The Toadstool Bookshops of Keene, Milford, and Peterborough, NH

This novel opens in Czechoslovakia in 1928, during that brief period between the World Wars when Czechoslovakia was an independent republic. A wealthy young Czech couple, the Landauers - the husband Jewish; the wife Catholic - engage a radical young architect to build an ultramodern house with a capacious, glass-enclosed living area. As the story progresses, through the Anschluss, Kristallnacht, World War II, the Soviet occupation, and the collapse of the Soviet state, this beautiful house (modeled on a real house built by Mies van der Rohe in Brno, Czechoslovakia) represents both the collapse and the endurance of the Modernist dream of a new society, based on science and reason, free from war and religious enmity. Through the lives of his masterfully drawn characters, Simon Mawer enables us to experience the nightmare of mid-20th century Europe at ground level, in horrific and heartbreaking specificity. This is a remarkable novel!

Ever wonder what it would be like to work the night shift as a paramedic in the heart of a large city? Well, here's your chance to find out. Shannon Burke, who has been a paramedic in Harlem, tells a slam-bang story with the pace of a freight train. This is easily a "read-in-one-sitting" kind of a novel. Not for the faint of heart!

When I picked this novel up, I was expecting an excoriating air travel rant; which I was very much up for. And while Jonathan Miles does deliver an explosively funny rant that anyone who’s flown in the last ten years will give an enthusiastic thumbs-up to, this rant is just the framework on which he hangs a poignant and powerful tale of late mid-life remorse over missed connections of the personal, rather than the airport, variety. Don’t miss this great read!

Nick Reding’s guided tour of this country’s methamphetamine epidemic will open your eyes and chill your heart. Based on his four years of old-fashioned, ‘boots-on-the-ground’ reporting in the small Midwestern town of Oelwein, Iowa, Reding presents a detailed etiology of a plague in which both the pharmaceutical industry, through its refusal to limit the availability of the chemicals needed to manufacture methamphetamine, and the government, through its inability to fashion effective immigration policy, are deeply complicit. Oelwein, Iowa stands in for thousands of communities throughout the American heartland who are struggling, mostly in vain, against this monstrous problem.