Grove Press announced on Wednesday that they will publish Australian author Gregory David Roberts’ second novel, The Mountain Shadow, on October 13, 2015 (ISBN 978-0802124456; not yet listed on wholesaler catalogs). A sequel to Shantaram (Macmillan/St. Martin’s), it follows Roberts’ 2004 epic about Lin, an escaped convict from Australia, and his adventures in Bombay, which was loosely based on the author’s own life after his conviction for bank robbery.

Shantaram was a success in the author’s own country, where he was already somewhat of a legend, inspired cult followings when it was published here (Johnny Depp has worked for several years to get a film adaptation off the ground) and was considered a great, although long (933 pages), yarn by The New York Times, USA Today and The Washington Post, which sums up the plot:

“ … the book, told in 933 readable pages, follows [Lin] from a remote Indian village in monsoon season to the Afghan mountains in winter, but mostly it takes place in Bombay: in a slum where he founds a medical clinic, in a prison where he is beaten and tortured, in meetings of a branch of the India mafia led by Abdel Khader Khan, an Afghan who becomes a father figure and employer for the fugitive.”

According to Grove press release The Mountain Shadow is “set two years after the events in Shantaram, Bombay is now a different world, with different rules. Lin’s search for love and faith leads him through secret and violent intrigues to the dangerous truth.”

It’s difficult to predict if the public will be interested in a sequel that is ten years after the first success, but consider that Shantaram continues to inspire customer reviews on Amazon and copies continue to circulate from libraries.

In early December, Rainbow Rowell promised fans that a new Simon & Baz novel is on its way.

Now we know she wasn’t trolling us; it’s listed in distributor catalogs.

Carry On by Rainbow Rowell
Macmillan/ St. Martin’s Griffin
October 6, 2015

Publisher summary:

Rainbow Rowell continues to break boundaries with Carry On, an epic fantasy following the triumphs and heartaches of Simon and Baz from her beloved bestseller Fangirl.

Simon Snow just wants to relax and savor his last year at the Watford School of Magicks, but no one will let him. His girlfriend broke up with him, his best friend is a pest, and his mentor keeps trying to hide him away in the mountains where maybe he’ll be safe. Simon can’t even enjoy the fact that his roommate and longtime nemesis is missing, because he can’t stop worrying about the evil git. Plus there are ghosts. And vampires. And actual evil things trying to shut Simon down. When you’re the most powerful magician the world has ever known, you never get to relax and savor anything. Carry On is a ghost story, a love story, a mystery and a melodrama. It has just as much kissing and talking as you’d expect from a Rainbow Rowell story — but far, far more monsters.

She recently spoke to Time magazine about it,  declaring that the book is not fanfiction for her own book, “I don’t think it’s fanfiction, I think it’s more like canon! Because even though Simon Snow is fictional inside of Fangirl, I still had to make him up. He still feels like he’s my character.”

A sneak peek will be featured in a new “collector’s edition” of Fangirl, (Macmillan/St. Martin’s Griffin) coming in May, described as including “Fan Art, a ribbon bookmark, an exclusive author Q&A, and an excerpt from her upcoming book Carry On.“

Rowell is scheduled to appear at BookCon in May, which follows Book Expo America.

This September, fans can stop wondering what happened to Louisa Clark, from Jojo Moyes’ best selling novel, Me Before You, (Penguin/Pamela Dorman).

The sequel, titled of course After You, is announced today by USA Today.

The announcement comes just as production is about to begin this April on the movie version of the first book, starring Emilia Clarke as Lou, a young woman who is hired as caretaker for the paralyzed Will, to be played by Sam Claflin. Originally scheduled for release in August, according to USA Today, it won’t hit screens until 2016.

The book is currently showing as Untitled on some distributor sites:

ISBN: 0525426590 EAN: 9780525426592
Penguin/Pamela Dorman; $ 27.95
Pub Date: September 29, 2015

The fourth book in The Millennial series, which began with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, (Swedish cover on the left, above, next to the familiar American cover) will be published in August, as originally announced at the end of 2013, confirms the Swedish publisher Norstedts. Titled That Which Does Not Kill, it is written by the Swedish journalist and author David Lagercrantz.

There’s not much information available on the content of the book. As The Guardian comments, “the author remained tight-lipped about the meaning of the title or what direction the action-packed political thriller – 500 pages long in Swedish – will take,” telling the Dagens Nyheter newspaper, simply “What I wanted to make use of in the book was the vast mythology that Stieg Larsson left behind, the world he created.” When the project was first announced, the publisher said it has nothing to do with the manuscript that Larsson left unfinished when he died in 2004 (the series was originally planned as ten books and there is a legal dispute over ownership of the rights to the unfinished manuscript).

There’s no news yet on which company will publish the book in the U.S. and the possible contenders represent a tale of modern publishing consolidation. The previous titles in The Millennial series were published in the U.K. by Quercus and in the U.S. by RH/Knopf. Since then, Quercus opened offices in the U.S., launching in 2013 with a collection of Larsson’s articles, The Expo Files. After financial struggles, the entire company was acquired by Hachette last September and, according to  PW,  a new publisher of the U.S. division was named just a couple of weeks ago, reporting to the Little, Brown imprint. So, the Swedish publisher may have followed tradition and sold the rights to Quercus division of Hachette in the U.K., followed by RH/Knopf in the U.S., or they may have sold both the U.S. and U.K. rights to Hachette.

Then again, they maybe going with another publisher entirely. There also remains the question of whether a Stieg Larsson book without Stieg Larsson will attract readers.

Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert is publishing a new book in September on creativity, which may be why she gave the exclusive announcement to the Etsy blog, which is written for craftspeople and craft buyers.

Titled Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, (Penguin/ Riverhead; 9781594634710), the announcement has been picked up by several news sources, including the New York Times (via the AP) and USA Today.

For those people whose New Year’s resolutions are work-related, the Washington Post’s leadership columnist offers a dozen books to watch for next year, admitting that business self-help books tend to be “an overcrowded, underwhelming genre if there ever was one.”

One of the standouts is a book that offers lessons from The Second City Improv group (hey, if a bunch of fishmongers can become business gurus, the field is wide open), Yes, And: How Improvisation Reverses “No, But” Thinking and Improves Creativity and Collaboration, Kelly Leonard, Tom Yorton, (HarperBusiness, 2/3/15).

After dozens of best books lists (the New York Times daily reviewers posted theirs today), Janus turns his head with the first preview of the new year, from Entertainment Weekly.

As much fun as the book section is, it will frustrate many librarians because it includes several fall titles that are not yet available for ordering. So, for now, you may have to go with blind catalog entries.

Purity, Jonathan Franzen, (Macmillan; FSG, Sept) — Says Entertainment Weekly, “Franzen’s novels never fail to elicit equal parts hype and hate. Purity promises to be a departure from his previous works The Corrections and Freedom.” So, does that mean it won’t inspire hype and hate? According to a NYT story last month, it’s due in September from Macmillan/FSG.

City on Fire, Garth Risk Hallberg, (RH/Knopf, Sept) — According to a 2013 story in New York magazine’s Vulture blog, this 900-page first novel sold to Knopf for almost $2 million and movie rights went to Scott Rudin. Way back then, they also offered a list of “28 things you can surmise about Garth Hallberg’s City on Fire by reading Garth Hallberg.”

M Train, Patti Smith, (RH/Knopf, Fall)  — Smith mentioned she’s working on this follow-up memoir to Just Kids in a Rolling Stone interview in October, saying it was due on Friday. Giving that timing, we assume it will be released in the fall. She described it as not about the past, but “sort of in present tense. I wanted to write a contemporary book or just write whatever I felt like writing about, and it’s things going from literature to coffee to memories of Fred in Michigan.”

The Witches, Stacy Schiff, (Hachette/ Little, Brown; Nov, 2015) — According to Schiff’s Web site, this is about the Salem Witch trials. The publisher told EarlyWord that it is currently scheduled for Nov., 2015 list.

A couple of the titles have already shown up on librarian radars. You can catch up by reading them over the holidays, digital ARC’s are still available:

The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins, (Penguin/Riverhead, Jan. 13)

This debut began drawing attention back in August and is a LibraryReads pick for January. This is one of three titles Entertainment Weekly considers a possible successor to Gone Girl, along with the “buzzy” The Kind Worth Killing, Peter Swanson, (HarperCollins/Morrow, Feb. 3) and “the most understated an plausible of the three,” The Daylight Marriage, Heidi Pitlor, (Workman/Algonquin, May).

My Sunshine Away, M.O. Walsh, (Penguin/Putnam. Feb. 10)

Entertainment Weekly says this debut is “sure to be a breakout.” Librarians who have read it in galley concur, calling it, “a roller coaster of a read that doesn’t let up until the very end of the ride.” Join us for a chat with the author on January 21, as part of Penguin’s First Flight program.

For a listing of the other titles, go to our Edelweiss Collection.

Announcing her next book via a tweet, picked up by Entertainment Weekly‘s “Shelf Life” column, Rainbow Rowell says,

In another tweet, Rowell teases that more news is coming.

I’m not trolling you. I mean, I WOULD troll you. But I’m not right now: Real live Simon Snow book. PLUS MORE FANGIRL NEWS LATER THIS WEEK! — Rainbow Rowell (@rainbowrowell) December 10, 2014

Fans, of course will be speculating. Could it be a movie? Film rights have been picked up for Eleanor & Park, but there have been no announcements for  Fangirl (don’t be confused by that Meg Ryan movie in the works, Fan Girl. It is not an adaptation, but an original script).

UPDATE: Turns out the news is about the special collector’s edition which we noted below.

Ordering information for Carry On won’t be available until early spring. A sneak peek will be featured in a new “collector’s edition” of Fangirl,  coming in May, described as including “Fan Art, a ribbon bookmark, an exclusive author Q&A, and an excerpt from her upcoming book Carry On.“

Fangirl: A Novel by Rainbow Rowell

St. Martin’s Griffin: May 12, 2015

9781250073808, 1250073804

Hardcover; $18.99 USD

The number one librarian Favorites of the year for 2011 was the debut science fiction novel, Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (RH/Crown), a book that was also a Librarian’s BEA Shout ‘n’ Share pick that year (good going, Robin Nesbitt, Columbus Metropolitan Library (OH).

Rumors were swirling last week that Warner Brothers, who bought the film rights prior to publication, are courting Intersteller director Christopher Nolan to tackle this one. Other sites scoffed at the idea (Nolan doesn’t do adaptations), but then Ain’t It Cool News reported that Nolan is just one of many the studio is considering, including Robert Zemeckis, Peter Jackson, Edgar Wright and Matthew Vaughn.

The only thing that seems certain is that a script has been submitted. The rumors may indicate that it’s been accepted.

Cline’s second novel Armada was sold to RH/Crown in 2012 and Universal quickly snapped up the film rights.

The audio version is listed on Edelweiss for release on September 29, 2015. The hardcover is noted on an  accompanying “Comp. Title” list, from Crown, with the same release date and ISBN 9780804137256.  Below is the publisher description:

A cinematic, inventive, heartwarming, and completely nerdtastic adventure from the best-selling author of Ready Player One.

Zack Lightman is daydreaming through another dull math class when the hightech dropship lands in his school’s courtyard-and when the men in the dark suits and sunglasses leap out of the ship and start calling his name, he’s sure he’s still dreaming. But the dream is all too real; the people of earth need him. As Zack soon discovers, the videogame he’s been playing obsessively for years isn’t just a game; it’s part of a massive, top-secret government training program, designed to teach gamers the skills they’ll need to defend earth from a possible alien invasion. And now…that invasion is coming.

Soon Zack and and a handful of top gamers find themselves in a bunker beneath the Pentagon, hearing about our planet’s vast secret history over the last forty years-ever since a NASA probe first discovered evidence of intelligent life in our solar system, hidden beneath the ice of Jupiter’s moon, Europa.

As he and his companions prepare to enter their ships and do battle, Zack learns that the father he thought was dead is actually a key player in this secret war. And together with his father, he’ll uncover the truth about the alien Europans, race to prevent a genocide, and discover a mysterious third player in the interplanetary chess game he’s been thrown into.