delta to visit the youngest Graney brother, Raymond, who's been locked away on death row for eleven years. * Clanton is rocked with the rumor that the gay son of a prominent family has finally come home, to die. Of AIDS. Fear permeates the town as gossip runs unabated. But in Lowtown, the colored section of Clanton, the young man finds a soul mate in his final days. * Three good ol' boys from rural Ford County begin a journey to the big city of Memphis to give blood to a grievously injured friend. However, they are unable to drive past a beer store as the trip takes longer and longer. The journey comes to an abrupt end when they make a fateful stop at a Memphis strip club. * The Quiet Haven Retirement Home is the final stop for the elderly of Clanton. It's a sad, languid place with little controversy, until Gilbert arrives. Posing as a lowly paid bedpan boy, he is in reality a brilliant stalker with an uncanny ability to sniff out the assets of those "seniors" he professes to love.

Hardcover, 320pp, $24.00, Doubleday, Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2009

9. The Girl Who Played with Fire

By Stieg Larsson

Weeks on list: 15  •  Mikael Blomkvist, crusading journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium, has decided to run a story that will expose an extensive sex trafficking operation between Eastern Europe and Sweden, implicating well-known and highly placed members of Swedish society, business, and government. But he has no idea just how explosive the story will be until, on the eve of publication, the two investigating reporters are murdered. And even more shocking for Blomkvist: the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to Lisbeth Salander -- the troubled, wise-beyond-her-years genius hacker who came to his aid in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and who now becomes the focus and fierce heart of The Girl Who Played with Fire. As Blomkvist, alone in his belief in Salander's innocence, plunges into an investigation of the slayings, Salander herself is drawn into a murderous hunt in which she is the prey, and which compels her to revisit her dark past in an effort to settle with it once and for all.

Hardcover, 512pp, $25.95, Knopf, Pub Date: Jul. 28, 2009

10. Nine Dragons

By Michael Connelly

Weeks on list: 4  •  LAPD Detective Harry Bosch is off the chain in the fastest, fiercest and highest-stakes case of his life. Fortune Liquors is a small shop in a tough South L.A. neighborhood, a store Bosch has known for years. The murder of John Li, the store's owner, hits Bosch hard, and he promises Li's family that he'll find the killer. The world Bosch steps into next is unknown territory. He brings in a detective from the Asian Gang Unit for help with translation -- not just of languages but also of the cultural norms and expectations that guided Li's life. He uncovers a link to a Hong Kong triad, a lethal and far-reaching crime ring that follows many immigrants to their new lives in the U.S. And instantly his world explodes. The one good thing in Bosch's life, the person he holds most dear, is taken from him and Bosch travels to Hong Kong in an all-or-nothing bid to regain what he's lost. In a place known as Nine Dragons, as the city's Hungry Ghosts festival burns around him, Bosch puts aside everything he knows and risks everything he has in a desperate bid to outmatch the triad's ferocity.

Hardcover, 384pp, $27.99, Little, Brown and Company, Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009

11. Her Fearful Symmetry

By Audrey Niffenegger

Weeks on list: 6  •  Audrey Niffenegger's second novel opens with a letter that alters the fate of every character. Julia and Valentina Poole are semi-normal American 21-year-olds with seemingly little interest in college or finding jobs. Their attachment to one another is intense. One morning the mailman delivers a thick envelope to their house in the suburbs of Chicago. From a London solicitor, the enclosed letter informs Valentina and Julia that their English aunt Elspeth Noblin, whom they never knew, has died of cancer and left them her London apartment. There are two conditions to this inheritance: that they live in it for a year before they sell it and that their parents not enter it. Julia and Valentina are twins. So were the estranged Elspeth and Edie, their mother. The girls move to Elspeth's flat, which borders the vast and ornate Highgate Cemetery, where Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Radclyffe Hall, Stella Gibbons and Karl Marx are buried. Julia and Valentina come to know the living residents of their building. As the girls become embroiled in the fraying lives of their aunt's neighbors, they also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including -- perhaps -- their aunt.

Hardcover, 406pp, $26.99, Scribner Book Company, Pub Date: Sep. 29, 2009

12. True Blue

By David Baldacci

Weeks on list: 2  •  Mason "Mace" Perry was a firebrand cop on the D.C. police force until she was kidnapped and framed for a crime. She lost everything -- her badge, her career, her freedom -- and spent two years in prison. Now she's back on the outside and focused on one mission: to be a cop once more. Her only shot to be a "true blue" again is to solve a major case on her own, and prove she has the right to wear the uniform. But even with her police chief sister on her side, she has to work in the shadows: A vindictive U.S. attorney is looking for any reason to send Mace back behind bars. Then Roy Kingman enters her life. Roy is a young lawyer who aided the poor until he took a high-paying job at a law firm in Washington. Mace and Roy meet after he discovers the dead body of a female partner at the firm. As they investigate the death, they start uncovering surprising secrets from both the private and public world of the nation's capital.

Hardcover, 464pp, $27.99, Grand Central Publishing, Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2009

13. An Echo in the Bone

By Diana Gabaldon

Weeks on list: 7  •  In An Echo in the Bone, Diana Gabaldon continues the story of the 18th-century Scotsman Jamie Fraser and his 20th-century time-traveling wife, Claire Randall. Jamie Fraser, former Jacobite and reluctant rebel, is already certain of three things about the American rebellion: The Americans will win, fighting on the side of victory is no guarantee of survival, and he'd rather die than have to face his illegitimate son -- a young lieutenant in the British army -- across the barrel of a gun. Claire Randall knows that the Americans will win, too, but not what the ultimate price may be. That price won't include Jamie's life or his happiness, though -- not if she has anything to say about it. Meanwhile, in the relative safety of the 20th century, Jamie and Claire's daughter, Brianna, and her husband, Roger MacKenzie, have resettled in a historic Scottish home where, across a chasm of two centuries, the unfolding drama of Brianna's parents' story comes to life through Claire's letters. The fragile pages reveal Claire's love for battle-scarred Jamie Fraser and their flight from North Carolina to the high seas, where they encounter privateers and ocean battles -- as Brianna and Roger search for clues not only to Claire's fate but to their own. Because the future of the MacKenzie family in the Highlands is mysteriously, irrevocably, and intimately entwined with life and death in war-torn colonial America.

Hardcover, 832pp, $30.00, Delacorte Press, Pub Date: Sep. 22, 2009

14. Look at the Birdie

Unpublished Short Fiction

By Kurt Vonnegut

Weeks on list: 1  •  Look at the Birdie is a collection of 14 previously unpublished short stories from Kurt Vonnegut. In this series of vignettes, Vonnegut paints a warm, wise and funny portrait of life in post-World War II America -- a world where squabbling couples, high school geniuses, misfit office workers and small-town lotharios struggle to adapt to changing technology, moral ambiguityand unprecedented affluence: A family learns the downside of confiding their deepest secrets into a magical invention. A man finds himself in a Kafkaesque world of trouble after he runs afoul of the shady underworld boss who calls the shots in an upstate New York town. A quack psychiatrist turned "murder counselor" concocts a novel new outlet for his paranoid patients. Features a Foreword by author and longtime Vonnegut confidant Sidney Offit and illustrated with Vonnegut' s characteristically insouciant line drawings.

Hardcover, 272pp, $27.00, Delacorte Press, Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2009

15. The Children's Book

By A.S. Byatt

Weeks on list: 5  •  When Olive Wellwood's oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip sketching in the basement of the new Victoria and Albert Museum -- a talented working-class boy who could be a character out of one of Olive's magical tales -- she takes him into the storybook world of her family and friends. But the joyful bacchanals Olive hosts at her rambling country house -- and the separate, private books she writes for each of her seven children -- conceal more treachery and darkness than Philip has ever imagined. As these lives -- of adults and children alike -- unfold, lies are revealed, are broken and the damaging truth about the Wellwoods slowly emerges. But their personal struggles, their hidden desires, will soon be eclipsed by far greater forces, as the tides turn across Europe and a golden era comes to an end.

Hardcover, 688pp, $26.95, Knopf, Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2009