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Suburgatory by Linda E Keenan from Lyons Press is $2.53

Book Description:

The title behind the new ABC TV Show, Suburgatory excoriates — through satirical local news “stories” — the mostly upper middle class American pieties and parenting obsessions that surround raising the perfect child amid the anxiety of an America in decline.

The book uses laugh out loud humor to target racism, classism, sexism, submerged suburban sexuality, class warfare, willful ignorance, and the all-around bad behavior raging underneath the surface of those obsessively-tended suburban lawns and bikini lines.

Red Flags by Juris Jurjevics from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is $2.26

Book Description:

A novel of soldiers and spies in the Highlands of Vietnam

Army cop Erik Rider is enjoying his war until he’s sent to disrupt Vietcong opium fields in a remote Highland province.

Rider lands in Cheo Reo, home to hard-pressed soldiers, intelligence operatives, and profiteers of all stripes. The tiny U.S. contingent and their unenthusiastic Vietnamese allies are hopelessly outnumbered by infiltrating enemy infantry. And they’re all surrounded by sixty thousand Montagnard tribespeople who want their mountain homeland back.
The Vietcong are on to Rider’s game and have placed a bounty on his head. As he hunts the opium fields, skirmishes with enemy patrols, and defends the undermanned U.S. base, Rider makes a disturbing discovery: someone close to home has a stake in the opium smuggling ring—and will kill to protect it.

Written by a master, and as authentic as Matterhorn or Dog Soldiers, Red Flags is a riveting new addition to espionage fiction.

The Miracle Detective by Randall Sullivan from Grove Press is $3.82

Book Description:

A gripping investigation into the extraordinary phenomenon of Virgin Mary sightings around the world, the priests and scientists who investigate them, and a powerful examination about what constitutes the miraculous in the contemporary world

In a tiny, dilapidated trailer in northeastern Oregon, a young woman saw a vision of the Virgin Mary in an ordinary landscape painting hanging on her bedroom wall. After being met with skepticism from the local parish, the Catholic diocese officially placed the matter “under investigation.” Investigative journalist Randall Sullivan wanted to know how exactly one might conduct the official inquiry into such an incident, so he set off to interview theologians, historians, and postulators from the Sacred Congregation of the Causes for Saints. These men, dubbed by the author as “miracle detectives,” were charged by the Vatican with testing the miraculous and judging the holy.

What Sullivan didn’t know was that his own investigation would lead from the Vatican in Rome to the tiny village of Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where six visionaries had been receiving apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Amid a tapestry of believers, skeptics, and apostates, we meet the compassionate Father Slavko Barbaric, an intellectual priest who is known as the Medjugorje seers’ “spiritual director,” and the legendary Father Groeschel, who is continually called upon to investigate supernatural—or at least strange—phenomena across America. Sullivan’s quest turns personal, taking him from the halls of the Vatican, where Pope John Paul II counts himself among Medjugorje’s numerous believers, to Scottsdale, Arizona, site of America’s largest and most controversial instances of Virgin Mary sightings, culminating an eight-year investigation of predictions of apocalyptic events, false claims of revelation, and the search for a genuine theophony, that is, the ultimate interface between man and God.

The Miracle Detective is a gripping investigation into the extraordinary phenomenon of Virgin Mary sightings around the world and the priests and scientists who investigate them, as well as a powerful examination about what constitutes the miraculous in the contemporary world.

I Love Yous Are for White People by Lac Su from HarperCollins is $2.99

Book Description:

As a young child, Lac Su made a harrowing escape from the Communists in Vietnam. With a price on his father’s head, Lac, with his family, was forced to immigrate in 1979 to seedy West Los Angeles where squalid living conditions and a cultural fabric that refused to thread them in effectively squashed their American Dream. Lac’s search for love and acceptance amid poverty—not to mention the psychological turmoil created by a harsh and unrelenting father—turned his young life into a comedy of errors and led him to a dangerous gang experience that threatened to tear his life apart.

Heart-wrenching, irreverent, and ultimately uplifting, I Love Yous Are for White People is memoir at its most affecting, depicting the struggles that countless individuals have faced in their quest to belong and that even more have endured in pursuit of a father’s fleeting affection.

The Maytrees by Annie Dillard from HarperCollins is $2.99

Book Description:

Toby Maytree first sees Lou Bigelow on her bicycle in postwar Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her laughter and loveliness catch his breath. Maytree is a Provincetown native, an educated poet of thirty. As he courts Lou, just out of college, her stillness draws him. Hands-off, he hides his serious wooing, and idly shows her his poems.

In spare, elegant prose, Dillard traces the Maytrees’ decades of loving and longing. They live cheaply among the nonconformist artists and writers that the bare tip of Cape Cod attracts. When their son Petie appears, their innocent Bohemian friend Deary helps care for him. But years later it is Deary who causes the town to talk.

In this moving novel, Dillard intimately depicts willed bonds of loyalty, friendship, and abiding love. She presents nature’s vastness and nearness. Warm and hopeful, The Maytrees is the surprising capstone of Dillard’s original body of work.

About the author:
Annie Dillard is the author of ten books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winner Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

One More River by Mary Glickman from Open Road is $2.99

Book Description:

From the author of Home in the Morning comes this National Jewish Book Award Finalist: the sweeping story of a father and son, and of the loves that transform them amid the turbulence of the American South

Bernard Levy was always a mystery to the community of Guilford, Mississippi. He was even more of a mystery to his son, Mickey Moe, who was just four years old when his father died in World War II.

Now it’s 1962 and Mickey Moe is a grown man, who must prove his pedigree to the disapproving parents of his girlfriend, Laura Anne Needleman, to win her hand in marriage. With only a few decades-old leads to go on, Mickey Moe sets out to uncover his father’s murky past, from his travels up and down the length of the Mississippi River to his heartrending adventures during the Great Flood of 1927. Mickey

Moe’s journey, taken at the dawn of the civil rights era, leads him deep into the backwoods of Mississippi and Tennessee, where he meets with danger and unexpected revelations at every turn. As the greatest challenge of his life unfolds, he will finally discover the gripping details of his father’s life—one filled with loyalty, tragedy, and heroism in the face of great cruelty from man and nature alike.

A captivating follow-up to Mary Glickman’s bestselling Home in the Morning, One More River tells the epic tale of ordinary men caught in the grip of calamity, and inspired to extraordinary acts in the name of love.