EarlyWord

Librarians picked it first. The number one LibraryReads pick for May 2015, Uprooted, by Naomi Novik (PRH/Del Rey; RH Audio; OverDrive Sample) was announced as the winner of the 2016 Locus Award for Fantasy on Saturday, having also won the Nebula last month.

The winner in the Science Fiction category is Ancillary Mercy, by Ann Leckie (Hachette/Orbit; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample) the final book in the series which began with Ancillary Justice  winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Awards. The middle novel, Ancillary Sword, also won the Locus award in 2015.

The late Terry Pratchett won the YA category for The Shepherd’s Crown (HarperCollins; HarperCollinsAudio and Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample).

Pratchett and his fellow nominees in the YA category are all male, a choice that has raised eyebrows even as the Locus awards have avoided much of the controversy that has plagued the Hugo awards.

The Guardian reports on the story, saying that “the Locus awards were broadly representative of a sci-fi field that is continuing to grow in diversity: 18 female to 17 male writers, with many upcoming writers of colour among the voters’ top picks. Placed in that context, the way the YA category has turned out seems less like myopic sexism, and more indicative of the older demographic of readers who read Locus magazine and see the YA genre from their own preferences.”

However, YA author Gwen Katz said:

“YA, including YA fantasy, is a vastly female-dominated age category, but there’s a history of male authors being picked out for awards or heralded as champions of the age category … Yet another all-male slate reinforces the message that an art form primarily practised by women and girls only becomes noteworthy when a man gets in on it.”

The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu (S&S/Saga; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample) won best First Novel.

Neil Gaiman won twice: in the Novelette category for ‘Black Dog,’’ a piece in Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances (HC/William Morrow; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample), which also netted Gaiman another trophy for best Collection.

Beyond the winners, readers’ advisors looking for suggestions in SFF will find a ready list of titles in the award’s short lists.

The SF nominees read like a who’s who of the genre:

• The Water Knife, Paolo Bacigalupi (PRH/Knopf; OverDrive Sample)

• Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson (Hachette/Orbit; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample)

• Seveneves, Neal Stephenson (HC/ William Morrow; OverDrive Sample)

• A Borrowed Man, Gene Wolfe (Macmillan/Tor; OverDrive Sample)

The Fantasy short list is equally impressive:

• Karen Memory, Elizabeth Bear (Macmillan/Tor; OverDrive Sample)

• The House of Shattered Wings, Aliette de Bodard (PRH/Roc; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample)

• Wylding Hall, Elizabeth Hand (PS; Open Road; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample)

• The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin (Hachette/Orbit; OverDrive Sample)

The First Novel Short list points to the breadth of these two genres, their international flavor, and the range of subjects being explored:

• Sorcerer to the Crown, Zen Cho (PRH/Ace; OverDrive Sample)

• Signal to Noise, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Solaris; OverDrive Sample)

• The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, Natasha Pulley (Macmillan/Bloomsbury; OverDrive Sample)

• The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, Kai Ashante Wilson (Macmillan/Tor; Macmillan Audio; OverDrive Sample)

The controversial YA category included:

• Half a War, Joe Abercrombie (PRH/Del Rey; OverDrive Sample)

• Half the World, Joe Abercrombie (PRH/Del Rey; OverDrive Sample)

• Harrison Squared, Daryl Gregory (Macmillan/Tor; OverDrive Sample)

• Shadowshaper, Daniel José Older (Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine; Scholastic Audio ; OverDrive Sample)

Also useful for readers advisors is the annual reading list created by Locus, a gold mine of titles and authors to know.

The full list of winners is online.

Holds Leaders

The Games, James Patterson, Mark Sullivan, (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio; Hachette Large Print; OverDrive Sample)

Currently, Patterson has only 4 books on NYT Best seller lists — the first two titles in his new trade paperback original series BookShots, which debuted last week on the combined list, 15th Affair at #14 on the hardcover fiction list after 7 weeks  and Jacky Ha-Ha on the Childrens Middle Grade list after 13 weeks. So it’s high time to publish a new title.

Next week’s title is the next in the Private series about a private security agency cleverly named Private. Head of the agency Jack Morgan heads to Rio to provide security for the Summer Olympics, as he did  the 2012 Olympics in London in Private Games.

First Comes Love, Emily Giffin, (PRH/Ballantine; RH Audio; BOT; OverDrive Sample)

Griffin comes off her #1 NYT best seller of last year with a new title told from the perspective of two very different sisters, one who has a traditional family, but envies her sister’s single life. Of course, the single sister is desperate for a child. This one is described by PW as “Giffin at her finest, a fantastic, memorable story.” Kirkus agrees, “Giffin’s fans will be pleased with this fast-paced, witty, and thoughtful new offering.”

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 June 27, 2016

Advance Attention

Crisis of Character: A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience with Hillary, Bill, and How They Operate, Gary J. Byrne, (Hachette/Center Street; Hachette Audio)

As we wrote earlier this month, this embargoed title, the latest in a line of books aimed at discrediting Hillary Clinton, has topped Amazon’s sales rankings for weeks. Byrne is a  former Secret Service officer who was assigned to the White House when Bill Clinton was in office. Politico reports that Secret Service veterans “blast writer Gary Byrne for having ‘underlying motives.'”

Consumer Media Picks

We Are Not Such Things: The Murder of a Young American, a South African Township, and the Search for Truth and Reconciliation, Justine van der Leun (PRH/Spiegel & Grau; OverDrive Sample)

Free-lance journalist van der Leun discovers some uncomfortable truths about  a story that made headlines in its day. During the Clinton administration, a young American activist was murdered in South Africa. Her parents, in an amazing act of grace, forgave the killers.The only book reviewed in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly, which gives it and A- and says, it is  “a story steeped in extraordinary characters and circumstances …a dense and nuanced portrait of a country whose confounding, convoluted past is never quite history”

Peer Picks

Two June LibraryReads titles come to the shelves this week.

 We Could Be Beautiful, Swan Huntley (RH/Doubleday; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample), has already appeared on several summer book previews and is this week’s People magazine’s “Book of the Week,” which calls it a “riveting psychological thriller [that] takes you inside the world of Manhattan’s elite — and keeps you on tenterhooks.”

“Wealthy art collector Catherine spends her time fussing over her tiny boutique card shoppe so that she can feel like a productive member of society. She meets the handsome and refined William Stockton, yet something seems just a little too good to be true. The plot thickens as long hidden family secrets emerge. Huntley certainly knows how to build up the suspense. This debut novel includes some nice plot twists and Catherine’s character evolves favorably. Recommended for fans of psychological fiction.” — Mary Vernau, Tyler Public Library, Tyler, TX

Missing, Presumed, Susie Steiner (PRH/Random House; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample).

“This is a thoughtful police procedural about a missing person case and the secrets that come to the surface when a feisty detective becomes relentless in finding the truth. Edith is a successful college student from a well-known family, but all is not what it seems. Detective Manon Bradshaw is feeling the pressure to quickly resolve the case. What sets this apart from other detective stories is how the lead character is brought to life; she exposes her melancholy and it adds a satisfying mix to the thrills. Recommended for fans of Tana French.” — Andrienne Cruz, Azusa City Library, Azusa, CA

Three titles booksellers enjoyed also publish this week:

A Certain Age, Beatriz Williams (HC/William Morrow; HarperAudio).

“Open the pages of A Certain Age and be drawn into Williams’ rich, atmospheric world of Manhattan in the 1920s — a world where society pages hint at gossip, speakeasies tease with gin, and secrets and hidden desires lie just below the polished veneer of the fashionably dressed and well-bred families of the city. This deft retelling of Richard Strauss’ comic opera Der Rosenkavalier is simply exquisite.” —Dawn Rennert, The Concord Bookshop, Concord, MA

A Hundred Thousand Worlds, Bob Proehl (PRH/Viking; Penguin Audio/BOT).

“Nine-year-old Alex and his mom, Valerie — the ex-star of a superhero TV show — make their way across the country, Comic-Con by Comic-Con, toward a future of inevitable loss. They visit the fallen heroes, wise women, and wizards of pen-and-ink who have all shaped the story of their lives. Pushed and pulled by so many other people’s stories, can Alex and Valerie learn to write their own?” —Cat Nichols, Bookshop Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA

Soft in the Head, Marie-Sabine Roger, translated by Frank Wynne (PRH/Pushkin Press; OverDrive Sample).

“Two disparate individuals pass the time counting pigeons in the town park and finally make each other’s acquaintance: Marguerite, a retired and lonely 80-something plant scientist, and Germain, an unemployed, undereducated, dim-witted 45-year-old who lives in a trailer behind his mother’s house. Soon, Marguerite is reading to Germain, who eventually overcomes his childhood aversion and begins to read himself. This is a lovely story of the redeeming qualities of civil conversation, the possibility of friendship bridging many years and inquiring minds, and the worlds opened up through reading.” —Darwin Ellis, Books on the Common

Tie-ins

Pete’s Dragon Junior Novel: With 8 Pages of Photos From The Movie!, Disney Book Group (Hachette/Disney Press) ties in to the new Disney re-vamp of their 1977 musical film of the same name,  about a young boy and his friendly (and often invisible) dragon.

The new film changes the story and stars Bryce Dallas Howard, Robert Redford, and Karl Urban. It opens Aug. 12.

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

#MrowbackMonday
In 2008 I bought Chernow’s Hamilton bio to read on vacation.@HamiltonMusical rehearsal starts today. pic.twitter.com/C1CK2Xjdxw

— Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) June 15, 2015

(via USA Today)

As a result of Miranda’s summer reading pick, Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton (Penguin Books) went back on the NYT Paperback Non-fiction list at #2 ten years after it was published in trade paperback (in 2005, its highest position was #12). Currently, it is #1 on that list.

Seth Meyers interviewed Neil Gaiman on Late Night yesterday about his first collection of nonfiction [video here] and the upcoming STARZ adaptation of American Gods, set to premiere in 2017 [video here] .

On compiling his nonfiction collection The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction (HC/William Morrow; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample), Gaiman admitted he had difficulty locating some of the pieces. In one case. he even had to enlist the help of a super obsessive fan.

Gaiman is interviewed in more depth about the book in today’s L.A. Times.

Anticipation is building for the STARZ series adaptation of American Gods. Today, The Hollywood Reporter offers a get-up-to-speed guide (amusingly, they feel the need to tell their readers that it began life as a book). They also give kudos to the choice of director, Bryan Fuller (Pushing Daisies, Wonderfalls, Hannibal) saying. “His shows lean toward the supernatural and the visually sumptuous, so he’s the perfect person to bring American Gods to the small screen.”

After nearly a decade of writing novels to steady but muted notice, Paul Tremblay may have broken through.

Tremblay won the Bram Stoker award this year for A Head Full of Ghosts (HC/William Morrow, June 2015; paperback, May 10, 2016; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample),  a novel that earned him comparisons to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House by io9, a rave in the NYT, and the attention of Stephen King.

Now Tremblay is back with Disappearance at Devil’s Rock (HC/William Morrow; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample). NPR reviewer Jason Heller, a senior writer at The A.V. Club, says is “it’s even more head-spinning” than his Stoker winner.

Heller calls the book a “dizzying emotional vortex” full of “immediacy [and] immaculate storytelling” and says Tremblay’s “characters are rendered vividly and sensitively. The ambience is all shadows.”

Terrance Rafferty, in a round-up of new horror titles in the NYT, says that Tremblay (among others he highlights) is the heir to Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Straub, and Edgar Allan Poe and that his book “is never, at any point, exactly what you expect it to be.”

Tor.com offers a rave review, concluding: “Tremblay left me speechless, breathless, deeply unsettled and impossibly impressed. I love being genuinely scared by a book, so Disappearance at Devil’s Rock left me with a giant smile, too … In a summer of great horror releases, this one is among the very best.”

Holds are over a 3:1 ratio at several libraries we checked while others have yet to order or are showing circ. about equal to copies.

Get an early look at Margaret Atwood’s first graphic novel via BuzzFeed. A mix of advocacy (for cats and wildlife) and storytelling, it pairs Atwood with noted illustrator Johnnie Christmas in a tale featuring a superhero scientist who is a part cat and part bird, Angel Catbird (PRH/Dark Horse; Sept. 6, 2016; ISBN: 9781506700632; $14.99).

As we noted in May, Dark Horse acquiring editor says it will be “a humorous, action-driven, pulp-inspired story … [with] …a lot of cat puns …. a strange mix of Will Eisner’s The Spirit, Grant Morrison and Chas Truog’s Animal Man, and Ryan North and Erica Henderson’s Squirrel Girl.”

Atwood told BuzzFeed that comics are not new to her, saying “I grew up in the 1940s drawing comics, and I’ve continued: I even drew a strip in the 1970s.”

Angel Catbird is not the only comic Atwood has in the works. She is part of The Secret Loves of Geek Girls: Expanded Edition, Hope Nicholson (PRH/Dark Horse; on sale Oct. 18), an anthology that started as a kickstarter campaign, reports The Guardian.

Atwood tweeted about it last year:

The Secret Loves of Geek Girls is popular on @Kickstarter! http://t.co/OJ1tv7FyOJ (I’m white-hair w. cat; pleased I have long legs at last!)

— Margaret E. Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) June 23, 2015

Driven by heavy media attention, The Girls by Emma Cline (PRH/Random House; RH Audio; BOT; OverDrive Sample),

debuts on the new USA Today best seller list, landing at the #9 spot. Since that list ranks all categories and formats of books together, we can expect to see it debut much higher on the upcoming NYT Hardcover Fiction list [UPDATE: Soon after we posted this, the new NYT list was released and The Girls is #3. That list shows sales through June 18, four days after the book was published. We’ll see in coming weeks if word of mouth works in its favor].

In libraries holds continue to be very strong, running at 5:1 ratios and higher. Many libraries have ordered additional copies  to keep up with demand.

Librarian Nancy Pearl interviews one of her favorite authors, Guy Gavriel Kay for Book Lust TV this month.

The pair, who have talked several times before, start by discussing Children of Earth and Sky (PRH/NAL; OverDrive Sample), Kay’s newest book, published in May and,set in the same general world as Sailing to Sarantium (a particular favorite of Nancy’s) and Lord of Emperors. It also falls within the general universe of The Last Light of the Sun and The Lions of Al-Rassan.

Kay explains that he likes to write stand-alones rather than series as endings are very important to him and he wants each book to have its own arc. He also wants readers to enjoy every book for itself, without feeling as if they are missing an insider joke but does offer long-time readers “grace notes, small, glancing allusions to the previous books.”

The two discuss Kay’s particular brand of fantasy, which he calls a “quarter turn to the fantastic” as well as the rise of popularity of the fantasy genre in pop culture. Kay believes the rush of fantasy novels rests in the fact that the “book industry is a copy-cat industry” and much “cloning” takes place. Of his own take on fantasy, he says he likes to compress time so that readers get an immediate sense of what happens over hundreds of years.

The interview concludes with Kay detailing what he is currently reading and recommending to others: Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote, Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread, and Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk.

Rising dramatically on Amazon, leapfrogging over nearly 1500 titles ahead of it to move from #1,494 to #45 is White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg (PRH/Viking; Tantor Audio; OverDrive Sample).

The jump coincides with a rave NYT daily review, running today on the front page of section C and also online. In it Dwight Garner calls the book “formidable and truth-dealing” and says Isenberg:

“has written an eloquent volume that is more discomforting and more necessary than a semitrailer filled with new biographies of the founding fathers and the most beloved presidents … This estimable book rides into the summer doldrums like rural electrification … It deals in the truths that matter, which is to say, the uncomfortable ones.”

The book is receiving attention from a wide range of media, including Slate, the WSJ‘s SpeakEasy podcast, and LitHub, which calls it one of “Five Books Making News This Week.” On the trade side, it has received starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly, both of which call it “riveting.”

Holds so far are low in libraries we checked but like Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond and A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, it seems destined to be a title that will spark discussion for months to come and appear on end-of-the year best lists.

A second full-length trailer for Tim Burton’sadaptation of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children has just been released. It gives a closer  at some of the characters, including Barron, a villain created for the film and played by Samuel L. Jackson.

Starring Asa Butterfield as 16-year-old Jacob with Eva Green (star of Showtime’s Penny Dreadful) as Miss Peregrine and Chris O’Dowd, Ella Purnell, Allison Janney, Rupert Everett, Terence Stamp and Judi Dench, the movie opens.on Sept. 30.

The tie-in:

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (Movie Tie-In Edition)
Ransom Riggs
Quirk Books, Trade Paperback, August 2, 2016

Also coming is a behind-the-scenes companion book:

The Art of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children: The Art of the Film
Leah Gallo
Quirk Books, Hardcover, August 30, 2016
$39.99 USD, $49.99 CAD

The currently hyper-popular psychological suspense genre is examined in depth by film critic Terrence Rafferty in the new issue of The Atlantic, declaring in the headline, “Women Are Writing the Best Crime Novels,”  

Among upcoming titles, Rafferty is particularly keen on The Darkest Secret, Alex Marwood (PRH/Penguin, Aug. 30) and You Will Know Me, Megan Abbott (Hachette/Little, Brown, July 26), calling the first “brilliant” and the second “superb.”

The genre was created by women authors, amply proved he says by the Library of America’s two-volume collection, Women Crime Writers (2015) and it now has “many more daughters than sons,” running down a global roster:

America — Megan Abbott, Alison Gaylin, Laura Lippman

England — Alex Marwood, Paula Hawkins, Sophie Hannah

Scotland — Val McDermid, Denise Mina

Ireland — Tana French

Norway — Karin Fossum

Japan — Natsuo Kirino

These authors have ushered in a new order, that, says Rafferty, “is not a world Raymond Chandler would have recognized … The female writers, for whatever reason (men?), don’t much believe in heroes, which makes their kind of storytelling perhaps a better fit for these cynical times. Their books are light on gunplay, heavy on emotional violence … pure noir, velvety and pitiless.”

If you’ve longed to attend San Diego Comic-Con, this year you can experience it vicariously. Syfy Presents Live From Comic-Con will run on the network the three nights of the show, July 21-23.

Host Will Arnett will, according to Deadline, “invite fans at the network’s outdoor stage to discuss and engage in the Con’s breaking news, insider party coverage, and exclusive content, along with sneak peeks of the most anticipated films and TV series.”

Too bad they don’t mention actual comics, but perhaps, at least, they will cover the Eisner winners. This year, by the way, a record number of women have been nominated for the award

The Free State of Jones leads the book-to-screen lineup this week with the Matthew McConaughey vehicle, set during the American Civil War, opening in wide release beginning June 23.

The movie recounts the true-life events of a Mississippi farmer who lead a band of rebels against the Confederate army. It is a rarity, an adaptation of a university press book, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War, Victoria E. Bynum (U. of N. Carolina Press), with a tie-in featuring a new afterward by Bynum.

Also on June 23, Queen of the South starts its run on the USA Network, adapting Arturo Perez-Reverte’s story of female drug lords. The novel on which it is based, Queen of the South (PRH/Plume; OverDrive Sample), first published in 2005, now features new cover art advertising the show.

The novel has been adapted previously, as La Reina del Sur, which aired in 2011 on Telemundo (the American Spanish-language network owned by NBCUniversal).

The series is #4 on People magazine’s picks for the week, calling it a “satisfyingly pulpy melodrama.”

On June 24 The Fundamentals of Caring comes to Netflix. Staring Paul Rudd, Craig Roberts, and Selena Gomez, the film is based on The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison (Workman/Algonquin Books; OverDrive Sample). No new tie-in is available for the road-trip story of a teen with muscular dystrophy and his down-on-his-luck care giver, but the 2013 paperback now has cover art promoting the movie.

The film got nods at Sundance but as Variety reports, the market for indie self-actualization films has fallen: “Indie-comedy cliches get a crowdpleasing workout … but the theatrical market isn’t what it used to be … Already acquired by Netflix for SVOD [streaming video on demand] in a pricey pre-fest pick-up, that venue sounds like the best bet to connect with audiences.”

Following on the heels of the “unexpected” success of the adaptation Me Before You (is it possible that Hollywood underestimated the female-led production?), director Thea Shamrock has her next assignment, reports Variety, directing another adaptation, the best selling YA dystopian series The Selection by Kiera Cass, (HarperTeen, 2012) as a feature film for Warner Bros.

Author Cass tweeted that she’s happy with the choice, but reminded fans that the project does not yet have the green light.

Fans don’t need the reminder. Back in 2012, as detailed by the site MoviePilot, the CW network ordered a pilot for a TV series based on the books. Not satisfied with the result, but not willing to give up, a new script was ordered and a new cast. The resulting pilot was also ultimately rejected. This may be the magic third time.

Add comics to the recent flurry of successful Shakespeare re-vamps. Ryan North’s 1,100 page “chooseable-path” graphic novel  Romeo And/Or Juliet (PRH/Riverhead), is based on the famous romance and debuts on the NYT Best Sellers Advice, How-To & Miscellaneous list, landing at #7. He celebrates with a collage image on his homepage, labeled “AWESOME AND/OR WHAAAAAT.”

North’s wildly imaginative adaptation of the bard (in one adventure readers can choose to become the character of a glove) caught the attention of the media. He tells NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday that he thinks this way of encountering Shakespeare makes the play fun again, bringing the old story back to life, and providing a deeper understanding in the process:

“You know what these characters are supposed to be like, and when you kind of push them off the rails a little bit, there’s a sense of breaking the rules that’s a lot of fun.”

He tags his books “Plays weren’t meant to be read. They were meant… to be played.”

New York magazine’s site Vulture offers an illustrated interview that includes North commenting on the 100+ artists contributing to the book (including Noelle Stevenson, Randall Munroe, and Kate Beaton), how the book relates to video games (he mentions on his website that he has created an unlockable character), and the process of reading a work with so many endings. About the latter he says: “just because you give the reader a choice doesn’t mean it’s an easier book.”

Paste offers a gallery of images, showing the range of styles included.

North’s first chooseable-path adventure was the Kickstarter-funded project To Be or Not to Be (Perseus/PGW/Legato/Breadpig, 2013), based on Hamlet, According to North, it was the most funded publishing project in the history of Kickstarter.

North also creates Dinosaur Comics and writes for The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl comics.