James Patterson’s newest co-author is getting top billing. According to the Associated Press, Patterson and former president Bill Clinton are writing a thriller together, appropriately titled The President is Missing.

The Amazon listing shows that it will be released on June 11, 2018, ISBN 978-0316412698. In an unusual move, it will be published jointly by PRH/ Knopf, which has published Clinton’s most recent books, and Patterson’s publisher, Hachette/Little, Brown.

In a the press release announcing the book, the publishers say it will be “a unique amalgam of intrigue, suspense and behind-the-scenes global drama from the highest corridors of power. It will be informed by details that only a president can know.”

Clinton adds, “Working on a book about a sitting president — drawing on what I know about the job, life in the White House and the way Washington works — has been a lot of fun. And working with Jim has been terrific. I’ve been a fan of his for a very long time.”

The Hill adds that Clinton and Patterson will go on a national book tour to promote their novel.

Hearing the news, we had to check the date, but April Fools Day was over a month ago. Further backing it up, the story is being reported by several other sources, including the Washington Post. and the New York Times, which quotes unnamed sources saying the idea was cooked up by the agent the two men share.

Two very different adaptations begin airing this week, both on streaming services.

Anne with an E begins its eight-week run on Netflix starting May 12, with a two-hour premiere. It is a new version of L.M. Montgomery’s beloved childhood classic, Anne of Green Gables.

As we summarized last week, advance publicity indicates the new version will be grittier than readers remember.

As the show’s creator, Moira Walley-Beckett tells the CBC News, “I feel that this Anne is entirely different … We’re off-book … This is a very grounded, real version of the story. Life in Prince Edward Island in the late 1800s was a hard, gritty, scrappy life. It was messy, it was covered in red mud … It’s not doilies and teacups, it’s life.”

The relatively unknown Irish-Canadian actress, Amybeth McNulty, plays the title role. R.H. Thomson (Chloe) and Geraldine James (Sherlock Holmes) play Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert.

The few advance reviews are raves. The Globe and Mail say it is “striking and fresh … It imagines rather than remembers or reveres previous versions, no matter how beloved they were. This Anne should be approached and appreciated in the same spirit – it’s a sublimely reinvigorated Anne of Green Gables.” The Cleveland Plain Dealer, writes “With an ‘e’ for exceptional, Walley-Beckett got it right.”

There is no tie-in, but the book is in print in multiple editions from various publishers.

Based on a cult novel by Chris Kraus, published by the indie press Semiotext(e) (reprinted by MIT press in 2006), I Love Dick starts airing on Amazon on May 12.

Jill Soloway, who created the Emmy-winning Transparent for Amazon, returns as co-creator and director. The series stars Kevin Bacon and Kathryn Hahn.

The press release details the plot: “Chris (Kathryn Hahn) is a frustrated New York filmmaker who finds herself marooned in Marfa, Texas, where her academic husband, Sylvère (Griffin Dunne), has a writing residency. Amid the dusty silence, art snobs, and tumbleweeds, she meets renowned scholar Dick (Kevin Bacon). An infuriating and beguiling exchange with this enigmatic, macho character unleashes in her a dramatic awakening.”

It debuted at Sundance and reviews thus far are generally strong. The Guardian says it is “innovative, well-acted and visually sumptuous.” Variety says it is “a treasure trove of charged moments, an intriguing dance of provocation, creation, and self-reflection. It digs to the roots of desire with unflinching curiosity. It is a daunting show to step into, with its scathing critiques and blunt personalities. But there is something cleansing and freeing about its unvarnished intimacy.” Reflective thought pieces are also piling up, from Slate, New York magazine and The New Republic.

There are some naysayers. The Hollywood Reporter calls it “Messy and not very likable,” summing it up with, “You might want to commit to something/someone else.”

There is no-tie in. For those who want to know more about the ground-breaking book, The Guardian wrote about it when it was published in the UK, saying it is “the book about relationships everyone should read.” The New Yorker wrote about it in 2015, calling it a “white-hot text.”

The film adaptation of the beloved and bestselling memoir by Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle (S&S/Scribner, 2005), finally has a debut date, set to open in wide release on August 11.

The film stars Academy Award winner Brie Larson as Walls with Woody Harrelson and Naomi Watts as her dysfunctional,  sometimes homeless parents, Rex and Rose Mary.

The memoir spent over 250 weeks on NYT best seller lists, in both hardcover and the trade paperback, where it had its most enduring success. Also a constant in book groups, the memoir is assigned reading in schools, and even has its own Cliff Notes.

Deadline Hollywood reports that Lionsgate plans to pitch the film to women hoping to create the kind of appeal and word of mouth power enjoyed by Eat Pray Love, The Help, and Julie & Julia, all of which also had August release dates.

As we have noted, readers have been waiting for some time for the film version. In 2012, Paramount announced plans to adapt the film with  Jennifer Lawrence in the lead, but that project fell through. In 2015, Lionsgate bought the rights and cast Larson in the title role. Director Destin Daniel Cretton, who worked with Larson on her breakout film, Short Term 12, has stayed the one constant in the adaptation’s ups and downs.

UPDATE: In a blog post, Martin corrects several details in these stories.

HBO is searching for a way to keep viewers tuned in and paying subscription fees once Game of Thrones, their landmark and most popular show, ends sometime next year.

Entertainment Weekly reports that the network has “taken the highly unusual step of developing four different ideas from different writers …  a potentially massive expansion of the popular fantasy universe.”

George R.R. Martin is involved with two of the four projects, teaming up with Jane Goldman (Kingsman: The Secret Service, X-Men: First Class) on one and with Carly Wray (Mad Men) on the other. The other two are being worked on by Max Borenstein (Kong: Skull Island, Fox’s Minority Report) and Brian Helgeland (A Knight’s Tale, L.A. Confidential).

None of the projects are finalized or greenlit yet and HBO will only say that the potential follow-ups will “explore different time periods of George R. R. Martin’s vast and rich universe.” The NYT warns “The earliest a new season of ‘Thrones’ could come would likely be 2019.”

In March, Mashable reported that showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss have no plans to write any of the follow-ups but will serve as executive producers on any further GOT project. Martin will serve as EP as well.

That role, as well as his active involvement writing and developing two of the potential projects, raises the question of when Martin’s print series will be completed. He has previously admitted that other duties and events take time away from novel writing. After failing to meet several deadlines, he finally told his fans “it will be done when it’s done.” Vanity Fair goes so far as to say “even if he has, as some suspect, turned in his manuscript for The Winds of Winter, the final book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series—A Dream of Spring—may be deferred indefinitely.”

Meanwhile, Game of Thrones returns on July 16 for its seventh season.

Kate Moore’s The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women (Sourcebooks; HighBridge Audio; OverDrive Sample) is catching on.

Holds are topping 7:1 ratios and spiking as high as 34:1. Bases on that, and Amazon’s sales rankings, it is headed for bestseller lists.

Already a hit with librarians, it is a LibraryReads selection for May and a GalleyChat title. Booksellers are on board as well, making it an Indie Next pick.

Catherine Coyne, Mansfield Public Library, Mansfield, CT provided the LibraryReads annotation:

This is the story of hundreds of young, vibrant women who were sentenced to death by their employers. The so-called “Radium Girls” painted luminescent faces on clock and watch dials using a paint mixture that contained radium. Instructed to “lip-point” their brushes as they painted, they absorbed high doses of radium into their bodies. When the effects of the radium led to horrific disfigurement and pain, the company refused to take responsibility. This heartrending book was one I could not put down.”

For GalleyChat, library director Nicole Steeves, Fox River Grove (IL), said the elements are perfect for readers’ advisory (readable non-fiction, women’s stories, and science writing) and would also recommend it to teens. She added, “It is also is a timely example of good research and careful attribution, relevant to librarians’ concerns about news literacy.”

Coverage is wide ranging. The Spectator introduces the book with the creepy headline, “The Radium Girls — still glowing in their coffins.” BuzzFeed runs an illustrated feature written by Moore, NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday has an interview, as do the NYT and Jezebel. Bustle, The Atlantic, the NY Post, and Nature offer stories, with Nature calling the book “harrowing.”

Reviews are pouring in for Paula Hawkins’s second novel, Into the Water (PRH/Riverhead; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample). So far, seven are pans, as Literary Hub’s Book Marks characterizes them, with just one rave, one positive and one mixed.

In The Guardian, crime writer Val McDermid gives Hawkins some sympathy, “The second novel is a notorious challenge to a writer. Hawkins had a mountain to climb after the success of The Girl on the Train and no doubt the sales of her second thriller will be massive. I suspect her readers’ enjoyment may be less so.”

Entertainment Weekly offers a rare life raft, giving the novel a B-, writing, “The book’s piled-on storylines lack the feverish, almost subdermal intimacy of Train, and Hawkins’ pulp psychology has only the soggiest sort of logic. Still, buried in her humid narrative is an intriguing pop-feminist tale of small-town hypocrisy, sexual politics, and wrongs that won’t rinse clean.” (They gave The Girl on the Train an A-).

USA Today is also on board, writing,”The various plot currents eventually converge, and when they do Into the Water takes off with a rush … So do dive in. The payoff is a socko ending. And a noirish beach read that might make you think twice about dipping a toe in those dark, chilly waters.”

Reviews are predictors of popularity only to the extent that they anticipate word of mouth an this book has legs. Movie rights were sold to Dremaworks, it is rising on Amazon’s rankings, and is currently in the top ten. Although holds were light prepub, they have risen dramatically in several libraries, jumping from ratios of 2:1 to 5:1, and in one case from 4:1 to 12:1.

We expect it to to hit the NYT bestseller list in the top five next week and stay there the next month or so, sliding down and settling in for the rest of the summer. In other words, while not at the level of The Girl on the Train, it will do as well as most books by established best selling authors.

UPDATE: Hawkins was interviewed today on ABC’s Good Morning America.

The BBC has announced that it has put into production 11 new series. Several are adaptations of favorite books.

Variety reports that the creator of Call the Midwife, Heidi Thomas, will adapt Louisa May Alcott’s beloved classic Little Women. The group that created Wolf Hall is producing.

A joint project with PBS Masterpiece, The Huffington Post reports the three-hour miniseries will start production this July.

In a press release, Thomas, said the story’s “humanity, humor and tenderness never date, and as a study of love, grief and growing up it has no equal. There could be no better time to revisit the story of a family striving for happiness in an uncertain world … we hope to deliver a new screen version that will speak to contemporary audiences, meet the expectations of the book’s ardent fans and bring a whole new generation to this great classic.”

Also in the works at BBC Drama, the producers who created Victoria will take on a new adaptation of H.G. Wells’s SF masterpiece, The War of the Worlds. The writer who created the TV version of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is on board. Filming will begin in early 2018.

Vikram Seth’s critically acclaimed novel, A Suitable Boy is also being adapted. Set in India, the story revolves around efforts to create an arranged marriage.

Announced earlier, the BBC is currently producing a four-part adaptation of E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End, set to air on the Starz channel in the US some time this year.

The other shows are not likely to appear until 2018 or later.

One of the autopsies of the 2016 election might be made into a limited TV series reports the NYT.

Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (PRH/Crown; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample) has been optioned by Sony’s TriStar Television.

The paper says it has become “a mainstay in dinner-party chatter in political circles since its publication.” In library circles it is doing well too, as we reported earlier, holds soared on light ordering.

It hit the  NYT  Hardcover Nonfiction list at #1 last week, slipping to #2 this week, displaced by Sheryl Sandberg’s Option B

The daily NYT‘s chief book critic Michiko Kakutani calls it “compelling”and The Globe and Mail writes that the authors “may be credited with banging the first hot-tipped galvanized spiral-shank nail into her historical coffin … [it is] an unfavourable – no, an unforgiving – look inside the Clinton presidential campaign of 2016.” Staff from the Clinton campaign are pushing back.

Deadline Hollywood reports that this would make the fourth TV project focused on the election. Mark Halperin and John Heilemann have a project with HBO. Annapurna and Mark Boal (Zero Dark Thirty) have one in the works they are keeping under wraps, saying only it will be “Trump-centric.” Tomorrow Studios is making what they hope will become an ongoing series, called Trump: It Happened Here.

The NYT says of this newest project that no writers or stars have been chosen for the project and a network “is not yet attached.”

Among the books arriving next week, the most eagerly awaited, based on holds are The Girl Who Knew Too Much by Amanda Quick, Dennis Lehane’s Since We Fell, which is also a peer pick (see below) and Jo Nesbø’s The Thirst, the 11th novel featuring detective Harry Hole, who will make his film debut this fall, played by Michael Fassbender in The Snowman scheduled for release on October 20.

In literary fiction, Colm Tóibín’s take on Greek tragedy, House of Names, will be heavily reviewed. Among the first is The Washington Post‘s chief critic Ron Charles who writes, “Never before has Tóibín demonstrated such range, not just in tone but in action. He creates the arresting, hushed scenes for which he’s so well known just as effectively as he whips up murders that compete, pint for spilled pint, with those immortal Greek playwrights.” Tóibín is scheduled to appear on NPR’s upcoming Weekend Edition Sunday.

The titles covered in this column, and several other notable titles arriving next week, are listed with ordering information and alternate formats, on our downloadable spreadsheet, EarlyWord New Title Radar, Week of May 8, 2017

Media Magnets

The Road to Camelot: Inside JFK’s Five-Year Campaign. Thomas Oliphant and Curtis Wilkie (S&S; Recorded Books).

With all the assessments of the recent election, it’s useful to be reminded that the first takes on history are often revised. In The Washington Post, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, David Plouffe, admits, “I thought I knew everything about the Kennedy magic on the campaign trail. But to my great surprise, Thomas Oliphant and Curtis Wilkie’s new book …  brings much new insight to an important playbook that has echoed through the campaigns of other presidential aspirants as disparate as Barack Obama and Donald Trump.” The authors will be featured this week on CBS Sunday Morning.

Peer Picks

Four LibraryReads arrive, including the #1 pick for May, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman (PRH/Pamela Dorman Books; Penguin Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample).

“I loved this book about the quirky Eleanor, who struggles to relate to other people and lives a very solitary life. When she and the new work IT guy happen to be walking down the street together, they witness an elderly man collapse on the sidewalk and suddenly Eleanor’s orderly routines are disrupted. This is a lovely novel about loneliness and how a little bit of kindness can change a person forever. Highly recommended for fans of A Man Called Ove and The Rosie Project – this would make a great book club read.” — Halle Eisenman, Beaufort County Library, Blufton, SC

Additional Buzz: Honeyman is an EarlyReads author and was spotted by GalleyChatters in February. It is an Indie Next pick for May. InStyle names it one of “7 Books You Won’t Be Able to Put Down This Month.” Booklist stars, writing “Move over, Ove (in Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove, 2014)—there’s a new curmudgeon to love.” It is doing well in audio too; AudioFile just gave it an Earphones Award. The Guardian profiles Honeyman in their introduction to the “new faces of fiction for 2017.” The book was the subject of a fierce auction fight, landing Honeyman over seven figures (in the US alone). PW reports it was one of the biggest books of the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2015. Paving the way, Honeyman won the Scottish Book Trust’s Next Chapter Award in 2014, which supports “a talented yet unpublished writer over the age of 40.”

Since We Fell, Dennis Lehane (HC/Ecco; HarperLuxe; HarperAudio).

“Rachel is a journalist who, after her online breakdown, becomes a recluse scared to resume her daily life. She is recently divorced and meets an old friend who wants to help her overcome her fear. They fall in love, marry and appear to have the perfect life, until Rachel ventures out of the house one day and sees something that makes her question everything she knows about her new husband. Once a reporter, always a reporter and Rachel has to get to the bottom of her story.” — Michele Coleman, Iredell County Public Library, Statesville, NC

Additional Buzz: DreamWorks bought the film rights prepub and Lehane will write the screenplay. Entertainment Weekly picks it as one of their “19 book you have to read in May.” The Guardian includes it on their list of “The best recent thrillers,” calling it “invigorating … With sharply acute [characterization], this is classic Lehane … [and] bears traces of his magnum opus, Mystic River.” The Denver Post counts it as one of the “38 books we can’t wait to read this spring.” Fast Company puts it on their “Creative Calendar” of “77 Things to See, Hear, And Read This May.” It is on the spring book lists complied by The Washington Post and the Amazon Editor’s Top 20. Booklist and Kirkus star. Booklist says “Lehane hits the afterburners in the last 50 pages, he produces one of crime fiction’s most exciting and well-orchestrated finales,” while Kirkus calls it “a crafty, ingenious tale of murder and deception.”

Sycamore, Bryn Chancellor (HC/Harper; HarperAudio).

“A newly divorced woman is starting life over in a small Arizona town. She comes across the skeletal remains of what the locals think is the body of a seventeen-year-old girl named Jess who disappeared almost two decades ago. The discovery forces community members to recall memories and secrets that have been buried a long time. Readers are treated to a cast of characters with distinct personalities who, with each piece of the puzzle, form a patchwork that reveals the truth surrounding Jess’s disappearance.” — Sharon Layburn, South Huntington Public Library, Huntington, NY

Additional Buzz: It is a GalleyChat title and an Indie Next pick. Bustle lists it as one of “The 15 Best Fiction Books Of May 2017,” calling it “masterfully-written suspense [that] will draw you in immediately.” Glamour includes it on their list of “New Books by Women You’re Guaranteed to Love this Summer.” LJ and PW star, with LJ calling it “absorbing” and “gripping” and PW saying it is “movingly written.”

Saints for All Occasions, J. Courtney Sullivan (PRH/Knopf; RH Large Print; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample).

“Sisters Nora and Theresa Flynn leave their home in Ireland for a new life in 1958 Boston. Each adjusts to life in America in her own way. Steady Nora watches younger Theresa, until choices made by each woman drive the sisters apart. We follow the story from 1958 to contemporary New England, Ireland, and New York, exploring how siblings and children relate to their parents and each other as they age. Novels about Irish immigrant families and their American descendants are a weakness of mine and the way this story unfolds from everyone’s perspectives is very satisfying!” — Trisha Rigsby, Deerfield Public Library, Deerfield, WI

Additional Buzz: It is an Indie Next pick for May and a GalleyChat choice. It is on the spring book list from The Washington Post as well as Glamour‘s list of “New Books by Women You’re Guaranteed to Love this Summer.” The Denver Post picks it as one of the “38 books we can’t wait to read this spring.” Elle names it as one of their “5 Must-Read Books for Your May Book Club,” saying it is for readers “ripe for a presummer blockbuster that delivers an engrossing family drama with feisty humor and transformative tough love.” NPR’s The Roundtable features it in the “Book Picks” section, calling it a “moving, unforgettable novel … captivating.” (Scroll down the page for the audio, unfortunately we cannot embed the file – if you don’t know the program, make sure to listen to the opening book-y jingle).

Tie-ins

There are no tie-ins this week. For our full list of upcoming adaptations, download our Books to Movies and TV and link to our listing of tie-ins.

The May 14 New York Times best seller lists shows three women in top spots.

The #1 hardcover nonfiction title is Sheryl Sandberg’s Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy (PRH/Knopf; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample). A book about grief, resilience, and finding a way through tragedy – with some Facebook business ethos served on the side.

Coverage is pervasive, from NPR to In Style. The Atlantic offers a feature while The New Yorker and Wired offer a mix of cultural commentary and review. Summing up much of the positive coverage, The New York Times writes “This is a book that will be quietly passed from hand to hand, and it will surely offer great comfort to its intended readers.”

The number one trade paperback title is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (Houghton Mifflin, 1986; tie-in ed., PRH/Anchor, 2017; OverDrive Sample), rising to that position after 12 weeks on the list.

As the author modestly says, she is having “a moment.” Her 1986 book has been rising as part of a post-election wave of interest in dystopian novels, solidified by the premiere of the Hulu series,  which is airing to rapturous reviews and think pieces and has just been renewed for a second season.

Elizabeth Strout’s Anything Is Possible (PRH/RH; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample) debuts on the fiction list at #4, following strong coverage.

It was the #1 LibraryReads pick for April and made many monthly best of lists. The NYT calls the book is “a necklace of short stories” and says that “the writing is wrenchingly lovely … You read Strout, really, for the same reason you listen to a requiem: to experience the beauty in sadness … it’s certainly more grim than Strout’s previous work. It’s more audacious, too, and more merciless, daring you to walk away.”

The Guardian compares Strout to John Steinbeck, Leo Tolstoy, and Anne Tyler, calling the book “a wise, stunning novel.” NPR’s Maureen Corrigan calls it “gorgeous” and says “Strout is in that special company of writers like Richard Ford, Stewart O’Nan and Richard Russo, who write simply about ordinary lives and, in so doing, make us readers see the beauty of both their worn and rough surfaces and what lies beneath.” The New Yorker ran a feature and The Atlantic showcases Strout and the literature that matters most to her.

The great-great grandchildren of Henry H. Holmes, the serial killer featured in the best seller, The Devil in the White City, have received permission to exhume his body to confirm whether he was indeed hanged in Philadelphia in 1896.

The investigation aims to determine the truth of the legend that he faked his own death, reports the Chicago Tribune, by bribing “jail guards to hang a cadaver in his place.”

Meanwhile, the film version of Eric Larson’s true crime title, The Devil in the White City (RH/Crown, 2003), has been in the works ever since it was published. As recently as last month, Deadline Hollywood wrote that Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio are still developing the project.

Scorsese told the Toronto Sun in December, “Right now, there is a script being worked on … One of the things that I had to stop for the past six months [to complete Silence] was my meetings on that script. They want me to start again in January and see if we can find a way because it’s an extraordinary story.”

Finding a way has proved difficult thus far. Tom Cruise acquired the rights in 2003 but the project stalled. We wrote about the last wave of hopes for it in April 2016. Even earlier, in 2015, we posted about the film’s long gestation period. DiCaprio has owned the rights since 2010.

The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story by Hyeonseo Lee and David John (HC/William Collins; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample) published in 2015 got a sudden boost on Amazon’s sales from a FOX news feature headlined “North Korea defector hails Trump’s tough stance on hostile country.” It is also building a holds list at most libraries we checked.

In 2015 the NYT Book Review included the memoir in a “The Shortlist” feature on North Korean defection books, but did not rate it as highly as other titles, citing an “emptiness at the heart of her story.” StarTribune was more positive, saying “Lee shows the terrible treatment of its people by North Korea’s authoritarian dictatorship. She also shows the price the regime pays for being awful: the loss of people like her who have enormous drive, intelligence and will.” Kirkus summed it up as “Remarkable bravery fluently recounted.”

The British press were more generous. The BBC said, “First-hand accounts of perilous defections from brutal dictatorships aren’t supposed to be funny. But Hyeonseo Lee’s pioneering memoir The Girl With Seven Names contains great humour alongside its shocking evocation of the North Korean regime’s surveillance, torture, privation and propaganda.” The Scotsman wrote “This is a stirring and brave story.” The Guardian featured a long excerpt with photos.

Her TED Talk was hailed by Oprah in O magazine as “The most riveting TED Talk ever.”

Hulu has announced that The Handmaid’s Tale will return for a second season.

In a statement the streaming service said:

“The response we’ve seen to The Handmaid’s Tale in just one week since its premiere has been absolutely incredible. It has been an honor to work with this talented team of cast and creators to develop a series that has struck such a chord with audiences across the country … We can’t wait to explore the world of Gilead and continue Margaret’s vision with another season on Hulu.”

As New York magazine notes, the renewal means “the series will move beyond the scope of Margaret Atwood’s original novel, from which it has already started to diverge.”

While the news is not shocking based on the show’s success and media attention thus far (not to mention Moss’s long term series contract for the show), it does mean the series will continue to move off book, and perhaps, as New York magazine suggests, give room for the sequel Atwood has hinted might be coming.

E! News reports it was the most watched premiere in Hulu’s history and it has been quickly swept up in popular culture with many media outlets offering the type of per episode recap usually given to established hits such as Game of Thrones.

A new adaptation of one of Agatha Christie’s most beloved cases, Murder on the Orient Express (HarperCollins/Morrow; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample), directed by Kenneth Branagh, is steaming towards us, scheduled to arrive on Nov. 22, 2017, ideal timing for awards considerations.

To fit the enormous cast onto the cover of their new issue, Entertainment Weekly took the unusual approach of rotating the image, asserting, “a goodly portion of planet Earth’s most famous residents have gathered” for the shoot (we did what everyone at the newsstands will be doing, flipped it sideways).

According to the magazine, “The book’s large number of supporting characters allowed Branagh to cast stars keen to take roles that were chunkier than cameos but did not demand too much of their time.” In addition to Branagh, who both directs and plays Hercule Poirot, among the others featured on the cover are Daisy Ridley (Star Wars), Michelle Pfeiffer, Willem Dafoe, Leslie Odom Jr. (Hamilton), Judi Dench, Derek Jacobi, Josh Gad (Beauty and the Beast), Olivia Colman (Broadchurch), Penélope Cruz, and Johnny Depp.

The mystery places the meticulous Hercule Poirot on the famed Orient Express. The train is delayed by a snowstorm, a perfect setting for murder.  Branagh tells The Hollywood Reporter that “This is not only a who dunnit and how dunnit, it’s crucially a why dunnit.”

Underlining Christie’s timeless appeal, the NYT highlighted her recently in one of their “Enthusiast” features (“an occasional column dedicated to the books we love to read and reread”), describing why reading Christie is so pleasurable:

“[Christie] captures something elemental about mysteries: that motive and opportunity may suffice for a crime, but the satisfying part is the detective’s revelation of whodunit, how and why. I never tried to piece together the clues. I vastly preferred to hear it from Hercule Poirot or Jane Marple. Why spend time with such endearing, clever characters if you’re not going to let them do their job? And while their job was ostensibly solving crimes, really it was storytelling.”

The trailer is not yet been released. HarperCollins is publishing mass market and trade paperback tie-ins on Oct. 31st.

Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Richard Ford was featured on Fresh Air yesterday, discussing his new memoir, Between Them: Remembering My Parents (HC/Ecco; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample) with host Terry Gross.

In a long, gentle and revealing interview Ford talks about his parents’ lives and how their love for each other shaped his. He tells Gross that his somewhat wild childhood, breaking into houses and stealing guns, may indicate that he is missing the gene for guilt.

And, yet, as an adult, he has regrets. One of the biggest is that, as his mother was dying, he invited her to move in with him, but then told her not to make plans yet. He says he could see the light of hope in her eyes bloom and then die as he spoke to her.

Cheryl Strayed, reviewing it for the upcoming  NYT Book Review, writes that it offers “a master class in character development and narrative economy” and that “In this slim beauty of a memoir, he has given us — the same way he has given us many times in his fiction — a remarkable story about two unremarkable people we would have never known, but for him. Which he couldn’t have written, but for them.”

In the Washington Post author William Giraldi is less enthusiastic, “At just 175 pages, spattered with ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I’m not sure,’ Between Them is a wisp of a book.” However, he ends the review by saying, “[Ford] has attempted a gentle reckoning here, his own exertion of mercy and mourning — his parents breathe in him still — and the attempt alone makes a loving homage.”

PW, Kirkus, and Booklist all starred it, PW says it is vivid and graceful and writes “Every page of this little remembrance teems with Ford’s luxuriant prose.”