One of the year’s most unlikely success stories is that of a Broadway musical about one of the Founding Fathers, in rap.

Hamilton: An American Musical hit Broadway in August following its Off-Broadway success. So hot are tickets that it’s even getting coverage in the UK, where it has yet to be staged, The Telegraph reports,

“It’s being billed as a game-changer in Broadway history, the first musical since Rent to bring the kind of popular music people are actually listening to in clubs, on the radio, at home, to the Broadway stage.”

The show album is also breaking records. Playbill reports that it has gone “where no other Broadway score has gone before: #1 on the Billboard chart of rap albums.” This month, it was announced as one of the nominees for a Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album.

As Hamilton the man is getting more attention, so is Ron Chernow, the historian and biographer who wrote the National Book Award winning Alexander Hamilton (Penguin, 2004), which is central to the show’s creation. Rapper Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the Broadway musical In the Heights, read it on vacation and instantly saw its potential as a musical. It was a six-year trip to realization with Chernow serving as the show’s historical adviser.

The Wall Street Journal features the author in a Christmas Day article on the show and its effect on the his celebrity. Says Chernow, “I never dreamed that I would be autographing Playbills … [this year has been] a biographer’s wish-fulfillment fantasy” adding, “With any piece of writing, you’re hoping that it will change something, and it seldom does. Between the book and the show, we really changed the perception of Alexander Hamilton.”

As part of a Time special edition, Alexander Hamilton: A Founding Father’s Visionary Genius—and His Tragic Fate, Chernow explains that Hamilton’s reputation is seeing a revival partly because,

“America has grown into the contours of the country of [Hamilton’s] imagination … We have caught up to his prophetic vision.”

Readers are also catching up. Chernow’s biography of Hamilton has been on the NYT Paperback Nonfiction list for the last six weeks, reaching a high of #2 and holds are growing in many libraries we checked.

While not actually a tie-in, the trade paperback edition now features the logo from the show on the cover.

The Wall Street Journal posted a video with clips from the show.

Before it moved to Broadway, CBS Sunday Morning featured a story on Hamilton, Chernow, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

More is coming, including road show versions, a likely Tony Award, and a book about the musical.

Hamilton: The Revolution, Lin-Manuel Miranda with Jeremy McCarter, (Hachette/Grand Central Publishing; Hachette Audio and Blackstone Audio). Playbill, quoting a release, reports,

“The book will be designed to look like an object from Hamilton’s era and will include photos and artifacts in addition to interviews, essays and sidebars to accompany the central narrative of Hamilton’s life story and how and why Miranda crafted that life into the stunning stage work over the course of six years.”

Chernow told The Wall Street Journal he is currently working on a biography of Ulysses S. Grant, which the paper says, he is writing “faster than usual, energized by the impact of 2015.”

In a year end review of big stories, the buzz around the publication of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman and the revelations that it was an earlier version of what became the heavily revised and strongly edited To Kill a Mockingbird offers NPR’s All Things Considered a chance to ask “What Exactly Does an Editor Do?”

Reporter Lynn Neary took up that question with the help of author A. Scott Berg and vice president and editorial director of Riverhead Books, Rebecca Saletan.

Berg, who nearly two decades ago wrote the award-winning biography Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (he edited several geniuses, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe), says that Perkins re-created the job of editor:

“Not only did he change the course of the American literary river, but he changed what editors do by becoming their best friends, their money lenders, their marriage counselors, their psychoanalysts … And along the way he began offering them titles. He often provided structure for what their novels ought to be. He often gave them whole ideas for what their next book should be.”

Today, given the demands on their time and the expansive duties of their jobs, editors are less intimately involved but have not stopped editing says Saletan:

“Now, with online media and other aspects of modern life there’s a ton to do and it takes a lot of time and we have to work very, very hard to get our books above the tree line … I always cringe a little and feel a little sympathetic for the editor when a review says, ‘This wasn’t well-edited.’ Because it’s very hard for anybody outside the process to know what went into it.”

For those who want to harken back to the earlier days, Berg’s book on Perkins is making its way to the silver screen under the title Genius (see our earlier story), scheduled for release in July. It’s likely to be a glorified version, however, with Colin Firth as Perkins, Jude Law as Thomas Wolfe, Dominic West as Hemingway, and Guy Pearce as Fitzgerald. The website Thompson on Hollywood provides a photo from the filming.

Looking for a book for the New Year, something a bit different that crosses a number of popular genres? In her most recent KUOW radio appearance, librarian Nancy Pearl offers a suggestion, the 2014 genre-blending City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett (PRH/Broadway; OverDrive Sample).

Saying it’s exciting to discover an author she has never read before, especially one with a backlist to explore, Nancy discusses the first in Bennett’s The Divine Cities trilogy (the second, City of Blades, PRH/Broadway; OverDrive Sample will be published on Jan. 26), a cross between mystery, fantasy, and SF about a land once ruled by incarnate gods and a young spy sent on a mission to catch a murderer.

The beginning is a bit odd, she says but the story and the world-building quickly caught her attention and drew her in.

She is not alone in that assessment.

NPR’s reviewer says he put the book down three times but,

“I also came back, drawn by something about City of Stairs, even in those interminable opening pages … It was the shine of a wholly and fully realized world. The hard gleam of competence coming from a writer who knows what he’s doing, where he’s going and just exactly how to get there … Bennett is plainly a writer in love with the world he has built — and with good cause. It’s a great world, original and unique, with a scent and a texture, a sense of deep, bloody history, and a naturally blended magic living in the stones.”

A new book on parenting (or the lack of it) is rising on Amazon’s sales rankings after CBS This Morning featured The Collapse of Parenting: How We Hurt Our Kids When We Treat Them Like Grown-Ups by Leonard Sax (Perseus/Basic Books; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample).

Dr. Sax, who has worked as a family physician for more than 20 years, blames parents, media of all sorts, and cell phones for much of the failure to raise respectful, healthy, and happy kids.

In his CBS interview he says kids used to be told to eat their vegetables but are now begged to eat three bites just three bites of broccoli before getting dessert. He also cites the explosion of kids on medication for behavioral reasons in the U.S., 90 times the number in Italy.

In an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Sax continues his call to re-vamp parenting and says parents should:

“Require respectful behavior at all times. It’s OK to disagree. It’s never OK to be disrespectful. Prioritize the family. The family meal at home is more important than piling on after-school extracurricular activities. Instead of boosting self-esteem, teach humility. Fight the cultural imperative to be ‘awesome.’ ”

Keying in the season, he suggests New Year’s as a good time to start parenting afresh, going cold turkey and telling kids flat out that things will be different from now on.

Amazon’s sales rankings show that readers are getting ready for New Year’s resolutions. New books on weight loss and regaining focus in a distracting world are doing well as are long-time favorites, such as StrengthsFinder and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Even the NYT Book Review is getting into the act, featuring self-help in the upcoming issue. The cover feature, “You, New and Improved,” offers reviews of Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges by Amy Cuddy and Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes, titles we have covered in earlier “Titles to Know and Recommend” posts (here and here).

The 12/27 NYT Sunday Book Review devotes its attention to “The Year in Poetry.” Discussing the issue on the weekly podcast, the editors note that this has been a year of controversy and scandal in poetry, as poets dealt with the issue of race, “badly, mostly,”(see Sonya Posmenther’s “Critics Take: A Language for Grieving“) as well as politics.

Somewhat less controversially, a range of people, from John Green to John Waters response to the question “What is Your Favorite Poem?” Gillian Flynn selects Gwendolyn Brooks, musing that Brooks “nestled into my heart when I was about 12, and she’s never been replaced,” adding that her poem, “a song in the front yard” is her “heartbeat anthem… it hit me with so much impact as a quiet, shy, relentlessly pleasing junior-schooler who yearned to be so much more than that.”

Lena Dunham picks “Man and Wife,” by Robert Lowell, explaining that she relates “to the story of the wronged wife, the wounded daughter, the angry mistress. But Lowell captures what is painful and precious about long-term love, about learning to live with someone else even when you cannot mend them.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates lists Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage,” saying “It is the poem I return to over and over — both for what it says about my country, and how it says it.”

Separately, online only, the NYT BR’s “On Poetry” columnist  David Orr selects the ten Best Poetry Books of 2015.

Mary Jo Bang, Robin Coste Lewis, Ada Limón, and Lawrence Raab are likely the most familiar of his selections, with Limón also making the National Book Award’s poetry short list and Lewis winning that award for her collection Voyage of the Sable Venus (PRH/Knopf; OverDrive Sample).

We’ve added all ten selections to our downloadable spreadsheet:

Best Books, Poetry, V3

See all the downloadable spreadsheets, at the right, under “Best Books 2015.”

A few well-known names arrive this week, in time for shoppers wielding gift cards.

These, and several other notable titles, are listed with ordering information and alternate formats on our downloadable spreadsheet, EarlyWord New Title Radar, Week of 12/28/15

Holds Leaders

After She’s Gone by Lisa Jackson (Kensington; OverDrive Sample)

Booklist enthuses, “a sure bet for Jackson’s popular blend of women’s fiction and suspense,” but PW‘s view is quite different, “Jackson settles for a lot of smoke but little heat in this tepid thriller.”

The Forgotten Soldier (Pike Logan Thriller #9) by Brad Taylor (PRH/Dutton; OverDrive Sample)

In a starred review, Booklist says, “this exploration of the human side of war should quickly be recognized as one of Taylor’s best efforts. Comparisons to Vince Flynn and Brad Thor are expected and not inaccurate, but Taylor is now in a class by himself,” but PW disagrees, “Complicated character motivation muddles bestseller Taylor’s unusually introspective ninth Pike Logan thriller.”

The Hunting Trip: A Novel of Love and War by William E. Butterworth, III (PRH/Putnam; OverDrive Sample)

Author Butterworth steps out from behind the name W.E.B. Griffin and introduces a new style, also signaled by the change in cover. Kirkus applauds the change from “spy/soldier/police derring-do to … romantic adventure novel fueled by sly, sometimes arch, humor … Butterworth’s good-natured buffoonery and hyperbole work far better than Butterworth-as-Griffin.” Fans may not have caught on, holds are light so far.

Consumer Media Picks

People Picks

    

People‘s “Book of the Week” is Amy Cuddy’s Presence (Hachette/Little,Brown; OverDrive Sample), which the magazine says is “a must-read for anyone looking to achieve their personal best.”

Val McDermid also gets notice with Splinter the Silence (Atlantic Monthly Press; Highbridge Audio; OverDrive Sample), with the magazine saying, “check out this tartan noir treat.”

The Short Drop by Matthew Fitzsimmons (Amazon Publishing/Thomas & Mercer) rounds out the picks. People calls this thriller a “live-wire debut” and says, “The plot is convoluted but not at the expense of its sympathetic, entertaining hero. Hang on and enjoy the ride.”

Entertainment Weekly

The “Books” section of Entertainment Weekly leads with a review of Marie Kondo’s next, Spark Joy (see our earlier story), calling it a “superfluous follow-up.” They are much more appreciative of a book that came out in November, Fox Tossing: And Other Forgotten and Dangerous Sports, Pastimes, and Games by Edward Brooke-Hitching (S&S/Touchstone; OverDrive Sample), which covers the “world’s weirdest, most dangerous pastimes.”

Peer Picks

Two January IndieNext Picks arrive this week.

The Song of Hartgrove Hall by Natasha Solomons (PRH/Plume; OverDrive Sample).

Vicki Burger, of Wind City Books, Casper, WY, says in her annotation:

“Three brothers return to Hall after World War II to find their beloved home hard-used by military forces and greatly in need of repair. Their efforts are complicated by the introduction of the oldest brother’s fiancé, Edie Rose, whose beautiful voice instilled hope in the British citizenry during the darkness of war. Soon, all three brothers are in love with Edie, but only one will ultimately win her hand. Fast-forward to present times and Edie has just passed away, leaving Fox reeling from his wife’s death and mired in grief. Called upon to babysit his four-year-old grandson one day, he discovers that the lad is a prodigy at the piano with an uncanny ability to impart through his grandfather’s musical compositions the emotions Fox felt when writing them. This novel is a joy to read and fills readers with a hope of restoration in the face of loss.”

The Visitors by Simon Sylvester (Melville House; OverDrive Sample) also makes the list.

Sarah Hinckley, of Hudson Booksellers, Marietta, GA, says:

“Neil Gaiman meets Tana French in this debut thriller that takes place on a remote island off the coast of Scotland. Flora is as independent, vulnerable, and anxious for adulthood yet yearning for magic in all of its guises as any teen you’re likely to meet in literature. It is no surprise that she is drawn into the mystery of a man and his daughter moving into the abandoned Dog Cottage next door. The braiding of Scottish myth into this tale of suspicious disappearances adds a compelling twist to the wonderfully evocative setting and great cast of supporting characters.”

Tie-ins

In addition to the tie-in for Revenant, which we covered earlier, also arriving this week is The Finest Hours: The True Story of the U.S. Coast Guard’s Most Daring Sea Rescue by Michael J. Tougias, Casey Sherman (Pocket Books).

The big budget disaster movie from Disney comes out on Jan 29 and stars Chris Pine, Casey Affleck, Ben Foster, and Eric Bana.

The film recounts the true-life story of the 1952 Coast Guard attempt to rescue two oil takers caught in a massive nor’easter.

(for our full list of upcoming adaptations, download our Books to Movies and TV and link to our

The SheepOver (Hachette/Little, Brown Books for Young Readers), a children’s book about the illness and recovery of Sweet Pea the sheep, has turned two Vermont farmers into multi-book contract authors.

Based on the buzzy reaction to their Facebook page updates about their sick sheep, John and Jennifer Churchman decided to write a book detailing the story, illustrated with photographic collage art.

John took the book to his local indie bookstore, the Flying Pig, and owner Elizabeth Bluemle blogged about the unique illustrations – a mix of photos, drawings, and kaleidoscopic layering.

Turns out that Bluemle contributes to PW’s ShelfTalker and wrote the post there (you can see samples of the illustrations in the post).

It caught the eye of agent Brenda Bowen, who contacted the Sweet Pea’s owners and within weeks had netted them a mid-six-figure deal for three books with Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.

On CBS News, which picked up the story, Bowen called the deal remarkable, saying “I don’t know the degree of rareness that I can get down to. I mean it’s granular level rare.”

Shelf-Awareness picked up the story too, thanks to the indie angle and PW reports it in detail as well.

Now the book is zooming up Amazon’s rankings and is currently out of stock.

Libraries seem to have missed the first wave of interest, with only 19 currently showing holdings in World Cat. With a three-book deal and plenty of farm animals to fuel additional stories, the interest in sheep might not be over for a while.

We don’t often see reviews of novelizations, but in The Washington Post Elizabeth Hand addresses the question, “You’ve seen the new Star Wars movie — should you read the book tie-in?” Her answer may be a bit biased. She wrote the novelization of Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys as well as a few Star Wars titles.

She reveals that authors “typically don’t see the film before they write the book. They’re given a screenplay and some still photos, and they work from that.”

Some may believe that novelizations were a 70s phenomenon, but Hand dates the popularity of books based on movies as far back as The Perils of Pauline, The Ten Commandments, and Metropolis, and writes that Jack London even made money as a novelizer.

Other well-known authors such as John Steinbeck, Orson Welles, Graham Greene and Arthur Miller produced them as well. Take that, novelization snobs.

As to the newest Star Wars novelization, The Force Awakens (PRH/Del Rey/LucasBooks; Random House Audio/BOT), Hand loves it, saying author Alan Dean Foster (who also wrote the very first Star Wars novelization although it got credited to George Lucas), does the movie “proud.”

At this point, the only available edition is the eBook. The print version has been delayed until January, for fear that hackers would get into printers’ files and reveal key plot points before the movie’s release. Hand says the reading experience is “fast-moving, atmospheric and raises goose bumps at just the right moments … it’s a testament to Foster’s skill and professionalism that he not only evokes entire onscreen worlds but that he also gives us glimpses of an even more vast, unseen universe that has arisen from his impressive imagination.”

So cheer up Star Wars fans, even as the movie ends, the story does not.

At one point, Johnny Depp was in talks to play famous magician Harry Houdini in a film based on the 2007 biography, The Secret Life of Harry Houdine.

Another film based on a different book that features Houdini may make it to the screen first. STX Entertainment has acquired film rights to David Jaher’s first book, The Witch of Lime Street: Séance, Seduction, and Houdini in the Spirit World (PRH/Crown; BOT; OverDrive Sample).

About Houdini’s showdowns with a famous Boston medium of the time, it got a glowing review from NPR calling it “spellbinding” and saying that “Jaher writes with a novelist’s panache,” has a wonderful “poetic sympathy and journalistic distance,” and “exhibits a what-the-hell candor that makes [the book] a page-turner.” The Wall Street Journal was also enthusiastic.

Echoing the reviewers’ assessments, the president of STX says in a press release quoted by The Hollywood Reporter, “Quite a few producers and studios were pursuing rights to this book for very good reason … this is a spellbinding and exciting true story.”

Over a year after its initial publication, many libraries still have very long holds queues for Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (RH/Ten Speed Press) and those that have managed to work through the reserve list are still seeing copies rotate off the shelf in heavy circulation.

As we reported earlier, now comes the next book in the series, Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up (Ten Speed Press; RH Large Print; OverDrive Sample).

This version, according to EW (which gave it a C in their brief review), is “mainly a rehash,” but that is unlikely to matter to Kondo’s fan base.

The new book offers illustrations of how drawers, closets, and cabinets should look after tidying as well as step-by-step folding guides for various articles of clothing – each reason enough to get fans buzzing.

If you lost circ. on the first edition by buying low, this is a chance to get a head start on the new one.

The holiday season marks an end and a beginning for Downton Abbey.

In Great Britain, the beloved series is coming to a close with the final episode airing on Christmas Day.

Season six began there on Sept. 20th, marked by this tearjerker of a preview:

To jolly-up viewers, the show offered a holiday spoof created as a fundraiser for the U.K. charity Text Santa:

(Last year’s effort featured George Clooney, see it here).

In the U.S., all things Downton are just getting started. Season six begins on PBS Sunday, Jan. 3 at 9 p.m.

PBS offers American viewers a decidedly more upbeat preview than the U.K. version:

For those who cannot wait to find out what’s happened to the huge cast, there is plenty of coverage of Downton events to date in the London papers, such as this summary in the Daily Mail. as well as the book,  Downton Abbey – A Celebration: The Official Companion to All Six Seasons by Jessica Fellowes, (Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press. 11/10/15).

Oprah Winfrey, who has made the career of many a memoirist, is set to finally come through on the promise of writing a memoir of her own.

Joining with Flatiron Books, a division of Macmillan, Winfrey is to pen The Life You Want, an inspirational memoir due out in January 2017 (no cover or ISBN yet).

According to her site, the book “reveals never-before told stories from Oprah’s experience and shines a light on how they can inform your life.”

Deadline Hollywood reports the memoir deal netted Winfrey an eight-figure payday.

It will follow Winfrey’s 2014 What I Know for Sure, a collection of her O magazine columns also published by Flatiron.

The memoir is not the only deal Winfrey has struck with the company.

She is also starting her own imprint and plans to hand-select several nonfiction titles each year.

In a press release quoted by The Hollywood Reporter, Bob Miller, president and publisher of Flatiron Books, said,

“We’re … thrilled to give a home to Oprah’s imprint titles. We all know how extraordinary Oprah’s instincts are when it comes to choosing books, instincts borne of her lifelong love of reading and the power of the written word.”

While these days it takes more than a nod from Oprah to make a book a sensation, her endorsements continues to spur sales, making hers an imprint to watch.

Dominating the books arriving next week are titles aimed at the concerns of the new year, weight loss and self improvement.

It’s odd, but not surprising to find that no titles from big-name authors arrive next week, when stores are occupied with selling, rather than unpacking boxes and stocking shelves. That leaves room for a some under-the-radar picks.

The titles covered here, and a few other notables arriving next week, are listed with ordering information and alternate formats, on our downloadable spreadsheet, EarlyWord-New-Title-Radar-Week-of-12/21/15

Consumer Media Picks

Paradise City, Elizabeth Day, (Macmillan/Bloomsbury USA; 12/9) — People magazine’ s Book of the Week is set in London,  “four desperate lives intersect in this moving novel about love and identity.”  It is also an Indie Next pick

People picks for the week also came out earlier this month, James Lee Burke’s House of the Rising Sun  (S&S, Dec. 1) and Ametora by W. David Marx (Perseus/Basic Books, Dec. 1) . The latter title is the Japenese word for “American traditional style.” ,The book is “a fascinating cultural history ]that] explores japan’s revival of classic styles in the U.S. (think Uniqlo) and evolution into a global fashion force”

This Raging Light, Estele Laure, *HMH Books for Young Readers)

On Entertainment Weekly‘s Must List at #9; “a 17-year-old’sfather goes crazy, her mother abandons her, ad she’s left to care for her young sister. The author explores the teen emotions, from loneliness to first love, with poetic insight.

Peer Picks

Year of the Goose by Carly J. Hallman (The Unnamed Press)

Indie Next Pick:

“Sometimes too much pineapple turns your tongue into a caterpillar, all that acid seeping through. Between detailing a government-sanctioned fat camp meant to ‘rehabilitate’ China’s morbidly obese children and the brutal assassination of China’s richest man — Papa Hui, CEO of Bashful Goose Snack Company, China’s most profitable corporation — Hallman’s Year of the Goose contains that same tartness. Snarky and sinister, this debut novel will make you both cackle and cringe.” —Annalia Linnan, Brazos Bookstore, Houston, TX

Tie-ins:

The Choice by Nicholas Sparks (Hachette/Grand Central Publishing; Hachette Audio).

An earlier Sparks novel (first published in 2007) makes it way to theaters on Feb. 2, 2016. The film stars Teresa Palmer and Tom Welling.

City of Bones: TV Tie-in by Cassandra Clare (S&S/Margaret K. McElderry Books; Simon & Schuster Audio).

The TV series Shadowhunters will premiere on basic cable channel Freeform (formerly ABC Family) on Jan. 12, 2016.

It is based on Cassandra Clare’s popular YA series beginning with The Mortal Instruments: City Of Bones, (S&S/M.K. McElderry Books, 2007), which was made into a movie in 2013. After it flopped at the box office, the producers changed their plans of creating a film franchise and turned to TV, with a new cast of actors, all of whom are fairly new to the screen.

(for our full list of upcoming adaptations, download our Books to Movies and TV and link to our

The slowdown in release of titles continues next week, which is dominated by the Star Wars tie-ins (see previous post). As a result, we can round up the other titles in one short paragraph.

James Patterson publishes the next in his middle-grade series,
I Funny TV: A Middle School Story (Hachette/LittleBrown; Hachette Audio) as well as the next in the Manga version sof his YA series, Maximum Ride: The Manga, Vol. 9, (Hachette/Yen Press). In adult titles, the next in James Rollins’s  Sima Force series arrives, The Bone Labyrinth.(HarperCollins/Morrow; HarperLuxe; HarperAudio).

The titles covered here, s well as the week’s tie-ins, are listed with ordering information and alternate formats, on our downloadable spreadsheet, EarlyWord New Title Radar, Week of 12/14/15.

The output of titles slows down considerably this week, as stores move into high gear for the big holiday season. Even so, two big-name titles arrive to strong holds lists.

Secret Sisters, Jayne Ann Krentz, (PRH/Berkley)
A People pick this week, called  “suspenseful, romantic escape,” LJ picked it as one of the best Romance novels of the year. Booklist stars it, saying, “the doyenne of sophisticated romantic suspense serves up another irresistible combination of sharply etched characters, suspenseful plotting, smoldering sexual chemistry, and wonderfully written dialogue that snaps, crackles, and pops with the author’s distinctive wit.”

Ashley Bell, Dean Koontz, (PRH/Bantam)
Further behind in holds, this is People magazine’s “Book of the Week,” described as “a mind-bender filled with satisfying surprises.” Booklist predicts, “Koontz hits the canny nexus of horror, mystery, and fantasy here, which should drive demand even higher than normal.”

The titles covered here, 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 12/7/15.

Media Attention

The Relic Master, Christopher Buckley,  (Simon & Schuster)

Buckley moves his brand of satire from the present back to the Holy Roman Empire in 1517. PW calls the result “part Monty Python and part Ocean’s 11. The clever narrative is filled with laugh-out-loud one-liners but, amazingly, doesn’t stint on the suspense.”

The author is set to appear Dec. 8th on CBS This Morning and Dec. 12th on NPR’s Weekend Edition.

Peer Picks

Paradise City by Elizabeth Day (Bloomsbury USA; OverDrive Sample).

A December Indie Next selection:

“When I was young, one of my favorite toys was my dollhouse. It looked just like a regular house from the front, but the back was open with all the rooms exposed. That’s what Paradise City reminded me of, with each chapter narrated by a different character, all inscrutable to the people around them, but giving the reader glimpses into their inner lives. Every character is richly detailed and Day’s clear, sharp prose had me relating to their every feeling from wild, unexpected happiness to deep, thudding sadness. I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a book this much!” —Lauren Peugh, Changing Hands Bookstore, Tempe, AZ

Tie-ins

Last week Nexflix began streaming a series based on the Marvel superhero comic Jessica Jones. Four books collect the original comics. Released earlier this fall were  Jessica Jones: Alias Vol. 1 and Volume 2 (Marvel).

Coming next week is  Jessica Jones: Alias Vol. 3 and  in January, Jessica Jones : Alias Vol. 4.

Starring Krysten Ritter (Breaking Bad) as Jones, a character with superhuman strength, The Guardian says the show explores “the after-effects of trauma, exploitation and abuse, with smart and subtle things to say about the way guilt affects the lives of the victims, and how exploitation corrupts the exploiter.”

The Disney film The Finest Hours, starring Chris Pine and Casey Affleck. coming Jan. 29th, is based on the middle-grade title,  The Finest Hours: The True Story of a Heroic Sea Rescue by Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman (Macmillan/Holt, 2014)

In addition to the children’s tie-in (Macmillan/Square Fish, trade pbk), it is being released as an adult title (S&S. Scribner; mass market edition S&S/Pocket, 12/29).

The true story of the US Coast Guard’s efforts to rescue two tanker ships during a 1952 monstrous nor’easter  was revisited recenty in a story in The Washington Post.