Amazon Book List Reveals What's Hot In American Regional Cuisine

(from nrp.org
by April Fulton)

With zillions of cookbooks coming out every year, how do you decide which ones are worth your time?


From upstate New York's heirloom veggie craze to the Pacific Northwest's baking boom, regional fare is taking off.

But with zillions of cookbooks coming out every year, how do you figure out which culinary jewels will be worth your precious time and shelf space?

Amazon, that giant aggregator of all things, breaks down about 500 regional cookbooks into manageable bites by curating what it considers the best of its vast collection.

Mari Malcolm, Amazon Books food editor, says she learned a few things putting the map together its Great American Eats map. For example, while California is a healthful hub of juicing how-to's and guides to going gluten-free, it's also a place where cookbook authors obsess over fatty meat.

"There's lots of charcuterie coming out of California," Malcolm says, like In The Charcuterie: The Fatted Calf's Guide to Making Sausage, Salumi, Pates, Roasts, Confits, and Other Meaty Goods and the new Charcutería: The Soul of Spain, and Sausage Making: The Definitive Guide With Recipes, which is due out May 13.

And while we're on the subject of meat, it's pretty much tops in Texas. The Lone Star state's best cookbooks are "a lot of what you would expect, with barbecue and paleo [diet books]," she says. But Christine Ha's Recipes from My Home Kitchen: Asian and American Comfort Food is a fan favorite. Ha won Season 3 of "MasterChef" on Fox and lives in Houston.

The most prolific region for new cookbooks in recent years is the South, with 152 books — think Bobby Deen's Everyday Eats and The New Southern Table. It's followed closely by the mid-Atlantic, which boasts 105 of the 500 cookbooks on the list, including the coffee-table worthy Beekman Boys' latest, The Beekman 1802 Heirlook Vegetable Cookbook, and new contributions from celebs Ina Garten, Mark Bittman and Lidia Bastianich.

Up north in New England, it's history and science-y tomes from America's Test Kitchen.

To develop the map, Malcolm started with books she personally liked, then James Beard and International Association of Culinary Professionals award winners, then historically significant ones like Fannie Farmer and the quintessential African American contribution from the 19th century: What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, Soups, Pickles, Preserves, Etc. Then she threw in highly-rated reader favorites. "Editorial selection criteria didn't have anything to do with sales," she says.

Beyond the map, Amazon says, more American cookbooks these days are incorporating food with once obscure ingredients and a global edge, be it Asian, Middle Eastern or Latin. "There's a lot of international cooking ... across the country," Malcom says.

Top 10 Novels Inspired by Shakespeare

(from theguardian.com
by Sally O'Reilly)

Words, words, words … Scott Shepherd (with Richard Burton on film) playing Hamlet in The Wooster Group's production at the Edinburgh International festival. Photograph: Paula Court


Shakespeare famously customised existing plots when writing his plays, and added to them an acute perception of human experience which gave them universal significance. Thwarted love, ambition, greed, jealousy, fear – if you want to write a story about a fundamental predicament, there is a Shakespeare play to fit the bill. So it's not surprising that he has inspired so many writers, from Herman Melville to Angela Carter.

He dealt in archetypes before anyone knew such things existed, and his ability to take an emotion or a situation and push it to the limit helped create a cadre of plays that have been endlessly staged – and copied. Apart from the examples below, Romeo and Juliet inspired Malorie Blackman's Noughts & Crosses, there are references to Hamlet in Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis and The Tempest was the cue for The Magus by John Fowles.

But Macbeth is my favourite – a preference I apparently share with Jo Nesbo, who recently announced that his new noir crime novel would be based on the Scottish play. Its sinister magic is also the inspiration behind my historical novel Dark Aemilia.

In Jacobean times, the occult was accepted as part of everyday life, and witchcraft was both feared and sought out as a useful resource. I tried to channel some of this, and recreate the psychology of a fearful, superstitious age.

1. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (Macbeth/King Lear)

Melville's Great American Novel draws on both Biblical and Shakespearean myths. Captain Ahab is "a grand, ungodly, god-like man … above the common" whose pursuit of the great white whale is a fable about obsession and over-reaching. Just as Macbeth and Lear subvert the natural order of things, Ahab takes on Nature in his determination to kill his prey – and his hubristic quest is doomed from the start.

2. The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey (Richard III)

Richard III gets a sympathetic makeover in Josephine Tey's 1951 whodunnit, which reads like a cross between Rear Window and Time Team. Detective Alan Grant, confined to bed after an accident, begins to take in interest in the much-maligned king after studying his portrait. Although clearly Richard III was a real person, the false picture we have of him was originally created by Shakespeare, Tey argues. He created a pantomime villain and child murderer in order to curry favour with his Tudor patron, Elizabeth I.

3. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (The Tempest)

Huxley makes numerous references to the work of Shakespeare in this dystopian novel, and the title is taken from the Tempest: "O brave new world, / That has such people in 't!" Like Caliban, John "the Savage" is an outcast, despised for his appearance, and Huxley is exploring ideas about the power of art and the nature of humanity as Shakespeare does in his haunting and, possibly, final play.

4. Cakes and Ale by W Somerset Maugham (Twelfth Night)

I discovered Maugham when I was about 14. He was out of fashion then, and is completely below the radar now. But this is a fascinating novel about literary snobbery. The portrayal of "loose woman" Rosie Driffield is sexist in modern terms, but her unapologetic hedonism is inspired by Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night: "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?"

5. The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (Macbeth)

Like Macbeth, Ripley wants what someone else has got. And just as Macbeth murders Duncan, Ripley bumps off golden boy Dickie Greenleaf, seeking to take his place. Then the body count rises as Ripley attempts to secure his position. This isn't a direct retelling, but the parallels are clear: Macbeth is accused of taking on "borrowed robes" and Ripley literally steals Dickie's clothes and identity. For me, the main difference between the Scottish king and the young American is that Ripley is a proper psychopath – he doesn't feel remorse.

6. The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch (Hamlet)

This is a brilliant depiction of obsessive love, though its plot is a typically convoluted Murdochian creation which is inspired by Freud and Plato as well as Hamlet. It tells the story of a twisted friendship between two writers, and features some cheekily cross-dressed sex scenes in which Julian (a young woman) dresses up as the gloomy Dane. Murdoch is strongest on the unpredictability of love, and the black comedy that can result.

7. The Dogs of War by Frederick Forsyth (Julius Caesar)

Shakespeare's exploration of violence and treachery has inspired numerous contemporary writers. Forsyth references Julius Ceasar in the title of his novel about mercenaries fighting in a fictional African republic: "Cry 'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war." The themes also reflect those in this brutal play: the story shows these ruthless men operate by their own code, consistent but merciless, and difficult for outsiders to understand.

8. Wise Children by Angela Carter (The Taming of the Shrew et al)

Twins, doubles and paradoxes abound in Carter's final novel, as they do in Shakespeare. The story of twins Dora and Nora Chance explores ideas about paternity and incest, and the novel is written in five chapters like the five acts in a Shakespeare play. One of the themes is "high art" versus "low art" and Carter jokily refers to Shakespeare via Kiss Me Kate, a populist adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew. I loved the audacity and sheer verve in this novel, and the way it both challenges and celebrates the Shakespeare legacy.

9. Love in Idleness by Amanda Craig (A Midsummer Night's Dream)

This is a modern reworking of A Midsummer Night's Dream set in contemporary Tuscany, which gently ridicules the chattering classes. The familiar tropes of Shakespearean comedy are all there – confusion, heartache and eventual resolution. Like Murdoch, Craig has some fun with names – my particular favourites are Theo Noble and Ellen and Ivo Sponge – as well as exposing some of the frailties and inconsistencies in our approach to love and marriage.

10. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley (King Lear)

Smiley retells the story of King Lear in modern-day Iowa in her Pulitzer-prizewinning novel. The novel is set on a thousand-acre farm which is owned by a father and his three daughters, and told from the point of view of the oldest, Ginny. Instead of dismissing the two older daughters as wicked and grasping, as Shakespeare does, in her novel Smiley explores the family secrets that underpin the drama, and shows the significance of the land itself

Wellcome Book Prize Goes to Andrew Solomon's Far From the Tree

(from theguardian.com
by Alison Flood)

'This is a rapturous day for me' … Andrew Solomon. Photograph: Sophia Evans

Ten years in the writing, Andrew Solomon's "monumental" book about parents and exceptional children, Far From the Tree, has won the £30,000 Wellcome book prize for a title on a medical theme.

Solomon interviewed more than 300 families for the book, which covers subjects from autism to prodigies as it tells the stories of parents who find profound meaning in their relationships with children who are unlike them. He spokeof how "the backdrop to the book, woven through its chapters, is my own experience as a child who was miserable about being gay and as an adult who has found joy with my husband and our children".

He said that winning the prize so soon after the UK passed gay marriage was "especially cheering". "My husband and I first celebrated our civil partnership in the UK in 2007, and we are overjoyed, as are so many other people enmeshed in love, to be able to assume that beautiful word for our relationship. That, like this prize, marks a more tolerant, kinder world. This is a rapturous day for me," said the author and journalist, who writes for publications including the New Yorker and the Guardian.

Solomon uses the book, which is subtitled "a dozen kinds of love", to investigate different types of family, including children born of rape, children convicted of crime, transgender people, deafness, dwarves, Down's syndrome, schizophrenia and disability. The author said he was accepting the prize on the behalf of the families he interviewed while writing the book, "who told me their stories with such bracing honesty and such unyielding passion", speaking of his admiration "for the human spirit that allowed so many of them to end up grateful for lives they would once have done anything to avoid, that allowed them to love and fight for children whom so much of society might have dismissed".

He has won rave reviews for his nigh-on 1,000-page tome: it's "a wise and beautiful book", said the New York Times, "an affirmation of what it is to be human," said the Guardian, and "a catalogue of astonishing tenacity and unexpected joy that inevitably expands both our sympathies and sense of wonder at the immense variety of human experiences," said the Financial Times.

Chair of the Wellcome prize judges, the former poet laureate Andrew Motion, said the choice of Far From the Tree ahead of shortlisted titles including Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert's novel about botany The Signature of All Things and Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks was "unanimous" for the judging panel.

"It's already been widely praised but I hope this lifts it to another level," he said of the book. "Anyone who has ever had anything to do with a family should read it - and that's everybody."

Motion called Far From the Tree a "very, very unusual" title. "It's written in an astonishingly sprightly way - it has that New Yorker blend of sprightliness and deep seriousness," he said. "It's very deeply learned as well."

The Wellcome prize is in its fifth year, and was set up to honour "the best new work of fiction or non-fiction released each year centred on medicine and health". One novel has won the award so far, Alice LaPlante's Turn of Mind, with other winners including Andrea Gillies' Alzheimer's memoir, Keeper, and Thomas Wright's biography of William Harvey, Circulation.

Motion said that the greatest strength of Solomon's winning title was "to combine proper scholarly objectivity with a sense of intimate connection – and to do so in ways that allow for the creation of distinct categories and clear conclusions, while at the same time admitting contradictions and exceptions. It is, in other words, a very well-organised book yet a very generous-minded one: a profound reflection on the family, and on the influence of medicine and science," he said.

"And not only that. It's also a book that is driven powerfully by an appeal to personal experience – by Solomon's recollections of growing up as a gay man, and by his exploration of the difficulties and opportunities this created for him. Taken all together, these things make it an exceptionally distinguished winner: startlingly intelligent, generously compassionate, memorably insightful, and courageous."

Solomon said he was "profoundly honoured" to receive the Wellcome book prize, and "very grateful to the judges for their generous reading of my work".

"There sometimes seems to be an opposition between the social progress that allows us to accept the range of human difference and the medical progress that allows us to cure and eliminate many such differences," said Solomon. "My book is about the extraordinary stories of love and compassion that unfold around this duality. For such work to be recognised by a prize that is specifically focused on medicine and health indicates the increasing openness to the nuanced questions of what constitutes health, and what the appropriate parameters are for medicine."

Motion was joined on the judging panel by the writers Lisa Appignanesi and James Runcie, medical journalist and television presenter Michael Mosley and Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman.

10 Must-Read Books for May

(from flavorwire.com
by Jason Diamond)


Despite the fact that the rain and cold have stubbornly refused to leave some parts of the US, it’s spring, and spring means things are in bloom. Sure, we’re talking about flowers, but we’re also talking about a bunch of debut novels, along with a few new books by some veterans. All of it is very exciting. May’s calender is so good, in fact, that we also have to fit in mentions of Young God by Katherine Faw Morris, The Fun We’ve Had by Michael J. Seidlinger, and Dan Barber’s exploration into the future of food, The Third Plate. All of those books are great enough to be on this list, but we could only fit the following ten.

Save the Date, Jen Doll (May 1)

Ah, the perpetual wedding guest. A lot of us have been this person, or maybe we’ve had a streak of wondering when all of the ceremonies featuring people we know would stop — the “always the bridesmaid (or simple attendant), never the bride” deal. Jen Doll probably has us all beat in terms of the ratio of weddings attended to smart and witty observations, and they’re collected here in Save the Date.

An Untamed State, Roxane Gay (May 6)

In a month filled up with great releases, Roxane Gay’s debut novel stands out as an event in itself. A writer who has shown time and time (and time and time…) again that she possesses an abundance of talent and passion, Gay has written a truly unforgettable first novel about a woman’s kidnapping in Haiti and what comes after, family, what we want, and what we think we deserve. An Untamed State is sure to stick with you for a very long time after you’ve closed it.

The Impossible Exile, George Prochnik (May 6)

Much to the delight of his readers, the author Stefan Zweig is experiencing something of a renaissance in America, thanks in large part to Wes Anderson citing the Austrian writer as a big influence on The Grand Budapest Hotel. Now, in one of the finest literary biographies of the year, George Prochnik traces Zweig’s time in exile after Hitler’s ascension, and paints a portrait of another time, and a few of the places where Zweig lived before his suicide in 1942.

The Noble Hustle, Colson Whitehead (May 6th)

Colson Whitehead is on an intriguing streak, writing books whose premises might make readers a little suspicious at first (a zombie novel for literary fiction fans? Who woulda thunk it?), but then they turn out to be total gold. In The Noble Hustle, Whitehead has a chunk of money and an assignment to see how he can fare in the World Series of Poker. The results turn out to be a supposedly fun thing he might never do again, but at least he got another fine book out of it.

The Last Illusion, Porochista Khakpour (May 13th)

One of the books Flavorwire has been looking forward to all year, Khakpour’s latest is a stunning, darkly humorous, and at more than a few points totally heartbreaking novel abut an Iranian boy who thinks he’s a bird after years of torture. We invite you to read it — and help us figure out how one writer can take such a subject and spin it into something you just want to wrap yourself in. An absolute stunner.

Cutting Teeth, Julia Fierro (May 13)

A bunch of young urbanites stay in a beach house on Long Island during the dog days of summer. They’ve got kids hanging around, marriage issues, and a lot of unchecked passions that they need to figure out what to do with. In her debut novel, Julia Fierro takes all of these combustible elements, puts them in a jar, shakes the hell out of them, and something great explodes out of it.

Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush, Geoff Dyer (May 20)

When Geoff Dyer wants to write about something, he gets totally into it. Be it a Russian film or yoga, Dyer’s unique take on whatever subject he’s focused on always yields a great book. In this latest case, Dyer finds himself on an American supercarrier, and if you’ve read anything by Dyer (and you should probably read everything by Geoff Dyer) you pretty much get the brilliant results you’d expect.

Lost for Words, Edward St. Aubyn (May 20th)

Edward St. Aubyn, Saint of Bitingly Funny, Dark as Fuck, and Gritty English Realism, we know how herculean a task it is to try and get readers talking about anything other than your perfect Patrick Melrose books. Thankfully, with Lost for Words, you move on from deplorable English aristocracy to an even madder group of people: writers.

Why I Killed My Best Friend, Amanda Michalopoulou (May 21)

For a book that’s under 300 pages, Amanda Michalopoulou’s novel packs a whole lot of the joys, pitfalls, and politics of friendship, as well as Greece and all its problems, into one book.

The Vacationers, Emma Straub (May 29)

Did Emma Straub just get a little John Cheever-esque with her latest novel? Take the WASPy family on vacation, with all their little underlying issues coming to the surface, combined with Straub’s witty and colorful writing, and The Vacationers is the type of book just about anybody can read and enjoy. We guarantee this will be on every single list of summer beach reads come next month. Just you watch.

Cynthia Bond Author of RUBY

(from kirkusreviews.com
interviewed by Sean Rose)

Cynthia Bond photographed by Jay Harris.

Some of the first stories Cynthia Bond ever heard were born from scars. As a child, she studied the scars scattered across the body of her mother, who gained most of them from growing up on a farm near Liberty, a small African-American town in East Texas.

“We’d point to a scar and we’d say, ‘Tell us that story,’ ” Bond says. “Each scar was like a chapter. That town was woven into my entire youth.”

She learned her family history, and in doing so, she learned the collective history of a specific group of African-Americans in a volatile time with stories full of love, magic, and inconceivable violence that echoes to this day.

She learned how her grandfather was a carpenter. How he found ground water with a divining rod. And her mother shared one of her earliest memories, how she was sitting at the edge of a cotton field as a little girl and people pointed and told her to look. “See that hill up there?” Bond says her mother was told. “That’s where your sister Carrie was killed.”

Bond’s aunt was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in the late 1930s for being involved with a white man. Bond’s grandfather died knowing her killer was free. As far as Bond knows, there was never any retribution against the murderer.

“When something like that happens,” Bond says, “it’s really like a great thorn gets wedged into your heart.…It lives in me. It just sort of seeps into the DNA. It’s a part of who you are.”

The greatest scar the family bears became the seed for Bond’s debut novel, Ruby.

It is a book with a gritty undercurrent of violence and manipulation. But it’s also a love story spanning decades in the Jim Crow south and a tale where religion is counterbalanced with pagan magic.

The book’s protagonist is Ruby Bell, who has returned from New York City to her childhood home of Liberty as a troubled 30-year-old woman. The locals promptly dismiss her as crazy and ponder reasons why, including the lynching of her aunt and past abuse she suffered as a child. The town’s violent past has left ghosts—both literal and figurative—scattered about and Ruby finds herself struggling with the spirits and her memories. Meanwhile Ephram Jennings, an admirer of Ruby’s since they were both children, faces down the indignation of his neighbors and family to win Ruby’s affection.bond_cover

The incorporation of magic is the most striking feature of Bond’s book. Spirits and spells are simply a reality of the world and there are pages of interactions with the intangible that read like a fever dream.

The presence of magic was another borrowed element from her family history. Bond grew up with a litany of superstitions—you couldn’t hang your underwear on the clothesline for instance, or be at risk of someone putting a hex on you—but the presence of ghosts serves a practical purpose, allowing Bond to have a tangible way to express the intangibles of hate. In the novel there are spirits that try to possess the living, and Bond sees the mechanics of evil as working similarly.

“It’s a way to showing how pervasive it is,” she says. “It enters you and becomes your blood stream.”

Aside from her family’s collision with hate and bigotry, Bond has personal experiences that informed how she would write Ruby as a character. Bond experienced physical and sexual abuse as a child, and part of the reason she began writing in the first place was to aid in her own recovery.

“That is where my writing came from,” she says. “It’s this desire to tell. This desire to speak about what you know. If you’ve seen atrocities or lived through anything that is pain, then this desire to tell is very, very basic.”

“Ruby wandered the road for 11 years,” she adds. “I think I went through that amount of time in my recovery.”

If Ruby and her author sound like people marred by violence with no hope in sight, neither are. How Ruby ends up is still a bit of a mystery by the end of the novel (the original draft was 900 pages long and Bond has since split it into three books and is hoping to find publishers for the remaining two). But Bond has found a catharsis in her writing, a fuel in her history and displays an infectious sense of optimism when they are combined.

“There is this urge to destroy beauty and things of great value,” she says of the world at large. “But ultimately I think that art that is created by love or genius, ultimately that survives. That is stronger.”

Sean Rose is a former crime reporter and current MFA student at Texas State University. Follow him @swritenow.

*Blogger's note: I am reading this book right now it is really good so far.

THE QUOTE, THE REVIEW, THE LIST for April 30. 2014

A BOOKISH QUOTE

Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.
-Will Self

THE REVIEW

THE GIRL WHO SAVED THE KING OF SWEDEN
by Jonas Jonasson , translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles

KIRKUS REVIEW

A funny and completely implausible farce about a woman, a bomb and a man’s frustrated ambition to overthrow the king of Sweden.

Nombeko Mayeki is a 14-year-old latrine cleaner in apartheid-era Soweto who is exceptionally good at her job. Because of her race, she is incorrectly presumed to be illiterate. She gets another job as the housemaid of the nuclear engineer in charge of South Africa’s secret program to build six atomic bombs, and in her spare time, she masters Wu Chinese at the library in Pretoria. The engineer is an incompetent fool who accidentally builds a seventh bomb that remains a secret even to his bosses. Soon, Nombeko ships two crates: dried antelope meat to feed herself as she escapes to Sweden and the 1,700-pound atomic bomb the engineer wants sent to the Mossad in Israel. But the packages get switched, and for years Nombeko carts a 3-megaton bomb around Sweden while the Mossad doesn’t know what to do with the antelope meat. Meanwhile, Ingmar Qvist’s lifelong dream is to abolish the Swedish monarchy. He indoctrinates his identical-twin sons, both named Holger, to carry on after his death. But Holger One is an idiot, and Holger Two, whose birth was not registered and who thus technically doesn’t exist, is intelligent. Because Nombeko is an illegal immigrant, she doesn’t exist either. And of course the bomb doesn’t exist. Can Nombeko and Holger Two prevent the idiot anarchist Holger One and his idiot girlfriend, Celestine, from blowing up the king, themselves and a sizable chunk of Sweden? Author Jonasson is wickedly inventive with a constant flow of absurdities, for which his narrator blames the Almighty: “If God does exist, He must have a good sense of humor.” This book follows Jonasson’s equally crazy The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (2012).

Definitely not a book for sourpusses. The rest of the world will chuckle all the way through it.

Pub Date: April 29th, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-232912-7
Page count: 400pp
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 16th, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1st, 2014

THE LIST

9 Books Perfect For A Recent Graduate

Top Reasons Nobody Bodine Can Be Your New Book Boyfriend

(from usatoday.com
by Joyce Lamb)

(Photo: Sara M. Anderson)


Author Sarah M. Anderson sells us on Nobody Bodine, the hero of her new release, Nobody. (Based on that cover, I'm not needing much selling, frankly.)

Sarah: Sure, we talk about spunky heroines and funny sidekicks, but as a reader, I want the hero of my book to be my book boyfriend — all of the emotional perks and warm glow of that falling-in-love feeling without having to wash dirty socks.

So let me introduce you to Nobody Bodine, your new book boyfriend! Why?

• He's not afraid of a little hard work. Nobody is the caretaker of a herd of 27 half-wild horses. He feeds them, brushes them, and trains them to be ridden without a saddle or even a bridle. A man who loves animals? Yes, please.

• He keeps his home immaculately clean. A place for everything and everything in its place is how he sees the world. While Nobody does veer toward being a neat-freak, that just means you won't have to pick up after him and he'll always be ready to do the dishes!

• Nobody loves to read. His trailer is crammed from floor to ceiling with quite possibly every Western ever written — all in alphabetical order, of course. Imagine! You can read your romances without anyone complaining about how boring books are — because Nobody will have his nose buried in a book of his own.

• Nobody has a code of honor he follows at all times. Sure, his code doesn't always lead to the most legal of choices — like when he "borrows" the lawn furniture he uses from a big-box hardware store. But he never "borrows" something that would cause a hardship — he would never take something just because he wanted it. He only takes what he needs and nothing more.

• Nobody likes kids. He's the self-appointed guardian of a young boy named Jamie who lives in an abusive home. Whenever he can, Nobody protects the kid — sometimes by beating back Jamie's father, sometimes by giving Jamie a safe place to stay until things calm down. Nobody would die to protect Jamie. If that's not hero material right there, I don't know what is.

• Last (but not least!), Nobody is simply hotter than sin. He's built like a brick house — nothing but compact muscle. He's not afraid to fight for what he thinks is right — and he's got the scars to prove it. All of that physicality carries over to the bedroom. He's so strong — and so concerned with his lover's well-being — that sometimes he needs to be reminded to let go. But don't worry, ladies — he takes direction very well!

Here's the blurb about Nobody:

Nobody Bodine is a nobody who came from a nobody and will always be a nobody.

He disappears into the shadows—no one sees him if he doesn't want them to. He exists in neither the white man's world nor the tribe's, dispensing vigilante justice when he sees fit. There's no other place for a man like him in this world.

Until Melinda Mitchell shows up on the rez. From the first moment he lays eyes on her, he can tell there's something different about her. For starters, she's not afraid of him. She asks where his scars came from, and why he has so many. But more than that, she sees him. For the first time in his life, Nobody feels like a somebody in her eyes.

Melinda has come west to run the new day care on the White Sandy Reservation. She's intrigued by this strange man and his tattered skin, and when she discovers that he's a self-appointed guardian angel for the boy in her care, she realizes that there's more to Nobody than meets the eyes. But how far will he go to keep the boy safe? And will she be able to draw him into the light?

Find out more at www.sarahmanderson.com.