For two seasons viewers have learned to expect the Starz’s TV series Outlander to begin in April. Not this year. It will debut in September.

Entertainment Weekly reports season 3, based on Voyager (PRH/Delacorte, 1993), will run for 13 episodes and that shooting has moved from Scotland to Cape Town, South Africa to “the former sets of the Starz series Black Sails.” For those who do not know the books, part of the action of Voyager involves pirates and takes place on ships as Jamie and Claire travel to the West Indies.

Carmi Zlotnik, President of Programming at Starz, said “While Droughtlander will last just a little longer, we feel it is important to allow the production the time and number of episodes needed to tell the story of the Voyager book in its entirety … The scale of this book is immense, and we owe the fans the very best show. Returning in September will make that possible.”

A specific release date has not been announced. A tie-in edition also has not been announced.

“The words are like an incantation, a spell.”

That is how the NYT describes “In the great green room,” the beloved opening of Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon.

The classic bedtime story is in the news again because a new Brown book is forthcoming, Good Day, Good Night (HarperCollins; Oct. 3, 2017). The fresh tale follows the little bunny of the great green room as he wakes up in the morning, explores outside, and then says goodnight to all he has found.

The paper says it “can be read as part variation on, part expansion of Goodnight Moon … the theme and cadences will be instantly familiar.”

In keeping with recent efforts to find and assemble new works from unearthed private papers and collections, this new book has been created by an editor who combined two fragments Brown wrote in 1950.

Loren Long provides the illustrations. In 2005, he worked on another iconic children’s book, creating new art for The Little Engine That Could. He is also the creator of the Otis the tractor books and illustrated president Obama’s Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters.

Philip Pullman is writing a new trilogy featuring his beloved character Lyra Bevacqua, to be titled The Book of Dust. The first in the series, as yet untitled, is scheduled for release on October 19, 2017 from PRH/Knopf Books for Young Readers (ISBN 9780375815300).

Breaking normal practice to cover the story, NPR’s Morning Edition noted, “we don’t typically cover book announcements at NPR,”  but did so because readers have been waiting seventeen years for Lyra to return.

The first book of the new series will take place a decade before the fist book in The Golden Compass series, His Dark Materials, when Lyra is a baby. The second and third volumes will be set ten years after the last book of the earlier series (The Amber Spyglass), when Lyra is an adult.

Pullman tells NPR that readers should think of the new trilogy as a new story: “you don’t have to read it before you read [the original trilogy] … this is another story that comes after it, so it’s not a sequel, and it’s not a prequel, it’s an equal … It’s a sort of companion book, if you like. It doesn’t stand before [His Dark Materials], it doesn’t stand after it, it stands beside it.”

While a bit cagey about the plot, he says it is “More about the nature of Dust, and consciousness, and what it means to be a human being.” It features other characters readers know from the first trilogy and will include a great flood.

Pullman has already extended the His Dark Materials universe with two novellas and an audiobook-only spin-off, The Collectors. He tells NPR he is returning once more because “I sensed a big story. I sensed the presence, in the way that you do, of another story that hadn’t been told, and I went closer and … thought about it and lived with it for a while and discovered that yes, it was a big story, and it did deserve to be told, it deserves its own books.”

Final cover art (the image above is from the UK press release) and title will be revealed in the coming months.

The attention has already sent Pullman’s titles racing up Amazon’s sales rankings. The Book of Dust is currently ranked #285 and an omnibus edition of the full trilogy is now #302, up from yesterday’s ranking of #17,891.

NPR featured two stories on the news.

The film adaptation of R.J. Palacio’s Wonder (RH/ Knopf Young Readers, 2012; Brilliance Audio; OverDrive Sample)  has been moved from this coming April to the week before Thanksgiving, setting it up for family holiday viewing, reports Entertainment Weekly, as a result of “the film’s positive testing with families.”

The film stars Jacob Tremblay (Room), Julia Roberts, Daveed Diggs (Hamilton), Mandy Patinkin, Owen Wilson, and Sonia Braga (Luke Cage). Tremblay plays a young boy with a facial deformity who enters a new school. Roberts plays his mother and Diggs fills the role of a teacher who, says Deadline Hollywood, uses literature “to teach what it means to be human.” Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) directs.

The shift in date puts the movie into direct competition with Justice League, indicating the studio believes it can hold its own against one of the most highly anticipated superhero films of the year.

The novel has enjoyed 78 weeks on the NYT Children’s Middle Grade Hardcover list, and is currently sitting at #2, moving up from when the film was first announced.

A tie-in comes out November 7, 2017, Wonder Movie Tie-In Edition, R. J. Palacio (PRH/Knopf Books for Young Readers). The cover is not yet finalized. 

Historian Ron Chernow is moving from the Revolutionary War era to the Civil War era with a biography of Ulysses S. Grant (PRH/Penguin; ISBN 9781594204876) coming October 17, 2017. The book will be massive, running 928 pages.

The Associated Press reports that it will be “the most high-profile effort yet to change the reputation of the country’s 18th president” from what was, as described by the publisher, that of “a chronic loser and inept businessman … whose tenure came to symbolize the worst excesses of the Gilded Age” to being regarded by Ta-Nehisi Coates as a literary hero.

Chernow has had some luck in refurbishing historical figures. His 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton (PRH/Penguin) was the basis for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony Award-winning sensation. Chernow attributed its success to spurring him on to finish the new book.

The new year will be “a feast” for books, according to The Millions in their just-released “Most Anticipated: The Great First-Half 2017 Book Preview.” 

Their choices tend towards the literary, but they include many authors with a ready audience, including Dan Chaon, Ill Will (PRH/Ballantine; RH Audio; March 7), Joshua Ferris, The Dinner Party (Hachette/Little, Brown; May 2), and Elizabeth Strout, Anything Is Possible (PRH/RH; RH Audio; April 25).

Haruki Murakami, Richard Russo, George Saunders, Roxane Gay, J.M. Coetzee, Jesmyn Ward, and Cormac McCarthy are also part of the gathering.

Not on that list is the expected blockbuster of the summer, the second novel by Paula Hawkins, Into the Water (PRH/Riverhead; RH Audio/BOT; May 2). As we noted earlier, Entertainment Weekly includes it in their picks of “The 23 Most Anticipated Books of 2017,” 

EW also features All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai (PRH/Dutton; Penguin Audio; OverDrive Sample; Feb, 7.), a debut about “A man from a utopian parallel universe [who] ends up in our 2016 after a time-travel mishap.” The book is also the number one title on the February Indie Next list.

Join our online chat with the author on Jan. 11.

Links to both lists are posted on the right, under the header “Season Previews.” We add links as new lists arrive.

Entertainment Weekly‘s newest issue rings in the New Year with a listing of what to read, listen to, and watch in 2017, including their picks of “The 23 Most Anticipated Books of 2017.”

Already on many people’s minds is the expected blockbuster of the summer, the second novel by Paula Hawkins, Into the Water (PRH/Riverhead; RH Audio/BOT; May 2, 2017).

EW writes “Hawkins is very good at playing with your perceptions – and she does it again in her new novel.” The “First Look” feature highlights the creation of the cover image. The designer says that the novel is “rich and creepy and suspenseful” and that she wanted to get the “story’s murkiness and beauty to come through.” 

Already established as a major short story writer, George Saunders is set to publish his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (PRH/RH; RH Audio/BOT; Feb. 14). EW says the story, which  “unspools during one long night in a graveyard” is “narrated by multiple voices.”

Also releasing his first novel is the publisher of Quirk Books, Jason Rekulak. The Impossible Fortress (S&S; S&S Audio, Feb. 7). Readers should get ready to “Revel” in this novel set in 1987, says EW, “about a teen boy, a coveted copy of Playboy and a computer-nerd girl.”

Many of the featured titles are available for immediate download or to request (sorry, the Paula Hawkins’ title is not available yet). Check our Edelweiss collection.

Three of the titles, set for release this fall, are not yet listed on Edelweiss:

All The Dirty Parts by Daniel Handler (Bloomsbury, Aug. 29, 2017)

Endurance: My Year In Space, A Lifetime of Discovery by Scott Kelly (PRH/Knopf, Nov. 7, 2017)

Heather, The Totality by Matthew Weiner (Little, Brown, Fall 2017)

Featured on the issue’s cover is Blade Runner 2049, a spin off of the original film which was based on Philip K. Dick’s SF classic, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Also listed are several more direct adaptations, including HBO’s biopic The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks with “First Look” photos from the shoot. Screenwriter and director George C. Wolfe notes that the story resonates today, “This woman’s cells helped heal the planet, yet her children were suffering … I found that dichotomy incredibly moving.”

For kids, there’s Captain Underpants starring Kevin Hart, Ed Helms, and Thomas Middleditch. EW quotes director David Soren, “because the books are known for their irreverent, genre-bending style, the film plays with form in a similar way, switching between traditional CG animation and other media, from hand-drawn 2D comic scenes to sock puppet sequences. (Pilkey’s “Flip-o-Ramas” from the novels even play a role.)”

Robert Redford and Jane Fonda team up in the final book by Kent Haruf, Our Souls At Night. EW points out the pair who played newlyweds in Barefoot in the Park now play aging neighbors who seek solace with each other, only to upset both the town and their families. Fonda says of her relationship with Redford, “We show up for each other…We always have.” EW responds, “We’ll be showing up too.”

Also included are first looks at the following adaptations:

Outlander, Season 3, begins on Starz in February, based on the third book in Diana Gabaldon’s series, Voyager

The Lost City of Z, the movie, coming April 14, is based on the book by David Grann

American Gods, the Starz series begins in April, based on Neil Gaiman’s 2001 novel

It, the movie, based on the novel by Stephen King, opens in theaters on Sept. 8

Our Books to Movies & TV listing has information on many more upcoming adaptations. For tie-ins, check our Edelweiss collection.

Daniel Brühl (Rush, Inglorious Bastards, The Zookeeper’s Wife) and Luke Evans (The Girl on The Train, The Hobbit trilogy) will star in the TNT adaptation of Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, reports Deadline Hollywood.

Brühl will play the criminal psychologist in the novel, Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, and Evans will play newspaper reporter John Moore as they join forces to conduct an investigation into a series of gruesome murders ravaging gilded age NYC (Deadline, which generally gives scant attention to the source material, provides an unusually long and vivid description of the story).

This moves the long-gestating series closer to the screen, with an expected air-date of late 2017. After several attempts to adapt it as a movie, as we noted earlier, the best selling 1994 psychological thriller was planned for a small screen run as an 8-part series. Previously, Cary Fukunaga (Beasts of No Nation, True Detective) was attached to direct, but now he’s an executive producer and Jakob Verbruggen (episodes of House of Cards, Black Mirror) will take over the director’s role.

Filming is expected to begin early in the new year.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Award, Canadian Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Norton; Recorded Books; OverDrive Sample) did not win, but is now sweeping Canada’s literary awards.

It won the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize yesterday, an award worth $100,000 dollars.

The announcement said the novel:

“entranced the jurors with its detailed, layered, complex drama of classical musicians and their loved ones trying to survive two monstrous insults to their humanity: Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in mid-twentieth century China and the Tiananmen Square massacre of protestors in Beijing in 1989. Do Not Say We Have Nothing addresses some of the timeless questions of literature: who do we love, and how do the love of art, of others and ourselves sustain us individually and collectively in the face of genocide? A beautiful homage to music and to the human spirit, Do Not Say We Have Nothing is both sad and uplifting in its dramatization of human loss and resilience in China and in Canada.”

It also won the highly prestigious Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. That jury panel deemed it:

“an elegant, nuanced and perfectly realized novel that, fugue-like, presents the lives of individuals, collectives, and generations caught in the complexities of history. Tracing the intertwined lives of two families, moving from Revolutionary China to Canada, this ambitious work explores the persistence of past and the power of art, raising meaningful questions for our times.”

The NYT calls it “a beautiful, sorrowful work. The book impresses in many senses: It stamps the memory with an afterimage; it successfully explores larger ideas about politics and art (the mind is never still while reading it); it has the satisfying, epic sweep of a 19th-century Russian novel, spanning three generations and lapping up against the shores of two continents.”

Many libraries we checked bought few copies and are now seeing holds ratios skyrocketing while others with more copies are seeing holds top 3:1.

A new trailer for Star Wars: Rogue One debuted today on CBS This Morning.

The two and a half minute trailer is examined for clues to the story line by The Verge noting, “Disney has been careful to downplay its expectations for Rogue One. It’s the first major film set outside of the traditional saga, and has been characterized as ‘an experiment’ by the company’s CEO, Bob Iger.”

There are several tie-ins, of course but, following the precedent set by The Force Awakens, the official novelizations for Rogue One will not be released until after the film premieres on Dec. 16, 2016, to avoid spoilers.

Arriving ahead of the movie is a prequel, the Catalyst (Star Wars): A Rogue One Novel, (PRH/Del Rey, Nov. 15, 2016) written by James Luceno, the author of a number of earlier Star Wars titles.

See our downloadable list here. Our full list of upcoming tie-ins here.

Just weeks before Inferno hits screens, comes news that Robert Langdon will star in yet another book by Dan Brown, Origin (PRH/Doubleday; Sep 26, 2017; ISBN 9780385514231), the fifth in the series.

The news is being widely reported. In a press release Doubleday says:

“In keeping with his trademark style, Brown interweaves codes, science, religion, history, art and architecture into this new novel.
Origin thrusts Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon into the dangerous intersection of humankind’s two most enduring questions, and the earth-shaking discovery that will answer them”

The title is already on wholesaler systems for pre-order.