The Mockingbird Next Door
Life With Harper Lee
by Marja Mills (Penguin Press)
For the past 50 years, Pulitzer Prize-winning “To Kill a Mockingbird” author Harper Lee has been fiercely private. It’s a testament to one-time Chicago Tribune reporter Mills’ skill — and being in the right place at the right time — that she befriended Lee and her lawyer sister, Alice, in the author’s hometown of Monroeville, Ala., and was chosen to set the record straight on Lee. A wonderful, insightful and long overdue tale about the author of one of the greatest American novels.
Elephant Company
by Vicki Constantine Croke (Random House)
Some of the biggest heroes of World War II were even bigger than you thought. In her latest work, animal writer Croke (“The Lady and the Panda”) tells the story of Billy “Elephant Bill” Williams and his troop of marvelous mastodons. On the eve of the 1942 Japanese attack on Burma, these tenacious tuskers hoofed it to India with refugees and supplies. In a display of love and trust for Williams, they traversed treacherous terrain and often eschewing food and water. You may never call the lion the king of the jungle again.
Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall
by Will Chancellor (Harper)
A novel about fathers, sons and journeys. In Chancellor’s debut work, 6-foot-8 Stanford water-polo star Owen Burr is blinded in one eye during a game, drops out of school and disappears. His father, a widowed professor, searches for him. Both father and son reveal their desires: Owen has always wanted to be an artist; Dad longs for fame as a leftist revolutionary. Each man encounters a colorful cast of characters on his own individual journey. So does the author: In writing this novel, his research included traversing Iceland, crashing Art Basel while pretending to be an artist, joining a water polo team, wearing an eye patch and learning Ancient Greek.
The Crossword Century
100 Years of Witty Wordplay, Ingenious Puzzles, and Linguistic Mischief
by Alan Connor (Gotham Books))
Looking for a three-letter word meaning amusing and enjoyable? Try fun — an apt description for this celebration of the crossword puzzle (originally called a word-cross when it debuted in the New York World newspaper in 1913). Our favorite tidbit: The Brits used crossword experts — found through a newspaper contest — to help decipher German codes.
The Hundred-Year House
by Rebecca Makkai (Viking)
A college professor teaches a class on ghost stories while living in mansion haunted by her great grandmother. That’s the premise of Makkai’s (“The Borrower”) humorous new novel. Set in a Chicago manse called Laurelfield, the novel is divided into three parts: 1990, as Dee launches her academic career while living in Laurelfield’s carriage house with her husband Doug; 1955, when the house was an artist colony; and 1900, when the mystery of Great-Grandma Violet is finally unearthed, along with some other secrets. Hint: There’s more comedy than tragedy.