Get a Grip on These Hot New Novels Before They Hit the Shelves

Come late May and June, book reviews and articles about Ann Patchett’s upcoming novel, State of Wonder, will inevitably appear in publications like Entertainment Weekly and The New York Times. The book isn’t due out until June 7, but I’m secure in the knowledge I’ll be one of the first to get it. How do I know this? Because I put a hold on the book in the Des Plaines Public Library’s online catalog.

One of the cool things about the online catalog is that you can place holds on items in the catalog—on everything from books to DVDs—once they appear in the catalog as on order. You’ll then be contacted to pick them up when they come in. Sometimes you can even place holds on items on order at other libraries in our system—libraries we’re online with and with whom we share materials.

Below are five intriguing novels you can place on hold before they hit the shelves.

The recipient of a starred review in Publishers Weekly, which praised it as a “superbly rendered novel,” State of Wonder, Ann Patchett’s sixth novel, is about a Midwestern pharmaceutical researcher sent to the Amazon to investigate the death of a colleague. The novel explores science, responsibility, and ethics and should appeal to fans of her previous novels and readers who enjoy characters and storylines as rich and complex as life itself.

Tom Perrotta is best known for his novels made into movies, Election and Little Children, but I’ll read anything by the guy, whose books are humorous but also display more depth and understanding of human nature than so-called serious books. His latest novel, The Leftovers, due out August 30, is characterized by Kirkus Reviews as “more comic than tragic in tone”--one character runs off to join the “Healing Hug” movement--though it concerns the lives of those left behind after the Rapture, hence the title The Leftovers.

I’ve never read anything by Ann Napolitano, but I’m dying to read A Good Hard Look, in which the great and eccentric writer Flannery O’Connor is a character. In Napolitano’s novel, a young man is engaged to marry a beautiful, conventional young woman from Flannery’s hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia, but then he meets Flannery and starts to question his choices, as well as how one defines a meaningful life. (Due out July 7.)

Coming-of-age novels are as ubiquitous as pigeons in parks, but Jo Ann Beard’s In Zanesville, due out April 25, has already been lauded a standout. According to Publishers Weekly: “Beard is a faultless chronicler of the young and the hopeful; readers couldn’t ask for a better guide for a trip through the wilds of adolescence.” Set in the 1970s, its heroine is a fourteen-year-old former marching band geek who grapples with cliques, a turbulent home-life, and the shifting shape of childhood friendships.

Finally, Rebecca Makkai, an elementary school teacher who lives north of Chicago and whose stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories anthology three years in a row, has published her first novel. Entitled The Borrower, its heroine is a children’s librarian who finds herself on the lam with her favorite patron, a 10-year-old boy and avid reader whose mother has signed him up for “antigay” classes with one Pastor Bob. It’s not due out until June 9, but click here if you’d like to borrow The Borrower before it hits the shelves.