This Week's Acquisitions

• Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles (Ecco, 2012).  Retelling of the legend of Achilles and Patroclus from Patroclus' POV.  (Lift Bridge)
• Lynn Shepherd, The Solitary House (Delacorte, 2012).  Well, Bleak House already was a detective novel of a sort.  Here, Tulkinghorn asks private investigator Charles Maddox, a disgraced police detective, to do a little job for him.  (Amazon)
• Colm Toibin, The Empty Family: Stories (Scribner, 2011).  Short stories set everywhere from Ireland to Spain, and from the early twentieth century to the present.  (Barnes & Noble)
• Susan Barrett, Fixing Shadows (Review, 2005).  In Victorian England, a commoner's living baby is substituted for an aristocrat's dead one, with the usual results.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Fiona Shaw, The Sweetest Thing (Virago, 2004).  Neo-Victorian novel about a young working-class woman and her relationship with a Quaker who accumulates photographs of women like her (shades of Arthur Munby).  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Helen Dunmore, The Greatcoat (Hammer, 2012).  Ghost story involving a woman, an old coat, and a mysterious man who suddenly enters her life.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• C. P. Golightly, Look at Home, or Short and Easy Method with the Roman Catholics (J. H. Parker, 1837).  First polemical pamphlet by this ardent anti-Catholic campaigner.  (eBay)