Middletown Thrall Library Invites You to Hop... BEYOND THE BESTSELLERS: Your Personal Guide to Interesting Books Not Necessarily Found on Bestseller Lists: Spring 2007 Edition

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Past Issues

Missed a past issue of Beyond the Bestsellers? Click below for previous BTBs and more reading recommendations:

Consider any of the titles below the next time you're looking for something interesting to read. To learn more about a book and check on its availablity within the library system, click a title link below.

Some book records in the library catalog have additional links you can click to learn more about the book and the author. Some titles even have chapter excerpts that you can read online!

Scroll down and browse by genre to begin!





GENERAL FICTION

  • Summer People by Brian Groh - College student and aspiring graphic artist Nathan Empson accompanies an elderly woman from Cleveland to Maine to act as her summer caretaker. He befriends the local Episcopal priest, an alcoholic with a depressed wife, and falls in love with their nanny.
  • The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle - Alice Winston's older sister ran off to marry a rodeo cowboy. Her father's ranch is struggling to survive. Her mother is bedridden. Her shop class partner drowned in a canal. Her coming of age story has been called powerful and irresistible.


Other titles to consider:

HISTORICAL FICTION

  • Heyday by Kurt Andersen - Newsweek calls this novel a "rollicking tale of love, murder, revolution, the Gold Rush and young America."
  • Innocent Traitor by Alison Weir - Weir, a popular British biographer, chose Lady Jane Grey, as the subject for her first novel. Known also as the "Nine Days Queen", Lady Jane has her story retold from varying points of view.
Other titles to consider:

MYSTERIES

  • By the Time You Read This by Giles Blunt - If you scare easily, you might want to pass up Blunt's fourth crime novel featuring Detective John Cardinal. This latest suspense novel has received several great reviews and has had its villain compared to Hannibal Lector.
  • In Dublin's Fair City by Rhys Bowen - Molly Murphy is a young Irish immigrant who fled from murder charges in Ireland and becomes a detective in early twentieth century New York. In this sixth entry in the series, Molly returns home to Ireland to look for a woman in line for an inheritance but gets entangled both with the murder of an actress and the struggle for Irish freedom.
Other titles to consider:

SCIENCE FICTION

Other titles to consider:

THRILLERS

  • The Echelon Vendetta by David Stone - CIA agents are being murdered. Micah Dalton, a CIA "cleaner" - he goes in to wipe up and keep things quiet after something goes awry in the field - becomes involved when a good friend is slaughtered. Stone is the pseudonym of a former intelligence officer.
Other titles to consider:

NEWLY TRANSLATED FICTION

  • A Walk in the Dark by Gianrico Carofiglio - Guideo Guerrieri takes the case of Martina Fumai who is accusing her vicious former lover, a doctor, of assault. No one else will touch it because the lover is the son of a prominent judge. This legal thriller, written by a former mafia prosecutor, spent eight months on the bestseller list in Italy.
Other titles to consider: