Bookstore Booty

The Reluctant Fundamentalist ~ by Mohsin Hamid, 2007, fiction (Pakistan)
I have eyed this one for a long time, so when I saw it on sale, I got it.

At a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with a suspicious, and possibly armed, American stranger. As dusk deepens to night, he begins the tale that has brought them to this fateful meeting. Changez is living an immigrant’s dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by Underwood Samson, an elite firm that specializes in the “valuation” of companies ripe for acquisition. He thrives on the energy of New York and the intensity of his work, and his infatuation with regal Erica promises entrée into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore. For a time, it seems as though nothing will stand in the way of Changez’s meteoric rise to personal and professional success. But in the wake of September 11, he finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his budding relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. And Changez’s own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and perhaps even love.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant ~ by Anne Tyler, 1982, fiction
I've read most of her fiction, but just never happened to get this one, until now.

Pearl Tull is nearing the end of her life but not of her memory. It was a Sunday night in 1944 when her husband left the little row house on Baltimore’s Calvert Street, abandoning Pearl to raise their three children alone: Jenny, high-spirited and determined, nurturing to strangers but distant to those she loves; the older son, Cody, a wild and incorrigible youth possessed by the lure of power and money; and sweet, clumsy Ezra, Pearl’s favorite, who never stops yearning for the perfect family that could never be his own. Now Pearl and her three grown children have gathered together again–with anger, hope, and a beautiful, harsh, and dazzling story to tell.

The Face on the Milk Carton ~ by Caroline B. Cooney, 1990, YA fiction
I have three of Cooney's books stacked beside my desk right now, still waiting (Out of Time, 1996; The Terrorist, 1997; Prisoner of Time, 1998).  When I wrote about the two time-travel books, I also had another book by Cooney called Whatever Happened to Janie? (1993).  I'm sure it, too, is on one of my shelves or still in a box from my recent move. 

No one ever really paid close attention to the faces of the missing children on the milk cartons. But as Janie Johnson glanced at the face of the ordinary little girl with her hair in tight pigtails, wearing a dress with a narrow white collar — a three-year-old who had been kidnapped twelve years before from a shopping mall in New Jersey — she felt overcome with shock. She recognized that little girl — it was she. How could it possibly be true?  Janie can't believe that her loving parents kidnapped her, but as she begins to piece things together, nothing makes sense. Something is terribly wrong. Are Mr. and Mrs. Johnson really Janie's parents? And if not, who is Janie Johnson, and what really happened?