Last week I discussed the LVM and how much I like the idea of converging a strict business relationship with something that I love, books.

Well, here are two of their upcoming releases and a short blurb for each. Make sure to give them a look and see if they peak your interest:

The Leper Compound, by Paula Nangle
Published by Bellevue Literary Press/distributed by Consortium

“The Leper Compound succeeds remarkably in giving a sense of how, during the last years of white rule in southern Africa, the daily experience of ordinary people was interfused with the larger historical drama.”-J.M. Coetzee, 2003 Nobel Laureate for Literature and author of Slow Man

A stunning debut novel by a psychiatric nurse in which illness unleashes the
uncanny and essential of human identity, featuring an American missionary’s
daughter who grows into womanhood amid the social and political conflict of
1980s southern Africa The setting of this extraordinary novel is Rhodesia in
the throes of the conflict that will give birth to Zimbabwe, a transition
that Nangle witnessed when she lived there. Colleen, motherless from the age
of seven, is left alone with her father, an American ex pat coffee farmer,
and her younger sister, whose mental illness removes her from the family.
The Leper Compound is the record of Colleen’s passage into adulthood across
an Africa in transformation. Extending beyond the usual parameters of a
“coming of age” story, it is, simultaneously, about the forging of personal
and national identity. Paula Nangle was raised by missionaries in the US and
southern Africa and now lives in Benton Harbor, Michigan, where she works as
a psychiatric nurse.

The Big Eddy Club: The Stocking Stranglings and Southern Justice, by David Rose
Published by New Press/distributed by Norton

“A gripping and brilliant piece of reporting that both lays bare an
appalling miscarriage of justice and exposes its origins in the tortured
history of the South.”

- Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking

Over the course of eight bloody months in the 1970s, a serial rapist and
murderer terrorized Columbus, Georgia, killing seven elderly white women by
strangling them in their beds. In 1986, eight years after the last murder,
an African American, Carlton Gary, was convicted and sentenced to death.
Though many in the city doubt his guilt, he remains on death row. Vanity
Fair investigative journalist David Rose has followed this case for a decade
in an investigation that led him to the Big Eddy Club-an all-white,
members-only club in Columbus, frequented by the town’s most prominent
judges and lawyers . . . as well as most of the seven murdered women. The
Big Eddy Club is a gripping, revealing drama, full of evocatively drawn
characters, insidious institutions, and the extraordinary connections that
bind past and present. The book is also a compelling, accessible, and timely
exploration of race and criminal justice, not just in the context of the
South but in the entire United States, as it addresses the corruption of due
process as a tool of racial oppression.