Week of March 1, 2012
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
While recovering in the hospital, Lisbeth Salander enlists the aid of journalist Mikael Blomkvist to prove her innocent of three murders and identify the corrupt politicians who have allowed her to suffer. Translated by Reg Keeland.
News and Reviews
The Tiger's Wife
Tea Obreht's debut novel takes place in an unnamed Balkan country similar to the former Yugoslavia. Natalia, a young medical student, is on her way to an orphanage in enemy territory when she learns that her beloved grandfather has died. As his confidante, Natalia was not only aware of his cancer; she was also privy to his many incredible adventures, the two most fantastic being his stories of the Deathless Man and the Tiger's Wife.
News and Reviews
The Weird Sisters
Unwillingly brought together to care for their ailing mother, three sisters who were named after famous Shakespearean characters discover that everything they have been avoiding may prove more worthwhile than expected.
News and Reviews
The House at Tyneford
To escape 1938 Vienna, Elise Landau, a Jew, accepts employment as a domestic servant at Tyneford, a family estate in England, where her involvement with the son of the master of the house changes her life in unexpected ways.
The Help
Limited and persecuted by racial divides in 1962 Jackson, Miss., three women — an African-American maid, her sassy and chronically unemployed friend (also a maid) and a recently graduated white woman — team up for a clandestine project.
News and Reviews
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Oskar Schell, the 9-year-old son of a man killed in the World Trade Center attacks, searches the five boroughs of New York City for a lock that fits a black key his father left behind.
News and Reviews
A Visit From The Goon Squad
Working side by side for a record label, former punk rocker Bennie Salazar and the passionate Sasha hide illicit secrets from one another while interacting with a motley assortment of equally troubled people from 1970s San Francisco to the postwar future.
News and Reviews
Swamplandia!
The Bigtree children struggle to protect their Florida Everglades alligator-wrestling theme park from a sophisticated competitor after losing their parents.
News and Reviews

Cutting for Stone
Twin brothers born from a secret love affair between an Indian nun and a British surgeon in Addis Ababa, Marion and Shiva Stone come of age in Ethiopia, where their love for the same woman drives them apart.
News and Reviews
A Discovery of Witches
Discovering a magical manuscript in Oxford's library, scholar Diana Bishop — a descendant of witches who has rejected her heritage — inadvertently unleashes a fantastical underworld of demons, witches and vampires whose activities center on an enchanted treasure.
News and Reviews
Dreams of Joy
A continuation of the story that began in Shanghai Girls finds a devastated Joy fleeing to China to search for her real father while her mother, Pearl, desperately pursues her, a dual quest marked by their encounters with the nation's intolerant Communist culture. By the Edgar Award-nominated author of Flower Net.
The Art Of Racing In The Rain
Faithful canine Enzo, on the eve of his death, takes stock of his life while recalling the sacrifices, unexpected losses and personal struggles of his would-be race car driver human, Denny, in the latter's efforts to retain custody of his daughter.

The Sisters Brothers
Set against the backdrop of the California Gold Rush, this darkly comic novel follows the misadventures of the fabled Sisters brothers, two hired guns who, under the order of the mysterious Commodore, try to kill Hermann Kermit Warm, a man who gives them a run for their money.
News and Reviews
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
In John le Carre's Cold War-era novel, an honorable spy chief named George Smiley has been ousted after a shakeup in British intelligence — known as The Circus. But once it becomes clear that there's a double agent operating high up in The Circus, Smiley is brought back to catch him.
News and Reviews
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Forty years after the disappearance of Harriet Vanger from the secluded island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger family, her octogenarian uncle, convinced that she was murdered by someone from her own deeply dysfunctional clan, hires journalist Mikael Blomkvist, assisted by the unconventional young hacker Lisbeth Salander, to investigate. Translated by Reg Keeland.