A Winter 2021 Read This Next! Title
What a great story. This is one of those books that you can’t wait to get back to so you can figure out what is happening. The end will keep you guessing and make you wonder what happened in the end.
The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins (List Price: $27.99, St. Martins Press, 9781250245496 January, 2021).
Reviewed by Amy McNabb, Reading Rock Books in Dickson, TN
The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins Read More »
A sooty and shadow-filled Victorian London acts as a sentient backdrop to the sinister, dark, clever (and somehow even hilarious at times), detective mystery that is The House on Vesper Sands. As a reader, there were just so many sensory details and perfect moments of tension that made the world feel all the more real, and the discovery all the more haunting.
The House on Vesper Sands by Paraic O’Donnell (List Price: $26.95, Tin House Books, 9781951142247, January, 2021).
Reviewed by Cat Chapman, Oxford Exchange in Tampa, FL
The House on Vesper Sands by Paraic O’Donnell Read More »
This delightful book is the perfect antidote to what was a difficult year for so many–the perfect book to begin a new year with. Eve and Sally are both looking for an escape from their everyday life. They meet while rescuing a dog from a barge–who turns out not to need rescuing after all–and promptly meet the owner of the dog and the barge, who needs both somewhere to stay and someone to take care of her boat. So Eve and Sally set off down the canals in their borrowed boat, discovering new friends and learning new skills along the way. Their first time taking the boat through a tunnel is literally some of the most riveting writing I’ve read in ages. I loved this book and can’t wait to share it with readers looking for their own escape!
The Narrowboat Summer by Anne Youngson (List Price: $26.99, Flatiron Books, 9781250764614, January, 2021).
Reviewed by Kate Storhoff, Bookmarks in Winston-Salem, NC
The Narrowboat Summer by Anne Youngson Read More »
I am obsessed with A Certain Hunger. This is one of those books where the story and characters are so deep and complex, but you cannot help but become engrossed in their messiness and forget to put the book down. Dorothy Daniels is a wild and witty character. While it is dark, Dorothy’s outlook on her life and actions produce laugh out loud moments in this highly original story. The philosophical insights into life, love, and lust are only more profound with Chelsea G. Summers’s lyrical writing. Readers will want to devour the writing as much as the duck confit! Her rage is refreshing and oh so satisfying.
A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers (List Price: $26.00, The Unnamed Press, December, 2020).
Reviewed by Karyn Cumming, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, VA
A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers Read More »
Enormous in scope and theme, this book is a force. Weaving past and present into a lyrical world, Joukhadar uses a multi-generational cast to explore what it means to belong to a society, a community, and to oneself. It’s in this narrowing of belonging that the novel truly soars, literal ghosts and the ghosts of self-populating the story of a young trans boy as he sheds the confines of his traditional community-at-large and finds himself in the immigrant, working-class, LGBTQ, artists’ underground of NYC. The characters are imperfectly human. They experience everything from grief to joy, their lives full of loss and love, of heartbreak and the comfort of others, of seeing their world anew, and of being seen for who they are. This isn’t a novel about suffering; this is a novel about being in the world.
The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar
(List Price: $27, Atria Books, November, 2020)
Recommended by Miranda Sanchez, Epilogue Books|Chocolate|Brews, Chapel Hill, NC
The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar Read More »
Every season one or two books seem to come out of nowhere to become the books that everyone is talking about. Except, they don’t really come out of nowhere. In the weeks and months before a book is published, reviewers and booksellers with an early peak start posting their opinions and reviews. That early swell of chatter and excitement is an indication of good things to come for a book.
Among Southern booksellers, the early chatter about Bryan Washington’s new novel, Memorial, was enthusiastic — marking it as one of the books not to be missed this Fall.
What booksellers are saying about Memorial
About Bryan Washington
Bryan Washington is a National Book Award 5 Under 35 honoree, and winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His first book, the story collection Lot, was a finalist for the NBCC’s John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. Lot was a New York Times Notable Book, one of Dwight Garner’s top ten books of the year, and on best-of-the-year lists from Time, NPR, Vanity Fair, BuzzFeed, and many more. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, BuzzFeed, Vulture, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Tin House, One Story, Bon Appétit, GQ, The Awl, and Catapult. He lives in Houston.
Spotlight on Bryan Washington’s Memorial Read More »
A Fall 2020 Read This Next! Title
Simon Pulse | 9781534425170
November 10, 2020
In this coming-of-age romance perfect for fans of Jenny Han and Sarah Dessen, scandal and romance collide when an ambitious teen returns to her hometown only to have her plans interrupted after falling for the town’s “bad boy”—a.k.a. her childhood best friend.
Sometimes to find the good, you have to embrace the bad.
Budding photographer Josie Saint-Martin has spent half her life with her single mother, moving from city to city. When they return to her historical New England hometown years later to run the family bookstore, Josie knows it’s not forever. Her dreams are on the opposite coast, and she has a plan to get there.
What she doesn’t plan for is a run-in with the town bad boy, Lucky Karras. Outsider, rebel…and her former childhood best friend. Lucky makes it clear he wants nothing to do with the newly returned Josie. But everything changes after a disastrous pool party, and a poorly executed act of revenge lands Josie in some big-time trouble—with Lucky unexpectedly taking the blame.
Determined to understand why Lucky was so quick to cover for her, Josie discovers that both of them have changed, and that the good boy she once knew now has a dark sense of humor and a smile that makes her heart race. And maybe, just maybe, he’s not quite the brooding bad boy everyone thinks he is…
Chasing Lucky by Jenn Bennett Read More »
A Fall 2020 Read This Next! Title
Berkley | 9781984806130
October 27, 2020
A hacktavist and a cat cafe owner have love written into their future in this new novel in The Bromance Book Club series.
Alexis Carlisle and her cat cafe have shot to fame after she came forward as the vicitm of sexual harrassment at the hands of a celebrity chef. ToeBeans has become a Nashville hotspot for the curious, the furious, and the grateful. Women regularly come in to share their stories with her and thank her for coming forward. So when a young woman becomes a quiet regular at her cafe, Alexis assumes she’s just working up the courage to approach her about her own experience. The last thing Alexis expects is for the woman to blurt out that they’re sisters.
Known around Nashville as the hacker to the stars, Noah Parsons has built impenetrable servers for some of country music’s most famous faces. But after using his old hacking skills to help the Bromance Book Club bring down Royce Preston, he’s itching to get back to using his gifts for the greater good. When Alexis asks him to help investigate a girl’s claims that she and Alexis are sisters, he doesn’t hesitate.
But while investigating together, the greatest secret Alexis and Noah uncover is that they have feelings for each other…
Crazy Stupid Bromance by Lyssa Kay Adams Read More »
A Fall 2020 Read This Next! Title
Tordotcom | 9781250767028
October 13, 2020
Nebula, Locus, and Alex Award-winner P. Djèlí Clark returns with Ring Shout, a dark fantasy historical novella that gives a supernatural twist to the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror
IN AMERICA, DEMONS WEAR WHITE HOODS.
In 1915, The Birth of a Nation cast a spell across America, swelling the Klan’s ranks and drinking deep from the darkest thoughts of white folk. All across the nation they ride, spreading fear and violence among the vulnerable. They plan to bring Hell to Earth. But even Ku Kluxes can die.
Standing in their way is Maryse Boudreaux and her fellow resistance fighters, a foul-mouthed sharpshooter and a Harlem Hellfighter. Armed with blade, bullet, and bomb, they hunt their hunters and send the Klan’s demons straight to Hell. But something awful’s brewing in Macon, and the war on Hell is about to heat up.
Can Maryse stop the Klan before it ends the world?
Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark Read More »
A Fall 2020 Read This Next! Title
Swallow Press | 9780804012287
October 13, 2020
Set in rural Appalachia and told through the voices of three different present-day narrators, this harrowing novel about white supremacists attempting to take over a small town focuses an unflinching eye on America’s ongoing, fraught relationship with racial and political injustice.
A chilling, timely reminder of the moral and human costs of racial hatred.
What happens when a delusional white supremacist and his army of followers decide to create a racially pure “Little Europe” within a rural Tennessee community? As the town’s residents grapple with their new reality, minor skirmishes escalate and dirty politics, scandals, and a cataclysmic chain of violence follows. In this uncanny reflection of our time, award-winning novelist Charles Dodd White asks whether Americans can save themselves from their worst impulses and considers the consequences when this salvation comes too late.
Set in rural Appalachia and told through the voices of three different present-day narrators, this harrowing novel about white supremacists attempting to take over a small town focuses an unflinching eye on America’s ongoing, fraught relationship with racial and political injustice.
How Fire Runs by Charles Dodd White Read More »
Another great mystery-within-a mystery from Horowitz! A real page turner, clever and entertaining with twists. The novel within the novel was a surprise, and made it even harder to try to guess “who done it.” A perfect distraction read, engrossing in all the best ways.
Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz
(List Price: $28.99, Harper, 11/10/2020)
Recommended by Jamie Fiocco, Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz Read More »
Four stories wheelbarrowed down a potholed pathway of flawed love ’round the fecund pond in history’s horribly funded public park. The cartoon-strength attitudes of the four (or five) wonderfully constructed main characters gave me the strength to accept each of their fates with que sera and a sigh.
The Everlasting by Katy Simpson Smith (List price: $28.99, Harper), recommended by Avid Bookshop, Athens, GA.
The Everlasting by Katy Simpson Smith Read More »
Night Vale fans rejoice! Here is the latest offering from the talented offbeat minds of Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink – creators of the popular podcast Welcome to Night Vale. I don’t want to give anything away because that would spoil your enjoyment of this book. However, I will say this much: If you are already listening to Welcome to Night Vale, get this book. If you aren’t already listening, you need to start listening!! While being a fan definitely helps, it is not ultimately a bar to reading and enjoying this book. It might even get you to start listening!
The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home by Joseph Fink, Jeffrey Cranor (List price: $21.99, Harper Perennial), recommended by Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh, NC.
The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home by Joseph Fink, Jeffrey Cranor Read More »
He mounts the porch steps and hands me the mail addressed to me as I give him his glass. ‘What shall we toast to tonight?’ He looks up at the house. ‘How about to a new life for the Lawrence House?’
‘Yes, that’s perfect.’ I clink my glass against his. But I avert my gaze, tipping back my head to take a long sip, wondering if he can sense it, too. The wrongness of this place.
Goodnight Beautiful opens with the disappearance of Sam Statler, a therapist who has just moved back to his small New York town with his wife Annie to be near his ailing mother. The narrative then flashes back to earlier that summer, soon after the couple has moved to town and Sam has begun work. What follows feels like a rather straight forward domestic thriller, but nothing and no one is what they seem. Molloy has crafted a novel takes the unreliable narrator and turns the volume up to eleven. Her writing will appeal to both those familiar to the genre as well as novices. Readers may want to avoid learning too much in advance, but even when one knows the twist is coming, watching Molloy execute it is just as compelling.
Goodnight Beautiful by Aimee Molloy (List Price: $27.99, Harper, 9780062881922, 10/13/2020)
Reviewed by Faith Parke-Dodge, Page 158 Books in Wake Forest, North Carolina
Goodnight Beautiful by Aimee Molloy Read More »
A good looking couple from New York City move upstate for a slower lifestyle but things quickly takes a turn when the husband goes missing. Sam Statler is a therapist with a range of diverse clients and when he doesn’t come home, his wife Annie is desperate to find him and suspects one of his clients. As secrets and twists unravel, Molloy keeps the reader excited and engaged in this intriguing thriller.
Goodnight Beautiful by Aimee Molloy (List Price: $27.99, Harper, 9780062881922, 10/13/2020)
Reviewed by Deanna Bailey, Story on the Square in McDonough, Georgia
Goodnight Beautiful by Aimee Molloy Read More »
