"It was terribly hot the summer Mr. Robertson left town." For Amy Goodrow and her mother, Isabelle, the heat of that summer is the least of their problems. Other citizens in the New England mill town of Shirley Falls are bothered by the heat and by "other things too: Further up the river crops weren't right—pole beans were small, shriveled on the vine, carrots stopped growing when they were no bigger than the fingers of a child; and two UFOs had apparently been sighted in the north of the state." But Amy and Isabelle have a more private misery: a seemingly unbridgeable chasm has opened between this once-close mother and daughter and nothing will ever be the same again. For Amy has fallen in love with her high-school math teacher, Mr. Robertson, who has gone way beyond the bounds of propriety by encouraging the crush. When Isabelle finds out, she is horrified to realize that her anger at him is dwarfed by her rage at her own daughter for "enjoying the sexual pleasures of a man while she herself had not."

Mother-daughter novels can, by virtue of their subject matter, often seem claustrophobic, a little overwrought; Elizabeth Strout masterfully avoids this problem by placing Amy and Isabelle in the larger context of the community they inhabit. Though her main focus is on the Goodrow women, Strout often detours into the lives and thoughts of her many secondary characters: Isabelle's coworkers Dottie Brown and Fat Bev; Amy's best friend, Stacy Burrows; Stacy's ex-boyfriend, Paul Bellows; and women from Isabelle's church such as Peg Dunlap and Barbara Rawley. She also introduces a chilling frisson of menace with the unsolved abduction of a 12-year-old girl and a mysterious obscene phone-caller. Like the best of Alice Hoffman, Amy and Isabelle offers up a moving yet resolutely unsentimental portrait of people coming to terms with their lives, finding unsuspected nobility in themselves and unexpected kindness in others along the way. Elizabeth Strout has written a gem of a novel. —Alix Wilber

A masterpiece in the art of clear and concise writing, and an exemplar of the principles it explains.

In his third book, Robert Sullivan leaves the wilds of the (Meadowlands and the rough whaling waters of the Pacific Northwest to take up rat-watching in the alleys of New York City. Sullivan learned to appreciate the rodents during nocturnal stakeouts; a night-vision scope helped him observe rats without scaring them. As in his previous books, Sullivan uses pointillist details rather than broad portraiture to paint his subject, and the details in Rats are devilish. There are plenty of facts in the book to make your skin crawl, such as a description of the greasy skids rats leave on the paths they frequent, and a list of garbage items they prefer to eat. But Sullivan's style is often less that of a nature writer than a historian. In personable, essayish chapters, New York's history is revealed to be particularly ratty, with tall tales about the rodents' disgusting accomplishments going back to the city's founding. Although many people have never seen a rat outside a pet store, Sullivan reminds us that they are our constant neighbors, staring out from dim corners and messy crevices with beady eyes and twitching whiskers. —Adam Fisher

Competitive cooking isn’t limited to Iron Chef. Across America, amateur chefs cross spatulas at more than a thousand competitions covering numerous states and a pantry full of ingredients. Following a small group of contestants for a year on the contest circuit, journalist Amy Sutherland introduces us to well-known cookoff luminaries as well as some of the most bizarre cooks and recipes at local and national contests across the country—from the Great Garlic Cookoff to the National Chicken and National Beef Cookoffs, from the World Champion Jambalaya Cooking Contest to the Pillsbury Bake-Off®, the Holy Grail of competitive cooking. When the fanatics gather—be they chiliheads or barbecue fiends—and hunker down at the hot plate, it can be a recipe for delight or disaster as attitudes get spicy and tempers flare. Bursting with humor, Cookoff is an entertaining and in-depth look at a quirky, cutthroat, and (sometimes) delicious world.

Behind Procter & Gamble's wholesome image is a control-obsessed company so paranoid that Wall Street analysts, employees, and the chairman himself refer to it as "the Kremlin." P&G's wealth and power ensure that it gets what it wants, from tax breaks to the eager services of Washington lobbyists.

In this explosive expose, Wall Street Journal reporter Alecia Swasy tells the chilling story of life within P&G.

Wonderfully readable, impeccably researched, Soap Opera is a sobering look at the price of success in American business.

Few situations are more chaotic than being pregnant and having to eat nutritiously. In Eating Expectantly, Bridget Swinney tackles the daunting task of nutrition during pregnancy with information, recipes, ideas, and—best of all—no finger shaking. Swinney provides eating advice for days when you don't feel like eating and for days of morning sickness. You'll learn how to deal with diabetes, gestational or otherwise; how to get enough calcium in your diet; and all about food safety. Particularly wonderful are the chapters on vegetarian eating, including the detailed breakdown of appropriate food at 38 fast food establishments. The recipes are delicious and nutritious—for both the expectant and the merely hungry.

Hot on the heels of Anne Taintor's wildly popular first collection, I Can't Be Good All the Time, this hilarious volume brings together Taintor's best-loved images, plus brand new material sure to prompt a knowing snicker, all celebrating the follies of family, home, and hearth. As always, Taintor's sassy creations — vintage illustrations paired with witty new and impertinent observations — inspire deliciously less-than-well-mannered thoughts ("Gosh, he went well with her drapes."). These sharp-tongued favorites are sure to please her devoted fans and newcomers alike.

At the beginning of Amy Tan's fourth novel, two packets of papers written in Chinese calligraphy fall into the hands of Ruth Young. One bundle is titled Things I Know Are True and the other, Things I Must Not Forget. The author? That would be the protagonist's mother, LuLing, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. In these documents the elderly matriarch, born in China in 1916, has set down a record of her birth and family history, determined to keep the facts from vanishing as her mind deteriorates.

A San Francisco career woman who makes her living by ghostwriting self-help books, Ruth has little idea of her mother's past or true identity. What's more, their relationship has tended to be an angry one. Still, Ruth recognizes the onset of LuLing's decline—along with her own remorse over past rancor—and hires a translator to decipher the packets. She also resolves to "ask her mother to tell her about her life. For once, she would ask. She would listen. She would sit down and not be in a hurry or have anything else to do."

Framed at either end by Ruth's chapters, the central portion of The Bonesetter's Daughter takes place in China in the remote, mountainous region where anthropologists discovered Peking Man in the 1920s. Here superstition and tradition rule over a succession of tiny villages. And here LuLing grows up under the watchful eye of her hideously scarred nursemaid, Precious Auntie. As she makes clear, it's not an enviable setting: I noticed the ripe stench of a pig pasture, the pockmarked land dug up by dragon-bone dream-seekers, the holes in the walls, the mud by the wells, the dustiness of the unpaved roads. I saw how all the women we passed, young and old, had the same bland face, sleepy eyes that were mirrors of their sleepy minds. Nor is rural isolation the worst of it. LuLing's family, a clan of ink makers, believes itself cursed by its connection to a local doctor, who cooks up his potions and remedies from human bones. And indeed, a great deal of bad luck befalls the narrator and her sister GaoLing before they can finally engineer their escape from China. Along the way, familial squabbles erupt around every corner, particularly among mothers, daughters, and sisters. And as she did in her earlier The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan uses these conflicts to explore the intricate dynamic that exists between first-generation Americans and their immigrant elders. —Victoria Jenkins

"THE WISEST AND MOST CAPTIVATING NOVEL TAN HAS WRITTEN."—The Boston Sunday Globe

"TRULY MAGICAL . . . UNFORGETTABLE . . . The first-person narrator is Olivia Laguni, and her unrelenting nemesis from childhood on is her half-sister, Kwan Li. . . . It is Kwan's haunting predictions, her implementation of the secret senses, and her linking of the present with the past that cause this novel to shimmer with meaning—and to leave it in the readers mind when the book has long been finished."

—The San Diego Tribune

"HER MOST POLISHED WORK . . . Tan is a wonderful storyteller, and the story's many strands—Olivia—Olivia's childhood, her courtship and marriage, Kwan's ghost stories and village tales—propel the work to its climactic but bittersweet end." —USA Today

"TAN HAS ONCE MORE PRODUCED A NOVEL WONDERFULLY LIKE A HOLOGRAM: turn it this way and find Chinese-Americans shopping and arguing in San Francisco; turn it that way and the Chinese of Changmian village in 1864 are fleeing into the hills to hide from the rampaging Manchus. . . . THE HUNDRED SECRET SENSES doesn't simply return to a world but burrows more deeply into it, following new trails to fresh revelations.

—Newsweek

Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue.

With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.

"Tan is one of the prime storytellers writing fiction today."
NEWSWEEK
Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past—including the terible truth even Helen does not know. And so begins Winnie's story of her life on a small island outside Shanghai in the 1920s, and other places in China during World War II, and traces the happy and desperate events tha led to Winnie's coming to America in 1949.
"The kind of novel that can be read and reread with enormous pleasure."
CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Amy Tan begins The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings, a collection of essays that spans her literary career, on a humorous note; she is troubled that her life and novels have become the subject of a "Cliff’s Notes" abridgement. Reading the little yellow booklet, she discovers that her work is seen as complex and rich with symbolism. However, Tan assures her readers that she has no lofty, literary intentions in writing her novels—she writes for herself, and insists that the recurring patterns and themes that critics find in them are entirely their own making. This self-deprecating stance, coupled with Tan’s own clarification of her intentions, makes The Opposite of Fate feel like an extended, private conversation with the author.

Tan manages to find grace and frequent comedy in her sometimes painful life, and she takes great pleasure in being a celebrity. "Midlife Confidential" brings readers on tour with Tan and the rest of the leather-clad writers’ rock band, the Rock-Bottom Remainders. And "Angst and the Second Book" is a brutally honest, frequently hysterical reflection on Tan’s self-conscious attempts to follow the success of The Joy Luck Club.

In a collection so diverse and spanning such a long period of time, inevitably some of the pieces feel dated or repetitious. Yet, Tan comes off as a remarkably humble and sane woman, and the book works well both to fill in her biography and to clarify the boundaries between her life and her fiction. In her final, title essay, Tan juxtaposes her personal struggles against a persistent disease with the nation’s struggles against terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11. She declares her transformative, artistic power over tragedy, reflecting: "As a storyteller, I know that if I don’t like the ending, I can write a better one." —Patrick O’Kelley

You'll never feel intimidated and awkward about the customs and etiquette of another country again. With the insights provided in this Culture Shock! Guide, you'll learn to see beyond the stereotypes and misinformation that often precede a visit to a foreign land. Whether you plan to stay for a week or for a year, you'll benefit from such topics as understanding the rules of driving and monetary systems, religious practices and making friends. There are tips on political traditions, building business relationships, and the particular intricacies of setting up a home or office. Great for the business traveler, the foreign exchange student, or the tourist who makes a sincere attempt to cross the bridge into a new and exciting culture.