This post-Harry Potter book for both kids and adults tells the story of Teak, who travels in dreams to the land of Beejumstan and meets a host of amazing characters who, bit by bit, convince her of her own spiritual beauty and power.

JULY:
WATER STREET
by Crystal Wilkinson (Toby Press, 2002)
The citizens of a small Kentucky town tell their secrets in this linked collection of short stories--a sharp African-American updating of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio.

AUGUST:
AND THEN YOU DIE
by Michael Dibdin (Pantheon, 2002)
The latest installment in this literate mystery writer's saga of Aurelio Zen, a brilliant Italian detective menaced -- even on vacation -- by his mafia enemies.

SEPTEMBER:
MIDDLESEX
by Jeffrey Eugenides (Farrar, Straus, 2002)
The tale of Cal, a Greek-American hermaphrodite who lives as a girl, then as a man, is also the story of the complexities, mixings, and ambiguities of the immigrant experience -- and of history itself.

OCTOBER:
ERASURE
by Percival Everett (Hyperion, 2001)
Sick and tired of being unread, author Thelonius 'Monk' Ellison gives up his erudite style and, with tongue in cheek, turns out a preposterous 'ghetto' novel full of gangsta violence. Presto: he turns into America's hottest new black writer. A hilarious sendup of American expectations about race and culture.

NOVEMBER:
LIMBO: A MEMOIR
by A. Manette Ansay (Morrow, 2002)
Prolific novelist Ansay first trained to be a concert pianist. This memoir explores the illness that ended that career--a mysterious malady that robbed her of motor control--and her discovery of a new calling, the writing life.

DECEMBER:
TESTAMENT
by Nino Ricci (Houghton Mifflin, 2003)
A uniquely down-to-earth treatment of the life of Christ that plunges the reader into the sounds, smells, and emotions of his Jewish world.