One of the most anticipated books of the season (as proved by our compilation of all the summer previews) faces the Mikey of book reviewers, the daily NYT‘s Michiko Kakutani, and she likes it, calling it “charming.”

She may lose potential readers when she says that the story is “sort of a loose variation on those Hollywood comedies of remarriage like The Philadelphia Story or The Awful Truth, which, as the scholar Stanley Cavell pointed out in his insightful book Pursuits of Happiness,often seemed loosely inspired by Shakespeare’s romantic comedies,” but comes back to earth by the end, saying, “the book looks like designated vacation reading — but it’s just too deftly and thoughtfully written to be relegated merely to the beach.”

The NYT is lionizing the author. She was also profiled last week (revealing that she is the daughter of horror writer Peter Straub) and received earlier attention in one of the NYT‘s regular “Sunday Routine” features.

They aren’t the only ones. She is receiving attention from many other publications, including USA Today, “Book clubs will swoon over Emma Straub’s Modern Lovers,” Entertainment Weekly, which gives it an A-, even though the review reads like a solid A, and the Washington Post, which calls it “delightful.”

Will this become THE book of Summer, 2016? That’s difficult to predict. While holds in libraries are heavy in relation to modest ordering, the overall numbers don’t yet indicate a long-running best seller.

Among the repeat authors returning with new books this week are two co-authors whose book always has the same title, the new edition of the book that revolutionized pregnancy guides.
 
What to Expect When You’re Expecting (5th Edition), Heidi Murkoff, Sharon Mazel, (Workman; also trade pbk)

New editions of this book remind us of changes in the culture since the previous one. Information on how a changing body may affect piercings and tattoos, covered earlier, is now old hat. This time, according to the publisher, the new edition incorporates current lifestyle trends such as “juice bars, raw diets, e-cigarettes, push presents, baby bump posting …”

The media is already giving attention to memoirs by two very different people. Among bookseller picks are titles that have shown up on many consumer summer reading previews.

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 May 30, 2016

Advance Attention

The Long Game: A Memoir, Mitch McConnell, (PRH/Sentinel; Penguin Audio)

The Senate Majority Leader began promotion for his memoir with an appearance on yesterday’s CBS This Morning There were no prepub reviews, indicating this book is embargoed. As a result, many libraries have not ordered it.

Double Cup Love: On the Trail of Family, Food, and Broken Hearts in China, Eddie Huang, (PRH/Spiegel & Grau)

Celebrity bad boy chef Huang’s previous memoir was the basis for the ABC TV series Fresh off the Boat. The ground-breaking show just aired its second season final episode and has been renewed for a third, making this a good moment for the author to release his second book (even though he has complained openly that TV sanitized his book). He is profiled in the New York Times and on NPR.

Peer Picks

Four June Indie Next selections arrive this week, two fiction and two nonfiction.

Modern Lovers, Emma Straub (PRH/Riverhead Books; Penguin Audio; BOT; OverDrive Sample).

“Set in trendy Brooklyn, Straub’s latest novel follows the lives of former bandmates Zoe, Elizabeth, and Andrew and their teenage children, Ruby and Harry. When Ruby and Harry begin a relationship, their parents are forced to face and reveal long-buried tensions and secrets. Straub’s spot-on depictions of middle-age suburban life and teenage angst are alternatively searing and hilarious. This book is the ultimate literary beach read!” —Alexis Jason-Mathews, Politics & Prose Bookstore and Coffeehouse, Washington, DC

Entertainment Weekly picked Straub’s newest as one of the Hottest Fiction titles of the year, saying “The author of 2014’s summer hit The Vacationers focuses on a tight-knit set of college pals who now have college-age kids themselves.”

Before the Fall, Noah Hawley (Hachette/Grand Central Publishing; Hachette Audio; OverDrive Sample).

This is the author’s fifth novel, but in between he’s done a few other things, like create the  TV series Fargo, becoming, as  Vanity Fair claims. “the future of Hollywood.”

“When a private plane plunges into the ocean off Martha’s Vineyard, the media and the government want answers. The two survivors — a middle-aged artist along for the ride and the four-year-old son of a prominent and powerful family — have little to say. Before the Fall takes the reader on a thrilling ride through the past lives of the other passengers and the aftermath of the crash. As the deepest secrets of the wealthy and those who surround them surface, no one is safe. A brilliant and relentless thriller.” —Geoffrey Jennings, Rainy Day Books, Fairway, KS

The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction, Neil Gaiman (HC/William Morrow; Harper Audio).

“I must be one of the few people to love Neil Gaiman most for his nonfiction. Over the years, I’ve scoured the shelves and online for his speeches, his introductions, his forewords, even his tweets and blog posts, so this book is a thing of wonder. Filled to bursting with his humor, wisdom, and hope, all articulated in the thoughtful, generous prose we know and love, The View From the Cheap Seats will keep you company, give you solace, and help you think deeper, smile harder, and breathe easier.” —Serena Longo, Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, MA

The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks, Terry Tempest Williams (Macmillan/Sarah Crichton Books; OverDrive Sample).

“Terry Tempest Williams’ latest book, published for the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service, is personal, political, and profound. Her examination of 12 national parks is much more than a guide to the history and landscape of those places. It is a guide to the heart and soul of the entire National Park system, whose depth is exceeded only by its beauty.” —Chuck Robinson, Village Books, Bellingham, WA

Tie-ins

Typically a UK show running on ITV lands in the US on Masterpiece Theater but Amazon nabbed Doctor Thorne, the newest Julian Fellowes uppercrust drama, and will start airing the 3-part mini series this Friday. In something of a bid to out do Masterpiece, or at least evoke its Alistair Cooke heyday, Fellowes introduces each episode, sitting in an arm chair, as Slate puts it very “cozy highbrow … that velvet! That fireplace!”

The Guardian was not impressed when it aired in the UK in March, writing, “let’s take a memory drug to forget this disgrace … Pointless to the point of excruciating.”

The tie in, Doctor Thorne: The Chronicles of Barsetshire, Anthony Trollope (Oxford University Press), comes out June 1.

The Secret Life of Pets is an animated film from Universal detailing the adventures of pets. It stars Louis C.K., Eric Stonestreet, and Kevin Hart and opens July 8.

Two titles support its release thus far: the storybook The Secret Life of Pets Big Golden Book (Secret Life of Pets), David Lewman, illustrated by Craig Kellman (PRH/Golden Books) and the level reader Meet the Pets (Secret Life of Pets), Random House (PRH/Random House Books for Young Readers).

Coming out on May 31st is The Bye Bye Man: And Other Strange-but-True Tales, Robert Damon Schneck (PRH/TarcherPerigee). It is the tie-in for the horror movie of the same name, based on Schneck’s short story “The Bridge to Body Island.”

The film has been moved from its expected June 3rd opening to December release, but it appears the tie-in date has not been changed.

For our full list of upcoming adaptations, download our Books to Movies and TV and link to our listing of tie-ins.

Rising on Amazon on the strength of coverage in the NYT’s Sunday Book Review and NPR is The Mirror Thief, Martin Seay (Melville House; OverDrive Sample).

The reviews lavish it with praise. The NYT reviewer, the author Scarlett Thomas, says she “had been planning my glowing review since around Page 150” and that it is “audaciously well written.”

NPR’s reviewer, Michael Schaub, says it is a “thrilling dynamo of a novel [by] a tremendous writer … a startling, beautiful gem of a book that at times approaches a masterpiece.”

What is it about? Neither reviewer wants to say, as too much detail gives away the book’s pleasures and it is a hard book to write about, but Thomas calls it “mystical literary fiction with a hard edge” and offers:

“How could I express that while this novel seems on the surface to be a bit like Cloud Atlas (multiple perspectives, Russian doll structure), it’s more heartfelt, deeper, less of a pastiche? I thought I might describe it as Stone Junction rewritten by David Foster Wallace or Thomas Pynchon with a big twist of William Gibson, Susanna Clarke and Italo Calvino. But I wasn’t sure that would cover it.”

Schaub says it evokes comparisons to Umberto Eco, Saul Bellow, and James Ellroy.

Both agree it is a mesmerizing reading experience. Thomas calling it “demanding, frustrating and oddly enlightening … not The Da Vinci Code for intellectuals. It’s more like Howl translated into Latin and then back again. Over 600 pages. It’s amazing … How this book got published is a complete mystery to me. Not because it is not good enough, but rather because it is too good.”

Schaub says the novel “is as difficult to explain as it is completely original. It’s one of the most intricately plotted novels in recent years, and to call it imaginative seems like a massive understatement. The three stories are as different from each other as can be, and the fact that Seay weaves them together so skillfully is almost miraculous.”

It is also an Indie Next pick for May, with an equally glowing annotation:

“Three stories are linked in this outstanding debut by criminal pursuits and Venice — not so much the actual place, but the idea of that place: in the late 1500s Venice, Italy, a man schemes to steal the most guarded technology of the day — a mirror; in 1950s Venice Beach, California, a thief discovers a mysterious text that seems to have unusual insights about that stolen mirror; and in 2015, a soldier purses the thief in The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas to retrieve the book about the mirror. As the stories draw together, Seay’s thrilling novel dazzles at every turn. Unexpected and amazing, The Mirror Thief will leave readers breathless.” —Jeremy Ellis, Brazos Bookstore, Houston, TX

The indie press novel is doing very well in libraries we checked, either topping a 3:1 holds ratio or showing strong circ. where libraries are ahead of requests.

The summer is off to a dismal start for Hollywood. The movie trades are characterizing the holiday weekend box office as “lackluster,” with X-Men: Apocalypse coming in below expectations and Disney’s Alice Through The Looking Glass considered a flat-out “bomb.” Among the bright spots for adaptations, the much smaller release, Whit Stillman’s Jane Austen-inspired Love & Friendship is continuing to do well after opening earlier this month and is considered an “arthouse crossover” success.

Beginning tonight, May 30 Roots airs on the History Chanel, simulcast on A&E and Lifetime, over four consecutive nights.

The new version seeks to make the seminal TV event, based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Alex Haley, relevant to a new generation of viewers (the NYT review is headlined, “Roots for a Black Lives Matter Era“).

The 70’s version was a sensation, opening the eyes of many white Americans to the horrors of slavery and encouraging African Americans to research their family histories, but executive producer Mark Wolper, the son of the original’s EP David L Wolper, told Deadline he realized he had to re-imagine his father’s efforts when his own son refused to watch the 1977 series, saying, “like your music, it doesn’t speak to me.”

The series remake stars Malachi Kirby, Forest Whitaker, Anna Paquin, Laurence Fishburne, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

A tie-in edition come out on May 3: Roots [miniseries tie-in]: The Saga of an American Family, Alex Haley, (Perseus/Da Capo Press).

Me Before You opens on June 3. The anticipation is so fevered, as we noted, that just the two trailer releases caused bumps in sales for the book it is based on. The novel’s author, JoJo Moyes, wrote the screenplay and the movie stars Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones) and Sam Claflin (Finnick Odair from The Hunger Games) transitioning from worlds of dragons and death matches to life-affirming contemporary romance.

A movie-tie in edition came out on April 26: Me Before You: A Novel (Movie Tie-In) by Jojo Moyes (PRH/Penguin Books).

Outcast premieres on Cinemax in a 10 episode run starting June 3. It is based the comic Robert Kirkman writes and Paul Azaceta illustrates and stars Patrick Fugit (Gone Girl) and Philip Glenister (Life on Mars) as two characters caught in a web of demonic possession. Wired calls it “a bloody, brutal ride” and reports it has already been renewed for a second season.

Two collected editions of the comic are currently in print with a third to follow on June 15.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows also opens on June 3. The blast from the past stars Megan Fox, Stephen Amell, and Will Arnett and is a follow-up to the 2014 film.

This time the turtles wonder if they can become human while they fight new mutants created by their arch enemy.

The leveled reader tie-in, Shell Shock (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows), illustrated by Paolo Villanelli (PRH/Random House Books for Young Readers), is now available, but the novelization doesn’t arrive until  June 7: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows Deluxe Novelization (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows), David Lewman (PRH/Random House Books for Young Readers; also in paperback). Is it possible that, like the Star Wars novelization, it was held back for fear of spoilers?

Reflecting USA Today‘s reduced book coverage, this year’s summer books preview consists of just ten titles, most of them expected. At #1 is Stephen King’s End of Watch (S&S/Scribner, June 7) and at #3 is the summer debut on every list, Emma Cline’s The Girls (PRH/Random House, June 14).

Still, they manage to pick three titles that are not on any of the other previews:

#5 Before You Judge Me: The Triumph and Tragedy of Michael Jackson’s Last Days by Tavis Smiley and David Ritz (Hachette/Little, Brown, June 21)

#6 The Land of Stories: An Author’s Odyssey by Chris Colfer (Hachette/Little, Brown, July 12), the next in the series for young readers.

#10 Trump Revealed by Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher (S&S/Scribner, Aug. 23),  a late addition to summer releases, by  Washington Post investigative and political reporters. USA Today wonders what could possibly be left to reveal about the candidate.

See our catalog for a running list of all summer picks. Links to each of the summer previews are  in the column to the right.

Soaring on Amazon’s sales rankings due to a glowing review in The Wall Street Journal is Texas Ranger: The Epic Life of Frank Hamer, the Man Who Killed Bonnie and Clyde, John Boessenecker (Macmillan/Thomas Dunne Books; OverDrive Sample), which jumped from #5,403 to just outside the Top 100.

Writing for the paper, author Bryan Burrough (Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence), a frequent reader of “biographies of American lawmen and detectives” says that “in terms of sheer action and violence, from close-quarters gunfights to Mexican-border ambushes to face-offs with lynch mobs, I’m hard-pressed to think of one that rivals John Boessenecker’s excellent” account.

He goes on to say:

“What makes Texas Ranger a notable achievement is how thoroughly Hamer has eluded so many would-be biographers. Though he took part in 52 known gunfights and killed at least 27 men—and probably more—he was humble and tight-lipped about his achievements. He left no diaries and granted few interviews. But Mr. Boessenecker, after years mining state archives and yellowed newspapers, finally captures the full life of a man whose exploits could easily pack a dozen Hollywood movies.”

The book is getting a range of local press coverage as well as a vividly illustrated feature in Garden & Gun. The NYT, which is not as glowing, features it as part of their “Adventurers Shortlist” in last week’s Sunday Book Review.

Holds are thus far light on light ordering but this is the kind of book that can take off if there is word of mouth.

Amid the current unease about nuclear proliferation, Neal Bascomb’s historical account of Hitler’s efforts to create atomic weapons, The Winter Fortress: The Epic Mission to Sabotage Hitler’s Atomic Bomb (HMH; OverDrive Sample), is rising on Amazon, on the strength of a riveting review in The Wall Street Journal.

Detailing the efforts and sacrifice of Norwegian, British, and Americans seeking to stop Hitler’s plans, the paper calls the book a “riveting and poignant” account that “metamorphoses from engrossing history into a smashing thriller.”

Holds are mixed at libraries we checked, with some locations showing ratios over 4:1, others showing strong circ on moderate ordering, and others with copies on the shelf. Right now the book is mainly benefiting from local press, but books such as these are perennially popular and Bascomb’s is regarded as the definitive account of an overlooked part of WWII history, making it a core title for many collections.

As we head into Memorial Day weekend, summer reading previews are arriving. While others can only salivate over the forthcoming titles, librarians can begin reading most of them now, in the form of galleys from Edelweiss and/or NetGalley (see our catalog of all the titles here)

Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Amazon Editors, B&N, Buzzfeed, Harper’s Bazaar, The Wall Street Journal, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (widely syndicated in other regional newspapers) all have suggestions for readers. (EW‘s is not available online, so we’ve put together a downloadable spreadsheet of their picks),

Among the titles getting the most attention Modern Lovers, Emma Straub (PRH/Riverhead; Penguin Audio; BOT; OverDrive Sample), has an impressive showing, making the lists of The New York Times, Amazon Editors, B&N, Harper’s Bazaar, The Wall Street Journal, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It is also gets an A- from Entertainment Weekly this week . 

Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi (PRH/Knopf; RH Audio; BOT; OverDrive Sample) is making a splash, partly because of  its $1 million advance, as The Wall Street Journal notes in a profile of the author, adding that the book “is flecked with magic, evoking folk tales passed down from parent to child.” The debut made Entertainment Weekly‘s top ten picks for the season as well as hitting lists complied by B&N, BuzzFeed, and the NYT.

The Girls, Emma Cline (PRH/Random House; RH Audio), another debut that’s received advance attention, also impresses the Amazon Editors, BuzzFeed, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Entertainment Weekly, the Wall Street Journal, and the NYT. It is also the #1 Indie Next Pick for June. Entertainment Weekly says: “This breathtaking novel — about a young woman entangled in a Masonesque cult — is so accomplished that it’s hard to believe it’s a debut. Cline’s powerful characters linger long after the final page.”

Another Brooklyn, Jacqueline Woodson (HC/Amistad) is the National Book Award winner’s first novel for adults in 20 years. B&N, BuzzFeed, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and WSJ each take note. BuzzFeed says: “Gorgeously written and moving, Another Brooklyn is an examination of the complexities of youth and adolescence, loss, friendship, family, race, and religion.”

But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past, Chuck Klosterman (PRH/Blue Rider; Penguin Audio; BOT; OverDrive Sample) is on B&N, Harper’s Bazaar, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Entertainment Weekly‘s lists. EW says: “The essayist’s new book scrutinizes seemingly immutable concepts, like gravity and history under the assumption that we could be proved totally wrong about them in the future.”

It seems Hemingway still fascinates.  Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises, Lesley M. M. Blume (HMH/Eamon Dolan; OverDrive Sample) is picked by B&N, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and The Wall Street Journal, with the latter saying: “The story behind Ernest Hemingway’s debut novel, The Sun Also Rises, involves the “Lost Generation” and the trip to Pamplona … It also shows how delicately editor Maxwell Perkins of Scribner’s had to handle the manuscript, with its four-letter words, drinking and philandering.”

In addition to these highlights, below are a few more selections from each list.

Entertainment Weekly dives in with a rich collection of activities entitled “99 Ways to Spend 99 Days” – a number of which  include reading. Featured on their cover is The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, Amy Schumer (S&S/Gallery), one of the buzzy books from BEA. EW points out it is not the only book in Schumer-land. The head writer for Inside Amy Schumer also has a book out, You’ll Grow Out of It, Jessi Klein (Hachette/Grand Central).

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child makes the cover too and is set for a big splash. EW highlights both the London play and the script: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – Parts One & Two (Special Rehearsal Edition Script): The Official Script Book of the Original West End Production, J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany, Jack Thorne (Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine).

The New York Times daily reviewer Dwight Garner likes Emma Cline’s The Girls, but also Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer, Arthur Lubow (HC/Ecco; OverDrive Sample), saying: “Diane Arbus is one of the most important and unsettling figures in the history of photography, known for her pictures of people on the margins — dwarfs, cross-dressers, giants, sideshow freaks. Mr. Lubow’s biography of this pioneering artist …  is the first since Patricia Bosworth’s in 1984, and it looks serious, sensitive and wide-ranging.”

Daily nonfiction reviewer, Jennifer Senior, highlights Here Comes the Sun, Nicole Dennis-Benn (Norton/Liveright): “This novel may take place in Jamaica, but do not mistake it for a traditional beach read. It’s for readers who want to know what’s really behind the lacquered smile of the desk clerk at that lovely resort in Montego Bay, and what the pleasant woman at the market is really thinking when she sells tourists her jewelry and trinkets. The answers are often far less pretty than the scenery, but all evidence suggests that this debut deserves its ballyhoo.”

The Amazon editors offer lists for fiction, beach reads, kids, and YA. In fiction they note, as does Entertainment Weekly, the attention given to Blake Crouch. The novelist is gaining traction based on the adaptation of his books into the Fox studio’s Wayward Pines series. His newest title is Dark Matter (PRH/Crown; RH Audio). Also on the list is Truly Madly Guilty, Liane Moriarty (Macmillan/Flatiron Books). It is another impressive choice, making multiple lists including Entertainment Weekly‘s and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

B&N‘s list includes Invincible Summer, Alice Adams (Hachette/Little, Brown), offering: “This engaging first novel begins with a question posed by one of four close college friends in 1995: “If you could know the answer to any question, what would it be?” Two think big, wondering about the meaning of life and what happens after death. Another quips about next week’s lottery numbers. Adams follows the appealing Brits — two artsy types, a banker, and a physicist, split between the sexes — through their ups and downs and the ins and outs of their relationships over the next twenty years.”

Also making their list is I Almost Forgot About You, Terry McMillan (PRH/Crown; RH Audio; BOT): “A novel that encourages risk-taking and shaking things up by the author of Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Feeling stuck and dissatisfied despite her relative good fortune, twice-divorced 50-something optometrist Georgia Young decides to quit her job, reinvent herself and – yes – get her groove back.”

The Wall Street Journal includes the massive new novel by Annie Proulx, a 700 page tome she spent close to a decade writing. Barkskins (S&S/Scribner, S&S Audio) spans 320 years as it traces the fates of a pair of indentured woodcutters and their descendants through history, as, according to WSJ, “they exploit the forest, and grapple with the ecological consequences.”

Chronicle of a Last Summer: A Novel of Egypt, Yasmine El Rashidi (PRH/Tim Duggan Books; RH Audio; BOT) gets featured as well. It is a debut that tracks the fall of President Hosni Mubarak during the Egyptian Revolution, placing his story against that of a character readers meet at age 6, as a college student, and as an adult. WSJ says that El Rashidi watched the Egyptian Revolution “unfold in real time, covering the overthrow … in dispatches for the New York Review of Books.” WSJ also has a nonfiction summer preview out.

BuzzFeed leads with The Girls and Homegoing but then highlights another debut, Problems, Jade Sharma (Coffee House; OverDrive Sample), saying: “Bold and honest, Problems is a fresh look at recovery, redemption, and one woman’s increasing nest of problems.” Also on the list of 18 picks is Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty by Ramona Ausubel (PRH/Riverhead). BuzzFeed offers: “Filled with humor and heart … a wonderfully whimsical tale of privilege and class and what happens when you lose everything you’ve come to take for granted.”

Harper’s Bazaar offers a list of 12 titles which includes The Nix, Nathan Hill (RRH/Knopf; RH Audio), a book EW called the “wildest debut.” Harper’s says: “College professor Samuel Andresen-Anderson hasn’t seen his mother, Faye, since childhood, the day she walked out of his life. One day, he recognizes Faye on the news, caught on camera pelting rocks at a presidential candidate. He soon decides to write a tell-all biography of his mother, delving into her personal history as it fits into the rural Midwest in the 1960s to Occupy Wall Street and ultimately to Norway, home of the storied “Nix” that she often told Samuel about as a boy.”

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch complies a long list that includes Marrow Island, Alexis M. Smith (HMH; RH Audio; BOT; OverDrive Sample). It is Smith’s second novel after the cult favorite Glaciers (Tin House) and marks Smith’s quick jump to a big six publisher. The paper offers a brief summary: “Journalist who left her island home after a devastating quake returns to find it inhabited by an eerie, suspicious colony run by a former nun.”

It is an Indie Next pick for June as well, with the longer annotation:

“After an earthquake destroyed the oil refinery on Marrow Island and killed her father, Lucie Bowen left. Twenty years later, she returns to the Puget Sound and discovers her friend Kate is now living on this toxic island with members of ‘The Colony.’ Set in the Pacific Northwest, Marrow Island is a mystery/thriller that encompasses communal living, natural and man-made disasters, and what can happen when we tinker with the ecosystem and try to play a larger role.” —Tracy Taylor, The Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA.

See our catalog for a running list of all summer picks. Links to each of the summer previews can be found in the column to the right.

On her weekly radio appearance on Seattle’s NPR affiliate KUOW, librarian Nancy Pearl recommends Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett (Hachette/Little, Brown; OverDrive Sample), calling it a “wonderful, albeit, painful reading experience.”

The novel, told in alternating points of view, explores how depression runs through a family. Nancy says it is centered on the oldest son and progresses forward in time as each character tells their part of the story.

She particularly praised the acuity with which Haslett explores depression, saying she does not think she has ever read another novel that has explored the disease so well. She was also impressed with Haslett’s “amazingly wonderful writing.”

Nancy suggests the novel to readers who like books that explore the human condition and those readers who wish to partake of a character’s life and crises.

She’s not alone in her praise. The novel, Haslett’s second after Union Atlantic and the short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here, which was a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, is getting attention.

Entertainment Weekly gave it an A-, saying Haslett “illuminates not just madness but what it means to witness it, too.”

NPR’s Scott Simon interviewed Haslett on Weekend Edition Saturday and NPR posted a review as well, in which Heller McAlpin offers, “Haslett’s new novel forcefully demonstrates that he is unrivaled at capturing the lasting reverberations of suicide and the draining tedium and despair — along with the occasionally fabulous flights of fancy — that accompany intransigent mental illness. And he achieves this with an extraordinary blend of precision, beauty, and tenderness”

The NYT‘s “Sunday Book Review” assesses the novel as “ambitious and stirring” and adds, “it sneaks up on you with dark and winning humor, poignant tenderness and sentences so astute that they lift the spirit even when they’re awfully, awfully sad.”

A book on an ever-popular topic is rising on Amazon as a result of coverage from NPR and spotlights in the NYT and The Atlantic.

Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why by Paul Tough (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; OverDrive Sample), a book about teaching and parenting kids for success, has broken into the top 50, rising from #796.

His earlier book, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, And The Hidden Power Of Character, was a NYT bestseller and, as NPR says, “probably did more than any other single book to get the wider public thinking about the importance of grit and other noncognitive skills.”

Many libraries we checked have yet to order, perhaps because the only trade review thus far is from Kirkus.

Time to get those orders in. The book’s title alone will bring eager parents and, as NPR puts it, “for the past decade or more Tough has been one of the pre-eminent reporters translating education research for public consumption.” It’s likely to join another book on best seller lists, Grit: Passion, Perseverance, and the Science of Success by Angela Duckworth, (S&S/Scribner; S&S Audio), currently tied at #2 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction list with Anderson Cooper’s The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son On Life, Love, and Loss, (Harper; HarperAudio; HarperLuxe).

This month’s Target Club Pick brings renewed attention to The Book of Speculation, Erika Swyler (Macmillan/St. Martin’s Griffin; Macmillan Audio; OverDrive Sample), which
features a librarian as the
main character.

A June 2015 LibraryReads selection, it was described by Amanda Monson, of Bartow County Library System, Cartersville, GA:

“A roller coaster of a read! This is the story of a librarian from a splintered family with a tragic past who is gifted a mysterious book that leads him to dive deep into his family’s history, all while his present life seems to be falling to pieces around him. If you loved Morgenstern’s The Night Circus or Kostova’s The Historian, this is a book for you.”

The pick coincides with the paperback release of the novel, with added features; the short story “The Mermaid Girl,” an author Q&A, reading group guide, and a short essay by the author. Swyler offers images and a list of the new features on her tumblr page.

In a rare advanced review, the New Yorker discusses Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide, Charles Foster (Macmillan/Metropolitan; BOT), coming out next month, calling it an “exercise of the sympathetic imagination.”

The natural history memoir recounts Foster’s time trying to live like badgers, foxes, otters, and birds, going so far as to live in a dirt barrow, eat worms, and catch fish with his teeth.

Already published in the UK to glowing reviews, The Guardian calls it “Illuminating and unfailingly entertaining … a tour de force of modern nature writing.”

Libraries have ordered very lightly. There are few holds, but the memoir, which is being compared to H is for Hawk, is likely to get more media attention.

Featured in the same New Yorker article is another book about living like an animal, GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday From Being Human, Thomas Thwaites (Princeton Architectural Press; OverDrive Sample). The author, a designer, writes about his efforts to become as goat-like as possible, even using prosthetic goat limbs, to become a member of a Swiss goat herd. Published last week, it received attention from NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday as well as on NPR’s blog coincidentally titled Goats and Soda. Holds too are light on light ordering.

Two recent books suggest that if humans want to live like animals, they need to step up their game. Primatologist Frans de Waal’s new book offers a challenge in the title, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (Norton; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample). It is currently at #19 on the New York Times Hardcover Non-fiction list after two weeks.

Focusing on a specific species, Jennifer Ackerman’s The Genius of Birds(PRH/Penguin; HighBridge Audio; OverDrive Sample), released in April, received attention from NPR. The two books were reviewed jointly in the NYT Sunday Book Review.

In an interview with the Washington Post, de Waal offers an explanation for this growing interest, “I think we got tired of behaviorism, which was dominant last century. More and more phenomena are coming to the fore, of animals doing things that couldn’t be explained by simple instinct or by simple associative learning. And the younger generation is much more open to seeing what animals can do on their own terms.”

On the strength of an NPR interview Sherman Alexie’s new picture book jumped up Amazon’s sales rankings, jumping from #1,381 to #83.

NPR’s David Greene talks with Alexie about Thunder Boy Jr.,  illustrated by Yuyi Morales (Hachette/Little, Brown), calling it “joyful… funny and sweet.” Words which could also describe Alexie’s reading of the book, which opens and closes the interview.

The two discuss the inspiration for the story as well as Alexie’s life, father, and vision of himself, pointing to the dark humor in his National Book Award-winning novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is also rising strongly on Amazon.

Alexie talks about how reading created the person he is today:

“My life changed dramatically, and started to change dramatically, when I read The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. I was 4 or 5 on the reservation, and it was the first book I ever read with a brown-skinned character … I reached across the fictional and the real barriers and boundaries to connect my heart to him. And that’s why I’m here now. That one book made me a writer. And I can point to other books throughout my life that did the same thing — that made me who I am. I am constructed of stories that have changed my life.”

When Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in Literature last October, only two of her books were available in English in the US. That is slowly changing. Arriving this week is Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, translated by Bela Shayevich (PRH/Random House; RH Audio; OverDrive Sample), her fifth book first published in Russia in 2013.

On the strength of the NYT‘s profile on Saturday, the author’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, translated by Bela Shayevich (Random; RH Audio; OverDrive Sample) is rocketing up the Amazon sales charts, close to breaking into the top 100.

The NYT‘s calls the oral history:

“An intimate portrait of a country yearning for meaning after the sudden lurch from Communism to capitalism in the 1990s plunged it into existential crisis … Tolstoyan in scope, driven by the idea that history is made not only by major players but also by ordinary people talking in their kitchens … With every page, the book makes clear how President Vladimir V. Putin manages to hold his grip on a country of 143 million people across 11 time zones.”

All four trade review journals gave it a star with Kirkus calling it “Profoundly significant literature as history” and PW saying: “Alexievich’s work turns Solzhenitsyn inside out and overpowers recent journalistic accounts of the era. Readers must possess steely nerves and a strong desire to get inside the Soviet psyche in order to handle the blood, gore, and raw emotion.”

Holds are running roughly 2:1 on light orders in libraries we checked.

Librarians can look for more to come. The NYT reports that, in 2017 and 2018, Random House will issue translations of Alexievich’s previous work by the powerhouse team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (who brought new life to War and Peace). The paper also reports that Alexievich has plans for new collections, on aging and on love, and is planning a cross-country trip around the former Soviet Union to conduct interviews.

Of her books in English translations, the two that have been published here are Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War (Norton; 9780393336863; 1992) and Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (hardcover, Dalkey Archive Press; trade pbk Macmillan/Picador, 2006), which won the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Title output slows down next week, in anticipation of the Memorial Day weekend, traditionally a busy time in stores.

Two best-selling series wrap on Tuesday. The final book in Rick Yancey’s 5th Wave series, The Last Star  (Penguin/Putnam Books for Young Readers) and on the adult side, Justin Cronin’s The City of Mirrors (PRH/Ballantine).

Several consumer media and peer picks offer fodder for readers advisors (see below).

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 May 24, 2016

Consumer Media Pick

This Too Shall Pass , Milena Busquets, (PRH/Hogarth)

People magazine’s “Book of the Week,” described as, “Adrift after dementia and then death have stolen her mother, 40-year-old Blanca heads to … a Spanish coastal village … As she tries to ease her grief with sex and drugs, she turns the lives of those around her upside down … both poignant and funny.”

It is also picked as one of the more literary-minded Lit Hub‘s “Five Summer Reads,” — “Somehow she mixes a heady aperitif of a book that combines quirky, sexy, and gloomy in perfect measures as protagonist Blanca faces losing her mother and her mojo on a Spanish beach.”

Media Magnet

Tribe : On Homecoming and Belonging, Sebastian Junger, (Hachette/Twelve; Hachette Audio; Hachette Large Type)

The author of The Perfect Storm, is sure to get major media attention for his book about our returning troops. In an early review in the daily NYT, Jennifer Senior say Junger “writes, simply … After months of combat, during which ‘soldiers all but ignore differences of race, religion and politics within their platoon,’ they return to the United States to find ‘a society that is basically at war with itself. People speak with incredible contempt about — depending on their views — the rich, the poor, the educated, the foreign-born'” and therefor  has ” accidentally written one of  [the Presidential campaign’s]  most intriguing political books. All without mentioning a single candidate, or even the president, by name.”

Peer Picks

Food and lies are the topics of this week’s peer picks.

Sweetbitter, Stephanie Danler (PRH/Knopf; Random House Audio; BOT)

One of the season’s highly anticipated fiction debuts (the author was profiled in the NYT  back when the book was signed) arrives to much media attention, with an admiring early review by Dwight Garner in the NYT, a profile in the Wall Street Journal  [may require subscription] and coverage in Vogue, and a near-rave from Entertainment Weekly.Holds in bellwether libraries indicate this is capturing riders attention. The author is also scheduled for an appearance on the Charlie Rose show. A hit with GalleyChatters, it is also a LibraryReads selection:y

“At her new job at one of NYC’s posh restaurants, Tess falls for a mysterious bartender and negotiates the politics of the service industry while building a social life. Danler drew from her own experience and the writing is vivid and stimulating. I’m always interested in a story about a girl trying to find her place in the world and her adventures, but anyone who appreciates writing that pulses with life will drink this down.” — Sonia Reppe, Stickney-Forest View Public Library, Stickney, IL

The second LibraryReads pick coming next week is Smoke, Dan Vyleta (PRH/Doubleday; Random House Audio; BOT; OverDrive Sample).

“In an alternate historical London, people who lie reveal themselves by giving off smoke but the rules of how this works are complicated. There are some people who can lie and not trigger any smoke and this lends an interesting element to the story. The rules we are given are changeable. The setting lends itself well to the story. The writing is descriptive, and the tone is atmospheric. Similar authors that come to my mind were Neil Gaiman and China Mieville. This is a dark, delicious tale.” — Jennifer Ohzourk, St. Louis Public Library, St. Louis, MO

Smoke is also getting media attention. It’s featured in the Wall Street Journal [may require subscriptio]. The author will be interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered on Tuesday. Reviews are scheduled for upcoming issues of the Washington Post, the daily New York Times and the
New York Times Book Review.

It is also a June Indie Next pick.

Wrapping up the week is another Indie Next pick, Dinner with Edward: A Story of an Unexpected Friendship, Isabel Vincent (Workman/Algonquin).

“Dinner With Edward is the charming story of the author’s friendship with her friend’s widower father. Vincent does a wonderful job evoking the sensuous details of the meals they shared, but this is more than just a foodie memoir: it is an exploration of the nature of friendship, aging, loss, and how we define our identities as the world changes around us. Despite the sadness of some of its topics, Dinner With Edward is ultimately a warm, feel-good story.” — Carol Schneck Varner, Schuler Books & Music, Okemos, MI

Tie-ins

The big tie-in news this week is, well, giant, as in BFG. There is both a book version and an audio version in anticipation of Steven Spielberg’s film, opening on July 1,  The BFG Movie Tie-In, Roald Dahl (Penguin/Puffin Books; Paperback; $7.99; Audio tie-in, Listening Library; OverDrive Sample).

As we wrote earlier, a new trailer was recently released, as well as the news that the film got a 4-1/2 minute standing ovation at the Cannes film festival when it premiered last Saturday.

For our full list of upcoming adaptations, download our Books to Movies and TV and link to our listing of tie-ins.