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"Ray in Reverse"
by Daniel Wallace
Publisher: Algonquin Books
"Ray in Reverse" is such an exceptionally winning novel from start to finish (or would that be finish to start?) that one can almost forgive the whimsy of its opening chapter. The shtick: Ray's in heaven, and he's joined a group called Last Words, where the members... well, you guessed it, rehash the last things they said on Earth. As it turns out, the dead make for fierce critics, and when they criticize his offering (the incomplete phrase "I wish--") Ray storms out in a huff.

From the second chapter onward, Ray relives the most prominent episodes of his life in reverse order, starting with his fatal cancer and working his way back. Here is Ray losing hair, growing wings, and trying to make his final amends; Ray building his son a tree house and getting drunk there every night; Ray with amnesia; Ray stealing the good-luck penny from his grandfather's pocket--while his grandfather lies in his coffin. His is an ordinary life, with an ordinary mixture of good intentions and bad judgment, but it's also one in which extraordinary things happen. In "Big Fish," his first novel, Daniel Wallace proved himself a master at mapping precisely the point where the mythic and the quotidian meet. With its gentle humor and pitch-perfect prose, "Ray in Reverse" is exactly the right kind of fairy tale for our unmagical times. --Mary Park

Our Price: $15.36 | You Save: $6.59 (30%)   

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"Bereft: A Sister's Story"
by Jane Bernstein
Publisher: North Point Press
In 1966, when the author was 17, her 21-year-old sister, Laura, was murdered for no apparent reason by David Mumbaugh, a man she didn't even know. The girls' bereaved parents, "practical people who passed on their distrust of the intangible," made it clear that they must all "get on with their lives" without further discussion. Not until 1989, when she had two daughters of her own and found herself stuck in a troubled marriage, did Jane Bernstein pull out a folder containing 23-year-old articles describing her sister's death. This sensitive memoir chronicles her subsequent investigation into the case and weaves an account of the intervening years of college, political activism, and several abortive stints of therapy to show that Bernstein was badly damaged by Laura's loss and their parents' refusal to let her grieve. As she twice testifies against Mumbaugh's parole, arguing that he hasn't changed and is still dangerous, the author begins to realize that her violent husband won't change either. Eventually, she is able to assimilate the impact of Laura's death and leave her spouse. Yet this is not a bitter book: Bernstein displays great compassion for her parents' inability to voice their sorrow and for her husband's inability to control his anger. Her simple, subtle prose conveys understanding, not recrimination. --Wendy Smith

Our Price: $16.80 | You Save: $7.20 (30%)   

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"The Barn at the End of the World"
by Mary Rose O'Reilley
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Author Mary Rose O'Reilley is decidedly eclectic. She confidently blends sheep tending with her Quaker background as well as her passion for Mahayana Buddhism (a form of Buddhism taught by Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh). This may sound like the recipe for a soup of spiritual mush, but nothing could be further from the truth. Like Anne Lamott, O'Reilley also happens to be a hysterically funny storyteller who understands the importance of humility when writing spiritual autobiography. (One reviewer called O'Reilley a "social anthropologist from the Planet Mongo, a stand-up mystic going for the belly laugh...")

Whether she's talking about grief over dying lambs, the plague of Monkey Mind, flipping sheep, or a barnyard fashion crisis, O'Reilley keeps her metaphors down to earth and her epiphanies humble. The structure is especially inviting: a collection of brief essays of only about three to five pages each. But this collection also reads like a journey with a beginning and an end. It starts with O'Reilly as a college professor who decides to try some part-time animal husbandry at a local farm and ends with her finding a new direction in life that we can only hope will inspire her to write a sequel. --Gail Hudson

Our Price: $16.06 | You Save: $6.89 (30%)   

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"The Wild Numbers"
by Philibert Schogt
Publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows
Mathematical insight is like an assassin's bullet--you don't know it's there until it hits you. Dutch philosopher and mathematician Philibert Schogt shows us the workings of the math-obsessed mind in his short novel "The Wild Numbers." Following the mental and physical ramblings of the unspectacular Professor Isaac Swift as he comes closer to solving a beautifully thorny problem left behind generations ago by an eccentric French genius, the book cleverly dissects the forces driving mathematical creativity. Swift just barely balances his overpowering mental impulses, often likened to a "buzzing in his head," with his physical and social needs. Those familiar with academic math departments will find Schogt's eccentric crank Leonard Vale entertaining and all too true:

The pages crawled with incomprehensible equations in his familiar scratchy handwriting.... Here and there he had left a clearing in the dense jungle of formulae, in which he had written profound aphorisms, underlined three times and followed by three exclamation marks.

Vale becomes a serious problem when he accuses Swift of plagiarizing his work, driving the novel toward its dark conclusion. Nonmathematical readers shouldn't fear--the few equations are simply illustrations of Swift's thinking, and no advanced knowledge is required to follow the plot. Contrasting the flash of insight with the dull glow of truth, "The Wild Numbers" illuminates the plight of a mathematical mind stuck in a real world. --Rob Lightner

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