June Is Bustin' Out All Over

A sixteenth-century Venetian, already violating social norms just by being a female medical practitioner, must further test herself in a search for her missing father. This debut novel by an award-winning poet offers powerful language and vivid historical detail.

Gillian Flynn has long been a favorite at Island Books, but her latest thriller, about a marriage gone wrong, has the staff buzzing like none before. An absolute winner that should be a major breakthrough for this up-and-coming author.

Publishers Weekly has called Bisson's prose "a wonder of seemingly effortless control and precision," and John Crowley hails him as a "national treasure!" Bisson's latest novel is a poignant excursion into the last days of the Beats and the emerging radicalized culture of the sixties. This road movie of a novel, which begins as a fifties coming-of-age story and ends in an isolated hippie commune under threat of revolution, provides a transcendent commentary on America then and now. Bisson's daringly unique approach is to tinker subtly with the historical facts to create a potent and plausible alternative present.

Recently released from prison, Lamont Williams, an African American janitor in a Manhattan hospital and father of a little girl he can’t locate, strikes up an unlikely friendship with an elderly patient, a Holocaust survivor. A few blocks uptown, historian Adam Zignelik, an untenured Columbia professor, finds both his career and his long-term romantic relationship falling apart. Emerging from the depths of his own personal history, Adam sees in a promising research topic the beginnings of something that might just save him professionally, and perhaps even personally. As these men try to survive in early-twenty-first-century New York, history comes to life in ways neither of them could have foreseen. Two very different paths—Lamont’s and Adam’s—lead to one greater story dealing with memory, love, guilt, and heroism, spanning the twentieth century to the present, and spanning the globe from New York to Chicago to Auschwitz. Epic in scope, this is a remarkable feat of storytelling.