The new issue of Booklist has several reviews for some books everyone's been waiting for. Here are a few teasers:

Flight by Sherman Alexie: "This is a time-travel fable about the legacy of prejudice and pain. Zits is inexplicably catapulted back to 1975, where he inhabits the body of a white FBI agent confronting radical Indian activists, the first epdisode of an out-of-body odyssey. Smart, funny and resilient, Zits is profoundly transformed, as the hero in a tale of ordeals is supposed to be, by his shape-shifting experiences as an Indian boy at Little Big Horn, an Indian tracker, a homeless Indian drunk, and a pilot in unnerving proximity to a Muslim terrorist."

YA readers take note, Donna Seaman notes in her review that "Flight could almost be a YA novel, given its teen narrator, time-travel elements, brevity and edgy lessons in right and wrong."

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini: "Unimaginably tragic, Hosseini's magnificient second novel is a sad and beautiful testament to both Afghani suffering and strength. Readers who lost themselves in The Kite Runner will not want to miss this unforgettable follow-up."

After Dark by Haruki Murakami: "Each character is unique in his or her form of loneliness, yet each possesses a capacity for momentary empathy that is both sweet and heartbreaking. Murakami's genius, on both large and small canvases, is to create worlds both utterly alien and disconcertingly familiar."

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon: "Even without grasping all of the Yiddish wordplay that seasons the delectable prose, readers will fall headlong into the alternate universe of Chabon's Sitka, where black humor is a kind of antifreeze necessary to support life. And when Meyer, in the end, must 'weigh the fates of the Jews, the Arabs, of the whole unblessed and homeless planet' against a promise made to a grieving mother, it's clear that this parallel world smells a lot like home."

I also have a starred review in this issue, for a book that I highly highly recommend. The Long Exile by Melanie McGrath is about the 1950s relocation by the Canadian government of several Inuit families to Ellesmere Island. Death, despair and long term suffering followed and promises that the settlers could be returned at any time turned out to be lies. Here's a bit a of my review: "She [McGrath] opens with the 1920s filming of Nanook of the North, then pursues connections the filmmaker had to one Inuit family. By contrasting how the Inuit are perceived by movie audiences versus the treatment they received from government employees, she sets the reader up for the devastating conclusions revealed in the survivors' 1993 testimony before the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Because the events and people McGrath portrays had a direct effect on the development of the Nunavuit Territory, her book is an excellent example of living history. Highly readable and utterly fascinating, this startling examination of the meaning of the term civilized world is nonfiction literature at its best."

If you have any interest in indigenous peoples or Canadian history or how utterly stupid the whole notion of civilization can be sometimes then this book is for you. I can't stress enough how beautifully it is written. I was really impressed with The Long Exile. (Oh - and if you're a fan of Nanook of the North then it's high time you knew that truth behind the movie - and it will not at all be what you expect!)