Eight Titles to Know and Recommend, The Week of April 13
The leaders in holds next week are Nora Roberts and Lisa Scottoline. Also arriving is a memoir by a black woman who makes the horrifying discovery (while browsing in a library) that her grandfather was a notorious Nazi. Readers advisors can look to several LibraryReads and Indie Next picks for titles to recommend.
The titles covered here, and several more notable titles arriving next week, are listed, with ordering information and alternate formats, on our downloadable spreadsheet, EarlyWord New Title Radar, Week of April 13, 2015
Holds Leaders
The Liar, Nora Roberts (Penguin/Putnam; Brilliance Audio)
Readers, she married a liar and only finds out after he dies. In a starred review, Booklist says, “Roberts excels at effectively incorporating lots of domestic details about her heroine’s life in a slow-burning fuse of a plot that ultimately explodes in a nail-biting conclusion.”
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Every Fifteen Minutes, Lisa Scottoline (Macmillan/St. Martin’s; Macmillan Aurio; Thorndike, OverDrive Sample)
Starred reviews from all four trade publications
Advance Attention
My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past, Jennifer Teege, Nikola Sellmair, Carolin Sommer (The Experiment, dist. by Workman; Blackstone Audio)
Workman’s hottest ARC at Midwinter, according to library marketer Mike Rockliff.
People magazine ran an excerpt, with the description, “Adopted as a child, Jennifer Teege recently discovered a family secret her grandfather was the monstrous SS officer played by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List.” She is also featured on NPR’s web site. With all this advance attention, you can expect more to come. Below is the trailer:
Picks
Where They Found Her, Kimberly McCreight, (Harper; Blackstone Audio; HarperLuxe; OverDrive Sample)
Excitement comes from many quarters for McCreight’s second novel after her 2014 Edgar and Anthony nominee Reconstructing Amelia, beginning with a cover blurb by Gillian Flynn, “McCreight creates a world that pulls us in completely and genuinely, with characters that can enrage, amuse, and fill us with empathy. It’s a thrilling novel.”
Librarians and booksellers are also fans. It’s both an Indie Next and a LibraryReads pick :
“Molly Sanderson is covering a feature for the Ridgedale Reader that not only stirs up her recent grief over a stillborn child, but secrets that have been kept hidden for over two decades in this northern New Jersey college town. As the stories of four different women unfold, a new piece of the puzzle is revealed. Chilling and gruesome at times, this is a novel with characters who will stay with the reader long after the final page is turned.” — Jennifer Winberry, Hunterdon County Library, Flemington, NJ
Also note, McCreight has an YA speculative fiction trilogy in the works, titled The Outliers. Film rights for all three books were acquired by Lionsgate, with Reese Witherspoon as one of the producers.
House of Echoes, Brendan Duffy, (RH/Ballantine; RH Audio; OverDrive Sample)
LibraryReads:
“Eager to get out of the big city, Ben and Caroline Tierney purchase a large, old house upstate hoping to renovate it into a hotel. However, their house, called The Crofts, has a dark, mysterious past, and terrifying secrets begin to threaten the family. This wonderfully eerie and atmospheric debut novel is a great recommendation for fans of Bohjalian’s The Night Strangers and McMahon’s The Winter People.” — Sara Kennedy, Delaware County District Library, Delaware, OH
The Dream Lover, Elizabeth Berg, (Random House; Brilliance Audio; OverDrive Sample)
LibraryReads:
“George Sand leaves her estranged husband and children to embark on a life of art in bohemian Paris. A talented writer who finds monetary and critical success, Sand adopts a man’s name, often dresses as a gentleman and smokes cigars. Through her writing, politics, sexual complexities and views on feminism, Sand is always seeking love. This novel has spurred me to learn more about George Sand, a woman truly ahead of her time.” — Catherine Coyne, Mansfield Public Library, Mansfield, MA
The Turner House, Angela Flournoy, (HMH; Blackstone Audio)
Indie Next
“The greatest testament to the skill of a writer is the ability to make what might seem alien to the reader completely recognizable and utterly engaging. Such was my experience reading The Turner House. Mine is a tiny white family from a small town with no sense of heritage, yet every moment I spent with the Turners — a family of 13 children shaped by the Great Migration to Detroit — I felt at home. Their struggles and joys are universal, yet told with an exacting eye that always finds the perfect detail. This is a truly impressive debut.” —Kim Fox, Schuler Books & Music, Grand Rapids, MI
The Given World, Marian Palaia, (S&S; OverDrive Sample
Indie Next
“In this fresh take on stories about the devastation that war visits on those left behind as well as on those who are sent to fight, Riley resists believing her beloved older brother never emerged from the tunnels of Cu Chi. Since his body was never found, she follows this hope from the Montana plains to Vietnam and then spirals down into the back streets of 1980s San Francisco. As Palaia details Riley’s struggle to move from denial to the eventual acceptance of reality, she portrays the starry Montana nights as vividly as the streets of Saigon and the bars of Haight-Ashbury. A brilliant debut!” —Cheryl McKeon, Book Passage, San Francisco, CA