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Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle reviewed in the September 3rd issue include:


Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Print length: 576 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...a deep dive into a fascinating family that feels very real, and fully grounded in our time." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (5 reviews). Kindle edition $14.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul - the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter’s dreams. Together with Walter - environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man - she was doing her small part to build a better world. But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz - outré rocker and Walter’s college best friend and rival - still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty?" - Amazon.

Skippy Dies, by Paul Murray. Faber & Faber. Print length: 672 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...leaves you hopeful and hungry for life." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (10 reviews). Kindle edition $14.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Why Skippy dies and what happens next is the subject of this dazzling and uproarious novel, unraveling a mystery that links the boys of Seabrook College to their parents and teachers in ways nobody could have imagined. With a cast of characters that ranges from hip-hop-loving fourteen-year-old Eoin 'MC Sexecutioner' Flynn to basketball playing midget Philip Kilfether, packed with questions and answers on everything from Ritalin, to M-theory, to bungee jumping, to the hidden meaning of the poetry of Robert Frost, Skippy Dies is a heartfelt, hilarious portrait of the pain, joy, and occasional beauty of adolescence, and a tragic depiction of a world always happy to sacrifice its weakest members." - Amazon

NEWLY-AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK AND KINDLE EDITIONS:

The Extra Man, by Jonathan Ames. Scribner. Print length: 384 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "with a film version starring Kevin Kline in theaters, now's the time to read Ames' funny and oddball novel..." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (38 reviews). Kindle edition $11.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Louis has just lost his job as a seventh-grade teacher at a posh private school, owing to his misappropriation and misuse of a colleague's brassiere, and he finds himself living with Henry Harrison in a dirty, fourth-floor, one-bedroom apartment uptown. Henry is an elderly eccentric whose avocation is acting as 'the extra man' for wealthy elderly society ladies who live on the East Side. Louis lands a job telemarketing subscriptions to an ecological magazine by day, while by night he makes periodic attempts to establish his uncertain sexual orientation. The escapades of the two men, together and separately, make unbelievable but hilarious reading." - Library Journal.

A Happy Marriage, by Rafael Yglesias. Scribner. Print length: 384 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "[explores] with unflinching honesty a couple's imperfect but enduring union." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (93 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"...an autobiographical and devastatingly raw appraisal of a nearly 30-year marriage. As the novel opens in 1975, 21-year-old Enrique Sabas, a high school–dropout literary wunderkind, has just met Margaret Cohen, a vivacious, beautiful budding graphic designer who will become the love of his life. Enrique and Margaret's romantic and sexual misadventures during the first awkward weeks of their courtship are interspersed with scenes from the couple's three decades together before Margaret succumbs to cancer: raising children, losing a parent, the temptation of an easy affair. Margaret's physical decline and Enrique's acknowledgment of guilt, inadequacy and a selfish desire to postpone his loss are described in blunt, heart-wrenching detail, and Enrique's ongoing struggles to define the nature of masculinity, the significance of art and the value of marriage add a philosophical layer to the domestic snapshots." - Publishers Weekly.

The Children's Book, by A. S. Byatt. Vintage. Print length: 688 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...a meticulously researched chronicle...imbued with the author's signature dark touch." Amazon customer rating: 3 1/2 stars (88 reviews). Kindle edition $9.89. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.

"A spellbinding novel, at once sweeping and intimate, from the Booker Prize–winning author of Possession, that spans the Victorian era through the World War I years, and centers around a famous children’s book author and the passions, betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves. When Olive Wellwood’s oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip sketching in the basement of the new Victoria and Albert Museum - a talented working-class boy who could be a character out of one of Olive’s magical tales - she takes him into the storybook world of her family and friends. But the joyful bacchanals Olive hosts at her rambling country house—and the separate, private books she writes for each of her seven children - conceal more treachery and darkness than Philip has ever imagined. As these lives - of adults and children alike - unfold, lies are revealed, hearts are broken, and the damaging truth about the Wellwoods slowly emerges. Taking us from the cliff-lined shores of England to Paris, Munich, and the trenches of the Somme, The Children’s Book is a deeply affecting story of a singular family, played out against the great, rippling tides of the day." - Amazon.

The Truth About Love, by Josephine Hart. Vintage. Print length: 224 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...a moving examination of grief and recovery." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (1 review). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"It opens in a small Irish town in the 1960s with the accidental death of a teenage boy who commits one final, heartrending act of love. Then three brilliantly realized voices - the boy’s mother, his older sister, a German expat neighbor - speak the story into existence. Their descriptions of the aftermath of the boy’s death mix with meditations and conversations about other loves tested, twisted, or lost - in the past and forward, through the next forty years - as they struggle to make sense of tragedy: the boy’s, their own, their countries’". - Amazon.

Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel. Henry Holt. Print length: 560 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "[manages] to make the intricate court intrigue of 16th century English royalty as gripping as any mystery." Amazon customer rating: 3 1/2 stars (302 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king's freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?" - Amazon.