The Big Burn by Timothy Egan

In THE WORST HARD TIME, Timothy Egan put the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl at the center of a rich history, told through characters he brought to indelible life. Now he performs the same alchemy with The Big Burn, the largest-ever forest fire in America and the tragedy that cemented Teddy Roosevelt's legacy in the land.

On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno that jumped from treetop to ridge as it raged, destroying towns and timber in an eyeblink. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men -- college boys, day-workers, immigrants from mining camps -- to fight the fires. But no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them.

Egan narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force, through the eyes of the people who lived it. Equally dramatic, though, is the larger story he tells of outsized president Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester Gifford Pinchot. Pioneering the notion of conservation, Roosevelt and Pinchot did nothing less than create the idea of public land as our national treasure, owned by every citizen. The robber barons fought him and the rangers charged with protecting the reserves, but even as TR's national forests were smoldering they were saved: The heroism shown by those same rangers turned public opinion permanently in favor of the forests, though it changed the mission of theforest service with consequences felt in the fires of today.

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The Fires of Edgarville by Craig Joseph Danner

Hank Davenport is a man in search of his life. Born just days after the first anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he is a Japanese-American raised in the Pacific Northwest by Caucasian parents. A respected and successful pediatrician, his reputation is destroyed when he is accused of mercy-killing a young patient.

Seeking refuge on his adoptive mother's remote and dilapidated orchard, Hank discovers that she is rapidly succumbing to Alzheimer's. Long an outcast from her Mormon family, Myrna herself has only recently returned to the now-failed homestead her father and brothers built and planted when she was a child. As her dementia progresses, her long-held secrets are revealed, and Hank becomes entwined in the mystery of a phantom arsonist plaguing a community that holds the slowly turning key to his past and his future.

Tracing the evolution of a small Oregon lumber town and its connection to the Japanese internment during World War II, The Fires of Edgarville is a spellbinding story told with authentic detail and unexpected humor. Craig Danner's second novel is fast-paced and unflinching in its honesty, while filled with compassion for its original and endearing characters.

The Fires of Edgarville is a daring and enthralling novel with the power to surprise anyone who picks it up. Craig Joseph Danner takes a tiny Northwestern town and two unlikely protagonists -- a defamed Japanese-American doctor and an irascible senile woman -- and somehow turns out high drama. This novel is slender and fast-paced, but the story is rich and artfully woven with dazzling crescendos of action and original characters in search of elusive truths. -- Jim Lynch, author of The Highest Tide

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The Mom & Pop Store by Robert Spector

Business journalist Robert Spector grew up working in his family?s butcher shop in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where he learned invaluable lessons about the independent retail business?and about life. Mom & pop stores have always brought people together, fostering a sense of neighborhood identity and camaraderie, and are the glue that connects people in big cities and small towns alike. The Mom & Pop Store reflects the story of this country, for it embraces and cross-references every ethnic group and virtually every element of our society.

Long fascinated by the ?direct connection? people feel as merchants and customers when they do business in neighborhood shops, and responding to the growing ?buy local? movement across the country, Spector sets out to discover the state, and the state of mind, of independent retailing in America. From a specialty soda pop shop in Los Angeles to a florist shop in Dayton, Ohio, from a bakery in Chicago to a bookstore in Bellingham, Washington, mom & pop store owners shared their stories with him, revealing the spirit and tenacity of the small business owner, dealing with frustration and defeat as well as triumph and success. Spector also interweaves the history of independent retailing. The Mom & Pop Store reflects the story of this country, for it embraces and cross-references every ethnic group and virtually every element of our society.

About the Author

Robert Spector is author of The Nordstrom Way, The Nordstrom Way to Customer Service Excellence, Amazon. Com: Get Big Fast, and Category Killers. He has appeared on C NN, C NBC, ABC, Fox News, PBS, Bloomberg Business, NPR?s Marketplace Report, and numerous other radio shows, and has written on business for the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. He lives in Seattle. Visit his Web site at www.robertspector.com.

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The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter

In the winning and utterly original novels Citizen Vince and The Zero, Jess Walter ("a ridiculously talented writer"?New York Times) painted an America all his own: a land of real, flawed, and deeply human characters coping with the anxieties of their times. Now, in his warmest, funniest, and best novel yet, Walter offers a story as real as our own lives: a tale of overstretched accounts, misbegotten schemes, and domestic dreams deferred.

A few years ago, small-time finance journalist Matthew Prior quit his day job to gamble everything on a quixotic notion: a Web site devoted to financial journalism in the form of blank verse. When his big idea?and his wife's eBay resale business? ends with a whimper (and a garage full of unwanted figurines), they borrow and borrow, whistling past the graveyard of their uncertain dreams. One morning Matt wakes up to find himself jobless, hobbled with debt, spying on his wife's online flirtation, and six days away from losing his home. Is this really how things were supposed to end up for me, he wonders: staying up all night worried, driving to 7-Eleven in the middle of the night to get milk for his boys, and falling in with two local degenerates after they offer him a hit of high-grade marijuana?

Or, he thinks, could this be the solution to all my problems?

Following Matt in his weeklong quest to save his marriage, his sanity, and his dreams, The Financial Lives of the Poets is a hysterical, heartfelt novel about how we can reach the edge of ruin?and how we can begin to make our way back.

About the Author

Jess Walter is the author of The Zero, a finalist for the National Book Award; Citizen Vince, a winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel; Land of the Blind; and Over Tumbled Graves, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Also the author of the nonfiction book Ruby Ridge, Walter lives in Spokane, Washington, with his family.

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