February 2012 Recommendations

February's reading group recommendations — assassins, Valentine's Day and coming of age. Take your pick!

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Patrick Dewitt – The Sisters Brothers

Longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, deWitt's dazzlingly original second novel is a darkly funny, offbeat western about a reluctant assassin and his murderous brother. The book pays homage to the classic Western, and is filled with a cast of losers, cheaters, and ne'er-do-wells from all walks of life. It is a violent, lustful odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s frontier. and boasts a rather fantastic jacket.

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James Patterson – Bloody Valentine (Quick Read)

This year Valentine's Day isn't for romance. It's for murder. Mega rich restaurant owner Jack Barnes and his second wife Zee are very much in love. However, their plans for Valentine's Day are about to be torn apart by the most violent murder.Who is the strange figure plotting this sick crime? Who hates Jack that much? There are plenty of suspects living in Jack's fancy block of flats. Is it them, or could it be the work of an outsider with a twisted mind? One thing's for sure, the police have got their work cut out solving this bloody mess.

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Megan Abbott – The End of Everything

A close-knit street, the clink of glass on glass, summer heat. Two girls on the brink of adolescence, throwing cartwheels on the grass. Two girls who tell each other everything. Until one shimmering afternoon, one of them disappears. Lizzie is left with her dread and her loss, and with a fear that won't let her be. Had Evie tried to give her a hint of what was coming, a clue that she failed to follow? Caught between her imaginary guilt, her sense of betrayal, her own powerful need, and the needs of the adults around her, Lizzie's voice is as unforgettable as her story is arresting. This is no ordinary tale of innocence lost…

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David Mitchell – The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

Be transported to a place like no other: a tiny, man-made island in the bay of Nagasaki, for two hundred years the sole gateway between Japan and the West. Here, in the dying days of the 18th-century, a young Dutch clerk arrives to make his fortune. Instead he loses his heart. Step onto the streets of Dejima and mingle with scheming traders, spies, interpreters, servants and concubines as two cultures converge. In a tale of integrity and corruption, passion and power, the key is control - of riches and minds, and over death itself.