Kinokuniya Summer Reads 2011: Recommended Adult Fiction
Introduction
How do you pick a book to read this summer? Do you go through your collection and select a beloved title that you’ve read many times before or do you head to your favorite bookstore to browse its collection and choose a new book that you could lose yourself into? Well, here in Kinokuniya we do both. Other than going back to re-read books that have been published in the past, we also look at the plethora of new titles available in our bookstore. Then we realized that there are just simply too many to choose from and we can’t settle on one title that we want to read first. That’s how we then got the idea to ask around our office and selling floor asking for recommendations to read.
Fiction – of all kinds, be they teen, young adult or adult fiction – has always been the most popular genres in any season. Naturally, that’s where we started. After compiling a list of recommendations just for fun and internal reading only (plus one mild argument about a non-fiction book–which is not fiction but is still on the list because the Fiction People are good at arguments like that–on the author of On The Road and his friend), we had the idea to publish them in our blog because they’re too exciting to not be shared. And here it is… the recommended books from our Adult Fiction/Literature Category.
The list is by no means perfect or standard… it’s hardly New York Times material, that’s for sure. But we hope that we’ll be able to help you select a book or two among the collection we have in our stores to read this summer. If you haven’t heard of these titles before, we recommend checking them out in websites such as Goodreads and Amazon to further confirm that they really are the right books for you.
Have fun browsing!
Kinokuniya Jakarta’s Recommended Summer Reading: Adult Fiction
1. A Dance With Dragons (Book 5 of A Song Of Ice And Fire) by George R. R. Martin
Genre: Fantasy
The future of the Seven Kingdoms hangs in the balance. In the east, Daenerys, last scion of House Targaryen, her dragons grown to terrifying maturity, rules as queen of a city built on dust and death, beset by enemies. Now that her whereabouts are known many are seeking Daenerys and her dragons. Among them the dwarf, Tyrion Lannister, who has escaped King’s Landing with a price on his head, wrongfully condemned to death for the murder of his nephew, King Joffrey. But not before killing his hated father, Lord Tywin. To the north lies the great Wall of ice and stone – a structure only as strong as those guarding it. Eddard Stark’s bastard son Jon Snow has been elected the 998th Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, but he has enemies both in the Watch and beyond the Wall, where the wildling armies are massing for an assault.
On all sides bitter conflicts are reigniting, played out by a grand cast of outlaws and priests, soldiers and skinchangers, nobles and slaves. The tides of destiny will inevitably lead to the greatest dance of all…
The highly anticipated fifth book in George R. R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire couldn’t have been released at a better time. Following the success of the successful HBO series of the first book in the series, A Game Of Thrones, A Dance With Dragons has garnered the attention not only from longtime fans but also new fans of the series. At over 1000 pages, this epic novel is set to reign supreme in bestsellers list everywhere. (Review Source: Amazon.co.uk, Original)
2. The Hypnotist by Lars Kepler
Genre: Crime/Thriller
Tumba, Sweden. A triple homicide, all the victims from the same family, captivates Detective Inspector Joona Linna, who demands to investigate the grisly murders—against the wishes of the national police. The killer is at large, and it appears that the elder sister of the family escaped the carnage; it seems only a matter of time until she, too, is murdered. But where can Linna begin? Desperate for information, Linna sees one mode of recourse: hypnotism. He enlists Dr. Erik Maria Bark to mesmerize the boy, hoping to discover the killer through his eyes.
A number-one bestselling international sensation sure to please fans of Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell, The Hypnotist is the first novel in a series, soon to be published in thirty-three countries. With its pulse-pounding hooks and twists, it announces a stirring new contribution to the annals of crime fiction. (Review source: Goodreads)
3. The Sweetness Of Tears by Nafisa Haji
Genre: General Fiction
When faith and facts collide, Jo March—a young woman born into an Evangelical Christian dynasty—wrestles with questions about who she is and how she fits into the weave of her faithful family. Chasing loose threads that she hopes will lead to the truth, Jo sets off on an unlikely quest across boundaries of language and religion, through chasms of sectarian divides in the Muslim world. Against the backdrop of the War on Terror—travelling from California to Chicago, Pakistan to Iraq—she delves deeply into the past, encountering relatives, often for the first time, whose histories are intricately intertwined with her own . . . only to learn that true spiritual devotion is a broken field riddled with doubt and that nothing is ever as it seems.
A story of forbidden love and familial dysfunction that interweaves multiple generational and cultural viewpoints, The Sweetness of Tears is a powerful reminder of the ties that bind us, the choices that divide us, and the universal joys and tragedies that shape us all. (Review source: Amazon.com)
