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Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle and reviewed in the "Best of Summer" special double issue for July 9/16, 2010 include:

Corduroy Mansions, by Alexander McCall Smith. Pantheon. Print length: 368 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...fans will be grateful that the series has just begun." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (4 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Readers of McCall Smith's 44 Scotland Street novels will savor this new series set among a collection of flats in London's lively Pimlico neighborhood. Residents here run the gamut from the very likable to the much loathed. There's William, a well-meaning, widowed wine merchant determined to oust his lazy twentysomething son from his house... Then there's the thoroughly despicable Oedipus Snark, a Parliament member devoid of scruples, conscience, and class. Even his own mother despises him; she's writing his biography, with the aim of exposing every one of his faults. Four young women share a flat as well. Among them is Dee, a health-food devotee who can't understand a male coworker's resistance to her offer of a high-colonic, and art history student Caroline, who has designs on a friend unsure whether he wants to date women or men. Also afoot throughout the book is the astonishingly astute Freddie de la Hay, a canine inclined to paws and reflect..." - Allison Block for Booklist.

Lucy, by Laurence Gonzales. Knopf. Print length: 320 p. NOVEL EW's slant: "He's got Crichton's gift for page-turning storytelling, but also a vivid literary-grade prose style, and a knack for getting inside his characters' heads..." Amazon customer rating: 3 1/2 stars (26 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"When anthropologist Jenny Lowe brings Lucy, the teenage daughter of a murdered colleague, back home with her to Chicago from the Congo in Gonzales's glib biological thriller, Jenny puts the girl's behavioral quirks down to unfamiliarity with the world outside the jungle. But when Lucy shows uncommon strength, agility, and sensitivities typical of animals, Jenny is shocked to realize that Lucy is a 'humanzee': half human, half bonobo. Lucy soon becomes a magnet for the controversy that has colored debates between creationists and evolutionists for decades, as well as an object of interest to a clandestine military think tank." - Publishers Weekly.

The Cookbook Collector, by Allegra Goodman. Dial Press. Print length: 416 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...a novel of impressive élan and real emotional resonance." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (14 reviews). Kindle edition $14.30. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"If any contemporary author deserves to wear the mantel of Jane Austen, it's Goodman, whose subtle, astute social comedies perfectly capture the quirks of human nature. This dazzling novel is Austen updated for the dot-com era, played out between 1999 and 2001 among a group of brilliant risk takers and truth seekers. Still in her 20s, Emily Bach is the CEO of Veritech, a Web-based data-storage startup in trendy Berkeley. Her boyfriend, charismatic Jonathan Tilghman, is in a race to catch up at his data-security company, ISIS, in Cambridge, Mass. Emily is low-key, pragmatic, kind, serene - the polar opposite of her beloved younger sister, Jess, a crazed postgrad who works at an antiquarian bookstore owned by a retired Microsoft millionaire. When Emily confides her company's new secret project to Jonathan as a proof of her love, the stage is set for issues of loyalty and trust, greed, and the allure of power. What is actually valuable, Goodman's characters ponder: a company's stock, a person's promise, a forest of redwoods, a collection of rare cookbooks?" - Publishers Weekly.
$9.99 or less alternative: Goodman's earlier Kaaterskill Falls.

Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, by Jane Brox. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Print length: 368 p. HISTORY. EW's slant: "In a word: dazzling." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (1 review). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"... a sweeping view of a surprisingly revealing aspect of human history - from the stone lamps of the Pleistocene to the LEDs embedded in fabrics of the future. Brox plumbs the class implications of light - who had it, who didn't - through the many centuries when crude lamps and tallow candles constricted waking hours. She convincingly portrays the hell-bent pursuit of whale oil as the first time the human desire for light thrust us toward an environmental tipping point. Only decades later, gas street lights opened up the evening hours to leisure, which changed the ways we live and sleep and the world's ecosystems. Edison's 'tiny strip of paper that a breath would blow away' produced a light that seemed to its users all but divorced from human effort or cost. And yet, as Brox's informative and hair-raising portrait of our current grid system shows, the cost is ever with us. Brilliant is infused with human voices, startling insights, and - only a few years before it becomes illegal to sell most incandescent light bulbs in the United States - timely questions about how our future lives will be shaped by light." - Amazon.

What is Left the Daughter, by Howard Norman. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Print length: 256 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...honest and even lyrical, but that's not enough to give form to the amorphous narrative." Amazon customer rating: 3 1/2 stars (7 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Set on the Atlantic coast of Canada during WWII, Norman's latest is an expertly crafted tale of love during wartime. Wyatt Hillyer loses both his parents on the same day when they jump from different bridges in Halifax, Nova Scotia, after they discover they are both having affairs with the woman next door. Wyatt's aunt and uncle take him in, and Wyatt becomes his uncle's apprentice in his sled and toboggan business and, despite the circumstances, soon falls in love with his adopted cousin, Tilda. Yet he must resign himself to loving from a distance when Tilda brings home Hans Moehring, a German university student. The two begin a courtship harshly complicated by reports of U-boat attacks on Canadian ships, and Tilda's father becoming increasingly uneasy about this potential enemy in their midst." - Publishers Weekly.


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