Booksellers’ Picks for the Season
USA Today asks booksellers what new voices they’re most looking forward to in the upcoming season.
Among the fiction picks are several that are just out now, or about to be released.
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Simultaneous Unabridged Audio: 9780143145448; $39.95 Audio and eBook downloadable from OverDrive |
Bookseller Elaine Petrocelli from Book Passage in Corte Madera, CA thinks this debut will have “the kind of following that The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society had.” The author will be at MidWinter, signing at the Penguin booth, #1324, on Sunday, 1:30 to 2:30.
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Unabridged Audio: Book on Tape Audio and eBook downloadable from OverDrive |
This debut novel is about slave owners who vacationed with their black mistresses at a summer resort in Ohio. “Almost every copy we had pre-ordered was spoken for by the time it came in,” says a bookseller from Cincinnati, where the local setting may have particular appeal. All four prepub sources are enthusiastic about it; PW calls it “heart-wrenching, intriguing, original and suspenseful.” People gave it 3.5 of 4 stars, calling it a “devastating beautiful account of a cruel past.”
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Audio from Hachette: CD: $39.98; ISBN 9781600247453 Large Print:Little Brown: $28.99; ISBN 9780316043663 Book and audio downloadable from OverDrive |
The Swan Thieves is getting considerable attention, largely because of the huge success of the author’s 2005 debut title, The Historian. Borders tells USA Today that they are throwing support behind it. This week, rival B&N.com published Laura Miller’s intriguing review of the book in The Barnes and Noble Review.
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Petrocelli is also excited about a book we’ve been hearing advance reader buzz for, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s One Amazing Thing. PW and Kirkus are both lukewarm about this story of seven people trapped in an American consulate after an earthquake, but Booklist calls it a “a suspenseful, astute, and unforgettable survivors tale.”