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General Fiction: Dave Eggers – The Circle

When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world's most powerful internet company, she feels she's been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users' personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. … What begins as the captivating story of one woman's ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.

British Crime: The Devil in the Marshalsea – The Devil in the Marshalsea

London, 1727 - and Tom Hawkins is about to fall from his heaven of card games, brothels and coffee-houses into the hell of a debtors' prison.

The Marshalsea is a savage world of its own, with simple rules: those with family or friends who can lend them a little money may survive in relative comfort. Those with none will starve in squalor and disease. And those who try to escape will suffer a gruesome fate at the hands of the gaol's rutheless governor and his cronies. A twisting mystery, a dazzling evocation of early 18th Century London.

Tough Crime:  Peter Farris – Last Call for the Living

For bank teller Charlie Colquitt it was another Saturday. For Hobe Hicklin, an ex-con with nothing to lose, it was another score. For Hobe’s drug-addled, sex-crazed girlfriend, it was more lust, violence, and drugs. But Hicklin’s first mistake was double-crossing his partners in the Aryan Brotherhood. His second was taking a hostage. He and Charlie could hide out for only so long before Hicklin’s past catches up to them. Hot on Hicklin’s trail are a pair of Brotherhood soldiers, ready to burn a path of murder and mayhem to get revenge. GBI Special Agent Sallie Crews and Sheriff Tommy Lang catch the case, and soon Crews is making some dangerous connections. For hard-drinking, despondent Lang, rescuing Charlie might be the key to personal salvation.

Science Fiction: James Smythe – The Machine

Vic returned from war tormented by his nightmares. His once happy marriage to Beth all but disintegrated. A machine promised salvation, purging him of all memory.

Now the machines are gone, declared too controversial, the side-effects too harmful. But within Beth’s flat is an ever-whirring black box. She knows that memories can be put back and that she can rebuild her husband piece by piece.

Fantasy:  Steven Brust & Skyler White – The Incrementalists

The Incrementalists—a secret society of two hundred people with an unbroken lineage reaching back forty thousand years. They cheat death, share lives and memories, and communicate with one another across nations, races, and time. They have an epic history, an almost magical memory, and a very modest mission: to make the world better, just a little bit at a time. Their ongoing argument about how to do this is older than most of their individual memories.

Phil, whose personality has stayed stable through more incarnations than anyone else’s, has loved Celeste—and argued with her—for most of the last four hundred years. But now Celeste, recently dead, embittered, and very unstable, has changed the rules—not incrementally, and not for the better. Now the heart of the group must gather in Las Vegas to save the Incrementalists, and maybe the world.

Paranormal/Urban Fantasy: John Lambshead – Wolf in Shadow

Urban fantasy in one of the world’s greatest cities.

Rhian, a girl from the Welsh valleys on the run from tragedy and herself, finds a new home in the modern East End of London, where the world’s largest financial center spins a web of money and power from glistening towers of chrome and glass. Beneath the digital façade lurks the old East End where the layers of two thousand years of dramatic and violent history slide over one another like glaciers, spilling out in avalanches that warp the real world.

As bodies begin to litter the East End streets, The Commission dispatches its best enforcers to deal with the situation: Karla is not human, and Jameson left his humanity behind in pieces in Northern Ireland and Afghanistan. Rhian makes new friends, dangerous friends; and where Rhian goes, the wolf is always in her shadow, just a heartbeat away.

Among the bankers and traders of the East End walk demons in human form and who is to say which are the monsters? London is a magical bomb waiting to explode and somewhere a fuse is hissing.

Classic of the Month: Nathanael West – Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust

The title for our Classics bok club is The Day of the Locust, published 1939, set in Hollywood, California, during the Great Depression. Its themes deal with the alienation and desperation of a broad group of odd individuals who exist at the fringes of the Hollywood movie industry.

Miss Lonelyhearts, published in 1933 an Expressionist black comedy set in New York City during the Great Depression. Miss Lonelyhearts is an unnamed male newspaper columnist writing an advice column that the newspaper staff considers a joke. As Miss Lonelyhearts reads letters from desperate New Yorkers, he feels terribly burdened and falls into a cycle of deep depression, accompanied by heavy drinking and occasional bar fights. He is also the victim of the pranks and cynical advice of Shrike, his feature editor at the newspaper.

Teen reading: William Sutcliffe – Bad Influence

Highly recommended by Jan.

Meet Carl: cruel, fun, exciting a bit older than you, and totally in control. Your best friend Ollie likes Carl maybe even more than he likes you. You don't want to lose Ollie, so you tag along: playing Carl's games, doing what he says, getting into trouble. But how far will Carl go before he stops? And just how bad does he have to get before you say No?

General Fiction: Nathan Filer – Shock of the Fall

Winner of the Costa Best First Novel Award! 'I'll tell you what happened because it will be a good way to introduce my brother. His name's Simon. I think you're going to like him. I really do. But in a couple of pages he'll be dead. And he was never the same after that.' The Shock of the Fall is an extraordinary portrait of one man's descent into mental illness. It is a brave and groundbreaking novel from one of the most exciting new voices in fiction.

British Crime: Alex Grecian – The Yard (Murder Squad Novel #1)

1890, London.  Jack the Ripper’s reign of terror is finally over, but a new one is just beginning…Victorian London is a cesspool of crime and Scotland Yard has only twelve detectives – known as “The Murder Squad” – to investigate countless murders every month.  Created after the Metropolitan police’s spectacular failure to capture Jack the Ripper, The Murder Squad suffers rampant public contempt.  They have failed their citizens.  But no one can anticipate the brutal murder of one of their own…one of twelve…

Tough Crime: Christopher Irvin – Federales

Mexican Federal Agent Marcos Camarena dedicated his life to the job. But in a country where white knights die meaningless deaths, martyred in a hole with fifty other headless bodies in the desert, corruption is not an attribute but a scale; no longer a stigma but the status quo.

When Marcos’s life is threatened, he leaves law enforcement and his life in Mexico City behind for a coastal resort town—until an old friend asks him to look after an outspoken politician, a woman who knows cartel violence all too well. Despite his best efforts, Marcos can’t find it in his heart to refuse, and soon finds himself isolated on the political front lines of the war on drugs.

Inspired by true events, Federales is a story of survivors’ compulsive devotion to a cause in the face of ever-darkening circumstances.

Science Fiction: Jay Martel – Channel Blue

Earth used to be Galaxy Entertainment's most lucrative show. The inhabitants of the Western Galaxy – the saviest, richest demographic in the Milky Way – just couldn't get enough of the day-to-day details of the average Earthling's live.

But Channel Blue's ratings are flagging and its producers are planning a spectacular finale. In just three weeks, their TV show will go out with a bang. The trouble is, so will Earth.

Only one man can save our planet and he's hardly a likely hero...

Fantasy: Arianne 'Tex' Thompson – One Night in Sixes

Appaloosa Elim is a man who knows his place. On a good day, he's content with it. Today is not a good day. Today, his so called 'partner' - that lily-white lordling Sil Halfwick - has ridden off west for the border, hell-bent on making a name for himself in native territory. And Elim, whose place is written in the bastard browns and whites of his cow-spotted face, doesn't dare show up home again without him.

The border town called Sixes is quiet in the heat of the day, but Elim's heard the stories about what wakes at sunset: gunslingers and shapeshifters and ancient animal gods whose human faces never outlast the daylight. And about the only thing worse than finding whatever's left of Sil is the thought of getting caught out after dark - of discovering how much magic is living in Elim's own flesh, and how far he'll go to survive the night.

Paranormal/Urban Fantasy: Jamie Schulz – Premonitions

It’s the kind of score Karyn Ames has always dreamed of—enough to set her crew up pretty well and, more important, enough to keep her safely stocked on a very rare, very expensive black market drug. Without it, Karyn hallucinates slices of the future until they totally overwhelm her, leaving her unable to distinguish the present from the mess of certainties and possibilities yet to come.

The client behind the heist is Enoch Sobell, a notorious crime lord with a reputation for being ruthless and exacting—and a purported practitioner of dark magic. Sobell is almost certainly condemned to Hell for a magically extended lifetime full of shady dealings. Once you’re in business with him, there’s no backing out.

Karyn and her associates are used to the supernatural and the occult, but their target is more than just the usual family heirloom or cursed necklace. It’s a piece of something larger. Something sinister.

Karyn’s crew and even Sobell himself are about to find out just how powerful it is… and how powerful it may yet become.

Classic of the Month: Charlotte Perkins Gilman – Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland & Selected Stories

First published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's physical and mental health.

Teen reading: M Molly Backes – The Princesses of Iowa

Paige Sheridan has the perfect life. She's pretty, rich, and popular, and her spot on the homecoming court is practically guaranteed. But when a night of partying ends in an it-could-have-been-so-much worse crash, everything changes. Her best friends start ignoring her, her boyfriend grows cold and distant, and her once-adoring younger sister now views her with contempt. The only bright spot is her creative writing class, led by a charismatic new teacher who encourages students to be true to themselves. But who is Paige, if not the homecoming princess everyone expects her to be? In this arresting and witty debut, a girl who was once high-school royalty must face a truth that money and status can't fix, and choose between living the privileged life of a princess, or owning up to her mistakes and giving up everything she once held dear.