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March 18th, 2013

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Spring is here, and with the London Book Fair just around the corner, publishers are hopping on and off planes tempting us with suitcases full of new titles. And all the while, we try to strike that fine balance between reordering the tried and true and throwing ourselves at the new and exciting. Here are just a few of the new titles you might consider inviting along on your spring break in a few weeks time.

The 30-year-old marriage of a couple living in midwestern United States is torn apart by a woman’s size − and her obsession with food. In the wake of the split, their adult children try to come to turns with the reasons why and what they can or should do to help their mother. The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg is a story of marriage, love, family and our time’s strange preoccupation with food.

We tend to get so caught up in all the greatness of modern life and technology that we forget to think about our past, and particularly what we have learned and continue to learn from it. In his new book, The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, takes an in-depth look at traditional societies, drawing from decades of field work as well as evidence from Inuits, Amazonian Indians and others to find that many of their practices and traditions have a lot to teach us about child rearing, elder care, dispute resolution and much more.    

For fans of Mma Ramotswe and the #1 Ladies Detective Agency, the wait is over. The 13th book in the series, The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection, will be out in March when author Alexander McCall Smith introduces his very large and very loyal group of readers to Clovis Andersen, the author of Mma Ramotswe’s trusted guide The Principles of Private Detection.

For those of us who read and thoroughly enjoyed Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, this is a long awaited new title. In How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Hamid tells the story of a young man’s successful journey from poor rural life to a wealthy city one. The story itself described the dreams and desires of so many in South East Asia, but just as interesting is the structure of the book as a self-help book, in which every chapter begins with a rule. Once again, Hamid succeeds in telling a good story on so many different levels.

In Far from the tree, a fascinating and inspiring work of non-fiction based on 40,000 pages of interview transcripts with more than 300 families, author Andrew Solomon explores the universal themes of generosity, acceptance and tolerance, seen through the lives of parents who face extreme challenges with their children: challenges ranging from deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, multiple severe disabilities, to children who are prodigies and more. While all these challenges are different and isolating, what these families have in common is that they are proof that love can transcend every prejudice.

Isabella Mousavizadeh Smith is the owner of Books & Company, an English language book shop in Hellerup that prides itself on providing an interesting and diverse range of books, an excellent cup of coffee, and a warm and welcoming atmosphere. For more about Books & Company, please visit www.booksandcompany.dk, facebook.com/booksandcompany or the shop at Sofievej 1.