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Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle reviewed in the January 16th issue include:


The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver. HarperCollins. NOVEL. EW's slant: "I so wanted to love this sprawling, old-fashioned historical novel... but the book - told through newspaper clippings, letters, bits of memoirs, and the like - never quite comes together." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (16 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"...a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities. Born in the United States, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico - from a coastal island jungle to 1930s Mexico City - Harrison Shepherd finds precarious shelter but no sense of home on his thrilling odyssey. Life is whatever he learns from housekeepers who put him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs in the streets, and one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. He discovers a passion for Aztec history and meets the exotic, imperious artist Frida Kahlo, who will become his lifelong friend. When he goes to work for Lev Trotsky, an exiled political leader fighting for his life, Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution, newspaper headlines and howling gossip, and a risk of terrible violence. Meanwhile, to the north, the United States will soon be caught up in the internationalist goodwill of World War II. There in the land of his birth, Shepherd believes he might remake himself in America's hopeful image and claim a voice of his own... Through darkening years, political winds continue to toss him between north and south in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach - the lacuna - between truth and public presumption. With deeply compelling characters, a vivid sense of place, and a clear grasp of how history and public opinion can shape a life, Barbara Kingsolver has created an unforgettable portrait of the artist - and of art itself." - Amazon.

Lit, by Mary Karr. HarperCollins. MEMOIR. EW's slant: "...radiant, rueful, rip-roaring..." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (16 reviews). Kindle edition $11.98. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"The Liars' Club brought to vivid, indelible life Mary Karr's hardscrabble Texas childhood... Now Lit follows the self-professed blackbelt sinner's descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness - and to her astonishing resurrection. Karr's longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting blueblood poet produces a son they adore. But she can't outrun her apocalyptic past. She drinks herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide. A hair-raising stint in 'The Mental Marriott,' with an oddball tribe of gurus and saviors, awakens her to the possibility of joy and leads her to an unlikely faith. Not since Saint Augustine cried, 'Give me chastity, Lord-but not yet!' has a conversion story rung with such dark hilarity. Lit is about getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; learning to write by learning to live.." - Amazon.
$9.99 or less alternative: Drinking: A Love Story, by Caroline Knapp, a personal account of the late writer's 20-year battle with alcoholism.

NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK AND KINDLE EDITIONS

Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum, by Richard Fortey. Vintage. NONFICTION. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (11 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Fortey, senior paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London..., here turns his eye to the inner workings of a natural history museum. Though a paleontologist and an expert on trilobites, Fortey looks at all of the major departments of the museum, examining how they work, providing brief backgrounds on the sciences themselves, and telling stories of many of the museum’s scientists both past and present. Explaining how science works through his stories from the museum, Fortey tells of truffles and how they illustrate the science of taxonomy; the Piltdown Man fraud and how more modern techniques exposed the hoax; how one of the ichthyologists found a lost Mozart manuscript while searching for a sixteenth-century book’s illustration of a herring; and how the 'First Law of Museums' - never throw anything away - turned up a cast of the Koh-i-noor diamond made before it was recut... --Nancy Bent for Booklist.

Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. NOVEL. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (83 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Ghosh's best and most ambitious work yet is an adventure story set in nineteenth-century Calcutta against the backdrop of the Opium Wars. On the Ibis, a ship engaged in transporting opium across the Bay of Bengal, varied life stories converge. A fallen raja, a half-Chinese convict, a plucky American sailor, a widowed opium farmer, a transgendered religious visionary are all united by the smoky paradise of the opium seed. Ghosh writes with impeccable control, and with a vivid and sometimes surprising imagination..." - The New Yorker.

The World is What It Is, by Patrick French. Vintage. BIOGRAPHY. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (16 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"...the first authoritative biography of the controversial Nobel laureate, whose only stated ambition was greatness as a writer, in pursuit of which goal nothing else was sacred. Beginning with a richly detailed portrait of Naipaul’s childhood in colonial Trinidad, French gives us the boy born to an Indian family, the displaced soul in a displaced community, who by dint of talent and ambition finds the only imaginable way out: a scholarship to Oxford. London in the 1950s offers hope and his first literary success, but homesickness and depression almost defeat Vidia, his narrow escape aided by Patricia Hale, an Englishwoman who will devote herself to his work and well-being. She will stand by him, sometimes tenuously, for more than four decades, even as Naipaul embarks on a twenty-four-year affair, which will awaken half-dead passions and feed perhaps his greatest wave of dizzying creativity. Amid this harrowing emotional life, French traces the course of the fierce visionary impulse underlying Naipaul’s singular power, a gift to produce masterpieces of fiction and nonfiction..." - from the hardcover edition.

The White Mary, by Kira Salak. Henry Holt. NOVEL. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (89 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"A young reporter embarks on a dangerous adventure in Salak's gripping debut novel, a blend of Heart of Darkness and Tomb Raider. Like her protagonist, Marika Vecera, award-winning journalist Salak has traveled solo - and narrowly escaped death - in the world's most remote and terrifying places, including war-torn Congo and the interior of Papua New Guinea. Marika, an ambitious journalist, travels to discover the truth about war correspondent Robert Lewis, who has observed some of the modern world's greatest atrocities. He is believed to have committed suicide, but a letter from a missionary leaves Marika thinking he may still be alive in the wilds of Papua New Guinea. She sets off on her quest, and eventually malaria, ritual murder and arduous trekking through the wilderness lead Marika to some startling discoveries and a pathway out of her own past trauma..." - Publishers Weekly.