I’ve been the First Editions Club manager since 2007 and have thoroughly enjoyed seeing the books that John and Joe and all of the rest of the Lemuria staff have gotten behind and supported as FEC picks.  Here are my top 5 favorite picks (in no particular order) since I’ve been a part of this amazing club;

Mr. Sebastion and the Negro Magician by Daniel Wallace.  From the author of “Big Fish” comes this haunting, tender story that weaves a tragic secret, a mysterious meeting with the Devil, and a family of charming circus freaks recounting the extraordinary adventures of their friend Henry Walker, the Negro Magician.

 

Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles. Bennie Ford, a fifty-three-year-old failed poet turned translator, is traveling to his estranged daughter’s wedding when his flight is canceled. Stuck with thousands of fuming passengers in the purgatory of O’Hare Airport, he watches the clock tick and realizes that he will miss the ceremony. Frustrated, irate, and helpless, Bennie does the only thing he can: he starts to write a letter.

 

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon.  The lives of three strangers interconnect in unforeseen ways-and with unexpected consequences-in acclaimed author Dan Chaon’s gripping, brilliantly written new novel.
Longing to get on with his life, Miles Cheshire nevertheless can’t stop searching for his troubled twin brother, Hayden, who has been missing for ten years. Hayden has covered his tracks skillfully, moving stealthily from place to place, managing along the way to hold down various jobs and seem, to the people he meets, entirely normal. But some version of the truth is always concealed.

Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross.  David Pepin has loved his wife since the moment they met, and after thirteen years of marriage he still can’t imagine living without her–yet he obsessively contemplates her demise. Soon she “is “dead, and he’s both deeply distraught and the prime suspect.

The officers investigating her death are intimately familiar with conjugal enigmas. Detective Ward Hastroll was happily, complacently married until his wife became inexplicably, voluntarily, and militantly bedridden. And Detective Sam Sheppard is especially sensitive to marital guilt, having decades before been convicted and then declared innocent of his wife’s brutal murder.

Swamplandia by Karen Russell.  Ava, a resourceful but terrified twelve, must manage seventy gators and the vast, inscrutable landscape of her own grief. Her mother, Swamp landia!’s legendary headliner, has just died; her sister is having an affair with a ghost called the Dredgeman; her brother has secretly defected to the World of Darkness in a last-ditch effort to keep their sinking family afloat; and her father, Chief Bigtree, is AWOL. To save her family, Ava must journey on her own to a perilous part of the swamp called the Underworld, a harrowing odyssey from which she emerges a true heroine.

by Zita

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