A Cow called Boy by C. Everard Palmer

The first novel from the author of Writing Down the Bones. Nell Schwartz, a Brooklyn-born Jewish girl who moves to the Taos of communes and sweet cedar smoke, transforms herself into Banana Rose (because she’s “bananas”), falls in love with a horn player named Gaughin, and believes they can stop time if they just love hard enough. Subtly hilarious and achingly raw, this is the story of Nell’s long, strange trip from her beloved New Mexico to the alien Midwest and back again. As she struggles with the demands of canvas and paint, with her family and faith, and with her own wild heart, she discovers the one secret power that sustains her through it all.

Passionate, riveting and deeply moving, NEW MOON, the compelling sequel to TWILIGHT, irresistibly combines romance and suspense with a supernatural twist. “I knew we were both in mortal danger. Still, in that instant, I felt well. Whole. I could feel my heart racing in my chest, the blood pulsing hot and fast through my veins again. My lungs filled deep with the sweet scent that came off his skin. It was like there had never been any hole in my chest. I was perfect – not healed, but as if there had never been a wound in the first place.”

In Paradise – her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature – Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of “the one all black town worth the pain,” assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town’s ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void “Out There . . . where random and organized evil erupted when and where it chose.” Richly imagined and elegantly composed, Paradise weaves a powerful mystery.

Highly topical and absolutely compelling, the new thriller from bestselling author Kyle Mills features an intriguing protagonist caught up in a fight where there are no rights or wrongs. Trevor Barnett is the scion of an old tobacco family. Trevor is 31 and will come into a USD 10 million trust fund when he turns 60 so long as he has been in continuous employment from graduation until his 60th birthday with the cigarette company his ancestor founded. Trevor is consequently not the most motivated person in the world – at least when the novel opens. At the beginning of SMOKE SCREEN, the tobacco industry is facing a multi-billion dollar lawsuit which could bankrupt the industry. But the industry decides to fight back, and decides to use Trevor to do it. And Trevor may or may not have his own agenda, which may or may not include the woman he loves from afar, who is a lawyer for one of the anti-smoking campaigner groups.