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Our many links on the far right offer useful tools for selection and readers advisory librarians. Get a head start on the Fall season by checking out the new Publisher’s Catalogs, view trailers for Movies Based on Books and identify Movie Tie-ins. If you need a librarian-friendly contact at publishing houses, check our listings under Publisher Contacts.
When Washington Post Carolyn See critic loves a book, she doesn’t hide it. Her review for the debut novel The Doctor and The Diva, begins, “Some novels just naturally enslave you, and this is one of them.” Set in Boston in the early 1900’s, it’s about a woman caught in a conflict between her love for her husband, her desire to become an opera singer and her desire for another man.
The novel is based on a true story that the author researched in depth. Writes See,
The details of the novel — such as the long coach rides down a Trinidad beach where the sands are firm as pavement — gets its richness from diaries, clippings and letters. The effectiveness of the narrative comes from the novelist’s striking skill. From the very first pages, we are utterly engaged in what’s going to happen to these three people — they become as close to us as family friends.
It ’s published under a new Viking Penguin imprint, Pamela Dorman Books. Dorman is known for acquiring and editing The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards, Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding and The Deep End Of The Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard. When she was at Hyperion, she was responsible for The Physick Book Of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe, The Monsters Of Templeton by Lauren Groff, as well as the memoirs The Middle Place by Kelly Corrigan, and Perfection by Julie Metz.
“British writer Julia Stuart (The Matchmaker of Périgord) crafts a subculture that is so sweet and enchanting that the whole affair would be terribly twee were it not for the sense of heartbreak and longing that holds it all together.”
You Lost Me There by Rosecrans Baldwin (Riverhead) gets an A- from Entertainment Weekly, which calls it “beautiful, brainy, offbeat,” while praising the author’s “steadying compassion and literary flair in the dissection of miseries, identifying with equal compassion the dissatisfactions of a dead wife and the grief of a bewildered widower.”
But Kirkus, PW and Booklist were all underwhelmed by this debut, calling it “thinly plotted” and criticizing the main character’s “fundamental blandness” - so probably best to wait for more reviews.
Tough Customerby Sandra Brown (Simon & Schuster) tells the story of a private investigator whose estranged daughter is threatened by a stalker. Kirkus says “the narrative, slowed by too many talky scenes and descriptive filler, eventually rewards readers’ patience with a bang-up surprise ending.”
Cure by Robin Cook (Putnam) follows a couple, both medical examiners, who investigate a mob hit. PW says “Even devoted Cook fans may find that the crimes and subterfuges are resolved too swiftly and perfunctorily.”
Veil of Nightby Linda Howard is a romantic suspense novel about a wedding planner and the murder of her bridezilla client.
Death on the D-Listby Nancy Grace is the second Hailey Dean thriller by bestselling author, attorney, and TV personality Grace.
City of Veils by Zoe Ferraris (Little, Brown), is the author’s second literary mystery, set in Saudi Arabia and featuring the desert guide Nayir Sharqi and forensic scientist Katya Hijazi. The starred Booklist review calls it “a suspenseful mystery and a sobering portrait of the lives of Muslim women. Recommend this potent thriller as book-club reading.” It was also a pick on the LA Times summer reading roundup and the August Indie Next list. Libraries are showing modest reserves on modest orders.
Mary Roach was the big hit of this year’s BEA Librarian “Shout & Share,” getting votes from all the librarians on the panel for her book Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. She was also funny, enthralling and informative during a BEA author breakfast moderated by Jon Stewart (who was cracking up during most of her talk – watch it here). She was equally funny when she spoke to librarians at the AAP breakfast at PLA in March..
Word-of-mouth on the new book is good, but libraries we checked are well behind demand on this title.
Expect major media attention (no surprise, she will be on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Monday) for Roach’s look at some of the bizarre and uncomfortable realities facing future astronauts, as outlined in starred reviews from Library Journal (“While there are occasional somber passages, most of the descriptions of the many and varied annoyances of space travel are perversely entertaining.”) and Kirkus (“There is much good fun with – and a respectful amount of awe at – the often crazy ingenuity brought to the mundane matters of surviving in a place not meant for humans“).
The book trailer, already featured on BoingBoing, illustrates Booklist’s assessment that ”Roach brings intrepid curiosity, sauciness, and chutzpah to the often staid practice of popular science writing,” giving it YA crossover appeal
Though scheduled for release next week, Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography by Andrew Morton (St. Martin’s) was rushed to market this week because some the supposed revelations about the life and career of actress Angelina Jolie were leaking out.
USA Todaydissects Jolie’s epic love life, and adds that the Jolie-Pitt household’s legion staff includes “nannies from Vietnam, the Congo, and the U.S.; four nurses, a doctor on permanent call; two personal assistants; a cook; a maid; two cleaners; a busboy; four bodyguards, and six French former army guards.”
New York Times critic Janet Maslin chastizes Morton for not citing sources and for his many frivolous details (e.g. the type face of a particular Jolie tattoo never seen in public), while praising him (sort of) for connecting the biographical dots of Jolie’s life.
I Am Number Fourby Pitticus Lore (HarperCollins) is a YA novel about nine alien refugee teenages who land on Earth. Three are already dead, and number four is next. As we mentioned earlier, Entertainment Weekly has been running exclusives about this title, including an interview with the author, who claims to be “an extraterrestrial Elder from Lorien named Pittacus Lore.”
Artemis Fowl: The Atlantis Complex by Eoin Colfer (Hyperion); this will be the next-to-last entry in the best-selling middle-grade fantasy series, as Colfer revealed this week to the UK’s Guardian.
Notable Fiction on Sale Next Week
My Hollywood by Mona Simpson (Knopf) is her first novel since Off Keck Road (2000), narrated in alternate chapters by Claire, a composer whose marriage is strained by her husband’s late hours as a TV writer, and Lola, the Filipina nanny she hires. Entertainment Weekly gives it an “A-”: “Claire, privileged and damaged, floats along in a daze of unfulfillment, while the ever-practical Lola observes her L.A. milieu with a realist’s eye in imperfect yet oddly poetic English… A character as rich as Lola won’t easily fade from anyone’s mind.” There’s also an interview with Simpson in the New York Times.
I Curse the River of Timeby Per Petterson, translated by Charlotte Barslund (Graywolf Press), from the author of the surprise hit Out Stealing Horses, is the story of a Danish communist who faces divorce and a dying mother. Entertainment Weekly gives it a “B,” saying: “A times it’ll feel alien to readers who’ve never been young Communists… (The translation can also be quite a rickety bridge.) But there’s no denying the novel’s Raymond Carver-like power as Arvid and his mother come to terms with how life hands you hope just before it hands you disappointment and tragedy.”
Hangman by Faye Kellerman (Morrow) is the newest mystery novel with spouses Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus. Booklist says Kellerman fans will be reasonably satisfied, but “if you’re new to Kellerman…this is not the place to start. Kellerman works primarily in dialogue, with very sketchy narrative support, which requires readers unfamiliar with the backstory to act as their own detectives, figuring out what the heck is going on in each scene.”
Burn by Nevada Barr (Minotaur Books) is the 16th book with National Park Service ranger Anna Pigeon, though this time she is transplanted out of her element, to New Orleans. Booklist says, “Barr develops the narrative carefully, never letting the eerie black-magic elements overshadow her solid and suspenseful plotting. A definite winner.”
The Red Queenby Philippa Gregory (Touchstone) chronicles the War of the Roses through the perspective of Henry VII’s mother.
Scarlet Nights: An Edilean Novel by Jude Deveraux (Atria) follows a woman whose fiancé turns out to be a scheming criminal. Booklist says it’s ”another guilty-pleasure romance of suspense that will hook readers and leave them with a smile.”
In Harm’s Wayby Ridley Pearson (Putnam) is the fourth thriller with Idaho sheriff Walt Fleming. Booklist is not so impressed: “although this novel is sufficiently entertaining, it lacks both the taut plotting and intricate excitement of his best work.”
One of the librarians’ Shout & Share picks from BEA, A Fierce Radiance, was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered yesterday. In the novel, author Lauren Belfer tells the true story of the development of penicillin, featuring a fictional Life magazine photographer on assignment to cover the story. Belfer says she read every issue of Life magazine from 1939 to 1945 to get a feel for the time.
The book has been garnering strong reviews;
NYT Book Review, Pharma Drama, Maggie Scharf, “[Belfer] knows how to turn esoteric information into an adventure story, and how to tell that story very well.”
Chicago Tribune, Review by Celia McGee, “… who can’t be grateful for a long, interesting, if over-full, historical novel that isn’t about vampires?”
USA Today, War, love and loss burst from Lauren Belfer’s ‘Radiance’, Erik Brady, “…A Fierce Radiance, a genre-blending historical novel, is love story and murder mystery rolled into panoramic family saga and industrial-espionage thriller.”
Lots of major fiction arrives next week, as publishers prepare for the lead-up to Mother’s Day in bookstores. Here are the highlights of next week’s crop, all of which have strong holds in libraries we checked.
Deliver Us from Evil by David Baldacci (Grand Central): Holds are huge for this one, but unfortunately, PW says it “lacks the creative plotting and masterful handling of suspense that marked his earlier thrillers.”
This Body of Death (An Inspector Lynley Novel) by Elizabeth George is ”richly rewarding,” according to PW, with ”an intricate plot that will satisfy even jaded fans of psychological suspense.”
Burning Lamp by Amanda Quick (Penguin). Library Journal says: “With quirky humor and typical flair, Quick has penned another riveting, fast-paced adventure that… will leave readers anxious for the final installment, Jayne Castle’s Midnight Crystal, coming in September.”
Lucid Intervals(A Stone Barrington Novel) by Stuart Woods (Penguin). “Woods mixes danger and humor into a racy concoction that will leave readers thirsty for more,” PW declares.
The Double Comfort Safari Club (The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Series #11) by Alexander McCall Smith (Pantheon) gets a positive review from PW, which notes that the tale’s resolution many seem “unduly fortuitous, but it makes sense within the framework of these books, which are more about humanity than logic.”
Eight Days to Live by Iris Johansen (Macmillan). “Think The Da Vinci Code crossed with an Anne Stuart romantic suspense novel, and you’ll have a sense of the plot and tone,” says Library Journal.
Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey (Knopf). Reviews in PW and Booklist are enthusiastic, along with Library Journal, which sums up: ”Written by a two-time Booker Prize winner, this engaging book will be particularly appreciated by readers interested in early 19th-century American history, the French aristocracy, and emerging democracy.” It’s also reviewed in the current NYT BR.
One of the debuts we’re watching this season is The Postmistress by Sarah Blake. Many have compared it to Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. In fact, it’s received strong praise from Stockett (she even interviews Blake on Amazon’s site), and both books share the same editor, Amy Einhorn, who has her own imprint at Putnam.
In today’s New York Times, Janet Maslin also makes the comparison to The Help, which she calls a “socially conscious pulp best seller,”
Each of these novels appropriates galvanizing social issues in the service of a well-wrought tear-jerker. And each is crammed with talking points.
But Maslin also admits,
…the real strength of The Postmistress lies in its ability to strip away readers’ defenses against stories of wartime uncertainty and infuse that chaos with wrenching immediacy and terror.
She also predicts that, like The Help, “this book will click in a major way.”
The books may share many qualities, but the settings are different. Rather than 1960’s Mississippi, ThePostmistress takes place during World War II, which has led others to compare it to The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society.
The Postmistress releases today and has been steadily rising on Amazon (it’s now at #84). Library holds are also growing rapidly on conservative ordering; as high as 210 on 16 copies.
Entertainment Weeklygave it a middling “C” grade, but Elizabeth Kostova’s second book The Swan Thieves (after her 2005 blockbuster vampire-themed The Historian) gets more love from the Associated Press. The author was also interviewed on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday.
But the review that blows away the nay-sayers is from Laura Miller in the Barnes and Noble Review. Miller, a respected critic who writes for Salon, opens the review by marveling that The Historian was such a success; it’s “a vampire story without gore or brooding passions, a historical thriller without much in the way of action” but Kostova “…placed her faith in the conviction that readers are pleased to sink slowly into a novel, until the world it conjures has closed over their heads, submerging them entirely.” Miller feels she does the same with this book, even though the subject matter (Impressionist painting, rather than vampires) is quite different.
The heaviest holds for fiction going on sale next week are on Robert Crais’s thriller, The First Rule: A Joe Pike Novel, an IndieBound pick for January and a popular Amazon preorder.
Elizabeth Kostova’s The Swan Thieves – her second novel after her blockbuster 2005 debut, The Historian – has hold ratios of about four to one in libraries we checked.
Entertainment Weekly grades it a “C,” with the criticism that this literary thriller about a mentally ill painter obsessed with a dead woman doesn’t maintain a sense of urgency – “a desperate flaw for a story of passion and obsession.”
Beth Hoffman’s debut novel Saving Ceecee Honeycutt, which was acquired by the same editor as Sue Monk Kidd’s Secret Life of Bees, is getting a push from the publisher and many enthusiastic quotes from booksellers. It’s also the first pick in the new Sam’s Club Book Club, according to GalleyCat, and will be featured in all 600 of the chain’s big box stores.
Prepub reviews included a starred Library Journal review:
“Southern storytelling at its best, this coming-of-age novel is sure to be a hit with the book clubs that adopted Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees.”
Melanie Benjamin’s portrait of Alice Liddel, Lewis Carroll’s muse in Alice I Have Been, is a big favorite of Random House’s library marketing team, who compare it to Nancy Horan’s reading-club favorite Loving Frank. In fact, the author invites reading groups to contact her and possibly arrange a phone-in.
Prepub reviews bear out the inhouse enthusiasm; Booklist says, “First-novelist Benjamin tells … a story that is a mixture of historically accurate fact and liberally imagined fiction, including her solution to the mystery of what actually happened to estrange Carroll … from his muse’s family.”
Most large libraries have ordered modestly, with 2:1 holds. However, one library clearly expects strong demand, ordering 80 copies.
Elena Gorokhova’s memoir of growing up in 1960s Leningrad, A Mountain of Crumbs, has already received positive reviews in Elle and More magazines. Libraries are showing holds of three to one on modest orders.
Amy Bloom’s new story collection, Where the God of Love Hangs Out. Her novel, Away, was a bestseller. People gives the new collection 3.5 stars and makes it a People Pick. Bloom’s subject is love. Several of the stories are interlinked and People says they “hit harder than the stand-alones: mapping passion’s fallout takes time.”
Here’s an early jump on some titles going on sale next week that we’re likely to be hearing more about (for more titles, check B&N.com’s Coming Soon section).
Phillippa Gregory returns with The White Queen, about Britain’s wars of the Plantagenets, with a more cinematic jacket look than usual for Gregory (perhaps influenced by huge success of the tie-in to the film of The Other Boleyn Girl). People heralds it this week with 3.5 of a possible 4 stars,
…Gregory’s lush detail and deft storytelling are all in top form here, making The White Queen both mesmerizing and historically rich.
Libraries we checked showed high reserves on orders of up to 56 copies. This is the first of a planned trilogy.
Gail Parkin’s debut novel Baking Cakes in Kigali is an Indie Next pick for September. Set in Rwanda, it features a woman who finds healing after the losses of her two grown children, as we mentioned in an earlier post. Libraries we checked are showing modest reserves and under 10 copies on order. This could be a sleeper.
Baking Cakes in Kigali: A Novel
Gaile Parkin
Retail Price:
$24.00
Hardcover:
320 pages
Publisher:
Delacorte Press – (2009-08-18)
ISBN / EAN:
0385343434 / 9780385343435
Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater by New York Times food critic Frank Bruni gets a B+ in Entertainment Weekly. Libraries are showing modest reserves on modest orders. Our guess is that it’s likely to get enough review attention to change that.
Day After Night by Anita Diamant is the top choice on the independent booksellers’ Indie Next list for September. At one library we checked, reserves were as high as 106 on 38 copies, but World Cat shows that only 53 libraries have it.
Here’s how Kris Kleindienst, co-owner of Left Bank Books, Saint Louis, MO pitched the novel:
“Four women with four different stories of surviving the European Jewish Holocaust find themselves in an internment camp run by the British military in Palestine as illegals, Jews without papers. Based on the true story of a dramatic rescue in 1945 of more than 200 prisoners at the Atlit internment camp, this extraordinary novel is equal parts history, adventure, and celebration of the profound determination of the human psyche. I loved this book and will recommend it for reading groups.”
Day After Night: A Novel
Anita Diamant
Retail Price:
$27.00
Hardcover:
304 pages
Publisher:
Scribner – (2009-09-08)
ISBN / EAN:
0743299841 / 9780743299848
Also available from Simon & Schuster Audio on Sept. 1
CD $29.99; ISBN 9780743598392
The Indie Next #3 pick for September, Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin, is a debut novel that’s a strong favorite of Jen Childs, over at Random House’s library marketing department, and was also picked by librarians at the BEA “Shout and Share” panel. World Cat shows that 93 libraries have it, but libraries we checked show only modest reserves - though it’s still early.
Here’s a pitch from Sandy Scott at The Galaxy Bookshop, Hardwick, VT:
“Cake maker Angel Tungaraza lives in a multicultural community in Rwanda, where she finds healing after the losses of her two grown children as she helps others solve their own problems with equal doses of common sense and kindness. Tragedy and humor find balance in this thoroughly enjoyable novel.”
The inevitable has happened: there will be a graphic novel version of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, to be published by Del Rey in 2010, according to Publishers Weekly.
Veteran comics writer Tony Lee, who has worked on X-Men, Spider-Man and other series, will team with artist Cliff Richards, of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics series.
Quirk books, publisher of the surprise hit mashup Jane Austen andZombies by Seth Grahame-Smith,has announced a followup: Sense and Sensibility and Seamonsters by Ben H. Winters, slated for release on September 15. In the meantime, there’s a hilarious book trailer so good it gave me chills!
Here, the Dashwood sisters leave their childhood home after the arrival of their scheming stepmother, only to land on an island of man-eating sea creatures — alllowing Winters to take inspiration from ”everything from Jules Verne novels to Lost to Jaws to Spongebob Squarepants.“
However, the publisher has set a more conservative printing (200,000 copies vs. the 600,000 in print for Jane Austen and Zombies), since the house is not certain if the twist on Jane Austen will hold as much appeal as zombies do, according to Publishers Weekly. Then again, if the ingenious trailer truly reflects the book, there’s probably little need to worry.
Released just over a month ago, Sarah Waters’ fifth novel, the stylish ghost story The Little Stranger, has steadily gained critical attention. Reserve activity is pretty strong at libraries we checked, but orders are low.
The New York Times Book Review declared that Waters “magnificently” renders the grand old house where the novel is set, and that its inhabitants “sparkle like chandeliers in the damp, peeling rooms” as their way of life fades amid the Second World War. The review also notes that the members of the artistocratic Ayres family “are such lovingly depicted and realistic characters that it becomes hard to accept their gothic fates.”
NPR’s “Books We Like” columnist Maud Newton observes, “Although her past works have focused on lesbian characters, repressed desire has always been Waters’ terrain. In her hands these hidden longings incite turmoil and even blur into the occult. . . . Hundreds Hall serves as a perfect symbol of the postwar erosion of Britain’s class hierarchies, but it also, increasingly, transforms into a scheming, deadly character.”
The Washington Post wonders, “What are we dealing with here? Hysteria? Evil spirits? A jealous doctor? Waters teases us with clues that send us running off in every direction: psychological, paranormal and socioeconomic. But the story’s sustained ambiguity is what keeps our attention, and her perfectly calibrated tone casts an unnerving spell over these pages.”
The Little Stranger
Sarah Waters
Price:
$26.95
Hardcover:
480 pages
Publisher:
Riverhead Hardcover – (2009-04-30)
ISBN-10:
1594488800
ISBN-13:
9781594488801
Avaiilable from Penguin Audiobooks
CD; $39.95; 0143144804
Also available as a downloadable audio on Overdrive
R. Crumb, the famously subversive comics artist, allows a glimpse into his forthcoming Book of Genesis in a 12-page excerpt in this week’s New Yorker. The book, due for release on October 19, offers an unconventional take on the Bible that is likely to provoke the religious right, according to The Guardian (UK), which also quoted Crumb saying that the book is ”very visual. It’s lurid. Full of all kinds of crazy, weird things that will really surprise people.” Most libraries we checked did not show copies on order.
May 17 was a banner day for books on CBS Sunday Morning, which launched three featured titles into Amazon’s top 350 bestsellers. T.C. Boyle’s novel The Women, about the loves of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, moved to #100, while The Ashley Book of Knots by Clifford Ashley jumped to #295, and organization guru Julie Morgenstern’s SHED Your Stuff, Change Your Life: A Four-Step Guide to Getting Unstuck leapt to #336.
Libraries we checked favored Morgenstein’s self-help guide, with an average of 10 copies and signficant reserves. Quantities were more mixed and reserves more modest on Boyle’s novel, which came out in February, and The Ashley Book of Knots.
The Women: A Novel
T.C. Boyle
Price:
$27.95
Hardcover:
464 pages
Publisher:
Viking Adult – (2009-02-10)
ISBN-10:
0670020419
ISBN-13:
9780670020416
An audiobook version is available in three formats from Blackstone Audio:
15 CDs; $100; ISBN 978-1-4332-6061-2
2 MP3CD; $29.95; ISBN 978-1-4332-6064-3
Playaway; $69.99; ISBN 978-1-4332-6068-1
Ashley Book of Knots
Clifford Ashley
Price:
$80.00
Hardcover:
640 pages
Publisher:
Doubleday – (1944-06-21)
ISBN-10:
0385040253
ISBN-13:
9780385040259
-
SHED Your Stuff, Change Your Life
Julie Morgenstern
Price:
$15.00
Paperback:
288 pages
Publisher:
Fireside – (2009-03-03)
ISBN-10:
0743250907
ISBN-13:
9780743250900
An audiobook is available in three formats from Tantor Media
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