The Book Show on WAMC

    In Tara Conklin's debut novel, The House Girl: A Novel, two remarkable women, separated by more than a century, live lives that unexpectedly intertwine.

2004: Lina Sparrow is an ambitious young lawyer working on a historic class-action lawsuit seeking reparations for the descendants of American slaves.

1852: Josephine is a seventeen-year-old house slave who tends to the mistress of a Virginia tobacco farm—an aspiring artist named Lu Anne Bell.

    Jodi Picoult is the author of a string of best-selling novels with heavy themes ripped from the headlines.

Her latest book is The Storyteller, which is about a young woman who finds herself wrestling with a moral dilemma after she befriends an elderly man at a grief group who turns out to have been a Nazi war criminal.

  Award-winning novelist and poet, Stephen Dobyns, returns to the thriller genre after a fifteen-year hiatus with The Burn Palace.

The novel is a blend of suspense, supernatural underpinnings and sexual shenanigans set in a provincial New England town. Dobyns creates an insular community sideswiped by madness when a series of odd, violent crimes occur in rapid succession.

    In his early 70s, author Daniel Klein came to terms with aging. Klein returned to the Greek village and philosophers he has visited for decades to discover authentic ways of aging.

In Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life , he concludes that old age is a privilege to be savored, rather than a disease to be cured or a condition to be denied.

    George Saunders is renowned for his six collections of short stories, novellas, and his non-fiction essays.

His most recent work, Tenth of December: Stories, was reviewed for The New York Time Magazine with the headline: "George Saunders has written the best book you’ll read this year."

The collected stories are dark yet funny, desperate yet hopeful.

  Robert Crais is the author of the best-selling Elvis Cole novels and was the 2006 recipient of the Ross Macdonald Literary Award.

His latest novel, Suspect, tells the story of Scott and Maggie - an LAPD K9 team nobody trusts--damaged goods who are wounded, scared, and suspect. Who work together to solve a murder and regain trust.

    In 1973 in the offices of The Atlantic Monthly in Boston, a young freelance writer named Tracy Kidder came looking for an assignment. Richard Todd was the editor that encouraged him.

After much success they have written the new book, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, which explores three major non-fiction forms: narratives, essays, and memoirs.

    Insane City is Pulitzer Prize winning humorist Dave Barry's first novel in more than 10 years, though he has been writing non-fiction best-sellers during that time. In the book, Seth Weinstein is on his way to his destination wedding in Florida.

Little does he know what's in store: Russian gangsters, angry strippers, a desperate Haitian refugee and her two children on the run from some very bad men, and an 11-foot albino Burmese python named Blossom.

1281 - Aired on 2/5 and 2/7

1282 - Aired on 2/12 and 2/14

  After eight commanding works of fiction, Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Russo now turns to memoir in a hilarious, moving, and always surprising account of his life, his parents, and the upstate New York town they all struggled variously to escape.

Anyone familiar with Richard Russo's acclaimed novels will recognize Gloversville - once famous for producing gloves and anything else made of leather. This is where the author grew up, the only son of an aspirant mother and a charming, feckless father who were born into this close-knit community. But by the time of his childhood in the 1950s, prosperity was replaced by poverty and illness (often tannery-related), with everyone barely scraping by.

  Caleb Carr is the critically acclaimed author of The Alienist, The Angel of Darkness, The Lessons of Terror, and The Italian Secretary. He has taught military history at Bard College, and worked extensively in film, television, and the theater.