Bradley, Alan. Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd: A Flavia de Luce Novel. Delacorte. Sept. 2016. 400p. ISBN 9780345539960. $26. CD: Random Audio. MYSTERY Wickedly smart young Flavia de Luce launched her investigative career with The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, which proved its worth by winning the Agatha, Macavity, Barry, Dilys, Arthur Ellis, and Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger awards; her last two outings, The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches and As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust, were both No. 1 LibraryReads picks. Now Flavia is back, happily arriving home from banishment, er, boarding school, in Canada only to learn that her father has been hospitalized and cannot be visited. To escape a house full of unbearable relatives, she agrees to hop on her bike and deliver a message sent by the vicar’s wife to a gruff and isolated wood-carver, only to find him hanging upside down and his brinded cat looking singularly indifferent. That wonderful title? It’s from Macbeth. Butler, Robert Olen. Perfume River. Atlantic Monthly. Sept. 2016. 272p. ISBN 9780802125750. $25. LITERARY FICTION The Vietnam War is still with us, as evidenced by this latest from the Pulitzer Prize–winning Butler (A Good Scent from A Strange Mountain). Robert Quinlan and wife Darla, both tenured professors at Florida State University, met during protests against the war, and Robert’s brother Jimmy became estranged from the family at the time. Even as his World War II veteran father lies dying, Jimmy refuses to seek a reconciliation. Meanwhile, Robert’s marriage is showing stress fractures, and Robert has befriended a homeless man he thinks is a Vietnam vet, which hugely affects the course of events. Look for Butler at LJ’s upcoming Day of Dialog. Donoghue, Emma. The Wonder. Little, Brown. Sept. 2016. 320p. ISBN 9780316393874. $27. CD: Hachette Audio. LITERARY FICTION Donoghue follows up 2014’s much-starred Frog Music with another historical that sounds as wrenching as her Man Booker finalist, Room, now an award-winning film. In a remote 1850s Irish village, young Anna O'Donnell has decided to demonstrate her faith by fasting, declaring that she will live only on manna from heaven. Soon, folks from all over arrive to stand in the shining light of this presumed miracle (will she survive?). But English nurse Lib has another assignment: to determine whether Anna is a fraud. Instead, she finds herself wondering whether Anna is succumbing to slowly unfolding murder. Gleick, James. Time Travel. Pantheon. Sept. 2016. 304p. ISBN 9780307908797. $27.95; ebk. ISBN 9780307908803. CD/downloadable: Random Audio. SCIENCE A National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist multiple times over whose works represent the best science writing today, Gleick returns with something that will appeal to lovers of science fiction as well. Starting with H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, written when the telegraph, the railroad, and the excavation of ancient cultures were rapidly changing our sense of the world’s steady tick-tocking, he moves from Marcel Proust to Doctor Who as he tracks time travel as a relatively new and ever-evolving concept in human culture. He also clarifies what it’s like to live when the instantaneous communication afforded by the Internet collapses our sense of time altogether. With a 100,000-copy first printing and an eight-city tour to Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Phoenix, San Francisco, and Seattle; there will even be promotion at the New York Comic Con in October 2016. Gottlieb, Robert. Avid Reader: A Life. Farrar. Sept. 2016. 368p. ISBN 9780374279929. $28; ebk. ISBN 9780374713904. AUTOBIOGRAPHY A former editor in chief at Simon and Schuster; president, publisher, and editor in chief at Alfred A. Knopf; and editor of The New Yorker who’s also written books on George Balanchine, Sarah Bernhardt, and Charles Dickens, Gottlieb isn’t just an avid reader but a bright, defining moment in the writing world for the last 60 years. Here he gives us the arc of his career, from editing the likes of Toni Morrison, John le Carré, and Bill Clinton at Knopf to shouldering the huge responsibility of succeeding William Shawn at The New Yorker, even as he drops in his ideas about ballet, friendship, the writer-editor relationship, and Bakelite purses.