Cathy -- Harvard Book Store International Orders

Cathy lives within sight of the ocean and knows a lot about customer orders. Her cat, Coco, has fourteen Chanel quilted handbags.

Recommendations:

1. The Chimney Sweeper's Boy by Barbara Vine, whose career is much younger than Ruth Rendell's, though they are the same person. Rendell is perhaps the Queen of Crime, but Vine is the queen of human entanglements. She draws on the deft (and somewhat morbid) story-telling powers of expert mystery writer Rendell and combines them with her own psychological acuity to create novels both disturbing and profound. Layered in among the usual brilliance of this, her latest, is the portrait of a famous author writing under a false name. A hidden mirror? (Note: This title will be published in June 1998.)

2. Spending, by Mary Gordon. Come on, don't pretend you haven't thought about what your life would be like if you had all the money you needed. How would your creative output be transformed if you didn't have to work or teach? This book is about money -- the raw power that money exerts on the life of an artist. When the author set out to answer the question "Where are all the male muses?", she wreaked her whimsy on a lot of other issues -- sex, love, artistic fame, and even stocks and bonds.

3. Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road, a trilogy about World War I by Pat Barker. This scholarly Englishwoman has reimagined World War I through the eyes of poets, psychiatrists, working-class upstarts and homosexuals. You may be surprised, even freaked out.

4. Jack Maggs by Peter Carey. This new book is becoming a bestseller in independent bookstores, according to Publishers Weekly. Peter Carey's novels are thoughtful, crafty, vivid, detailed, devastating. Not to be attitudinous, but read Oscar and Lucinda before you see the movie.

5. Caucasia, a new book by Danzy Senna, set in Boston in the sixties and exploring the bizarre but all too real world of American racial relations from the point of view of a young black girl passing as white.

6. Mister Sandman by Barbara Gowdy. From the cover this can be mistaken for another fey retread of the quirky-family novel. It's not.

7. The God in Flight by Laura Argiri. A perpetual favorite of mine, this novel is about high passions, art, death, queer sex, consumption and Yale at the turn of the century. It doesn't get any more fun than this.

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