Jumpin’ June
Mystery, suspense and a generational saga are among this month’s offerings
By Brian Lampkin
June 6: The Last Kid Left, by Rosecrans Baldwin (MCD, $27). The Last Kid Left is a bold, searching novel about how our relationships operate in a hyper-connected world, an expertly-portrayed account of tragedy turned mercilessly into entertainment. And it’s the suspenseful unwinding of a crime that’s more complex than it initially seems. But mostly it’s the story of two teenagers, dismantled by circumstances and rotten luck, who are desperate to believe that love is enough to save them. Baldwin lives in Chapel Hill and teaches at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke.
June 6: Camino Island, by John Grisham (Doubleday Books, $28.95). A gang of thieves stages a daring heist from a secure vault deep below Princeton University’s Firestone Library. Their loot is priceless, but Princeton has insured it for $25 million dollars.
Bruce Cable owns a popular bookstore in the sleepy resort town of Santa Rosa on Camino Island in Florida. He makes his real money, though, as a prominent dealer in rare books. Very few people know that he occasionally dabbles in the black market of stolen books and manuscripts. John Grisham will appear at Scuppernong Books on June 27 (ticket required!).
June 13: You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir, by Sherman Alexie (Little Brown, $28). Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction, a PEN/Hemingway Citation for Best First Fiction, and the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, Sherman Alexie is a poet, short-story writer, novelist and performer. A Spokane/Couer d’Alene Indian, Alexie grew up in Wellpinit, Washington, on the Spokane Indian Reservation.
June 13: Blind Spot, by Teju Cole (Random House, $40). In this innovative synthesis of words and images, the award-winning author of Open City and photography critic for The New York Times Magazine combines two of his great passions. The Los Angeles Times calls Cole “one of the most vibrant voices in contemporary writing.”
June 27: Quiet Until the Thaw, by Alexandra Fuller (Penguin, $25). The debut novel from the bestselling author of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and Leaving Before the Rains Come. A complex tale that spans generations and geography, Quiet Until the Thaw conjures the implications of an oppressed history, how we are bound not just to immediate family but to all who have come before and will come after us, and, most of all, to the notion that everything was always, and is always, connected.
June 27: Take Out, by Margaret Maron (Grand Central, $27). Following the heartwarming conclusion to her Deborah Knott series, New York Times bestselling author Margaret Maron returns with a thrilling new mystery featuring NYPD detective Sigrid Harald. Hopefully we’ll see Greensboro’s own Ms. Maron at bookstores around the state. OH
Brian Lampkin is one of the proprietors of Scuppernong Books.
