Thomas Mallon returns with Fellow Travelers, an historical novel set in the mid-1950s climate of McCarthy’s mission to find and destroy the evils of communism and homosexuality. A closeted State Department politician plies his power with ugly fallout for an admiring and idealistic young Senate aide. It’s an absorbing story with a cast of historical figures.  Mallon’s previous historical novels include Henry and Clara, Two Moons, Dewey Defeats Truman, Aurora 7, and Bandbox. Also an essayist, Mallon, who has a PhD from Harvard, wrote Mrs. Paine’s Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy about Lee Harvey Oswald.

Have you missed the calm and graceful prose of Annie Dillard? Her anthropologist’s eye and poet’s precise language distinguish her second novel Maytrees.  Life, love and death in all their complexities inform this portrait of a relationship set in Cape Cod’s Provincetown. Dillard published one other novel (The Living), but most of her writing is poetry, essays or non-fiction narrative. Her ability to distill emotion into the essence of beauty and nature resonates in all her writing. Dillard, Professor Emeritus at Wesleyan University, last published An American Childhood, an autobiography.

Athletes behaving badly! You may recognize some details, but Frank Deford enhances the story with his knowledge of the “underside” of the sports business in his newest novel The Entitled. Well written fiction illuminates the beliefs and motivations that drive the characters in the story and Deford’s expertise generates strong reactions to the events that mirror the headlines. Deford, author of fourteen books, is a six-time National Sportswriter of the Year. Come to hear him speak on The Entitled at the Library on Sunday May 20 at 2 pm.

Is there a book club that has not discussed The Kite Runner? Afghan native Khaled Hosseini returns with A Thousand Splendid Suns. Superb story-telling, this historical chronicle of family, friendship and faith confirms the author’s talents. This time the story  is of  two Afghan women brought together by war in an unlikely friendship that nevertheless endures. Despite the pain and heartbreak, the novel is not depressing. Will his second novel lift Hosseini to another 103 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list?

Thirty years ago, Sara Davidson wrote Loose Change, the bestseller about the baby-boomer generation’s coming of age. Now she has turned her attention to her contemporaries again to check out what is happening and where they are going. She interviews a variety of contemporaries with candid and inspiring results. There are no prescriptions here, just a journalistic laying out of the issues. Leap! What Will We Do With the Rest of Our Lives?  examines the various stages of life and nudges boomers to think about the future.

Anne Lamott follows up her two bestselling books about her own journey of belief,  Traveling Mercies and Plan B,  with Grace(Eventually): Thoughts on Faith, a collection of essays showing an older and wiser spiritual searcher. Lamott does not preach, when she explores decency, love and forgiveness.  She uses her own experience to encourage the positive values that have developed in her life.