• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Mira; Original edition (July 27, 2010)

Sylvia Sandon is at a crossroads in her life. A wife and mother of two daughters, she and her city-planner husband are grappling with the escalating renovation of their antique farmhouse—a situation that mirrors the disarray in Sylvia’s life. Facing a failing marriage and a stalled career as an art teacher, Sylvia finds herself suddenly powerless to the allure of Tai Rosen, the father of her most challenging art student. As their passion ignites, Sylvia is forced to examine her past, and the seeds of betrayal that were sown decades earlier by her mother’s secret life.

Eloquently written and deeply thought-provoking, Ostermiller’s OUTSIDE THE ORDINARY WORLD crosses many years and miles—from the California brushfires in the 1970s to New England during the first half of this decade. Raised Seventh Day Adventist, Sylvia must reconcile the conflicting values exhibited by her parents—a mother involved in an extramarital affair and a father who was emotionally distant and abusive—while coming to terms with her own troubling role in her family’s dissolution and father’s tragic death.

While infidelity is a subject often explored in fiction, Ostermiller shines a razor-sharp lens on the gray areas surrounding betrayal, the interplay of religion, and the legacy passed down from one generation to the next. At the same time, she reveals the redemptive power of the human spirit to love, grow, and change despite family history.

View the Reader’s Group Guide HERE.

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About Dori

Dori Ostermiller was born in Los Angeles, a fifth-generation Californian. In her early 20′s, she abandoned her path as a pre-med student to pursue an MFA in writing at the University of Massachusetts. Since then, her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Bellingham Review, Roanoke Review, Alligator Juniper, Chautauqua Literary Journal and the Massachusetts Review. She is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist’s Grant and a Tobias Wolf Fiction award, and is the founder of Writers in Progress, a literary arts center in Western Massachusetts.

Her debut novel, Outside the Ordinary World, was released by MIRA in August, 2010.  She lives in Northampton, with her husband and two daughters, and is at work on her second novel.

Connect with Dori on her website, on Facebook, and on Twitter.

Dori Ostermiller’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:

Monday, November 1st:  Book Club Classics!

Tuesday, November 2nd:  Rundpinne

Wednesday, November 3rd:  Cozy Little House

Thursday, November 4th:  Lit and Life

Monday, November 8th:  Peeking Between the Pages

Tuesday, November 9th:  I’m Booking It

Wednesday, November 10th:  The 3 R’s Blog

Thursday, November 11th:  Dolce Bellezza

Monday, November 15th:  Musings of a Bookish Kitty

Tuesday, November 16th:  Reviews from the Heart

Wednesday, November 17th:  Mockingbird Hill Cottage

Thursday, November 18th:  Starting Fresh

Friday, November 19th:  Diary of an Eccentric

Monday, November 22nd:  Along the Way

Wednesday, November 24th:  In the Next Room

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks (October 5, 2010)

With the new millennium approaching, the eccentric town of Thebes grows even stranger. Mrs. Leontina Scales begins speaking in tongues after being clocked by a Catholic statuette. Her daughter, Tabitha, and her sons scheme to save their mother or surrender her to Jesus—whatever comes first. Meanwhile, choir director Jeremy Carr, caught between lust and ambition, fumbles his way toward Y2K. The ancient Sisters of the Sorrowful Mysteries join with a gay singing group. The Radical Radiants battle the Catholics. A Christmas pageant goes horribly awry. And a child is born.

Only a modern master like Gregory Maguire could spin a tale as frantic, funny, and farcical as The Next Queen of Heaven.

About Gregory Maguire

Gregory Maguire is the bestselling author of Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Lost, Mirror, Mirror, Matchless, Making Mischief, and the Wicked Years series that includes A Lion Among Men, Son of a Witch, and Wicked, now a beloved classic and the basis for the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical of the same name. Maguire has lectured on art, literature, and culture both at home and abroad. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

Visit Maguire at his website.

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks (September 21, 2010)

Loyalty, loss, and the ties that bind: These are the ingredients of The Recipe Club, a “novel cookbook” that combines an authentic story of friendship with more than eighty delicious recipes.

Lifelong friends Lilly and Val are united as much by their differences as by their similarities. In childhood, “LillyPad” and “ValPal” form an exclusive two-person club, writing intimate letters in which they share hopes, fears, deepest secrets . . . and recipes—from Lilly’s “Lovelorn Lasagna” to Valerie’s “Forgiveness Tapenade.” The Recipe Club sustains Lilly and Val’s bond across the decades: through the challenges of independence, the joys and heartbreaks of first love, and the emotional complexities of family relationships, identity, mortality, and goals deferred—until the fateful day when an act of kindness becomes an unforgivable betrayal.

ANDREA ISRAEL (left) is a producer/writer for ABC’s Focus Earth. She was a producer/writer for Anderson Cooper 360, Dateline, and Good Morning America (which garnered her an Emmy Award). Her story, “In Donald’s Eyes,” was optioned for a film. She is the author of Taking Tea, a guide to the history and ceremony of the drink. Her writing has appeared in many publications.

NANCY GARFINKEL (right) is co-author of The Wine Lover’s Guide to the Wine Country: The Best of Napa, Sonoma, and Mendocino. A writer, design consultant, creative strategist, and editor for a wide range of magazine, corporate, and non-profit clients, she has won a host of graphic arts and editorial merit awards. She has written extensively about food and graphic arts.

Have fun at their website, www.therecipeclubbook.com.

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks (September 21, 2010)

Tillie Harris’s life is in disarray—her husband is away on business, the boxes in her new home aren’t unpacked, and the telephone isn’t even connected yet. Though she’s not due for another month, sudden labor pains force Tillie to reach out to her estranged father for help, a choice that means facing the painful memories she’s been running from since she was a little girl.

An extraordinary debut from a talented new voice, Up from the Blue untangles the year in Tillie’s life that changed everything: 1975, the year her mother disappeared.

Praise for Up From the Blue:

“Up From the Blue deftly portrays a family with contradictions we can all relate to—it’s beautiful and maddening, hopeful and condemning, simple, yet like a knot that takes a lifetime to untangle. You will love it completely, even as it hurts you…it’s a heartbreaking, rewarding story that still haunts me.”
— Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

“A haunting tale of the terrible ways in which we fail each other; of the whys, the what ifs, and the what nows. This is not a book you’ll soon forget.”
— Sara Gruen, New York Times bestselling author of Water for Elephants

“Henderson beautifully portrays this family in crisis through its most voluble and consistent member. Rapturous prose reveals young Tillie’s heart as she yearns for the mother who will make her world better but who can’t seem to mend her own tortured soul. A triumphant debut.”
— Library Journal

“Henderson shows remarkable compassion in her debut novel, an affecting portrait of depression through a child’s eyes.”
— Booklist

“A rare literary page-turner full of shocking discoveries and twists. Susan Henderson has created a remarkable narrator—as memorable for her feistiness as for her tenderness. Up From the Blue is going to be one of this year’s major debuts.”
— Josh Kilmer-Purcell, author of I Am Not Myself These Days

About Susan Henderson

Susan Henderson is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the founder of the literary blog LitPark: Where Writers Come to Play (www.litpark.com). Her work has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, the Pittsburgh Quarterly, North Atlantic Review, Opium, and many other publications. Henderson lives in New York, and Up from the Blue is her first novel.

Connect with Susan:

• On the LitPark blog
• On Facebook
• On Twitter: @litpark

Susan Henderson’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS

Tuesday, September 21st: Booksie’s Blog

Wednesday, September 22nd: Sara’s Organized Chaos

Thursday, September 23rd: Reviews from the Heart

Monday, September 27th: The Zen Leaf

Tuesday, September 28th: Literary Feline

Wednesday, September 29th: The Dumbest Smart Girl You Know

Thursday, September 30th: Eleanor’s Trousers

Thursday, September 30th: Rundpinne

Monday, October 4th: Books Like Breathing

Thursday, October 7th: In the Next Room

Tuesday, October 12th: Cozy Little House

Wednesday, October 13th: Raging Bibliomania

Thursday, October 14th: she reads and reads

Monday, October 18th: Life In Review

Tuesday, October 19th: Peeking Between the Pages

Wednesday, October 20th: lit*chick

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1 edition (July 6, 2010)

Of Bees and Mist  is an engrossing fable that chronicles three generations of women under one family tree and places them in a mythical town where spirits and spells, witchcraft and demons, and prophets and clairvoyance are an everyday reality.

Meridia grows up in a lonely home until she falls in love with Daniel at age sixteen. Soon, they marry, and Meridia can finally escape to live with her charming husband’s family—unaware that they harbor dark mysteries of their own. As Meridia struggles to embrace her life as a young bride, she discovers long-kept secrets about her own past as well as shocking truths about her new family that push her love, courage, and sanity to the brink.

Erick Setiawan’s astonishing debut is a richly atmospheric and tumultuous ride of hope and heartbreak that is altogether touching, truthful, and memorable.

About Erick Setiawan

Erick Setiawan was born in 1975 in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. A quiet, shy child, he was thankfully raised in a family of gifted storytellers, who taught him that while life might have an endless supply of conflict, not all of it translates into a good story. Due to the anti-Chinese sentiment prevalent in Indonesia, his childhood was often fraught with tension, which prompted him to take comfort in books and in the world of his imagination. To traumatize him further, his parents sent him to Catholic schools, where he learned from an early age to feel guilty about everything and that a grown man in a sash and a swishing robe with a ruler in his hand was in no way maternal.

At age sixteen, he left his family and moved to the United States. He knew three people and barely spoke English, yet was somehow convinced that he could compete with the top students to get into the best colleges. His resolution/delusion pushed him to work hard. The following year, his first choice, Harvard, rejected him, but fortunately Stanford had a lower standard. To this day, he believes that they admitted him by mistake.

In college, he wanted to study English, but his shyness and insecurity about his adopted language prevented him from enrolling in classes that required him to speak. Instead, he chose to major in Psychology and Computer Science, going as far as getting a Master’s in the latter. Bafflingly enough, studying about mental disorders and complex algorithms only increased his hunger for literature. Once too often, he shuffled aside his term papers and problem sets to lose himself in a novel.

After graduation, he began his tenure as a software engineer in San Francisco. By the end of the first year, he knew that his heart was not in it. Confronted with the risk of being a corporate burnout at twenty-six, he turned to writing in his spare time. To the exasperation of his bosses, he began coming to work late and taking longer and longer lunch breaks in order to write. Several years, two failed novels, and countless short stories later, he decided to quit his job to finish writing Of Bees and Mist. At the time, he had no book deal and knew no one in publishing, but he pursued his passion with the same stubborn resolution/delusion that had motivated him earlier. He sold Of Bees and Mist four years after he started it.

Connect with Erick on his website and on Facebook.

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (October 5, 2010)

Hummingbirds is a wonderfully compelling novel about the intertwining and darkly surprising relationships at the elite Carmine-Casey School for Girls on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where the rivalries and secrets of teachers and students intersect and eventually collide.

In the world of students, popular Dixie Doyle battles to wrest attention away from Liz Warren, who spends her time writing and directing plays based on the Oresteia. In the world of teachers, Leo Binhammer must now share his territory with Ted Hughes, the new English teacher who threatens Binhammer’s status as sole owner of the girls’ hearts. Seasons change and tensions mount as the students, longing for entry into the adult world, toy with their premature powers of flirtation. The deceptive innocence of adolescence becomes a trap into which flailing teachers fall, as the line between maturity and youth begins to blur.

About Joshua Gaylord

Joshua Gaylord lives in New York with his wife, the Edgar-award-winning novelist Megan Abbott (The Song Is You, Queenpin, Bury Me Deep). For the past nine years, he has taught high school English at an Upper East Side prep school (a modern orthodox co-educational Yeshiva). Since 2002, he has also taught literature and cultural studies courses as an adjunct professor at the New School. Prior to coming to New York, he grew up in the heart of Orange County: Anaheim, home of Disneyland. He graduated from Berkeley with a degree in English and a minor in creative writing, where his instructors included Bharati Mukherjee, Leonard Michaels and Maxine Hong Kingston. In 2000, he received his Master’s and Ph.D. in English at New York University, specializing in twentieth-century American and British literature.

Visit Joshua at his website, www.joshuagaylord.com.

Joshua Gaylord’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS

Tuesday, October 5th: Write Meg

Thursday, October 7th: The Scholastic Scribe

Monday, October 11th: Bloggin’ ‘Bout Books

Tuesday, October 12th: Helen’s Book Blog

Wednesday, October 13th: Bookstack

Thursday, October 14th: Tales of a Capricious Reader

Monday, October 18th: Take Me Away

Wednesday, October 20th: Life in the Thumb

Friday, October 22nd: After ‘I Do’

Monday, October 25th: Bookworm with a View

Tuesday, October 26th: Bibliophiliac

Thursday, October 28th: five borough book review

Hardcover: 320 pages

Publisher: Harper (August 3, 2010)

Set against a vivid and lush South Florida background during the years of Miami’s coming-of-age, Stiltsville offers a gripping, bittersweet portrait of a marriage—and romance—that deepens over the course of three decades.

One sunny morning in 1969, near the end of her first trip to Miami, twenty-six-year-old Frances Ellerby finds herself in a place called Stiltsville, a community of houses built on pilings in the middle of Biscayne Bay. On the dock of a stilt house, with the dazzling skyline in the distance and the unknowable ocean beneath her, she meets the house’s owner, Dennis DuVal—and a new future reveals itself.

Turning away from her life, Frances moves to Miami to be with Dennis. Over time, she earns the confidence of his wild-at-heart sister and the approval of his oldest friend. Frances and Dennis marry and have a child—but rather than growing complacent about their good fortune, they continue to face the challenges of intimacy, and of the complicated city they call home.

Stiltsville was called “an exquisite debut” by Publishers Weekly, and “a perfect balance of wit, weakness and tenderness . . . wonderfully buoyant” by BookPage.  Susanna Daniel interweaves the beauty, chaos, and humanity of Miami with an enduring story of a marriage’s beginning, maturity, and heartbreaking demise.

Learn more about Stiltsville at the author’s website.

About Susanna Daniel:

Susanna Daniel was born and raised in Miami, Florida, where she spent much of her childhood at her family’s stilt house in Biscayne Bay. She is a graduate of Columbia University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and was a Carl Djerassi Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.

Susanna lives with her husband and son in Madison, Wisconsin, where during the long winter she dreams of the sun and the sea, and of jumping off the stilt house porch at high tide. She is at work on a second novel.

Connect with Susanna:

On her Website

On Twitter

On Facebook

Susanna Daniel’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:

Monday, September 13th:  Joyfully Retired

Wednesday, September 15th:  Simply Stacie

Friday, September 17th:  Reading at the Beach

Monday, September 20th:  Books and Cooks

Wednesday, September 22nd:  Raging Bibliomania

Thursday, September 23rd:  Bermuda Onion

Monday, September 27th:  The Book Faery Reviews

Tuesday, September 28th:  Book Club Classics!

Wednesday, September 29th:  My Random Acts of Reading

Thursday, September 30th:  Devourer of Books

Monday, October 4th:  Pudgy Penguin Perusals

Wednesday, October 6th:  A Bookish Way of Life

Thursday, October 7th:  Luxury Reading

Monday, October 11th:  Mockingbird Hill Cottage

Follow along as we give away copies of Dracula, My Love on various blogs, then come back and chat with us about all things vampire.

On August 13th at 1:00 pm PST/4:00 pm EST, we’ll have a Vampire Lit Twitter chat (#TLCbookchat) with Syrie joining us in the chat. We’ll be giving away copies of Dracula, My Love before, during, and after the chat.. please join us!

About Dracula, My Love:  The Secret Journals of Mina Harker

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Avon A (July 20, 2010)

What if you were in love with an immortal being
who everyone you knew was determined to destroy?

Syrie James approaches Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula with a breathtaking new perspective–as, for the first time, Mina Harker records the shocking story of her scandalous seduction and sexual rebirth.

Who is this young, magnetic, handsome, fascinating man? And how could one woman fall so completely under his spell?

Mina Harker is torn between two men. Struggling to hang on to the deep, pure love she’s found within her marriage to her husband, Jonathan, she is inexorably drawn into a secret, passionate affair with a charismatic but dangerous lover. This haunted and haunting creature has awakened feelings and desires within her that she has never before known, which remake her as a woman.

Although everyone she knows fears Count Dracula and is pledged to destroy him, Mina sees a side to him that the others cannot: a tender, romantic side; a man who’s taken full advantage of his gift of immortality to expand his mind and talents; a man who is deeply in love, and who may not be evil after all. Soon, they are connected in a way she never thought humanly possible.

Yet to surrender is surely madness, for to be with him could end her life. It may cost Mina all she holds dear, but to make her choice she must learn everything she can about the remarkable origins and unique, sensuous powers of this man, this exquisite monster, this … Dracula!

Read an excerpt HERE.

“A spooky yet thoroughly romantic love story.”
—Chicago Tribune

About Syrie

Syrie James is the bestselling author of The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë. A member of the Writers Guild of America, she is also a screenwriter and lecturer. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their two sons, and welcomes visitors to her website at www.syriejames.com.

Connect with Syrie:

On her Website

On Facebook

On YouTube

Follow the tour for Dracula, My Love:

Monday, August 2nd:  LoveVampires

Monday, August 2nd:  Tynga’s Reviews

Tuesday, August 3rd:  All Things Urban Fantasy

Tuesday, August 3rd:  Pirate Penguin’s Reads

Wednesday, August 4th:  Parajunkee

Wednesday, August 4th:  Hist-Fic Chick

Thursday, August 5th:  Book Junkie

Thursday, August 5th:  Peeking Between the Pages

Friday, August 6th:  Mindful Musings

Monday, August 9th:  Scandalous Women

Monday, August 9th:  Passages to the Past

Monday, August 9th:  Stephanie’s Written Word

Tuesday, August 10th:  Historical-Fiction.com

Tuesday, August 10th:  Stiletto Storytime

Wednesday, August 11th:  Dark Faerie Tales

Thursday, August 12th:  Lovin’ Me Some Romance

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (November 2, 2010)

Wally Lamb, the beloved #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much Is True, and She’s Come Undone, delivers a holiday treat with Wishin’ and Hopin’—an unforgettable novella of warmth and joy. Poignant and hilarious, in a vein similar to Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story and David Sedaris’s The Santaland Diaries, Lamb’s Christmas tale focuses on a feisty parochial school fifth grader named Felix Funicello—a distant cousin of the iconic Annette!

About Wally Lamb

Wally Lamb’s first two novels, She’s Come Undone (Simon & Schuster/Pocket, 1992) and I Know This Much Is True (HarperCollins/ReganBooks, 1998), were # 1 New York Times bestsellers, New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and featured titles of Oprah’s Book Club. I Know This Much Is True was a Book of the Month Club main selection and the June 1999 featured selection of the Bertelsman Book Club, the national book club of Germany. Between them, She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True have been translated into eighteen languages.

Lamb is also the editor of the nonfiction anthologies Couldn’t Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters (HarperCollins/ReganBooks, 2003) and I’ll Fly Away (HarperCollins, 2007), collections of autobiographical essays which evolved from a writing workshop Lamb facilitates at Connecticut’s York Correctional Institute, a maximum-security prison for women. He has served as a Connecticut Department of Corrections volunteer from 1999 to the present.

Wally Lamb is a Connecticut native who holds Bachelors and Masters Degrees in teaching from the University of Connecticut and a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Vermont College. Lamb was in the ninth year of his twenty-five-year career as a high school English teacher at his alma mater, the Norwich Free Academy, when he began to write fiction in 1981. He has also taught writing at the University of Connecticut, where he directed the English Department’s creative writing program.

Wally and Christine Lamb are the parents of three sons, Jared, Justin, and Teddy.

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow (August 17, 2010)

The acclaimed New York Times bestselling author returns with a new stand-alone novel—a powerful and utterly riveting tale that skillfully moves between past and present to explore the lasting effects of crime on a victim’s life….I’d Know You Anywhere.

Eliza Benedict cherishes her peaceful, ordinary suburban life with her successful husband and children, thirteen-year-old Iso and eight-year-old Albie. But her tranquillity is shattered when she receives a letter from the last person she ever expects—or wants—to hear from: Walter Bowman. There was your photo, in a magazine. Of course, you are older now. Still, I’d know you anywhere.

In the summer of 1985, when she was fifteen, Eliza was kidnapped by Walter and held hostage for almost six weeks. He had killed at least one girl and Eliza always suspected he had other victims as well. Now on death row in Virginia for the rape and murder of his final victim, Walter seems to be making a heartfelt act of contrition as his execution nears. Though Eliza wants nothing to do with him, she’s never forgotten that Walter was most unpredictable when ignored. Desperate to shelter her children from this undisclosed trauma in her past, she cautiously makes contact with Walter. She’s always wondered why Walter let her live, and perhaps now he’ll tell her—and share the truth about his other victims.

Yet as Walter presses her for more and deeper contact, it becomes clear that he is after something greater than forgiveness. He wants Eliza to remember what really happened that long-ago summer. He wants her to save his life. And Eliza, who has worked hard for her comfortable, cocooned life, will do anything to protect it—even if it means finally facing the events of that horrifying summer and the terrible truth she’s kept buried inside.

An edgy, utterly gripping tale of psychological manipulation that will leave readers racing to the final page, I’d Know You Anywhere is a virtuoso performance from acclaimed, award-winning author Laura Lippman that is sure to be her biggest hit yet.

About Laura Lippman

Laura Lippman grew up in Baltimore and returned to her hometown in 1989 to work as a journalist. After writing seven books while still a full-time reporter, she left the Baltimore Sun to focus on fiction. The author of two New York Times bestsellers, What the Dead Know and Another Thing to Fall, she has won numerous awards for her work, including the Edgar, Quill, Anthony, Nero Wolfe, Agatha, Gumshoe, Barry, and Macavity.

I’d Know You Anywhere is Laura Lippman’s 18th book.

To learn more about Laura’s work, visit her website or connect with her on Facebook.

Laura Lippman’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS

Tuesday, August 24th: red headed book child

Wednesday, August 25th: Shhh I’m Reading

Thursday, August 26th: Staircase Wit

Monday, August 30th: A Bookworm’s World

Tuesday, August 31st: Thoughts From an Evil Overlord

Thursday, September 2nd: Bibliofreak

Tuesday, September 7th: Proud Book Nerd

Wednesday, September 8th: Books and Movies

Thursday, September 9th: Wordsmithonia

Monday, September 13th: Raging Bibliomania

Tuesday, September 14th: Lesa’s Book Critques

Thursday, September 16th: she reads and reads

Monday, September 20th: My Random Acts of Reading

Tuesday, September 21st: Jen’s Book Thoughts

Wednesday, September 22nd: nomadreader

Thursday, September 23rd: Book Chatter

Monday, September 27th: In the Next Room

Thursday, September 30th: Café of Dreams