This Week's Acquisitions

• Grace Kennedy, Dunallan; Or, Know What You Judge (William Oliphant, 1872).  Didactic novel by the author best known for the anti-Catholic Father Clement.  There's a Victorian biographical sketch of Kennedy at the Center for Disability and Public History and another at Electric Scotland;  a more recent account, plus an e-text of one of her other novels, is available from the Hockliffe Project. 
• Haruki Marukami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (Knopf, 2006). Short story collection.
• Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End (Penguin, 2001).  Ford's meditation on England in the wake of WWI.
• John McGahern, The Dark (Penguin, 2002).  Struggles of a boy growing up in rural Ireland.
• Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (Grove, 2006).  Indian families try to make sense of themselves and their country, both at home and in New York.
• Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Viking, 2006).  Precocious child + many books + murder.
• T. C. Boyle, Talk Talk (Viking, 2006).  A thriller involving a deaf protagonist and trumped-up charges.
• J. W. Colenso, The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically Examined, part I only (Longman, 1862).  One of the Victorian period's most controversial works of Biblical criticism.  There's a quick overview of the subject at the Victorian Web. 
• Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire?: British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700-1914 (Manchester, 2004).  Discusses the connections and tensions between missionary work and imperialism.