PAPERBACKS BOUND TO PLEASE

Phillips' wry and ironic tale about a new lost generation takes place in 1990s Budapest, Hungary, which five expatriates regard as a runner-up in trendy post-Communist capitals. Prague, Czech Republic, is where they want to be, but Budapest is where they've ended up. Columnist John Price has followed his handsome brother Scott, who's busy trying to outrun his past as a failed, fat teen. Charles Gabor works as a venture capitalist, while Canadian Mark Payton studies collective nostalgia. All are hungry for experience and romance, and Phillips skewers their ambitions with deft, amused precision even as he portrays Budapest with detailed affection.
As in such previous acclaimed works as "Dark Star," "The Polish Soldier" and "Red Gold," Furst again uses the shadowy world of espionage to illuminate history and politics with compelling immediacy. In 1940, Russian emigre writer I.A. Serebin agrees to help the British stop the transport of Romanian oil to Germany. Another of Furst's idealists caught up in war's moral ambiguities, he travels from Paris to Istanbul, Turkey, to Bucharest, Romania, meeting strangers in smoky nightclubs, crouching in corners while gunfire shatters the snow-stifled streets. There's as much atmosphere as action as Furst continues to write the secret history of the Nazis' efforts to dominate Europe and the heroic efforts of ordinary citizens to stop them.
Schooler, an award-winning wildlife photographer, recalls the friendship he struck with Japanese photographer Michio Hoshino in the 1990s and how they worked together to find the rare and elusive glacier bear. Several years later, Hoshino was killed by a grizzly and, as Schooler writes in this haunting memoir, only nine months later he gets the picture they'd been trying to capture of the glacier bear.
Music is at the heart of Hijuelos' elegiac tale of Israel Levis, who moves between Cuba and Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Born into privilege in 1890s Cuba, he becomes a composer, writing a rumba, "Rosas Puras," for singer Rita Valladares, his great unrequited love. The song -- its title means "Beautiful Roses" -- becomes a hit, but it always reminds Levis, a devout Roman Catholic, of his own ambivalence toward matters of the heart. When he does fall in love again, it is with a Jewish woman in 1930s Paris, and the Nazis change their lives forever. Eventually, he returns to Cuba, his plans for a great opera derailed forever, his fame lost to time -- although "Rosas Puras" endures. The poignant story's resonance is underscored by Hijuelos' own lyrical prose, his understanding of a vanished era and its beautiful music.
A debut novel set in rural Ireland in the 1960s, this opens with the narrator attending his own funeral. This is a tragi-comic coming-of-age story that has been compared to "The Butcher Boy."
Banker Molony was a mild-mannered manager by day, an uncontrollable gambler by night. Molony loaned to himself, and then lost, $10 million of his bank's money before he was arrested. His story is now the subject of the film, "Owning Mahowny," but it's hard to believe you can beat Ross's wonderfully engrossing look at obsession.
Suzuki believes that we should preserve the wild not for economic, but for spiritual reasons. To that end, he has collected personal essays from Australia, Great Britain, U.S. and Canada, including one by Timothy Findley.
The sublime side of the beach is here, in this mesmerizing memoir of a surfing adolescence in the 1960s. You don't have to know a thing about surfing to be charmed by poet and essayist Ziolowski's evocation of life and the ocean.
Described as "Kitchen Confidential with ouzo," this travel memoir is the perfect summer escape. Stone describes his adventurous summer trying to run a taverna on the island of Patmos when he had to learn the Greek style of business and bargaining. Complete with recipes.
FOR CHILDREN
In his second adventure, young criminal mastermind Artemis Fowl is more likable as he searches for his father, held hostage by the Mafiya in Siberia. Turns out he's going to need the help of his nemesis, Capt. Holly Short of the LEPrecon (Lower Elements Police Reconnaissance), the high-tech fairy who lost the People's gold to Artemis and his bodyguard, Butler, in the first book. There's lots of clever James Bond-like action to keep reluctant readers flipping pages while waiting for Harry Potter.
The award-winning author of the Sammy Keyes mystery series offers a humorous stand-alone about a love/hate relationship between a boy and a girl. In elementary school, Julie cares about trees, chickens and blue-eyed Bryce. But he thinks she's weirder than weird. Then, in eighth grade, their relationship flips. Bryce starts to think Julie's pretty cool about the same time she decides he's shallow and selfish.
The subtitle indicates the subject: "The Private Diary of My Almost Bummer Summer with Cecily, Matt the Brat, and Vincent Van Go Go Go." In other words, in the summer between fourth and fifth grade, Melanie chronicles a trip to the Netherlands with her family and her best friend, whose mother is ill.
The imaginative Aiken's eight stories offer the magic of once-upon-a-time fairy tales, and are especially good for reading aloud. One story about real pie in the sky begins: "There was an old man and an old woman, and they lived in a very cold country." There's also a house that lays an egg and a cat that's larger than an elephant.
Source: Combined dispatches