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words by > Michael J. Bandler

This month’s best and brightest must-reads.

Focus on…

Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Marisha Pessl (Viking, $25.95)

This debut novel with a rather ungainly title confirms that we’re going to have the excellent Marisha Pessl on the literary scene for a while. So what’s her book about? In Hollywood-speak: “Terry Southern and Tom Wolfe meet Rabelais for lunch in Voltaire’s garden.” But such a description doesn’t even begin to hint at the clever breadth of this literary farce that, in simple terms, is a coming-of-age novel. Special Topics in Calamity Physics is also classifiable as a road epic, a portrait of a father-daughter relationship and a murder mystery, dappled with a wide array of cultural and pop-cultural riffs that will leave the reader gasping for air. Along with all this, though, comes a poignancy and wistfulness that make Blue van Meer, the student heroine, one of the most appealing characters in contemporary fiction. Prepare to be glued to the pages.

The Messenger

Daniel Silva (Putnam, $25.95)

World War II counterintelligence operations and the endless strife in Ireland were warm-up themes a few years ago for novelist Daniel Silva. In their wake have come a series of thrillers featuring Gabriel Allon, an Italian art restorer in daylight and an Israeli secret agent in the shadows. This, the sixth of the set, puts Allon in St. Peter’s Square as terrorists put the Pope in their sights.

The search for the masterminds and their benefactors leads Allon and his small coterie of colleagues across the continents, from Vatican City to London to the Caribbean to Megiddo—the hill in northern Israel known more familiarly as Armageddon.

The strength of Silva’s craft that has won him legions of readers is largely the sparse, no-nonsense, cinematic manner in which he moves the action along. This compelling new chapter in the Allon saga no doubt will keep his fans—old and new—on the edge of their beach chairs this month.

And the rest . . .

It’s August—the busiest month along Publishers’ Row—as late-summer titles wend their way to bookstores, and tomes for late fall undergo final editing. Books out of celebdom will bring the likes of Bob Newhart, Audrey Hepburn, Nicole Kidman, Johnny Carson, Ellen Burstyn and Jimmy Stewart to the shelves this month. Literary fiction will be represented by Richard Ford, Mary Gordon, John le Carré and Walter Mosley, with such scribes as Robert B. Parker, Stephen King, Janet Evanovich, Nelson DeMille, Linda Fairstein and Michael Connelly stepping onto the best-seller lists. Is there one surprise “big book” waiting to be launched? Possibly political cartoonist Doug Marlette’s Magic Time, a novel harking back to the civil rights era, or Erik Larson’s Thunderstruck, with wireless inventor Guglielmo Marconi and a murderous London wife-killer at its center.