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Book Recommendations and Reviews

In celebration of the 20th anniversary of the TWILIGHT books, we're heading to the theater.

This Wednesday, Lionsgate, the media company that acquired the Twilight production company Summit Entertainment, and the official Twilight Instagram account posted about the mega-popular film series returning to theaters for the 20th anniversary of the books by Stephenie Meyer. The captions read: “All five films. Back in theaters. This October. Get tickets now at the link in bio.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Twilight Saga (@twilight) The film series—which provided the breakout roles for Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, and Taylor Lautner—has grossed more than $3.3 billion worldwide, and still has pop culture relevance, more than 10 years since the last movie in the series was released. It follows Bella Swan as she navigates her feelings for vampire Edward Cullen. The theater dates for the rerelease of each of the five movies start on October 29th and go on to November 2nd. The first movie, simply titled Twilight, will be rereleased in theaters on October 29th, while New Moon will come out on October 30th, Eclipse on October 31st, Breaking Down, Part 1 on November 1st, and Breaking Dawn, Part 2 on November 2nd. The exact theaters where the movies will play have not been listed, but they are expected to be all over the country. Additionally, three special editions of Twilight will be published by publisher Little, Brown Books for Young Readers on September 30th. There will be a deluxe hardcover collector’s edition with a foil-stamped slipcase, a 20th-anniversary paperback with inside cover art, and a deluxe hardcover box set with wraparound box art. For the latest on Twilight, make sure to visit the official Instagram. Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books.

An anthology of new Black horror, high fantasy at a garlic festival, a cross-country mission to reunite with a high school crush, and more of today's best book deals

Today’s Featured Book Deals $2.99 Dreadful by Caitlin RozakisGet This Deal $2.99 Liliana’s Invincible Summer by Cristina Rivera GarzaGet This Deal $1.99 The Sweetness of Water by Nathan HarrisGet This Deal $7.99 Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins ReidGet This Deal $2.99 Nettle & Bone by T. KingfisherGet This Deal $4.99 Out There Screaming by Jordan Peele (ed.)Get This Deal $2.99 The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie HartnettGet This Deal $1.99 The Right Swipe by Alisha RaiGet This Deal In Case You Missed Yesterday’s Most Popular Book Deals $1.99 The Book of Alchemy by Suleika JaouadGet This Deal $1.99 First Lie Wins by Ashley ElstonGet This Deal $1.99 Light Years From Home by Mike ChenGet This Deal $1.99 The Crying Book by Heather ChristleGet This Deal Previous Daily Deals $1.99 The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen SnyderGet This Deal $6.99 The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison KingGet This Deal $1.99 The Woman with the Cure by Lynn CullenGet This Deal $0.99 Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale HurstonGet This Deal

The reader-in-chief has entered the chat. Plus: TWILIGHT heads back to theaters, Christmas rom-coms come early, and more.

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. Obama’s Summer Reading List Has Landed America’s reader-in-chief (remember having a president who was intellectually engaged?) has entered the chat. Barack Obama’s 2025 summer reading list is here, and…it looks like a Barack Obama reading list. Always one for consistency, Obama’s picks follow a reliable template. I’m delighted to see Katie Kitamura’s Audition and Sophie Elmhurst’s A Marriage at Sea get shout-outs, and you know dude couldn’t resist Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain and the latest Michael Lewis, which just happens to be about government. Any time there’s an S.A. Cosby book out, it’s going to make an Obama list, and King of Ashes is no exception (indeed, the Obamas’ Higher Ground production company has optioned the novel for adaptation). Wonderful recognition for a few less-well-known novels here, too. Madeleine Thien (The Book of Records) and Anita Desaid (Rosarita) but must thrilled. The Twilight Saga Will Return to Theaters This Fall A moment of silence, please, for my fellow elder millennials as we reckon with our mortality. Next month will mark the 20th anniversary of the publication of Twilight, and theaters are set to cash in on the nostalgia with a limited re-release of the so-bad-they’re-good Twilight Saga movies. Lest you roll your eyes at the thought of sparkly vampires, let me remind you that the blockbuster teen romance series led to a new era of young adult publishing and inspired Fifty Shades of Grey, which singlehandedly brought spicy romance into the mainstream. Today’s BookTok romantasy fans have Stephenie Meyer to thank. Can We Just Not? Yes, I have seen the think-pieces and “investigations” into so-called “performative males” who allegedly carry books to signal their sensitivity to unwitting women. No, none of them are worth linking to. Instead, here’s Jason Diamond, whose recent response says it all: “The thing that gets me the most is the way we went from the “Men don’t read” trend to “Dudes reading are just trying to score babes.”” Please, I beg of you, go touch grass. Christmas Rom-Coms Come Early Few publishing trends have given me more pure enjoyment than the recent mainstreaming of holiday romances. If you could use a shot of holiday fun, here are some Christmas rom-coms hitting the shelves this year.

From skateboarding vampires to reckoning with America's racist history, this month's new YA nonfiction & YA comics are knockouts.

One great thing about the monthly roundup of new YA nonfiction and new YA comics coming at the tippy tail end of the month is that every single book will be available on shelves. You can pop into your retailer or library of choice to request a title and not have to wait a super long time to have that new read in your hands. This month brings a nice mix of both comics and nonfiction for your TBR. Whether you’re looking for a moving memoir, a work of nonfiction that will explain why America is what it is right now thanks to its past, a murder mystery, a skateboarding vampire, or something else entirely, you’re in for plenty of treats with August’s releases. While this month brings more nonfiction and comics than in the previous couple of months, it does not quite have the diversity that these two categories of YA books do more broadly. We’ll see this shift back to more inclusivity in the coming months. New YA Nonfiction for August Knocking on Windows by Jeannine Atkins Only six weeks after beginning her freshman year in college, Jeannine is back at home. She’s suffered an unimaginable trauma at school and now, she’s working to heal. Much of the solace she finds is through reading the works of women writers, and it’s through them, she’s able to begin finding her own voice and path to sharing what exactly happened to her. So when she enrolls in a local college after finding her footing again, Jeannine is once again pushed down by classmates and teachers who minimize what happened to her as no big deal. Rather than back down, though, Jeannine will use her voice, her writing, and inspiration to keep pushing forward and to keep telling her truth. Take Up Space, Y’all by Tess Holliday and Kelly Coon Teen readers looking for a work of nonfiction to feel empowered in their own bodies will find plenty to enjoy in this guide by plus-size model and body positive activist Tess Holiday. This book explores both physical and mental well-being through a variety of quizzes, stories from Tess’s own life and experiences, as well as fun and engaging sidebars. The goal isn’t necessarily body positivity–though that’s a possible outcome, of course–but rather, this guide seeks to reassure young people their experiences are common and there are ways to build one’s confidence that feel achievable…and, of course, feel good. White Lies: How the South Lost the Civil War, Then Rewrote the History by Ann Bausum After the Civil War ended, the South didn’t just give up their fight. They actively rewrote the history of the war and the reasons behind it. This allowed them to change the narrative into what’s known as The Lost Cause, and the echoes of The Lost Cause are seen today through things like the movement to end DEI, to ban books, and more. An example that might resonate is this–we know about Moms for Liberty and their book banning/anti-DEI agenda, but they were far from the first group of women with too much time on their hands to do this. They’re simply the latest iteration of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group that actively erased and redacted history textbooks throughout public schools in the South to change what young people learned about the Civil War and more. Bausum’s book is an attempt to be as truthful about what happened before, during, and after the Civil War, including where and how the outcome of that war echoes today. The description compares her work to Howard Zinn’s A Young People’s History of the United States, which is no light comp! The book has already earned six starred reviews from the trade journals, too, indicative of how crucial and how well-done this book is. New YA Comics for August A Bite of Pepper by Balazs Lorinczi Pepper is a vampire, sure, but she’s really more like an average teenager than anything else. She loves to skateboard, she loves her dog, and she’s really not super into her mother pushing her to find a vampire bride so she can become fully immortal. Then Pepper meets Ana and sparks begin to fly. Ana finds so much inspiration in Pepper and it shows in her art. But as Pepper prepares to fulfill her mom’s wishes of settling down with a parter and becoming immortal, Pepper begins to wonder if Ana really cares for her or if she’s just around for artistic inspiration. This looks super fun, and it’s compared to Squad by Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Lisa Sterle. Do Not Disturb: How to Say No to Your Phone by Brad Marshall and Lindsay Hassock, illustrated by Lauriane Bohémier This is a book that’s definitely targeting teenagers, but I suspect there’ll be plenty of adults who can find a passage or two that resonates. Brightly-colored and approachable, the book provides 10 steps to help young people better manage their relationships to their phones. But it’s not just a book of steps. It provides plenty of tips to make putting one’s phone down easier than it might seem (and that this book is written by a couple of psychologists doesn’t hurt!) Tall Water by SJ Sindu, illustrated by Dion MBD Nimmi’s got a loving father and a new relationship, but one thing missing in her life is seeing her mother. Her mom refused to leave Sri Lanka during the war, and even though Nimmi’s father is going there on assignment as a reporter, he refuses to take his daughter. It’s too unsafe. So when Nimmi has a dream about her mother, where her mother says that Nimmi must come find her, she plans to go. At the airport, Nimmi’s father sees her and finally agrees to let her come with. But when they arrive in Sri Lanka, disaster hits. It’s December 2004, and a tsunami has hit. Despite all of the work to get to the island, Nimmi may never make it to see her mom. This graphic novel is inspired by the real Indian Ocean tsunami that devastated the region. This Place Kills Me by Mariko Tamaki, illustrated by Nicole Goux The Wilberton Theatrical Society is the most elite group at Wilberton Academy. It’s a group helmed by Elizabeth Woodward, who is not only beautiful and beloved by all, but she’s also starring in the school’s production of Romeo and Juliet. She’s found dead, though, the morning after opening night. While authorities call it a suicide, transfer student Abby Kita–one of the last people to see Elizabeth alive–knows that there’s something else going on. What unravels are a host of secrets about the Theatrical Society, about Elizabeth, and about the Academy itself. What was Elizabeth hiding and who would want her dead? In addition to the comics above, the sequel to The Dire Days of Willowweep Manor hit shelves as well, The Nefarious Nights of Willowweep Manor by Shaenon K. Garrity, illustrated by Christopher Baldwin. Two other new comic releases this month include Tripping Over You by Suzana Harcum and Owena White, which has earned comparisons to Heartstopper, as well as Trumpets of Death by Simon Bournel-Bosson.

USA Today, Publishers Weekly, NYT, Amazon, and Indie Booksellers all have their own bestseller lists. Here are the combined results.

In this gripping coming-of-age odyssey, a young man’s quest to reunite his family takes him on a life-altering journey through the wilds of 1930s East Texas, where both danger and opportunity grow as thick as the pines. While last week’s bestseller list round-up brought us a batch of fresh titles, this week’s only has one: the newest release by Danielle Steel, who has been writing bestselling romance books for decades. Part of the reason there are so few new titles here is that the bestseller lists can’t seem to agree. Only one title is in the top ten of all the biggest bestseller lists: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, which was a bestseller in 2021 and has gotten a boost from trailer being released for the upcoming movie adaptation. Publisher’s Weekly has a particularly incongruous top ten list, which includes The Outsiders and Fahrenheit 451. Classic dystopian novels have been appearing on the bestseller lists a lot recently (I wonder why), but I went down a rabbit hole looking for what was happening with The Outsiders. The musical is getting made into a movie, but we haven’t had any updates on that recently. And then it hit me: it’s August. These are both titles that schools across the country are ordering in bulk to teach in English class. Mystery solved! This list continues to lack of diversity on many levels, including being disproportionately by white authors. Some Indie Bestsellers you should know about are The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride, The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali, and One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad. To get these numbers, we look at the New York Times, both Combined Print & E-Book Fiction and Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction lists; Amazon Charts, both Fiction and Nonfiction; Publishers Weekly; USA Today; and Indie Bestsellers, Fiction and Nonfiction, both Paperback and Hardcover. Books On All Five Bestseller Lists: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir Books On Four Bestseller Lists: Accomplice to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer (Publishers Weekly, NYT, Amazon, Indie Bestsellers) The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (Publishers Weekly, USA Today, Amazon, Indie Bestsellers) Books On Three Bestseller Lists: My Friends by Fredrik Backman (NYT, Amazon, Indie Bestsellers) For Richer for Poorer by Danielle Steel (Publishers Weekly, USA Today, NYT) Atmosphere: A Love Story by Taylor Jenkins Reid (NYT, Amazon, Indie Bestsellers) The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk (NYT, Amazon, Indie Bestsellers) Go beyond the bestseller lists with made-for-you book recommendations from TBR, our book recommendation service! Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books.

If you, too, are counting down the days until cooler weather, here are three autumnal queer graphic novels to transport you.

As I write this, it’s swelteringly hot outside. I just went swimming in the river for a reprieve. But autumn is so close I can taste it. Despite beach reads, vacation reads, and summer reads, fall is the ultimate season for readers. It brings a deluge of exciting new releases, and it’s the perfect weather for snuggling up with a book. If you, too, are counting down the days until cooler weather, here are three autumnal queer graphic novels to transport you. I plan on leaning into horror and gothic recommendations in September and October, so these are less Halloween, more generally autumnal. They include a couple of fantasy graphic novels that take place in fall as well a beloved series with falling autumnal leaves as its calling card. Life of Melody by Mari Costa I requested this graphic novel from the library the second I saw the cover. How cute and autumnal is that? When Razzmatazz, a fairy godfather, and Bon, a beast man, find a human child in the woods, they argue about what they should do. Eventually, they agree to coparent this kid in the human world, but the more time they spend together, the closer they become. You can also read the original webcomic online for free! Mooncakes by Wendy Xu and Suzanne Walker Tell me this isn’t the coziest opening to a book you’ve ever read: in this graphic novel, Nova is a queer teen witch who is working at her grandmothers’ magical bookshop when her childhood crush, a nonbinary werewolf named Tam, reappears in her life. Witches, werewolves, and magical bookshops: this is the fantasy world I want to live in this autumn. Together, Tam and Nova research the horse demon Tam fought in the woods, and along the way, they unearth secrets this town is hiding…and they make mooncakes for the Mid-Autumn Festival! Heartstopper by Alice Oseman The Heartstopper series takes place over several seasons, but I couldn’t leave off this story that has falling autumn leaves as its calling card. One of the biggest associations of fall—at least in the northern hemisphere—is with school, and part of why Heartstopper has been so successful is that it paints a version of high school many queer people wish they had been able to experience. In this story, it’s a predominantly accepting place, and the main characters are able to build a queer community around them. It’s a balm for those readers who had a very difference experience with high school. Looking for more? Check out these Comforting Queer Graphic Novels and these Cozy Queer Autumnal Books.

Prepare to return to Nevermore with these Wednesday-themed gifts for readers, just in time for season 2 of the hit show.

When I first heard Netflix was producing a supernatural mystery series centering Wednesday Addams that takes place at a Vermont school for outcasts with a strong Edgar Allen Poe aesthetic—and a Latina lead!—I was most intrigued. Fifteen minutes into the first episode, I was hooked. The dark humor, the mystery, the monsters, the vibes, and (most of) the cast were all a hit for me, enough to overlook whatever was going on with Catherine Zeta Jones’ makeup and the chemistry I just didn’t buy (I’m sorry!) in her pairing with Luis Guzman. Now, after an almost two-year wait, the second season of the hit show is finally upon us. Wednesday Season 2 is split into two parts: the first four episodes dropped on August 6th (on a Wednesday, brilliant), and the last four will drop on September 3rd. Whether you’ve inhaled Part 1 already or are waiting to devour it all in one go, here’s some Wednesday-flavored swag to prepare for your return to Nevermore. image from TheVinylOrchid on Etsy This acrylic bookmark reminds me of Christina Ricci’s Wednesday from the 1990s Addams Family films, and I love that she also stars in the Netflix series. $9 image from MyWonderlandBowtique on Etsy This bookmark made of embroidered glitter vinyl reminds us that Enid may be bright and bubbly, but she brings it when she needs to! $15 image from Amazon I have rewatched the Season 1, Episode 3 cello scene so. many. times. The eruption of chaos in that town square as Wednesday transitions from Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop” to the Winter movement of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” is macabre perfection. If Wednesday and her cello are also your perfect match, here’s the tote for you. $17 image from Amazon Cart around all of your weapons school supplies in this Wednesday-print backpack, featuring images of Wednesday herself mixed in with tiny little typewriters, ravens, cellos, Things, umbrellas, and skulls. $35 image from Amazon If you’re looking for a bag that’s more Wednesday-like in its sensibilities, this black vegan leather backpack is inspired by her own bag on the show. $43 image from UnwrappedBooks on Etsy We can’t all have our very own Thing running around keeping us in line and doing our dirty work, but we can have a pencil holder in his likeness. $22 image from LadyFernWoodworks on Etsy I’m sure Wednesday would hate me referring to anything about or related to her as cute, but this teeny tiny version of her typewriter really is just adorable. $24 image from LucyTeeDesign on Etsy The Nevermore uniform stripes just aren’t my personal fashion speed. A cozy crewneck, though? That’s my kind of swag. $28 image by LaceLoreDaggerBooks on Etsy This one isn’t specifically Wednesday-coded, but I cackled when Jenna Ortega delivered that FOBI line in episode 2 of Season 2. If you, too, are Team Fobi, grab this ghosty bookish t-shirt! $27+ image from Amazon Jot down all your thoughts (and suspicions) in this Wednesday notebook + pen set. $22 And Some Books! The Official Wednesday Cookbook by Mari Mancusi and Jarrett Melendez It seems there’s an official cookbook for just about every major film/series property, and I’m here for this one. Recipes include The Nightshade Society Poe Parfait (pictured on the cover), Wednesday’s Woeful Waffles, Morticia’s Magnetic Migas, Edgar Allen Poe’tatoes, and more. This would be a great one to pull from for a Halloween gathering. Wednesday: A Novelization of Season One by Tehlor May Mejia Tehlor Kay Mejia, author of We Set the Dark on Fire wrote the novelization for Wednesday‘s first season. If you’re holding out here thinking this is just a straight retelling, reviews say it goes beyond what we already know and brings readers into Wednesday’s head. That inner monologue sounds equal parts terrifying and enticing! All I know is that I’m always up for more Wednesday. For more bookish swag, check out The Goods, our hub for bookish gifts and accessories for readers of all stripes. And if you can’t get enough of Enid and Wednesday, check out these grumpy/sunshine books.

According to a HarperCollins survey, most gen Z parents don't see reading to their kid as fun. Here's how you can love reading to your kids.

As a children’s librarian, helping families read together is the most rewarding part of my job. And, as a new parent, I understand how challenging that can be—you are underslept, overstimulated, and reading on someone else’s schedule. When I first started working with children and families, it was clear how confusing and overwhelming choosing books can be for some parents. Their gratitude was evident. The importance of reading as a family can’t be underestimated. It does so much for kiddos, such as expanding their language skills, stimulating their brain activity, and teaching them about concepts and experiences. But the biggest, most wonderful part is what it does for the parent-child bond. Since reading can help relax, it can encourage both the adult and the child to slow down, listen to each other, and chill out. After all, the quickest way to get a snuggle from my excited little almost-toddler is to offer to read her a book. Then she just plops herself onto my lap as the story begins. Still, sometimes, I just want to zone out and stare at my ceiling or phone. Instead, I must do voices and read yet again the same book about food or shapes with enthusiasm. Librarian or not, reading at the urging of someone else can feel frustrating and even boring at times. But then I’ll remind myself that kids only want us to read to them for so long, and the internet and my ceiling will still be around after she goes to sleep that night. Usually, that’s enough to propel me out of my reading resentment, but if not, how do you push through and actually enjoy—nay, love—the experience of reading to your kids? First, accept that it will sometimes be tedious and just fake it till you make it. But if that isn’t enough, well, I have suggestions for jazzing up the actual activity. Pick Books that Interest You This is so crucial. Look, sometimes you are gonna need to read a snoozer, that’s just a fact. One of my daughter’s faves is just baby faces with minimal words, and that isn’t high on my personal Best Reads of 2025 list. But generally, my daughter’s bookshelf is packed with books I chose because their art or story speaks to me. We are in a golden era of children’s books for all ages, and there is so much quality out there. It’s fantastic. If you don’t know where to start, visit your local library and tell the librarian what sorts of books you and your kid like; maybe they can help you find something that will hit both interests. Add an Activity Reading can be combined with a more hands-on activity. Read a book and then cook or bake food inspired by it. It doesn’t have to be elaborate; for instance, put together a Very Hungry Caterpillar charcuterie plate with the various foods that fuzzy little hero eats, or decorate cookies to look like your kid’s favourite middle grade book characters. Or read a book and follow it up with a movie night showcasing the film version. That option has the added bonus of giving you some time to quietly drift off. Snuggle Up This will look different depending on the child’s age, but make reading together a snuggly bonding experience if that’s something both you and your kiddo would enjoy. When my daughter is sitting in my lap instead of on the floor next to me, I can breathe in her sweet toddler scent, and it reminds me why exactly I read books to my tiny muffin in the first place. Exchange Books with Friends Perhaps you’ve read everything you own a zillion times already, you don’t have time to hit the library, and you haven’t hung out with another adult who isn’t your partner or parent in ages. You should meet up with a child-having friend or two and have a book swap. Get your socializing in while you renew your reading choices, that’s a win-win. Even after all that, sometimes reading with your small human is going to bore you. We all have bad moods, but by trying some of these ideas, you might gain a new enthusiasm for reading with your kid. And when in doubt, ask a children’s librarian! Not sure where to start? Check out these guides: 14 of the Best Read-Aloud Books for Preschoolers 6 of the Best Read-Aloud Books for Toddlers 9 of the Best Autumn Read-Alouds

In these SFF links, I have terrifying sci-fi movies, cozy historical fantasy about a cat shelter, SFF authors' favorite tropes, and more!

Hello, my little prehistoric Pokémon! In today’s round-up of recent sci-fi and fantasy links, I have stuff to share about terrifying sci-fi movies, cozy historical fantasy about a cat shelter that hides illegal magic, SFF authors’ favorite tropes, and more! 10 Most Terrifying Sci-Fi Movies of All Time ComicBook recently shared a list of what they think are the 10 most terrifying sci-fi movies of all time. So, of course, I had to check it out and see if I agreed. It turns out, I have only seen four of them, so I can neither confirm nor deny. As a fan of the Southern Reach trilogy, you’d think I would have watched Annihilation. I should correct that. One of the movies on the list that I have seen is Event Horizon. I remember I was in line by myself to see a different movie (which one, I can’t remember), but it sold out, so I thought, “Sam Neal and Laurence Fishburne? I’ll try this.” Wow, was I in for a surprise. Its tagline should have been, “Hell Not on Earth.” I was really creeped out, but not as scared as the woman next to me, who started openly weeping. I wonder if I would still find it scary today. What movies would you add to the list? Let’s Follow That Up with Something Adorable—Cozy Cat Fantasy! Heather Fawcett, author of many books, including Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries, has a historical fantasy coming next year about a cat shelter that is a front for illegal magic. I NEED THIS NOW. Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter by Heather Fawcett takes place in Montreal in the 1920s, where Agnes Aubert is running a cat shelter, which has just been unceremoniously evicted. So Agnes finds a new place for the cats, but quickly learns that her grumpy landlord, Havelock, is a failed Dark Lord who is using the cat shelter as a front to sell illegal magical items. And when one of his enemies returns, Agnes will have to work with Havelock to keep his secrets from being discovered so the cats can keep their home. From the publisher’s description: “Agnes couldn’t care less about the shop—magical intrigue or not, there are cats to be rescued. But when an enemy from Havelock’s past surfaces, the magic shop—and more importantly, the cat shelter—are suddenly in jeopardy. To save the shelter, will Agnes have to set aside her social conscience and protect the man who once tried to bring about the apocalypse—and is now trying to steal her heart? Havelock is everything Agnes thinks she doesn’t need in her life: chaos, mischief, and a little too much adventure. But as she gets to know him, she discovers he’s more than the dark magician of legend, and that she may be ready for a little intrigue—and romance—in her life. After all, second chances aren’t just for rescue cats…” Doesn’t it sound so cute??! Please, please let the cats become magical too. Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter by Heather Fawcett will be out February 17, 2026, from Del Rey. SFF Authors Answer: What Is Your Favorite SFF Trope, and What Trope Needs To Be Reimagined? At San Diego Comic Con this year, 17 SFF authors were asked, “What is your favorite SFF trope, and what trope needs to be reimagined?” And the answers were great! On favorite tropes: Amal El-Mohtar: You can speak to the dead and the dead talk back. That’s where I’m at these days. Chuck Tingle: Everybody being friends and having a good time together, I love that trope. It’s the best thing that’s happened to stories. Evan Leikam: Magic school, I think that might be it. Or like any kind of like rendition of that, you know, like a true Watson character being shown a completely different organization, love that. On tropes they’d like to see reimagined: Danielle L. Jensen: I really love time travel books, but I can’t write them because they break my brain. So I really want other authors who don’t have their brains broken by them to do them in a really cool and new way. Maybe like, time travel in space. I would love that. Marie Lu: Like most people, I love enemies-to-lovers, but I think there’s more variation on that than I think gets to be seen. So I would love to see more variations on lovers-to-enemies or friends-to-enemies. Just to play around with that a little bit more. You can read all the answers over on Reactor! That Had to Hurt: The Grimmest Ensign Deaths on Star Trek Call me a morbid little space monkey, but I thought this list of fictional Star Trek characters buying the farm was entertaining. Someone (almost always) expendable dies on pretty much every episode of a Star Trek show, new or old. And it turns out, they aren’t all wearing red shirts. (As Sam Rockwell says in Galaxy Quest, “I’m just “Crewman Number Six.” I’m expendable. I’m the guy in the episode who dies to prove how serious the situation is. I’ve gotta get outta here.”) Let this be a lesson to you, kids: don’t touch the spatial distortions. You can read all about them on Gizmodo, with obvious spoiler warnings. And To Close: An Excerpt from Extremity by Nicholas Binge You’ve probably heard me mention somewhere that I really enjoyed Ascension, Nicholas Binge’s first novel, which is horror sci-fi. I meant to get to his newest one, Dissolution, but somehow, that hasn’t happened yet. I will definitely be reading it, but maybe before I do that, I’ll check out his upcoming novella, Extremity. It’s another horror sci-fi, but this time it’s also a police procedural involving clones. I love a good sci-fi murder mystery! From the publisher’s description: “A time-traveling, end-of-the-world police procedural, Extremity is True Detective if written by Philip K. Dick. When once-renowned police detective Julia Torgrimsen is brought out of forced retirement to investigate the murder of Bruno Donaldson, a billionaire she worked with whilst undercover, she doesn’t expect to find two bodies. Both are Bruno—identical down to the fingerprints—and both have been shot.” If you are intrigued, Reactor recently shared an excerpt from the book! “Mark—get your coat on. I’m gonna need some help.” “Sure thing, boss.” I’m already on my feet. “What’s up?” “Murder. Maybe two. Get your car.” “Crime scene?” I ask, feeling my pockets for my keys. “No.” There’s this resignation to his voice, like he’s already given up. “No, first we need to go get Julia Torgrimsen.” Extremity by Nicholas Binge will be out October 14, 2025, from Tordotcom. Okay, star bits, now take the knowledge you have learned here today and use it for good, not evil. If you want to know more about books, I talk about books pretty much nonstop (when I’m not reading them), and you can hear me say lots of adjectives about them on the BR podcast All the Books! and on Bluesky and Instagram. If an SFF fan forwarded this newsletter to you or you read it on bookriot.com and you’d like to get it right in your inbox, you can sign up here.

It might still be warm outside, but I'm already craving Christmas rom-coms. Here are three out this year that need to be on your list.

August is almost over, which means it’s basically the holiday season. If you’re one of those people who likes to read Christmas rom-coms as the weather gets colder, it’s time to start planning your TBR pile. Every year, so many new holiday rom-coms are released. It can be overwhelming to know where to even begin. Here are three I suggest you put at the top of your list! Merry Christmas, You Filthy Animal by Meghan Quinn (Bloom Books, October 14) If you liked Meghan Quinn’s 2024 novel How My Neighbor Stole Christmas, you’ll love this spinoff. Quinn’s 2025 Christmas novel follows two rivals competing against each other in their town’s annual holiday contest. Yes, this is an enemies-to-lovers rom-com, so you can expect sparks to fly. You’ll be able to pick up this book (and all of the books on this list) on October 14, but you can read an excerpt now. Grace & Henry’s Holiday Movie Marathon by Matthew Norman (Dell, October 14) Grace White and Henry Adler have something in common. They both lost their spouses almost a year ago, and now, they need something to distract them from the inevitable holiday blues. Neither is ready to date again, but they are prepared for a holiday movie marathon. Despite Grace’s misgivings about some of the movies, every time they watch a movie together, the sadness fades just a little. And maybe there’s room in their hearts for romance after all. I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm by Mariama J. Lockington (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 14) YA romance readers, here’s a holiday rom-com just for you! Juniper and Lyric are complete opposites. As someone who grew up in foster care, influencer Lyric has a difficult time with how family-oriented Christmas is. Meanwhile, Juniper has always loved Christmas, but some troubles at home with her moms threaten to ruin everything—especially because she can’t afford to pay for her gap year without their help. So, Lyric offers Juniper a deal: help her make some convincing social media posts about the holidays (posing as a couple), and they can split the money. It might still be warm outside, but I’m already craving all the holiday rom-coms! So here are some great queer holiday romances you’ll want to read, too.

This is a moderated subreddit. It is our intent and purpose to foster and encourage in-depth discussion about all things related to books, authors, genres, or publishing in a safe, supportive environment. If you're looking for help with a personal book recommendation, consult our Weekly Recommendation Thread, Suggested Reading page, or ask in r/suggestmeabook.

Welcome to our weekly recommendation thread! A few years ago now the mod team decided to condense the many "suggest some books" threads into one big mega-thread, in order to consolidate the subreddit and diversify the front page a little. Since then, we have removed suggestion threads and directed their posters to this thread instead. This tradition continues, so let's jump right in! The Rules Every comment in reply to this self-post must be a request for suggestions. All suggestions made in this thread must be direct replies to other people's requests. Do not post suggestions in reply to this self-post. All unrelated comments will be deleted in the interest of cleanliness. How to get the best recommendations The most successful recommendation requests include a description of the kind of book being sought. This might be a particular kind of protagonist, setting, plot, atmosphere, theme, or subject matter. You may be looking for something similar to another book (or film, TV show, game, etc), and examples are great! Just be sure to explain what you liked about them too. Other helpful things to think about are genre, length and reading level. All Weekly Recommendation Threads are linked below the header throughout the week to guarantee that this thread remains active day-to-day. For those bursting with books that you are hungry to suggest, we've set the suggested sort to new; you may need to set this manually if your app or settings ignores suggested sort. If this thread has not slaked your desire for tasty book suggestions, we propose that you head on over to the aptly named subreddit /r/suggestmeabook. The Management submitted by /u/AutoModerator [link] [comments]

Hello readers and welcome to our Weekly FAQ thread! Our topic this week is: What are your favorite reading positions? It can be very difficult to read comfortably; what have you discovered is the most comfortable way to read? You can view previous FAQ threads here in our wiki. Thank you and enjoy! submitted by /u/AutoModerator [link] [comments]

Man.. I feel defeated. This is the second Dostoevsky novel I've given up on. I tried reading Crime and Punishment, and couldn't get more than halfway through. Thought I'd try his magnum opus, was reading the new translation from Katz and 300 pages in, I just... can't. There are certainly passages that slap, but it just felt, excessively philosophical. I found myself speed reading through chapters thinking 'please just get to the point'. I enjoyed Alyosha and the sections in the Monastery, but I don't know why I can't get into the book as a whole. Am I not intelligent enough to understand the subtext? I don't give up on books often so I'm a little disappointed. This guy is literally a titan in the literature world. Idk.. Feels bad man. submitted by /u/WhaleSexOdyssey [link] [comments]

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I’ve just finished reading The Left Hand of Darkness and have some mixed feelings. I don’t know anyone who has read it, so you all get to hear my rambling thoughts instead! (Sorry) Overall, I liked the book. The first half felt a bit slow and aimless, though the world and its residents were interesting. My main complaint in the first half was that there was a lot of “telling” what happened—I.e. “I went here, and then I went there…” I thought it got significantly better when Ai and Estravan were out on the ice. That entire section was rich, descriptive, and had a lot of great character development for both characters. The ending was very emotional, and I thought it generally wrapped up really well. Overall, the themes it explores and the introspection of the characters was interesting. I liked the idea of a genderless world, and what it looks like for a gendered person to stumble into that environment as an envoy. I’m sure that, at the time, it felt very groundbreaking. That brings me to the part that gives me some mixed feelings. While it is interesting, a lot of it feels very dated. I know that this was written in the 60s, and was probably pushing a lot of boundaries at that time. Still, I was frustrated by Ai’s absolute insistence on trying to gender these obviously ambigendered people, and fit them into earth-like boxes of femininity and masculinity. For a guy sent as an ambassador to this world, he seems like he simply can’t wrap his head around the idea that they aren’t men or women, they are both. An example that really rankled me was when he was talking about Estravan’s careful food rationing, and he noted that it “could be seen as housewifely, like a woman, or analytical, like a man.” As if women (or housewives) can’t be analytical? Or when he was describing women to Estravan, and he said something to the effect of the women being smart still, but not performing important jobs like scientists, philosophers, etc. On the one hand, I recognize that Le Guin was a woman breaking the glass ceiling at the time, and it makes sense that these were intended to be critiques of Ai (as representing earth generally) or aspects of his character development. But he’s still doing the same thing at the end of the book! He meets Estravan’s son, and describes him having a girl’s manner, but “a girl could not keep so grim a silence as he did.” Like, what, girls weren’t capable of a grim silence in the 60s? Am I missing something here? Also, I’ve seen elsewhere that Le Guin later said she wished she’d done it differently, but it bothered me a little that she chose to use he/him pronouns for these nongendered beings. All in all, it’s a good book and I’d rate it well, but these aspects frustrated and confused me. What were your thoughts? submitted by /u/ExtremeToucan [link] [comments]

I finished Rebecca 2 days ago and loved it. The character that grabbed my attention most was Rebecca herself. SPOILERS What made Rebecca so interesting was that the only detailed descriptions we have of her are from 2 people who are obsessed with her and hence completely unreliable: Maxim murdered her, which immediately rules out anything he says . He an obvious interest in the protagonist believing Rebecca was evil and deserved it. (Side point that claiming their wife is evil/insane is a common tactic used by abusive husbands to excuse their abuse. Whilst insane women do exist, abusive husbands are rather more common, and Maxim was proven to be one of them by his treatment of his second wife.) Mrs Danvers was obsessed with her and her description of how Rebecca didn't actually like the men she saw could very easily have been Mrs Danvers' wishful thinking, or even Rebecca giving her that impression to keep her loyal. To be clear, Rebecca was a horrible person - she was cruel to Ben and mistreated her horse. But there is a massive chasm between someone who can be mean, and someone insanely evil. So what does everyone think? Was Rebecca evil? ***** Personally, I have a theory: We know that Rebecca told Maxim something that disgusted him only a few days after marriage. We know she is extremely promiscuous and emotionally volatile. So Rebecca was married to her new husband. They are happy, but then she tells him something that horrifies him. What if she was confiding something in him, not wishing to turn him against her, but to be open with her new husband? She sees his rejection and quickly offers to be a good wife and manage Manderly if he allows her to look for love elsewhere. He agrees. So what did she tell him? Well it would have to be something terrible but something that would embarrass him to even be connected with it. So something taboo. Obviously many women are promiscuous because they want to be and they enjoy it, without any other reason. But some women are promiscuous as a result of sexual abuse suffered at a young age. What if this happened to Rebecca? At the hands of a close relative. And she confided in Maxim, who was disgusted by what he saw as incest. So that was something i immediately wondered when I read the book. Thoughts? submitted by /u/letoelles [link] [comments]

I know art if subjective, so no one can truly define what makes good prose "good". Bad prose seems easier to define: confusing, clunky, unrealistic in its choice of words or syntax, inaccurate in its use of analogy. And yet, often, books that are lauded for being masterpieces often have these traits as well: dense wording that comes off confusing, syntax that breaks convention, word usage that has you consulting the dictionary every other page. At the end of the day, I wish I could appreciate prose more, because I see how deeply it can effect others, and I desire to feel that way myself; but realize I am more interested in concept and plot when reading a book, than I am in flowery prose. So what is it for you? Just the feeling the words give you, or is it more definable? submitted by /u/LeviBateman [link] [comments]

So I just recently finished The Sun Also Rises. And decided to skim some things online to see what other people got from it. Was quite surprised to see people saying the protagonist Jake was physically impotent from his briefly mentioned war injury. And that was the major hurdle preventing him from being with Brett Ashley in the way she needs. OK. Maybe. But what did I miss? Where did that come from? I think I read a story about an emotionally damaged, socially nice, man trying to process his way out of his love for Brett Ashley and partially succeeding, while partaking in a comfortably hedonistic and mostly pointless lifestyle. Jake is in many ways portrayed as impotent and powerless. Brett keeps one guy she doesn't love hooked for the money, has one guy caught in her influence who she briefly wanted and it became a problem, had some feelings of love still for Jake, but also lusts after others (bull fighter). Her character pursues and gets what she wants until she doesn't want it anymore. That and strong drink seem to be her primary motivations. Still she is charming and guys can't help falling for her. The guys in the peer group are for the most part aimless thrill seekers who get by with fancy meals and excessive drink. A code of class makes them friends and codependent but further neuters their ability to express themselves until the very end. And in Jake's case it seems quite clear the drink is a coping mechanism to tolerate all that, and as soon as he's out and doing what he wants, it usually involves sport or exercise and moderate, enjoyment drinking as opposed to getting tight. Opinions? submitted by /u/Significant_Owl8974 [link] [comments]

I'm on my second attempt at reading a fantasy series end to end. I picked up Way of Kings a few years ago and found the characters likeable, the world-building unique. But the sheer volume of each novel put me off from the rest of the series. Two weeks ago, I re-read Way of Kings and started on Words of Radiance. . . And I find myself liking the plot progression less and less because of the characters. Their arcs loop, they behave inconsistently, and they take astonishing leaps of logic with little to no supporting facts. Worse still, the magic system has begun to resemble modern video games more and more (though I can't speak to the accuracy of this statement, as I don't play games set in magic settings). Here's my list of cribs: Everyone's a Power Ranger: Kaladin and Shallan's unique powers manifesting themselves bit by bit were delicious to read. Sanderson hints at their powers through subtle observations of physics not quite working as it should around them. But as time goes on, he gets these characters to manifest their skills quite explicitly. And they no longer feel as special. Walk on walls, become extra slippery, create illusions? That's nice, I guess. And then it's revealed that each of the protagonists gets two power buffs, like in an arcade game. The Parshendi, the antagonists, even get a transformation called Stormform. All that's left is for everyone to dress up in colored Spandex and shout, "Ninja Storm, Ranger Form". Kaladin makes for a sucky bodyguard: Despite being characterised as the most paranoid, untrusting-of-light-eyes human on Roshar, Kaladin lets an awful lot of suspicious people slip through his net. Kings are dying at the hands of a nameless assassin in white. And the one man who helped said assassin during an attempt on the Alethi King, whom he was supposed to be guarding, gets the benefit of the doubt. Why? Because family. Then he gives this man, who has disobeyed his direct orders and betrayed the trust of the man who freed him, a shardblade and shardplate so he can have his revenge against the King. And now, Kaladin suddenly agrees with the assassins that the King is better off dead. What happened to honour and keeping Bridge 4 alive? And let's not forget the King's Wit, who has repeatedly shown Kaladin that he can slip in and out of the camp undetected, and even pops up inside the prison where Kaladin's being held. So Kaladin's very suspicious of all the people except those who actually might have the ability to kill his wards. Repetitive character arcs: Every other Kaladin chapter ends with him saying he knows one thing for sure - he'll never put himself in this position ever again. He'd rather die than feel like this ever again! And then he goes and puts himself in the same position with one Lighteyes or the other, be it Roshone, Amaram, Dalinar or Elhokar. Kaladin has a toxic attraction to the light-eyes that can't be explained away as plain misfortune or bum luck. Dalinar's missing wife comes up again and again with variations of, "I can't believe I don't even think about her for weeks on end while I trollop with Navani. Sounds like his boon from the Nightwatcher is going to be a major deus ex machina somewhere down the line. Maybe he asked for perpetual fresh undies in the middle of battle. And Shallan's lead-up to the Red Wedding in yearly and monthly flashback intervals gets old very quickly. Compressed character development and lines of investigation: Sanderson walks a fine line between pedantic world-building and progressing the plot. I understand that sometimes, you must compress a few chapters of background into a few short sentences of flashback. But not for dear Shallan! Shallan has such a perfect memory that she's able to connect random footnotes in Jasnah's scholarship to something she sees on the walls of Amaram's manor. Did she find it by accident while rummaging around the scrolls in her collection? No, she just remembered the resemblance from her years of being Jasnah's ward. It starts to become a pattern, the epiphanies more contrived and difficult to support. And most often, it just feels like she's being hurried towards a major plot point at the end of book 2. And let's take Kaladin's Lashing, which develops very suddenly when he's throwing himself against a chasm wall. He does this by placing one foot in the Cognitive Realm and leaving one in the Physical Realm. And he sees a black land under a white sun. Why does he never mention Shadesmar ever again, despite using Lashing so liberally? Why is he not even curious about that place that appears every time he uses this power? Final thoughts and disclaimers: I don't dismiss the Archives completely. The plot might get better in further books, and the inconsistencies might get explained. But as it stands, the book demands not just a suspension of belief, but also of short-term memory to have the characters make sense. After I finish book 2, I'm going to get a plot synopsis of the rest of the books before I decide to invest any more energy into this series. EDITED TO ADD: How did the other guys on Bridge 4 not react to Moash getting to be a Shardbearer and lighteyes, and not any of them? If we're saying all characters are fallible, how is covetousness non-existent among these former slaves? EDIT 2: How do people conceal emotions if there's a spren for everything? Sadeas did an entire bad boy betrayal without attracting Liespren or something? How? Why the inconsistent Sprenning? submitted by /u/quiescent_haymaker [link] [comments]

Just wanted to preface by saying that this is one of my favorite books ever. It handles SA in a really good way that's so messed up, but not exploitative or like trauma p*rn. And I loved that it shows how abuse can affect you in your adult life. I was never a victim of SA, but there are other things from childhood that are still lingering in me now as a college kid. Anyways, on to my questions. How did you guys feel about Vanessa's mother? I personally didn't like her but maybe I just lack media literacy. I get Vanessa was a difficult kid but so are a lot of teenagers, and I just feel like she could've done so much more for her daughter. Her apology at the end left me feeling kind of conflicted. Also what about her college professor? Do you guys think he crossed the line or no? I know some people think that Vanessa's portrayal of him to the audience isn't accurate because she's still traumatized from the events with Strane. That could be true too. But I do find him marrying one of his former students weird. submitted by /u/Affectionate_Key7206 [link] [comments]

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I don’t know if this is the sub for this. But I’ve just finished this. I’ve read her other work. I think she is a very fine writer. But this is the first time - probably in my adult life - that I’ve come away from a book thinking, “I don’t know what I was meant to get from that.” So I’m asking anyone that understands it better, or is generally just smarter than me, to patiently explain. Is there a deeper meaning? A subtly? It drips in mythology but has no allegory. It builds a mystery (kinda well) but in the end the delivery seems suggestive that the mystery was just the vehicle, and not the endgame. I don’t know. I’m whelmed. I feel like I’m missing something from a good writer, and a book that was championed in all quarters. submitted by /u/pyrpaul [link] [comments]

This is the second book in Davies's Cornish Trilogy, though these books can really be read in any order. I already reviewed the first, Rebel Angels. This volume, apart from a flimsy framing device set in the present where Simon Darcourt (professor at Massey College) is writing a biography of Francis Cornish, tells the story of Cornish's life. Or rather, as a frame within a frame, it's told by his Recording Angel as part of a conversation with Cornish's daimon. Cornish's early life, growing up in small-town Blairlogie, Canada, as the son of the richest, most important family in town, resembles Davies' own life very closely. Always guided by the dictum "what's bred in the bone will not out of the flesh," the various narrators (and Davies himself) closely examine the conditions of Cornish's ancestry, influences, environment, mind, and spirit, to understand the mysterious adult he became. This particularly means tracing Cornish's relationship with beauty, art, and culture--from an encounter at age three with a gorgeous red peony (also Davies's first memory) to his becoming an internationally known art expert/collector. That he also spies for the Allies seems almost by the way. As an artist, Cornish finds himself in the predicament of responding most wholly and satisfyingly to the Old Masters. He's not a reactionary dummy about it; he wants to appreciate modern art, he understands all the arguments for doing so, and understands the dangers of sentimentality and fakery when you try to revive a historical style. But Cornish can't do without art that has something to say about deep truths, universal truths (from "the Mothers," the source of archetypes), and so far as he can tell modern abstract artists are expressing only individualities, unrelated to well-understood symbolic systems. Another main thread is Cornish's relationships with women and, in Davies's usual Jungian way, with the feminine within himself. And throughout, the Trickster/Mercury appears to mix things up. Fraud, fakes, trickery, and lies run throughout the book. Cornish becomes apprentice to Tancred Saraceni, an Italian painting appraiser, restorer, and high-quality faker. The apprenticeship teaches Cornish the techniques and iconography of Old Master painting--all in aid of more realistic fakery, part of an elaborate scheme to defraud Nazi art collectors. Through years of this practice, Cornish becomes expert and finally creates his great painting, a triptych that expresses the formative characters and influences in Cornish's life. Many old friends from Blairlogie show up, and each element in the painting can be read in several symbolic ways. It's a masterpiece, but Cornish can never acknowledge it. A serious, not ironic painting in a style four centuries out of date would be laughed out of the art world. Also, during the war it's lost and rediscovered, and by this time Cornish has a name as an eminent art expert, a discoverer himself of fakes and forgeries. Owning up would ruin his career. So, in his one achievement meant to wed symbolically everything "bred in the bone," Cornish also buries this understanding. He can never publicly acknowledge what came out in the flesh, and the rest of his life--though increasingly wealthy and respected--is also increasingly twisted inward, less whole, less integrated, with consequences not just to himself. Davies is an amazingly skillful, lively, fluent storyteller. No matter how often you're tempted to criticize Francis, argue with Davies' ideas, or be annoyed (for example, by the frequent snobbishness) you still want to keep reading. Davies is a spellbinder. submitted by /u/arrec [link] [comments]

I am currently reading Model Home and I've noticed a lack of quotations for both the narrator and other characters in the book. I remembered seeing a post on some book subreddit saying how hard it was to read the book because it didn't have quotations. I don't remember the book being referenced, I only registered it because I had just read The Road, and I noticed the author didn't use them. *I know The Road is an older book. I haven't taken an English or writing course since college. I still double space before a new sentence. Is this something new? Is it something I'm just noticing now? What other books use this "no quotation" method? Please and thank you submitted by /u/misspink033 [link] [comments]

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I thought it likely that there's Agatha Christie fans in this sub, and might enjoy this Science Friday podcast episode where they talked to the author of a book on how Christie accurately used poisons as a plot device. There's a transcript for those who want to read and not listen. https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/agatha-christie-poisons-book/ submitted by /u/speculatrix [link] [comments]

I was volunteering at an event for a local author, Ann Braden, and I ended up taking one of the free books there even though they're aimed at a 10+ audience with kids as the main character and I'm in my mid 30s with no kids. I got Flight of the Puffin, and I wanted to post about it here because I think this book is pretty good for adults too. The story is cute and charming, and it features my current favorite theme of a dark, almost uncaring world with caring people trying to use kindness to make a difference. Stylewise she handles writing 4 different voices well, and I absolutely love her depiction of Vermont. It's not just the small cute New England towns in Hallmark Christmas specials, and shows a lot of the current struggles from a kids perspective pretty well. I really like how the select board meeting completely disintegrates because I've been to select board and town halls like it where people end up resigning because they make dumbass comments. This book has been banned for featuring trans themes, but I suspect what happens is this book ends up sparking a lot of uncomfortable discussions about trans issues, childhood homelessness, how children are bullied about adults, etc and then the conversation is just cut short and the book is banned because people just don't know how to actually talk about these things without completely falling apart and getting angry. I think she handles these things really well and keeps the book cute and charming, and at the talk she gave I found out that the idea in the book where the girl leaves bright colorful index cards with messages of affirmation comes from Ann Braden's own work sending post cards to people. Overall, I would totally suggest this to anyone regardless of age. submitted by /u/irishredfox [link] [comments]

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The Princess Bride by William Goldman is kind of tough to explain to someone who hasn't read it. The Princess Bride is a real novel by the real William Goldman, about a fictional author named William Goldman who fell in love with the fictional book, The Princess Bride by a fictional author, S Morgenstern, after his father read it to him as a child. When he grows up, he hunts down a copy to share with his son. After finding out his son found it so boring he couldn't get past chapter two, Goldman decides to revisit it and is shocked to find out that his father abridged it severely and only read him the good parts because a lot of it is boring and satirical. He decides to abridge Moregenstern's version and the abridged version is what most of us are familiar with, the one the movie is based on. In the fictional, abridged version of The Princess Bride the fictional Goldman includes a lot of personal asides where he comments on the story and justifies his editing decisions. It's like footnotes you would see in novels like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell except, instead of footnotes, it's italic in parenthesis. The real Goldman goes pretty meta with both the real and fictional Princess Bride. He blends autobiographical elements with fiction- think AU, retconn, head cannons, fanfic, etc. I loved that element. I think it elevates what could have been just a cute middle grade story into a funny satire. However, this is the element that pisses off a lot of the movie fans. I read someone say that The Princess Bride (real book) is about a miserable author who shits on true love and it ruined the movie for them. That's hyperbolic, but... In the movie, it's mostly Westley (the MMC) that embodies true love, and in the book Westley is... not the best. The only thoughts he ever has of Buttercup (the FMC) is how beautiful she is. He find Buttercup to be simple and kind of stupid. He antagonizes her, bullies her, and slaps her (unlike the movie). And in the end, both Morgenstern and the fictional Goldman agree that it maybe won't last because Buttercup will get old and stop being beautiful. Add in all the personal notes from (the fictional) Goldman about his lukewarm marriage and thoughts of infidelity, I can see why some people think that Goldman is saying true love isn't real. Buttercup is better in the book (vs the movie) because she's given a bit more agency. She's uneducated and naive but also pragmatic and realistic. She loves Westley because he's perfect at everything he does which... okay, he is... at least she loves him for more than just his looks. She's not a complex character but experiences inner conflict and regret. And while she is still a damsel in distress, she's slightly less useless in the book. The real star of the book is Inigo Montoya, so much so that I think one can argue that The Princess Bride (the fictional book) is actually his story, and that Buttercup and Westley are just plot conveniences to get him where he needs to be to accomplish his ultimate goal. Goldman spends just as much time fleshing out Inigo's origin story as he does the one true love between Westley and Buttercup. Inigo feels like a real character, not just a fairy tale trope. He embodies the lesson that both versions of Goldman are trying to say, which is that life is not a fairy tale. If you liked Inigo in the movie, you will love him in the book. In writing this post I realized how life imitates art. The Princess Bride is a book about an author who revisits a childhood classic only to discover that the story he enjoyed as a child is an abridged version, and the actual version is bogged down in satire (Morgenstern was also pretty meta and satirical according to the fictional Goldman). So, he decides to strip that away and present a fairy tale version that kids can enjoy. William Goldman the actual author, is also a screenwriter who wrote the screen play for the movie version of The Princess Bride, where he stripped away the meta satire and presented a fairy tale version of his own story that kids can enjoy. And those kids who grew up watching the abridged version of The Princess Bride decide to read the book as an adult and discover that the actual version is bogged down in meta satire. (I know I've used the word "meta" a lot. If used incorrectly, please feel free to point out that while I keep using that word, you don't think it means what I think it means.) And, if you're familiar with the book and was wondering... There is no reconciliation scene, the publisher will not send you anything. The version I read did come with Buttercup's Baby. I read the fictional William Goldman part but not the fictional Buttercup's Baby because I wanted the epilogue about the fictional Goldman but wasn't interested in the teaser for the sequel to the fictional The Princess Bride. submitted by /u/Anxious-Fun8829 [link] [comments]

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Today I finished reading The Snopes Trilogy: The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion. It seems like a fair number of people don’t think this trilogy is all that good. I can understand that—the quality of the storytelling can be inconsistent in parts (especially in the third book). However, I still enjoyed it and would recommend reading it if you’re the kind of person who likes Faulker’s writing style. One of the things I liked most about this trilogy is the three-narrator format. It makes the story just a little bit disjointed and you have to do some work to piece it together. Also, over the course of three books, you feel like you REALLY get to know the narrators and the other people in their lives. I don’t know about you all, but I came to pity Gavin. He got so trapped in Eula’s gravitational pull that he couldn’t even escape her daughter, let alone his memory of Eula. Meanwhile, V.K. was always there. Thinking, deducing, and talking (and talking and talking). What a fun character who I adore and am really going to miss having in my life. Finally, Flem. I rather enjoyed that we never got to peak inside his brain and see how he actually thought. He was this malevolent force out there in the world that happened to people. Flem was like a fire—he just consumed, there didn’t seem to be any humanity there. But I have to say, as someone who didn’t grow up with money, I kind of understood Flem. He was poor growing up, and he didn’t want to be poor anymore. He could do a few things well, and he used those things to his full advantage, regardless of who he hurt or whether or not he would ever be accepted at the top rung of society where his wealth should have placed him. If I pity Gavin for being too human, I pity Flem for being not human enough. Finally, I loved how I learned just a little bit more about this world that Faulkner has created in his many books. I know more about Jefferson than I do about most of the towns where I have lived! Does anyone know of any stories like this that I can run to now that my time with this one is finally done? submitted by /u/NettDogg [link] [comments]

Books any time any day.

Book Review Author :Delia Owens Genre: Historical Fiction Publisher : GP Putnam’s Sons Year of Publication: 2019 Number of Pages: 368 My Rating : 4 out of 5 I picked this up with a bit of hesitation. In spite of the great reviews that it got, I must say the title made me expect something … Continue reading Where the Crawdads Sing →

Book Review Author :Delia Owens Genre: Historical Fiction Publisher : GP Putnam’s Sons Year of Publication: 2019 Number of Pages: 368 My Rating : 4 out of 5 I picked this up with a bit of hesitation. In spite of the great reviews that it got, I must say the title made me expect something quite different from what it was. I expected a book filled with scientific details about marshes and birds that would be difficult to read. I was genuinely surprised and pleased to get drawn into the story and to find that it was not an exposition on the science of the marsh masquerading as a novel but a well written, enjoyable and easy to follow story. The story is about Kya a young girl born in the marshes of North Carolina, USA who is left to fend for herself by her family from the tender age of 7. The town people consider her strange and refer to her as Marsh Girl. She somehow manages to take care of herself all alone in the Marsh with only the occasional journey into town to get supplies. She is lucky enough to make a friend who teaches her how to read and helps her make use of her knowledge of the marsh to make a respectable living. When one day, Chase Andrews, the son of one of the town’s most prominent families is found dead in the swamp, the town people cannot help but suspect that the strange Marsh girl had something to do with his death. This is an interesting book about survival and overcoming all odds to make a good life in the face of extreme hardship and hostility. Though I must admit at times I found it difficult to believe that such a young child could survive alone in such difficult circumstances and that none of the residents of the town bothered to do anything about this situation, the story is touching in many ways. It would be amazing if anyone could actually survive such a childhood and manage to turn their life around as Kya did. I also enjoyed learning about the marsh and the different species to be found there and seeing the beauty in nature through Kya’s eyes, as she explored her marsh and got to know it better than anyone else. I rate this book 4 out of 5. If you enjoy reading coming of age historical fiction stories and are a lover of nature, you will absolutely love this book. If you are the skeptical and cynical type, you might find it a bit implausible. Happy reading!

Classics Book Review Author : Elizabeth Gaskell Genre : Literary Classic Fiction Original Publisher : Chapman and Hall Year of Publication : 1854 Number of Pages : 396 My Rating : 5 out of 5 My most recent read is this gem of a book by Elizabeth Gaskell, based in Victorian England. Margaret Hale is … Continue reading North and South →

Classics Book Review Author : Elizabeth Gaskell Genre : Literary Classic Fiction Original Publisher : Chapman and Hall Year of Publication : 1854 Number of Pages : 396 My Rating : 5 out of 5 My most recent read is this gem of a book by Elizabeth Gaskell, based in Victorian England. Margaret Hale is the daughter of a parson. At age nine, her parents sent her away from the sleepy hamlet known as Helstone, where her father serves as the Parish Priest, to go live with her maternal aunt in London’s Harley Street so she could get an education along with her cousin Edith. Nine years later, aged eighteen, she returns to the village home of her parents and is longing for a quiet, peaceful life walking in the forest and spending her days tending to the needs of her father’s congregation. “She took a pride in her forest. Its people were her people. She made hearty friends with them; learned and delighted in using their peculiar words; took up her freedom amongst them; nursed their babies; talked or read with slow distinctness to their old people; carried dainty messes to their sick; resolved before long to teach at the school, where her father went every day as to an appointed task, but she was continually tempted off to go and see some individual friend–man, woman, or child–in some cottage in the green shade of the forest.“ When her father suddenly announces that he is moving the family North to the manufacturing town of Milton-Northern, she is shocked and grief stricken and wonders how this change will affect her family, most especially her mother. Life in Milton is as different as expected – the air is heavy with smoke, the streets are bustling and the people are rough. Margaret tries her best to ease her mother’s worries and anxieties. With time, she gets to meet some of the people of Milton and make friends with them, in spite of the differences in behaviour, customs and mannerisms. She manages to get herself embroilled in the politics of the town and finds herself in the middle of a strike. She also manages to draw the attention of Mr. Thornton, a mill owner and one of the wealthiest manufacturers in the town, who is also her father’s pupil. John Thornton finds Margaret haughty and thinks she treats him with contempt while Margaret finds him hard and unfeeling and only interested in getting wealthy at the expense of his poor workers. Yet the two are brought together time and time again by fate. Will they be able to overcome their differences and find common ground? “If Mr. Thornton was a fool in the morning, as he assured himself at least twenty times he was, he did not grow much wiser in the afternoon. All that he gained in return for his sixpenny omnibus ride, was a more vivid conviction that there never was, never could be, anyone like Margaret; that she did not love him and never would; but she –no! nor the whole world –should never hinder him from loving her.“ This story is engaging and well written. It demonstrates what happens when there is a clash of cultures. Margaret and her family are used to Southern mannerisms and she struggles to understand the industrial town and its people. She has also had a privileged life at the her aunt’s London home which is very different from the life her own family leads. Through the eyes of the other characters, we get to experience the industrial revolution and the inevitable clashes between the mill owners and their workers as each strives to protect their interests. I loved how the author presented us with different view points of the lives of the people of Milton – that of the owners, workers and outsiders in the form of the Hale family. “After a quiet life in a country parsonage for more than twenty years, there was something dazzling to Mr. Hale in the energy which conquered immense difficulties with ease; the power of the machinery of Milton, the power of the men of Milton, impressed him with a sense of grandeur, which he yielded to without caring to inquire into the details of its exercise.“ This was my first Elizabeth Gaskell book to read as part of my 50 classics in 5 years’ challenge. Having gotten used to Jane Austen books where the biggest differences in social class were as a result of inheritance and the sort of family that one came from, it was refreshing to read about self-made characters who were not trapped in the lives that they were born into. Adaptation North and South has been adapted for TV three times. I watched the above 2004 BBC adaptation. It was a four episode production featuring Richard Armitage and Daniela Denby-Ashe. I absolutely loved it and found the characters very fitting for their roles, save that the ending was to me a bit too different from the actual ending in the book. I would have loved to see that ending played out here, though I must admit that it did not come out very nicely in the last episode of the 1975 adaptation that I managed to find on YouTube! I enjoyed every part of this book and recommend it to all lovers of classics. I rate it 5 out of 5.

Author : Marian Keyes Genre : Family Drama Publisher : Michael Joseph -an imprint of Penguin Year of Publication : 2020 Number of Pages : 633 My Rating : 4 out of 5 I totally fell in love with Marian Keyes after reading Sushi for Beginners. It led me to her other books which I … Continue reading Grown Ups →

Author : Marian Keyes Genre : Family Drama Publisher : Michael Joseph -an imprint of Penguin Year of Publication : 2020 Number of Pages : 633 My Rating : 4 out of 5 I totally fell in love with Marian Keyes after reading Sushi for Beginners. It led me to her other books which I also absolutely loved. I know it says ‘gloriously funny’ on this book’s cover – a quote from the Sunday Times – but it was more of drama than humor to me. This is especially so when I compare it with some of her other totally hilarious ones, like Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married and Rachel’s Holiday. The book is based on the Casey family, complete with a family tree, so we know who fits where – and once you tally all the children, they are quite a number. The three Casey brothers are close and spend a lot of time together, despite their estrangement from their very cold and distant parents. The family is fairly well-to-do (or at least Johnny and his wife Jessie are) so a good portion of the book features them at elaborate dinners or on holidays in picturesque destinations. We see the usual family dynamics play out, as the different characters encounter their own unique challenges. The book is quite voluminous at over 600 hundred pages. It took me a while to get into the story, I suppose due to the many characters, each with their own backstory and peculiarities. In fact, this felt more like several stories told together. Thankfully, once the story got going, I found myself pretty much drawn into it and I was easily able to follow the different story lines. I enjoyed the way that Marian expertly combined them into one tightly woven tale and, towards the end, I could not put the book down. Whilst the story was not ‘laugh out loud’ (at least not for me), there was a lot of humor in it together with all the family drama. The characters felt pretty familiar to me. I loved the interactions between them, as I got to know them and watch as they evolved. Marian explores some pretty serious themes in the book as she reveals the characters’ strengths and weaknesses. There was no part of this story that I did not like and I would recommend it to anybody who enjoys warm family stories about relationships and the trials and tribulations that we all have to deal with in every day life. I especially loved that this story does not take itself too seriously and none of the characters is reflected as being perfect. I rate this heartwarming story as a 4. The only reason why it did not get a 5 is because I enjoyed some of Marian’s books so much more and actually laughed out loud!

Book Review Author : Colleen Hoover Genre : Romance Publisher : Simon & Schuster Year of Publication : 2016 Number of Pages : 384 My Rating : 5 out of 5 Lily Bloom is upset following her father’s very emotionally draining funeral and just wants to be alone on a rooftop where she can breathe … Continue reading It Ends With Us →

Book Review Author : Colleen Hoover Genre : Romance Publisher : Simon & Schuster Year of Publication : 2016 Number of Pages : 384 My Rating : 5 out of 5 Lily Bloom is upset following her father’s very emotionally draining funeral and just wants to be alone on a rooftop where she can breathe in the fresh air and unwind. She does not count on meeting handsome Ryle, a neurosurgeon with whom she makes an instant connection. During their brief chat, they tell each other some ‘naked truths’ about their lives. Lily is trying to overcome complicated feelings around her father’s death and the life that she left behind when she moved to Boston. Ryle is struggling with his own demons that plague him. After their initial rooftop encounter, Lily doubts she will ever see Ryle again, as they want different things from life. When they reconnect several months later, she finds herself unable to resist him. In addition to starting a new business, and settling her mother in Boston, she reminisces about her first love, Atlas. She met Atlas as a teenager, at a time when he was lost, and she saved his life. When she unexpectedly bumps into him again, she believes she will finally get the closure she needs to be able to move on with her life. This is a love story, but not just the usual love story. It is a love story that almost made me cry in some parts and left me frustrated in others. Colleen Hoover is a bestselling author of romance, young adult, thriller and women’s fiction. “And maybe a ghost story soon,” as she says in her Goodreads Bio. It is no wonder then that this was not just a romance story, even though romance is at the heart of the book. I really rooted for Lily and Ryle and the twist caught me by surprise. I honestly did not see it coming. As it turns out, this is a tale about life and relationships – and how complicated both can get. I found the story gripping, even as it took an unexpected turn. The author uses first person to narrate the story, so I felt all of Lily’s emotions intensely, as I followed her thoughts and experiences. I loved Lily as a character and wish I had her strength. The other characters were also well developed and easy to relate to. This story seemed so familiar to me, yet the author managed to show me that some circumstances in life are not as they seem at first glance. She shows how easy it is to judge people unfairly when we do not fully understand what they have been through and what makes them act the way they do. Ultimately, this is a story about one woman’s journey and her quest to overcome her past and build a fulfilling, meaningful life for herself. It tells us that we are not bound by our past – or even our present circumstances and we can make the decision to break patterns. No matter what path we take, there is always time and space to course-correct. This may not always be easy and it requires a lot of reflection to recognize where we went wrong and the right path. It also requires the courage to do what is right as opposed to what is easy. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and rate it 5 out of 5. I recommend it to anyone who loves a good story with romance and a bit of a lesson.

Book Review Author : A. J. Finn Genre : Psychological Thriller Publisher : Harper Collins Published : January 2018 Number of Pages : 390 My Rating : 5 out of 5 The Woman in the Window is a psychological thriller by A. J. Finn. The main character, Dr. Anna Fox, suffers from severe agoraphobia and … Continue reading The Woman in the Window →

Book Review Author : A. J. Finn Genre : Psychological Thriller Publisher : Harper Collins Published : January 2018 Number of Pages : 390 My Rating : 5 out of 5 The Woman in the Window is a psychological thriller by A. J. Finn. The main character, Dr. Anna Fox, suffers from severe agoraphobia and is unable to leave her house. From the windows in her living room and her bedroom, she observes her neighbors. She knows all their goings and comings and sees everything that happens on her street. One day, she witnesses something shocking through her window. Unfortunately, no one believes her because of her condition. Dr. Anna Fox is an unreliable narrator. She has a severe anxiety disorder. At times, she either forgets to take her medication as prescribed, or takes double dosses after forgetting that she has already taken the medicine. She takes copious amounts of wine, even though she lies to her doctor that she will not take alcohol. She spends days and nights in her house, watching old thrillers shot in black and white. It is no surprise, therefore, that no one believes what she says. After a while, she even starts to doubt herself. I was drawn into this story from the beginning and it kept going at the same enthralling steady pace. It was full of twists and turns and a lot of suspense. At some point, I figured out part of the main character’s back story, but the main twist still caught me by surprise. I loved the way the author was able to clearly show us what Anna was going through, though at times, even Anna was confused and unclear about some of the events. I do not know anybody who suffers from agoraphobia, but I was able to feel the intensity of Anna’s fears, as they were set out so vividly. The characters were well developed. Most of the story is focused on Anna, but there is a good mix of supporting characters, who help to build the story. At the beginning, I thought this would be just a story about a nosy woman at a window spying on her neighbors – especially given how the story started. It turned out to be so much more. I’m glad I picked this as my last read of the year as I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I rate it 5 out of 5 and recommend it to anyone who loves psychological thrillers. A film based on the book, starring Amy Adams and Julianne Moore, is currently under production and is expected to air in 2020. I’m looking forward to watching it and hope it remains faithful to the book, as I could not bear the disappointment if they mess it up.

Book Review Author : Margaret Atwood Genre : Literary Fiction/Science Fiction and Fantasy Publisher : Penguin Random House Year of Publication : 2019 Number of Pages : 401 My Rating : 5 out of 5 This book is a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. It is set fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid’s … Continue reading The Testaments →

Book Review Author : Margaret Atwood Genre : Literary Fiction/Science Fiction and Fantasy Publisher : Penguin Random House Year of Publication : 2019 Number of Pages : 401 My Rating : 5 out of 5 This book is a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. It is set fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale. The author, Margaret Atwood, is an accomplished author whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries. An adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale is now an award-winning TV series. Though I haven’t read The Handmaid’s Tale, I caught a few of the episodes which gave me some background into Gilead. The Testaments still reads well as a Standalone and prior knowledge of Gilead is not really necessary to follow the story. Atwood was selected as a joint winner of the Booker Prize in 2019 for The Testaments. Margaret Atwood This book takes us back to Gilead, a dystopian society that can only exist in one’s worst nightmare. It is a country set up after the so called ‘Sons of Jacob’ overthrow the US Government. They are deeply unhappy with a country bedeviled by numerous ills and want to make it better. I didn’t know there was a place in the Bible known as Gilead, but it makes total sense that the country would be named after a biblical place. Or maybe it was named after another actual town in the US called Gilead. The Sons of Jacob set up a theocratic government that has retrogressive views on the role of women in society, deeming them unsuitable for any positions of power. All steeped in religious bigotry. Women are not allowed to do any professional work. They can only be Wives, Aunts, Marthas or Handmaids. Marthas are domestic workers for the elites whilst the sole role of Handmaids is to get impregnated and carry babies for couples who are sterile. The world has a severe fertility crisis and most adults are sterile. Many babies are born with serious genetic defects and do not survive. As in many such societies, it is the women who are assumed to be infertile, hence the Handmaids are meant to bear children on their behalf. This makes the Handmaids extremely valuable and they are forced to perform their role with no escape. Handmaids wearing their ‘white wings’. The story is narrated through the voices of three women, whose connection becomes evident as it progresses. These are Aunt Lydia, who featured prominently in The Handmaid’s Tale and two young girls, Agnes and Daisy. Aunt Lydia is one of the founding women of Gilead. She is extremely resourceful, powerful and greatly feared. To ensure her own survival, she maneuvered her way into being placed in charge of all the women. She runs the revered Ardua Hall where Handmaids are trained and no men are allowed. She protects her position by ensuring she has incriminating information on all the senior members of Gilead’s governing council. Agnes is a fifteen year old girl, born after Gilead was formed. She is the daughter of a high ranking Commander. Through her story, we get an insider’s perspective of how life in a Commander’s house is and the sort of upbringing that Gilead girls have. She lets us in on life at school and the transition from being a girl to becoming a Wife. Eventually, she ends up at Ardua Hall under Aunt Lydia and gives us a front seat perspective of the lives of recruits selected to become Aunts. Daisy is a sixteen year old girl living with her parents in Canada. She only knows of Gilead through what she learns in school or sees on the news. She gives us an outsider’s perspective of Gilead, through the eyes of a young girl. She eagerly participates in anti-Gilead matches and disdains the Gilead Pearl Girls, who walk around her neighbourhood looking for fresh recruits to take to Gilead, thinking them ignorant. This is a story of horrific treatment meted out to others in the name of religion. Those in charge take it upon themselves to decide the fate of others with rigid oppressive laws, rules and guidelines. Spies are everywhere. Disobedience is severely punished and life in Gilead is full of fear, violence and death. Serious crimes by powerful men – such as pedophilia – are, for the large part, ignored and victims are more likely to be punished for speaking out than the perpetrators. Handmaids occasionally gather to carry out a horrific execution. Whilst this is not a story that one can call at all enjoyable, it was an intriguing look into what could happen when there is unchecked power. I loved the style that Atwood used to tell the story as I got a clear, firsthand view of events from different angles as represented by the three main characters. Whilst I really hated Aunt Lydia in the TV series, she somehow comes out as sympathetic in this book and I found myself empathizing with her, in spite of my better judgement. I suppose that is what happens when you are able to see a character’s motivation articulated so clearly. The book has quite a number of characters. Though many of them are totally unlikeable, they play a vital role in showing us the treachery, deception and vindictiveness pervading in Gilead. Some of them are heroes, working to end the tragedy that is Gilead. A few are even unsung heroes. All in all, what I loved most about this tale of woe was the ending. It gets a well deserved 5 out of 5. I recommend it to anyone who loves literary fiction.

A Classic’s Club Book Review Author: Henrik Ibsen Genre : Realistic Problem Play Publisher: T. Fisher Unwin Year of Publication: 21st December 1879 Number of Pages: 101 My Rating: 5 out of 5 I picked a Doll’s House as the next book to read for my Classics Club ’50 books in 5 years challenge’ because … Continue reading A Doll’s House →

A Classic’s Club Book Review Author: Henrik Ibsen Genre : Realistic Problem Play Publisher: T. Fisher Unwin Year of Publication: 21st December 1879 Number of Pages: 101 My Rating: 5 out of 5 I picked a Doll’s House as the next book to read for my Classics Club ’50 books in 5 years challenge’ because my son is reading it for school and I thought it would be cool to discuss it with him and share ideas on the themes. This exceptional read is a three-act play written by Henrik Ibsen, who was a leading Norwegian playwright. It features Nora Helmer and her relationship with her husband, Torvald. The play takes place just before Christmas. Nora is overjoyed because her husband has been appointed Manager of the local bank. He is to start at the beginning of the coming year. The family has been experiencing financial problems and Nora is looking forward to having more money than she can spend. Torvald believes his wife wastes money, calling her extravagant and a spendthrift who cannot save, even as she says that she really does save all that she can. His opinion of her is also evident in the way that he addresses her, calling her ‘a little squirrel’, ‘a little lark’, ‘a little skylark’ and ‘a little featherhead’. Ugh! When he says something that seems to upset her, he gives her money to cheer her up. Unknown to Torvald, Nora is not as helpless as he thinks, as she reveals to her old school friend, Mrs. Linde. She has had to work hard as well to support the family. Soon after their marriage, Torvald had overworked himself and fallen ill. The doctors had recommended that he travel south. The trip had to be taken, even though the couple did not have money to finance it. As far as Torvald knew, Nora borrowed some money from her father to pay for the trip. But Nora’s father had also been ailing at the time and she did not want to bother him. So she did the unthinkable and borrowed money from an unsavory man known as Nils Krogstad, without telling anybody else about it. Since then, Nora has saved what she can and worked long hours on whatever job she can get in order to repay the loan and the interest charged. When Mr. Krogstad realizes that Torvald is planning to fire him from his position at the bank because of a fraud that he committed, he attempts to blackmail Nora. He threatens to reveal that she borrowed money from him (and committed a fraud in the process) if she does not get her husband to retain him in his position. Nora is distressed by this as she knows Torvald detests loans and any impropriety. This play is a very insightful look into the way that women were regarded in society at the time. Torvald thinks his wife is a feather head and constantly refers to her as ‘little’. It is clear that he has all the authority in the home and does not regard his wife as an equal. Eventually, Nora realizes that her husband does not really love her, as he even refuses to do a favor for her. He implies that he would do anything for her, but when she faces condemnation, he turns on her and blames her for ruining him. All he cares about is himself. As appearances mean a lot to him, he is happy to keep her in his house but proclaims that she must not have any contact with her children, lest she infects them with her immorality. She also realizes that she does not love him anymore. She feels that she has been treated like a doll, first by her father, then by her husband. Her opinion does not matter. Torvald does not understand her and he has no respect for her. She decides to do the unthinkable and put herself first, for once, and look after her own interests. I found this play very thought – provoking. The characters were so well developed that I felt like I knew them and what drove them, within such a short period. Their obsession with societal expectations was evident as they place this above all else. I thought it was fascinating how they believed that a parent’s immorality or indiscretions would inevitably lead to the ruin of the children. And how Nora was astonished by the realization that altruistic intentions could not forgive a crime! The play shows us how damaging secrets can be. It also demonstrates how unreasonable it is to expect that others will always be grateful for what you do for them, especially when you cut some corners in the process. I found it hilarious that Torvald was quick to forgive his wife after he realized that no harm was to come to him and how he attempted to make her forget what he had said before when he thought he was going to be ruined. The only thing that puzzled me was how a mother can walk out on her children, especially when they had such a good relationship and the kids kept on insisting on spending more time with her. In as much as I understand the need to put herself first, this seems a bit extreme to me! It therefore does not surprise me that Ibsen was made to write an alternate ending to this play (which he called ‘a barbaric act of violence’) for a staging in Germany where Nora eventually decides to stay, as audiences of the time could also not fathom such an ending. All in all, A Doll’s House was an interesting take on life and marriage in particular in the 19th century and I give it 5 out of 5 stars! I also greatly enjoyed hearing my son’s take on the themes in the play, so that’s an added bonus. Adaptations This play was first performed at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark on December 21, 1879. Since then, it has been performed numerous times and adapted for TV, radio and cinema. I didn’t really enjoy watching the adaptations. I think this is because an adaptation of a play follows the script very closely, so I just felt like I was re-reading the play again! 1992: Part of the British “Performance” series, with Juliet Stevenson as Nora and Trevor Eve as Torvald. Directed by David Thacker. 1973 : Claire Bloom as Nora and Anthony Hopkins as Torvald. Directed by Patrick Garland. If you love plays or classical literature, I recommend that you check this one out!

Book Review Author : Heather Morris Genre : Biographical Fiction Publisher : Echo/ Bonnier Publishing Australia Year of Publication : 11th January 2018 Number of Pages : 194 My Rating :4 out of 5 The Tattooist of Auschwitz has been on my ‘to-be-read‘ list for a while. To be honest, it has stayed so long … Continue reading The Tattooist of Auschwitzt →

Book Review Author : Heather Morris Genre : Biographical Fiction Publisher : Echo/ Bonnier Publishing Australia Year of Publication : 11th January 2018 Number of Pages : 194 My Rating :4 out of 5 The Tattooist of Auschwitz has been on my ‘to-be-read‘ list for a while. To be honest, it has stayed so long on my TBR list because I really did not want to read a story about the horrors of the Holocaust, having never read one before. The movies and documentaries I watched on the subject gave me quite a chill! I still kept coming across it everywhere, so my curiosity got the better of me and I decided to read it. This is Heather Morris’ debut novel, originally written as a screenplay before being reworked as a novel. The book has received international acclaim with four million copies sold worldwide (according to Amazon). In the midst of all this success, there has also been some controversy surrounding the book. This is the story of Lale Sokolov, originally known as Ludwig Eisenberg. It is April 1942 when Lale leaves his home in Slovakia. The German government has demanded that each Jewish family provide an adult child to work for them. Failure to do this will lead to the whole family being sent to a concentration camp. To save his family from this fate, Lale presents himself to the Germans for service, believing his family back home will be safe. On the gate at Auschwitz are the words ‘Work will make you free’. Lale ponders the meaning of this phrase. A number is tattooed on his arm. He soon learns the true nature of life at Auschwitz where a simple misstep can lead to the loss of a life. Fortunately for Lale, he gets appointed as a Tätowierer, whose job is to tattoo other prisoners. This puts him in a protected and advantaged position but also at risk of being considered a collaborator, since he now works for the political wing of the SS. He meets Gita as he tattoos her arm and immediately feels a connection with her. They start a relationship that endures until they separately leave Auschwitz and find each other back home in Slovakia. Heather Morris wrote Lale’s and Gita’s story from Lale’s recollections, more than sixty years after the events had transpired. Lale told her the story after Gita had passed away. Gita and Lale I liked the author’s writing style. The story is well written and easy to follow. I was able to easily picture the events as they happened and follow Lale’s thoughts as he lived through the traumatic events. The horror of life at the concentration camp – fear, devastation and suffering – are laid bare in a manner that made me feel like I was watching the events unfold through the characters’ eyes. Yet in the midst of all that is a powerful story of the resilience of human beings, their ability to survive brutal events and remain hopeful, even when surrounded by suffering and death. Their ability to fall in love and trust that they can build a relationship. It would have been easy for the characters to just give up but throughout the book, the desire to overcome their circumstances was evident. It amazed me how Lale and Gita were able to find one another and develop such a close bond in such restrictive and devastating surroundings when their future was so uncertain. Although I really doubted the authenticity of some of their encounters given my (admittedly limited) knowledge of concentration camps, I rooted for them and admired Lale’s determination to be with his beloved. Most of all, I marveled at his courage and ingenuity. I rate this book 4 out of 5 and recommend it to anyone who loves stories about overcoming adversity. It would have been a 5 but for some discussions I came across online, which resonated with me, given some of my misgivings about the book. Controversy Given the historical significance of the Holocaust, any story that is centered on it is bound to attract a lot of attention. Some researchers have questioned the accuracy of some of the details in the book and have stated that some of the events that have been described could not have happened. Critics have been concerned that readers may take the story as a source of knowledge about life at Auschwitz – Birkenau. In as much as the author clearly states that she changed some facts to further the plot, the story is described as being ‘based on a true story’ and a lot of readers connected with the story because of this. When questioned about this, the author stated that she wrote “a story of the Holocaust, not the story of the Holocaust.” She told the New York Times that ;- “The book does not claim to be an academic historical piece of non-fiction, I’ll leave that to the academics and historians.” My Take on this This made me ponder on whether writers of historical fiction have an obligation to accurately depict historical events in their books. Is it not true that inaccuracies can mislead and leave readers with a wrong impression of events? Is it enough for authors to state that their stories are fictional and expect readers not to assume all the historical events are as they happened? What is the line between the fictional and the historical bit? And what is biographical fiction anyway? I think critics here were so concerned because this is described as a book about real people in a real place at a real time in history. A very sensitive time and place. This would therefore lead most readers to expect the story to be mostly true. And it should be. How much artistic license do you think an author has when they claim that a novel is based on a true story? Shouldn’t they at the very least get the actual known historical events correct? Let me know!

Book Review Author : Lola Shoneyin Genre : Literary Fiction Publisher: Serpent’s Tail Date of Publication: 2010 Number of Pages: 245 My Rating : 5 out of 5 Yes, I somehow ended up with two copies of this book. I think I bought the first one and whilst it was still on my ‘to read’ … Continue reading The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives →

Book Review Author : Lola Shoneyin Genre : Literary Fiction Publisher: Serpent’s Tail Date of Publication: 2010 Number of Pages: 245 My Rating : 5 out of 5 Yes, I somehow ended up with two copies of this book. I think I bought the first one and whilst it was still on my ‘to read’ list I came across it again and bought a second copy! Lola Shoneyin is a Nigerian poet. The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives was her debut novel published in 2010. Lola was nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2010 for this book. She won the PEN Oakland 2011 Josephine Miles Literary Award and the 2011 Ken Saro-Wiwa Prose Prize. The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives features the Alao family, made up of Ishola Alao (Baba Segi) and his four wives – Iya Segi, Iya Tope, Iya Femi and Bolanle. Iya is the Nigerian term for ‘mother of’ so they are named after their respective first born children. Baba Segi is, of course, named for the oldest child of the first wife. The book opens with Baba Segi contemplating a problem that he has had to deal with before. The latest addition to his family, his wife Bolanle, has not yet conceived a child. The last time he faced this problem, he found the solution at Teacher’s shack, where men gather and discuss different topics over whiskey. Teacher recommended a visit to a herbalist. Not long after taking the prescribed powder, his first wife got pregnant and Segi was born. Now with seven children from his three wives, he is again concerned because Bolanle has not yet conceived, after almost three years of marriage. Bolanle is different from the other wives. She has gone to university and is educated, whereas they are not. She refuses to see a herbalist. Teacher advises Baba Segi to take her to a hospital. Bolanle married Baba Segi against the wishes of her family and friends, who do not understand why she would marry an uneducated polygamist. Baba Segi’s other wives resent her because she is educated. As a result, they refuse to let her in on the secret that they all share, hoping to get rid of her. When Baba Segi decides to visit the hospital with Bolanle, he sets in motion a course of events that will change their lives in unimaginable ways. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It gives us a good view of life in a polygamous family and the power dynamics that influence it. The role of the first wife and how it evolves as the husband gets more wives is explored. I enjoyed seeing the different personalities of the characters and how they affect their relationships. Baba Segi believes he is fully in control of the family and tries as much as he can to be fair to all his wives. Iya Segi is cunning, wise and controlling. Iya Femi is spiteful and vengeful. Iya Tope is lazy and not so bright, yet she is also kind. Bolanle is lost and carries deep-seated pain. Lola tells this story in an engaging way. She lets the main characters tell us their backstories and show us their feelings by using a first person narrative. In other places, she uses the third person to further the story. These characters are well developed and authentic. I empathised with them, even when I did not like their actions. The book tackles themes such as polygamy, violence, infertility, prejudice and other social injustices. It is a beautiful narrative that both entertains, questions and challenges. It is a tale of how far people will go to get what they want and to maintain their livelihood. It shows how easy it is to misjudge people and not appreciate their strengths. How our prejudices can make us blind to what should be obvious. Perhaps the most important lesson of all is – always be wary of karma! I rate it 5 out of 5 and recommend it to lovers of African literature.

Book Review May contain spoilers….. Author : Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Genre: Literary Fiction Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers Date of Publication: 2004 Number of Pages: 307 My Rating : 5 out of 5 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (Best Debut Fiction Category) in 2004 and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in 2005 … Continue reading Purple Hibiscus →

Book Review May contain spoilers….. Author : Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Genre: Literary Fiction Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers Date of Publication: 2004 Number of Pages: 307 My Rating : 5 out of 5 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (Best Debut Fiction Category) in 2004 and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in 2005 for Purple Hibiscus. Purple Hibiscus is Chimamanda’s debut novel, published in 2004. I read it after reading Americanah which resonated with me because of all the stories I had heard about the lives of immigrants in the US. Purple Hibiscus is a heartbreaking story about fifteen year old Kambili and her family. Kambili’s father, Eugene, is a wealthy Nigerian businessman. He is also a religious fanatic who does not allow any dissent in his family. Everything has to be done his way. He exercises tight control over their lives, planning and intricately scheduling every minute including family time, reading time, eating time and prayer time. There are prayers before and after meals, with a prayer before meals taking twenty minutes. Any dissent is met with horrific acts of violence. Eugene is fastidious about rituals and prayers but fails in kindness and compassion, yet he is blind to his many faults. Typically, he blames others for his wrongdoing and makes them go for confession when they have done nothing wrong. There are a lot of lessons to be glimpsed from the book. Chimamanda shows us how violence begets violence. Eugene was exposed to violence for behavior that was deemed ‘sinful’ by a priest he lived with while in school and metes out similar punishment to his family. Whilst this is no excuse, it helps us get a better understanding of his character. His family lives in silence and fear. This has greatly affected Kambili who rarely talks. When she does it is in a voice that is barely audible. Their mother, Beatrice, tries to prevent the violence by deflecting Eugene’s attention when she sees his temper rising, though she rarely succeeds. When Kambili and her brother, Jaja, visit their Aunt Ifeoma at the University campus in Nsukka where she works and lives with her family, they are surprised at how different life in her house is. Though Ifeoma’s family lacks the abundant resources that Kambili’s family has, they enjoy cheerful banter during meal times. Ifeoma’s house is full of music and laughter, which is alien to Kambili and Jaja. To their surprise, their aunt tells them that there is no need to follow their father’s strict schedule while they are at her house. At Nsukka, Kambili meets Father Amadi, a young catholic priest whose amiable behaviour is unlike anything her father would approve of. Father Amadi quickly notices that Kambili is different and pays her special attention. Kambili develops a crush on him. Though we do not see any inappropriate behaviour on Father Amadi’s part, he manages to draw Kambili out of her shell. She is able to open up and relax due to the way he treats her. Eventually she falls in love with him, even though she knows nothing can come out of this relationship (sigh………). Another theme that is explored in this book is how the wealthy are allowed to get away with ghastly behavior. Eugene is extremely generous. He is the main benefactor of his church. This gives him the confidence to stand in judgment of other worshippers, regarding those who missed communion on two consecutive Sundays as ‘having committed mortal sin’. Villagers flock to his rural home when he goes there and he gladly dishes out money. He is a highly regarded member of society, even though he permits his children only fifteen minutes to visit his own father whom he regards as a ‘heathen’. He refuses to have anything to do with his father. When they fail to report that they spent time with their grandfather at Aunt Ifeoma’s house, Kambili and Jaja are punished for knowingly being in the same house with a heathen. This in spite of the fact that their grandfather is only brought to Nsukka due to his deteriorating health. Eugene is not even moved when his father dies, his only comment is that a priest should have been called to pray for him and convert him. This does not stop him from sending a lot of money for the funeral, though he doesn’t bother attending it. Neither the villagers nor Father Benedict are shown as being at all concerned about the way he treats his family, though it must be clearly evident that something is off as others easily pick up on this. The only person who dares defy him is his sister, Ifeoma, who goes as far as to refuse his financial assistance because he tries to control her life in exchange for his support. Another theme that Chimamanda brings out is how society tends to turn a blind eye to things that make us uncomfortable. Nobody asks Kambili how she got hurt when she lands in hospital after her father repeatedly kicks her, not even Father Eugene or the doctor. The only person who dares broach the subject is her cousin, Amaka, who mentions it in a way that makes it obvious that she is already aware of what happened. How long can people really survive such treatment? Kambili’s mother, Beatrice, seems weak and helpless, as victims of domestic abuse often appear to be. She tries to protect her children but seems trapped by circumstances. She goes back to her abusive husband even after Ifeoma begs her not to go. Ifeoma often tries to talk some sense into her brother, although ultimately, she concludes that he is broken, perhaps beyond redemption. Jaja is wracked with guilt because of his inability to protect his mother. He is eventually able to take a stance against his father, and we see his character begin to develop. Unfortunately, the cycle of violence is doomed to continue as victims of violence often retaliate. All in all, this book was a poignant look at religious fanaticism and domestic violence. It is heartbreaking and distressing. It made me mad and frustrated. I wished I could enter into the book and shake some sense into some of the characters. I found the story well-paced and superbly written. The characters are well developed and easy to understand, even those that I did not like – Eugene and Father Benedict. I felt sorry for Kambili, celebrated Jaja’s growth into manhood, and empathized with Beatrice. I understood Ifeoma’s anger and frustration with her brother and even Amaka’s attempt at rationalizing her uncle’s behaviour. The story is told against the background of political instability and a military coup in Nigeria, which provides some useful information on what is going on in the characters’ lives. I love how Chimamanda uses the blooming of the newly planted and rare purple hibiscus to depict a new beginning for the family and how the characters are at last able to move on. The story is told from Kambili’s point of view and her emotional turmoil is brought out beautifully. I appreciated the way Chimamanda contrasts religion as depicted by Ifeoma’s family and Father Amadi, as opposed to Eugene and Father Benedict. The same religion expressed very differently. We see how Kambili feels isolated from her religion because of her father’s fanaticism, whereas her cousins embrace their religion and have a friendly and casual relationship with their priest, free from judgment. Even though a lot of violence is depicted, and I could clearly see how inhumane and traumatic this is for the characters, I did not find it at all graphic. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, even when it made me sad, and rate it 5 out of 5. I recommend it to lovers of African literature.

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Harrold is a former butler to King Charles III and the United Kingdom’s “leading expert on etiquette,” according to the jacket description, but he makes a good impression and does well without a ghostwriter. The Crown plays a modest role in the lives of most Britons, but Harrold’s parents were genuine enthusiasts who enjoyed visiting country houses or attending ceremonies where anyone connected to the royal family appeared. Catching the bug, he shared their fascination. As a child, he sent chatty letters to the queen, and by adolescence discovered that butlers made a career of assisting royalty and vowed to join them. He loved his first experience, a two-week stint cleaning a country house for the shooting season, after which the owners offered him a job. Trainee butlers spend their time scrubbing, vacuuming, and making beds, but he also attended a college course on serving at table. After some years in a run-of-the-mill manor, he was interviewed repeatedly before joining the household of Charles, Prince of Wales and later king. As he rose to the top of his profession, he seems to have enjoyed every minute of it. There is less drama than readers familiar with Upstairs, Downstairs or Downton Abbey might expect, and history buffs will note the absence of obnoxious royalty. He has little but praise for the aristocracy who seem to treat their staff well and even (in the younger generation) familiarly. Service in a noble household demands as much drudgery as skill, but he remains star-struck to the end as he recounts the camaraderie, friendship, and occasional horseplay of fellow workers, along with the perks—good food, celebrities, world leaders close-up, and first-class travel.

In the Bernese German dialect, "grossmeer," or grandmother, translates literally to "large ocean," and the sense the narrator has of their own beloved but often troubling Grossmeer reflects this vast, enveloping unknowability. As Grossmeer’s condition declines, the narrator sets out to compile the stories that form the complex throughline from their cloistered childhood in the provincial Swiss city of Ostermundigen, growing up in the house their great-grandfather built with his own hands, to their current life in Zürich as a genderfluid person with an abundant sex life. But, just as they see language as "an ocean, waving and mixing, ebbing and gushing, with no clear border,” the boundaries of memory prove equally fluid. The narrator travels backward through Grossmeer’s dark fairy tales of the Ostermundigen house and garden with its towering blood beech, planted on the day of Grossmeer’s birth, and then even further back through the biographical research their witch-obsessed mother has done into the family’s forgotten matrilineage of midwives, herbalists, and prostitutes. The resulting text is nothing so simple as a record of Grossmeer’s life, or even an answer to the questions that dog her descendants’ understanding of her secretive childhood, haunted by a harsh mother, dead or disappearing sisters, and the limitations placed upon her by both poverty and her gender. Rather, the narrator interrogates the “binary-fascism” of language (spoken, written, in the gestures of the body) in order to reflect the “urgent in-betweenness” forced upon them by their fluid reality in a rigidly binary world. As the narrator says, “Perhaps writing is the search for a foreign language in the words we have available to us.” This book, which flits stylistically among heady fairy-tale iconography, a meticulously researched cultural history, and a sendup of high postmodern maximalism, among other modes, reinvents the narrative of the family drama not as a vehicle for the narrator’s identity, but as a lucent mirror held up to the possibilities of our own.

The author first went to South Asia in 1971, and in the half-century since then, he’s explored India “by rickshaw, bicycle, camel, bullock cart, horse-drawn buggy, elephant, tuk-tuk, scooter, motorcycle, car, bus, plane, boat, and on foot,” visiting almost every district, talking to countless people, and reveling in all aspects of the nation’s art and culture. Huyler grounds his travel tales in his larger life story, from his upbringing in Ojai, California, to his time at the University of Denver; his courtship and marriage to his wife, Helene; and his journeys to other locations, such as Afghanistan and Turkey. However, the heart of the author’s narrative involves his many encounters with the merchants, vendors, and artists of India, many of whom became longtime friends. Huyler recounts his dealings with people he calls “mentors”—such as Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, the founder of the Central Cottage Industries, a government-owned arts-and-crafts store based in New Delhi—and he also shares a great deal of information regarding the history and traditions of various cities and regions he’s visited. All these experiences have made him an in-demand expert on Indian art and culture; for instance, in the 1980s, he was consulted by various collections and museums in the United States about various Indian art items they possessed. Throughout these reminiscences, Huyler is an unfailingly readable and genial narrator, effectively conveying the sights and sounds that made him fall in love with India and its people. He’s also excellent at relating the culture shock that he experienced coming home to the United States, which he calls a land of “good cars, modern buildings, and efficient businesses”: “After India,” he reflects, “my native society appeared too clean and antiseptic.” Aficionados of India will be captivated by the details that Huyler highlights, and armchair travelers will also find much of interest here.

After the success of Jesse Eisenberg’s film A Real Pain, American readers seem ready to embrace a comic novel featuring a visit to a concentration camp. Reza, a French writer best known here for the plays God of Carnage and Art, brings her skill at high-energy dialogue to this story of three aging siblings, Jean, Serge, and Nana Popper, narrated by Jean. We meet him at the community pool where he’s taken his ex-girlfriend Marion’s 9-year-old son, Luc, to teach him to swim. “I’ve never been entirely sure who I am to him,” he comments, and the reader will need to pay close attention or find themselves in a similar boat with the throng of named characters who arrive in the pages that follow. For example, in describing the Sunday lunches held at their mother’s house before her recent death, Jean introduces a slew of family members: “Joséphine, Serge’s daughter, came to the doorstep every other week already exasperated. Victor, Nana and Ramos’s son, was training at the École Émile Poillot, the ‘Harvard of gastronomy,’ according to Ramos, who pronounces it ‘Harward.’” All these people are important, as are the culinary credentials of the mostly off-stage Victor, whose career options become a bone of contention among the extremely argumentative older generation. It is Joséphine who spearheads the family trip to Auschwitz; her father’s first reaction is indicative of the tone of the entire adventure: “You know, I paid through the nose for a course in eyebrows, and look where that’s gotten her, now she wants to go to Auschwitz, what’s wrong with this girl?” Like her cousin Victor’s, Joséphine’s employment goals are a hot topic in the family, but this family can argue about anything, and will, from the Judenrampe to the gas chamber to the Kraków Radisson and back. Final scenes in a hospital waiting room add poignancy to the mix.

The story is narrated by CATCH-M, a starlike spark born in darkness, and follows a fantastical path from fear and loneliness to awakening and connection. Children are invited to tune into their inner “braveheart,” face their feelings, and trust in their potential. Along the way, CATCH-M meets animals, such as Baby Cheetah and Zebra, who also struggle with difficult thoughts and uncertainty. CATCH-M offers simple visualizations, encouraging phrases, and easy-to-understand concepts from science and nature—such as how stars are formed and how the Earth’s magnetic pull works—to help young readers see that in dark times, love, imagination, and connection can light the way. Tejido’s illustrations employ bold colors and outer-space imagery, the book gently shares lyrical language and repeated affirmations (“I am extraordinary!”; “I love me”; “I can”) that give the book a reflective rhythm, encouraging readers to internalize its message. A mix of narrative, interactive callouts, and “fun, simple science” facts will also engage young minds. At times, the message becomes somewhat abstract and may be difficult for very young children to grasp, but older picture-book readers may find reassurance in its optimism. An author’s note, tying the message to her own childhood struggles and desire to help others “fill [their] heart[s],” adds authenticity.

Steve and his magpie pal, Maggie, are headed to a pirate party. Both sport pirate hats, and they have a map to guide them on their journey. The map offers a clue, presented in the form of a rhyming challenge: “Look along your street. What’s got leaves up high and roots at your feet?” Gazing up at a nearby tree, they spot a piece of paper in its branches—the next clue! As the intrepid pair continue on their way, they uncover tantalizing new hints at various locations, among them an aquarium, a statue, the park, and their ultimate destination—the pirate party ship, where, according to the map’s “X spot,” they discover a treasure hoard. This jolly tale, first published in the U.K., provides plenty of entertaining diversion. The puzzlelike format not only adds an engaging element to Steve and Maggie’s adventure but also, importantly, heightens readers’ learning—by enhancing critical-thinking skills, spatial and directional awareness, and vocabulary development. The cartoonish digital illustrations capture the expressive protagonists’ fast-paced exploits and incorporate lots of strategically placed bold-faced type into the artwork for dramatic effect. Steve is pale-skinned, like his YouTube counterpart.

Kaja, a black-and-white dog, leads readers through her neighborhood and introduces her canine friends who live there. Acting as tutor and translator, she points out how each animal uses their body to show their emotions. The book shows and describes each behavior in ways that kids will find easy to comprehend and follows up with questions meant to generate empathy. For instance, an illustration features two excited children chasing a dog, and Kaja notes, “I can tell she is scared because her ears are back and her tail is underneath her.” She then asks the reader what they do when they feel scared. The book covers both positive and negative canine emotions, showing dogs who are frightened or angry but also those who are happy or excited. A “Parent’s Corner” (denoted by a pawprint symbol) offers additional important details for adults, such as “Moving your child after a warning growl builds trust and creates a safe space for the dog.” Lastly, the book offers discussion and comprehension questions and reveals the breed of each dog in the illustrations. (Kaja, for instance, is a mix of springer spaniel and Labrador retriever.) Knoppová’s cheery illustrations are both appealing and informative; the dogs’ faces are wonderfully expressive, and their body language is just as clear and easy to understand. Whenever children’s books address safety, there’s always the possibility of expressing danger in a way that frightens readers, but fortunately, that’s not the case here. Instead, it’s a compassionate and empowering read that makes clear to children that dogs can also feel nervous, excited, or upset—and that it’s important to be able to identify those feelings in order to respect them.

Rayne McGrath inherited McGrath Castle from her Uncle Nevin, with the proviso that Ciara Smith, his illegitimate daughter, stay on to manage the place. He gave them 12 months to get in the black or sell and split whatever money is left. Rayne was a successful bridal designer in LA who was doing very well until her boyfriend stole all her money plus a bunch of wedding gowns. Now the cousins, who had no idea the estate was in such bad shape, are nearly broke and are trying various schemes to make money. Rayne’s still designing bridal gowns and selling off valuable handbags. Ciara works with estate opportunities like raising sheep. Most of the villagers are old, and the cousins would love to attract younger people by refurbishing a bunch of cottages and fixing up a row of storefronts. But their attempts to save the village by modernizing meet with opposition. Although they’ve refurbished the castle as a wedding venue, their first booking ended in murder. As they wait for the next one, a project to clean up a cemetery leads them to a grave they think is in the wrong place, judging from some letters and photos they had found in an old trunk in the castle. Back at the cemetery the next day, Rayne’s dog discovers the body of a man named Aiden Dennehy slumped on the mystery grave, right next to a jewel that Rayne thinks the dog probably chewed out of her Jimmy Choos. More research indicates that the men in the photos were probably fighting in the revolution and involved in a secret society that may have stolen valuable jewelry.

“One Thursday morning, a box of babies arrives at this door.” With this whimsical premise, Xiao has crafted a heartwarming tale that perfectly captures the exhausting yet rewarding reality of caring for little ones. Seven distinctively expressive round-faced infants—varying in complexion—quickly make themselves at home, requiring feeding, bathing, and entertaining. The simple text is gracefully balanced with the visual exuberance of babies tumbling across pages, exploring their surroundings, and eventually snuggling up together. Xiao employs a restrained palette in her gouache and pencil illustrations—the tots’ yellow sleepers contrast against mostly muted backgrounds—creating scenes that are pleasingly detailed yet never overwhelming. Each baby has individual personality traits conveyed through subtle facial expressions and positioning, enticing children to follow their favorites through the pages. The diverse caregivers respond with good-natured acceptance to the sudden responsibility, modeling joyful adaptability amid domestic disruption. The story ends with a delightful invitation to readers—“What will they do next?”—cleverly setting up a potential sequel while also encouraging children to imagine their own adventures for these seven charming youngsters.

Dayna Lev is sitting in her car, stuck in LA traffic behind a moving truck containing all her possessions, when a friend sends her a link to a Reddit post clearly written by her boyfriend—and that’s how she discovers that he doesn’t really want her to move in. Oh, and she’s currently unemployed. She calls Craig Deckler, a former mentor, who offers her a job at his crumbling family home in the Loz Feliz hills. Dayna gives Craig’s address to the moving van and commits herself to overseeing social media content created by the young adults in what is now a hype house. Olivia Dahl from North Dakota, a newly orphaned 19-year-old, applies for a position at the house, and shows up with her bags and a crushing desire to find out what happened to a former resident—Becca Chambers, a tarot card reader—who mysteriously disappeared months earlier. The other residents include Morgan Bokelberg, makeup aficionado and stylist; Piper Bliss, who was kicked out of her first hype house, and her boyfriend, Sean Knight, who together focus on creating nonspeaking, dance-related couples content; and Jake Cho, who focuses on content designed to make middle-aged women feel cozy and loved. At the pinnacle of the house is Craig, whose family has owned the famous Deckler House for a century. His goal is to raise enough money to renovate the house so it can stay in the family. Author Stein adeptly captures the messiness and contradictions of being human and creating content, portraying the blurred lines between reality and online personas and the unhinged emotional toil that creating such content can take.

One day, when 10-year-old Mona removes the necklace given to her by her now-dead grandmother, she experiences a frightening, hour-long bout of blindness. Her parents take her to the doctor, who gives her a variety of tests and also advises that she see a psychiatrist. Her grandfather Henry tells her parents that he will take care of that assignment, but instead, he takes Mona on weekly visits to either the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or the Centre Pompidou, where each week they study a single work of art, gazing at it deeply and then discussing its impact and history and the biography of its maker. For the reader’s benefit, Schlesser also describes each of the works in scrupulous detail. As the year goes on, Mona faces the usual challenges of elementary school life and the experiences of being an only child, and slowly begins to understand the causes of her temporary blindness. Primarily an amble through a few dozen of Schlesser’s favorite works of art—some well known and others less so, from Botticelli and da Vinci through Basquiat and Bourgeois—the novel would probably benefit from being read at a leisurely pace. While the dialogue between Henry and the preternaturally patient and precocious Mona sometimes strains credulity, readers who don’t have easy access to the museums of Paris may enjoy this vicarious trip in the company of a guide who focuses equally on that which can be seen and the context that can’t be. Come for the novel, stay for the introductory art history course.

Hazell, a famed “topless titty model,” grew up under desperately poor circumstances, living in public housing with an abusive father and disconnected mother. So emotionally distant was her father that, in childhood, Hazell fantasized that her real father was soccer star David Beckham, of whom, she allows, “it didn’t occur to me that David Beckham would have been only eleven when I was born.” Leaving school as a young teenager, written off as a failure even though, as she says, “I’m just obsessed with knowing things,” she employed her beauty in a way that brought her both plenty of money and a crisis of conscience. Of her early experiences as a topless model, a fixture of British tabloids, she writes, “I hated how I looked. I hated the attention it rendered.” Yet the money was amazing for a child of the council flats—“my grand ‘fuck you’ to my teachers”—which she used for two things: eating gourmet meals she never could have afforded before and attending night classes in law and psychology, as well as real estate (“Why? Because I could”). Things took a turn with a terrible accident that resulted in a wave of surgeries, but it didn’t diminish her popularity. Neither did another turn, the release of a sex tape by her ex, which crushed her—just as did the fact that, an aspiring actor, she would not get to play herself in the hit series Ted Lasso: “I thought watching someone else play Keeley on TV was going to kill me, and that was an understatement. Death would have been easier.” Happily, having had the realization that “glamour modeling was just class oppression transmuted into sexual objectification,” she’s turned to writing instead, and this book makes a fine start.

The day starts like any other. A bespectacled, tan-skinned young boy named Victor enjoys his milky hot chocolate as his mom runs out the door, late for work. Things take a turn, however, when the earth shakes and everything falls to the floor. The cause? A green-skinned, hairy, nude giant (covered up by strategically placed clouds) has eaten the whole city—except Victor. After getting the full-bellied, napping creature’s attention, Victor explains that cities aren’t meant to be eaten but to be lived in. The solution to getting everyone back while still filling the giant’s hungry tum comes down to our hero’s ingenuity. While the book harkens back to classic tales of boys and giants, like Pete Seeger and Michael Hays’ Abiyoyo (1986), it deviates somewhat; rather than outwitting the foe, our protagonist plays upon the creature’s sympathies. Meticulously rendered art brings to horrendous life everything from the bumps on the giant’s tongue to its individual nose hairs. Alas, the book finishes on an oddly clunky note, contrasting wildly with its prior polished presentation. Even so, kids will revel as much in the logistics of confronting such a large antagonist as they will with the tale’s inevitable vomiting sequence. Publishes simultaneously in Spanish.

A zoo employee herself with a viral following, Payne leads young visitors through a typical day at a generic zoological park, from an early planning meeting and a morning spent shoveling giraffe poop to a quick jaunt to the nursery (“one of the most popular places in the zoo”) and a night guard’s view of snoozing wildlife on a multiscreen display. In between, she offers glimpses of dozens of residents from aardvarks to sea turtles, which Deming depicts with reasonable fidelity, though many seem to smile or bear anthropomorphic expressions. Payne underscores the work that zoos do with rescued and rare animals. Readers may be surprised at the amount of training zoo animals receive; some are taught to station (or position) themselves a certain way to be X-rayed, to present paws for inspection, or to open their mouths at a hand gesture for dental exams. The racially and culturally diverse human cast includes groups of visitors but focuses mostly on workers and their tasks, from feeding and providing toys or other stimulation to tending the gift shop and running outreach programs.

The author met her husband, Mark, when she was 27; she was a charge nurse in a neonatal intensive care unit, and he was a medical student with a winning smile. They married three years later and had two children, first Mike and then Rachel. Their family was close, with minimal acrimony. In retrospect, however, Levine identifies certain family patterns, combined with what is likely a genetic predisposition for addictive and/or compulsive behavior, that created a fertile field for anorexia to gain its terrifying foothold. The symptoms of Rachel’s eating disorder appeared gradually—the author pegs the first observable hints to a 2006 family trip to Australia, where Rachel was taking her semester abroad. But the red flags—she had lost weight, was becoming an obsessive runner like her father, and was rejecting high-caloric food—were easily dismissed. She was healthy and happy. However, by the time she returned to the Levine home in Vermont several months later, she had lost more weight. Levine began to study the symptoms, psychology, and devastating physical consequences of anorexia, which include bone loss and heart and kidney damage. It wouldn’t be until 2008 that Rachel would willingly enter an eating disorder treatment center. Levine’s memoir is a highly personal and vivid account of the period leading up to and including the 10 months Rachel spent in the center. It is written with love and a bold honesty about generational family history and dynamics. The book contains a wealth of information about the illness, and, supplemented by Rachel’s commentary and excerpts from her journals, it presents an intimate look at anorexia’s psychological underpinnings—the anxieties, the hidden sadness, and the persistent inner “voice” that kept telling her she was never perfect enough (“How could you have let yourself go? …You messed up. You’re a failure”), encouraged her to control every morsel she ate, and pushed her to dangerously unhealthy levels of exercise.

Though her family is busy preparing for tonight’s party, dark-eyed, tan-skinned Cala can’t stop thinking of her recently departed grandfather. She and her family head to the cemetery; amid the graves, altars, and candles, people sing, whisper, and laugh to greet deceased loved ones. Wrapped up in the festivities, Cala loses sight of her family and soon encounters three skeletal horsemen: one sickly, one famished, one sullen-faced with a wide-brimmed hat of storm clouds. The riders argue, and Cala decides to find her family alone until a fourth rider appears: Death. With encouragement from all the horsemen—in particular, Death, who shows her the “invisible parade” of departed loved ones who are always with us—Cala discovers the courage to face her sorrow and join the party. With aplomb, Bardugo and Picacio confront the specter of death, weaving small moments of catharsis and humor into a languidly paced narrative that gives readers the time and space they need to process the complex emotions on display. In the first half, Picacio’s gorgeous graphite artwork favors lush, golden-hued movement in contrast to Cala’s stoic profile before introducing subdued yet lush purples, blues, greens, and reds right around the first rider’s appearance. The illustrator deftly introduces each rider in striking, individual double-page portraits.

How many of Mancillas’ selections “changed the world” is moot, but all certainly left their marks on it. Some did so literally, like artists Frida Kahlo and Jean-Michel Basquiat, while others, such as storyteller Pura Belpré, flamboyant celebrity astrologer Walter Mercado, and singer/songwriter Shakira, have left a mark in real but less tangible ways. Monolingual despite the title and arranged roughly by birth year, the entries start with a quick identifier (most commonly a variation on “Activist”) and national “Heritage” for each subject, then move on to profiles highlighted by star-flanked summations in larger type to facilitate quick scanning. Emotion often runs high: Gabriela Mistral “was born with the heart of a poet”; in Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “was targeted in ways that stank of sexism and prejudice.” Though the biographical specifics tend to be slight, Mancillas includes multiple leads to further information about everyone at the end. Both Mancillas and Zeferino effectively cast their subjects in heroic molds that will appeal to young readers in need of role models. Better yet, the diversity of achievement they celebrate encompasses strides in gender and disability rights as well as groundbreaking feats by social warriors, scientists, athletes, artisans, and more.

How would bats read their favorite stories? Why, hanging upside down of course. And how would a kitten show some appreciation for a beloved read-aloud? By licking the pages: “yum-yummy story, purr-purr-purr-purrrrrrrrrrrrr.” In addition to showcasing adorable animals immersing themselves in literature, Paul and Walker highlight many places to read and acquire books, such as the library (staffed by a bespectacled mole) or a bookstore (with the books spread out on the branches of a tree). Beaver Kit snuggles up in a “stick-and-mud” nook, chewing a few of the pages, while several young badgers gather under a tree. The owls attend a monthly book club, and Dog holds a storytime as a passel of puppies gather around to listen. Paul’s singsongy text uses many identical rhymes (“Bunny would hug her book and hop-hop / in a book-happy dance, hip-hippity-hop”), but one stanza breaks the flow: “If animals loved books, / Fox Mama would read all Kit’s books, / but then he’d yelp, / ‘Read them again!’” Still, the tale brims with enthusiasm, and Walker’s soft, gentle colors match the roly-poly animals as they happily profess their love of reading. It all concludes with Fox Kit tucked up in bed, making this a lovely bedtime choice.

Having taken readers everywhere from the rainforest to the desert, it was only a matter of time before this dynamic author-illustrator pair invited us somewhere even more tropical. To say that the experience was worth the wait is an understatement. This latest installment of the bestselling series features a brown-skinned father and child as guides into the vibrant world of the coral reef. The book is a harmonious marriage of text and illustration; Neal has composed a symphony of color that makes for utterly immersive settings that also offer opportunities to learn more. As schools of blue tangs swirl and dance in concentric circles around bright red coral, the effect is so lush that even the Little Mermaid would long to return to the sea. Messner’s perfectly chosen prose advances the story, introducing the protagonist to various nooks and crannies of the reef while allowing readers to feel the sensations of floating, diving, and breathing underwater as they turn the pages. Taking youngsters to the inky depths alongside great barracudas and spotted eagle rays, then back to the water’s surface in time for a breathtaking sunset, this engaging book renders the reef mesmerizing.

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When a frightening man breaks into her London kitchen one evening, Alice Rathbone leaps into action. She’s hosting a playdate for her daughter and two other families, and when the intruder grabs a large kitchen knife and moves toward the room with the children in it, Alice goes into serious defense mode, grabbing a stool the man had kicked at her and fatally whacking him on the head. While waiting to hear from the police about whether she’ll be charged or cleared of any wrongdoing, Alice grapples with the randomness of the break-in, wanting to know more about her attacker. By all appearances, he was visibly under the effects of drugs or alcohol—or perhaps both—and had forced his way into a high-value home in a still-gentrifying neighborhood bent on destruction. But Alice can’t shake the desire to find out more about the person she killed, who turns out to be 18-year-old Ezra Jones. When, against her bail conditions, she wends her way into the life of Ezra’s family, things go spectacularly awry, even as Alice fends off anonymous phone calls and bitter, threatening online comments. The people closest to her—her husband, Jamie, a high-powered executive, and fellow school-focused mothers—beg her to move on, though one friend, Stella, a journalist, reluctantly agrees to assist with Alice’s investigation. Small items from Alice’s household go missing, the once-perfect nanny gives notice, and Alice’s life continues to fall apart. Skillfully spinning a taut, surprise-filled tale enlivened by multiple compelling characters, Faulkner keeps this highly charged guessing game going until the final page.

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Romance book reviews. Reviews of books that make my heart race, have a beautiful love story, and a happy ending.

After a decade of reading and reviewing books, I’ve decided that it’s time for me to take a step back from blogging. Running this book blog has been such a huge and wonderful part of my life. I’ve written over 600 book reviews and loved the experience of getting to share my love of reading ...Read More  >

After a decade of reading and reviewing books, I’ve decided that it’s time for me to take a step back from blogging. Running this book blog has been such a huge and wonderful part of my life. I’ve written over 600 book reviews and loved the experience of getting to share my love of reading with so many other readers from around the world. Blogging was quite an unexpected journey for me though as I never set out to “start” a blog at all. Back in 2011, I simply began reading so much that I wanted a way to remember which books were my most favorites… and that’s when I started writing reviews. At first, my reviews were written more for my own sake than anyone else’s. They began as a way for me to keep track of the books I enjoyed and remember what I loved most about each one. You see, I was quite picky about the types of books I wanted to read and had a hard time finding anywhere specifically recommending what I was looking for. I was drawn to romantic books that made my heart race, but I also strongly preferred no stupidity powering the storyline or eye-roll-enducing drama, and of course I needed a happy ending as I’ve always been quite allergic to cliffhangers. At that time, there weren’t many romance book review sites out there in general and none that focused on the particular type of books I personally wanted to read so my reviews were a way for me to catalogue the books I’d found that fit within the criteria I was looking for. At first, I really didn’t expect anyone else to read my reviews, but as I began to realize that my reviews were actually helping other readers find books they loved as well, I decided to officially begin blogging and started this website to hold all my reviews. Writing reviews was also quite cathartic for me because, after reading a truly wonderful book, I was often overwhelmed with thoughts and feelings so writing my thoughts down in reviews helped give me closure from a story and highlight/remember what I loved most about a book. I also found that I genuinely loved helping other readers find new books. So my blog began and I continued reading and reviewing books for it for almost a decade. However, the truth is that in the last while, I found myself falling in love with fewer and fewer books — I don’t know if it’s because I started to feel like I’d basically read every plotline within the types of stories I loved so many times over, or maybe if the other parts out my life just became too busy and I began having less time to read, but, regardless of the reason, I was falling in love with fewer and fewer books. And here’s the thing – this blog has always been a passion project for me so if I genuinely wasn’t falling in love with as many books, I didn’t want to continue to review books just for the sake of reviewing them. That was never what this blog was about so I just felt myself naturally drifting away from reviewing and blogging. A few months ago, I decided to try taking a break from blogging and honestly I have really been enjoying the mental freedom that came from that decision. So, least for the immediate future, I’m going to officially step away from my blog. I may begin reviewing books again one day – and that might be in a month, a year, or never… I can’t say for sure, but that door will always remain open. My blogging goal was always to put a spotlight on the wonderful books I loved and to share them with other readers. So even though I’m not reviewing new books at this time, I will leave this whole website up in the hope that it will continue to help new readers find new favorite books to fall in love with. I have 630 reviews and recommendations of books I’ve personally loved and would love for other readers to fall in love with too and I can see through my analytics that, even though I’m not actively blogging, readers continue to come to my blog every day and read my older reviews so it makes me happy to know that my reviews are still connecting readers with awesome books. I also want to take this opportunity to say THANK YOU to the thousands of amazing readers who’ve followed my blog over the years, and THANK YOU to the wonderfully talented authors who’ve written the beautiful stories that we’ve all fallen in love with. You’ve all given me so much joy and I’m so very grateful for all of it. I may return to blogging one day, and I may randomly post a surprise review/recommendation every now and again, but for now I wanted to officially make a statement that explains why my blog hasn’t been updated in a while and why it won’t have new content for the foreseeable future. If I ever start reviewing again, I will announce it by email, so please subscribe to my email list if you’d like to get a notification should that day come. I will not be sending emails out via that list until then though. In the meantime, if you’re looking for my top recommendations, here’s a list of my standout favorite books: The Bronze Horseman Trilogy by Paullina Simons (My Review) – this will always and forever by my #1 fav! The Sea of Tranquility by Katja Millay (My Review) – one of the most powerful endings ever! The Life Intended by Kristin Harmel (My Review) – incredibly unique love story with all the feels! Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah (My Review) – this has possibly my favorite epilogue ever! Archer’s Voice by Mia Sheridan (My Review) – gorgeous, heart-warming romance! Slammed & Point of Retreat by Colleen Hoover (My Review) – one of my first reviews, and still a top fav! Devney Perry books: reading list – heart-warming, gorgeous romance perfection every single time! Kristen Ashley books: reading list – badass alpha romance – pure epic, great families, much variety! Dark Hunter series by Sherrilyn Kenyon: reading list – addictive paranormal romance, my fav PNR world! On The Island by Tracey Garvis Graves (My Review) – just a truly beautiful story! The Starcrossed series by Leisa Rayven (My Review) – the best purely angsty romance I’ve read! A Thousand Boy Kisses by Tillie Cole (My Review) – ugly cry romance perfection! Crossfire series by Sylvia Day (My Review) – hot sexy romance but deeply emotional and addictive! Addicted series by Krista & Becca Ritchie – great romances and one of the best family dynamics ever! Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind (Series Overview) – fantasy, fantastic morals and world building! Night Huntress series by Jeaniene Frost (Series Overview) – action-packed vampire romance fun! Mists of the Serengeti by Leylah Attar (My Review) – an ugly cry favorite! Becoming Calder & Finding Eden by Mia Sheridan (My Review) – another ugly cry favorite! Black Dagger Brotherhood series by JR Ward: reading order – badass/epic paranormal vampire romance! The Girl He Used To Know by Tracey Garvis Graves (My Review) – second half of the book hit me so hard! In The Stillness by Andrea Randall (My Review) – the feels… literally all the feels! Wallbanger by Alice Clayton (My Review) – most I’ve ever laughed reading any book! The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah (My Review) – stunning wartime story! A full list of all my reviews can also always be found at this link. Happy reading! ~Aestas

BOOKWORM NEWS: Juniper Hill by Devney Perry is now live!! — “Memphis Ward arrives in Quincy, Montana, on the fifth worst day of her life. She needs a shower. She needs a snack. She needs some sanity. Because moving across the country with her newborn baby is by far the craziest thing she’s ever done. ...Read More  >

BOOKWORM NEWS: Juniper Hill by Devney Perry is now live!! — “Memphis Ward arrives in Quincy, Montana, on the fifth worst day of her life. She needs a shower. She needs a snack. She needs some sanity. Because moving across the country with her newborn baby is by far the craziest thing she’s ever done. But maybe it takes a little crazy to build a good life. If putting the past behind her requires a thousand miles and a new town, she’ll do it if it means a better future for her son. Even if it requires setting aside the glamour of her former life. Even if it requires working as a housekeeper at The Eloise Inn and living in an apartment above a garage. It’s there, on the fifth worst day of her life, that she meets the handsomest man she’s ever laid eyes on. Knox Eden is a beautiful, sinful dream, a chef and her temporary landlord. With his sharp, stubbled jaw and tattooed arms, he’s raw and rugged and everything she’s never had—and never will. Because after the first worst day of her life, Memphis learned a good life requires giving up on her dreams too. And a man like Knox Eden will only ever be a dream.” The Girl in the Mist by Kristen Ashley is now live!! — “Renowned author Delphine Larue needs a haven. A crazed fan has gone over the deep end, and she’s not safe. Her security team has suggested a house by a lake. Secluded. Private. Far away. In a beautiful area of the Northwest close to the sleepy town of Misted Pines. It’s perfect. So perfect, Delphine has just moved in, and she’s thinking she’ll stay there forever. Until she sees the girl in the mist. After that, everything changes. Delphine quickly learns that Misted Pines isn’t so sleepy. A little girl has gone missing, and the town is in the grips of terror and tragedy. The local sheriff isn’t up for the job. The citizens are up in arms. And as the case unfolds, the seedy underbelly of a quiet community is exposed, layer by layer. But most importantly, girls are dying. There seems to be only one man they trust to find out what’s happening. The mysterious Cade Bohannan.”” The Summer Proposal by Vi Keeland is now live!! — “The first time I met Max Yearwood was on a blind date. Max was insanely gorgeous, funny, and our chemistry was off the charts. He also had the biggest dimples I’d ever laid eyes on. Exactly what I needed after my breakup. Or so I thought… Until my real date arrived. Turned out, Max wasn’t who I was there to meet. He only pretended to be until my real date showed up. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. Before he left, he slipped me a ticket to a hockey game a few blocks away, in case things didn’t work out on my actual date. I tossed the ticket into my purse and went about trying to enjoy the man I was supposed to meet. But my real blind date and I had no connection. So on my way home, I decided to take a chance and stop by the game. When I arrived, the seat next to me was empty. Disappointed again, I decided to leave at the end of the period. Just before the buzzer, one of the teams scored, and the entire arena went crazy. A player’s face flashed up on the Jumbotron. He was wearing a helmet, but I froze when he smiled. You guessed it: Dimples. Apparently, my fake blind date hadn’t invited me to watch hockey with him, he’d invited me to watch him play. And so began my adventure with Max Yearwood. He was everything I needed at the time—fun, sexy, up for anything, and only around for a few months since he’d signed with a new team three-thousand miles away. Max proposed we spend the summer helping me forget my ex. It sounded like a good plan. Things couldn’t get too serious when we had an expiration date. Right? Though, you know what they say about the best-laid plans.” Only One Mistake by Natasha Madison is now live!! — “Two pink lines changed all my plans. So did the guy I had a one-night stand with, a man who made me laugh and smile, a guy who I called to share my unexpected news with, only to find out his number was no longer in service. Once more letdown by the opposite sex, I figured I was doing this on my own. Then one day, I was staring into the eyes of the man I hated, the father of my baby. All it took was only one mistake to change everything.” Baden by Sawyer Bennett is now live!! — “While my injuries are physical, the same can’t be said for the woman I rescued. Suffering from wounds that can’t be seen, Sophie Winters has withdrawn from the world in fear and guilt. I didn’t know Sophie before that fateful night and have only met her once since, but I refuse to let her face her demons alone. Determined to be a friend, I support Sophie in the only way I know how… by simply being there. Through our shared trauma, Sophie and I begin to find peace within one another. As we grow closer, what started as friendship becomes more intimate until our broken pieces become one. But can a love born of anguish endure, or will the pain of our past prove too much to overcome?” Shielding Sierra by Susan Stoker is now live!! — “No one knows she’s been taken. Her missing belongings point to desertion—which means no one is looking for her, either. But someone is. Fred “Grover” Groves never forgot the redheaded spitfire working the chow line on a base in the desert. He’d felt an instant attraction to the petite woman, a connection deep in his bones…which Sierra herself clearly didn’t feel, since she’d promised to keep in touch after his mission ended, only to ghost him—and seemingly her job. But she didn’t. When several contractors go missing from the base, it looks more and more like Sierra didn’t abandon her post. Then a long-lost letter proves she’d followed through on her promise to stay in touch with Grover—and suddenly, all bets are off. He bucks every protocol he’s ever known… If Sierra’s still alive, he’ll find her. Or die trying.” Flame by Helen Hardt (Steel Brothers Saga) is now live!! — “Callie Pike always considered herself the plain sister—stuck in the middle between beautiful Rory and vivacious Maddie—so she still can’t believe gorgeous perennial bachelor Donny Steel has fallen in love with her. She should be the happiest woman on the planet, and she is…but her nemesis from ten years ago seems intent on destroying her newfound bliss. Donny Steel will do anything to protect his family, even sacrifice his ethics and his own happiness. As much as he loves Callie, he knows he can’t be the man she deserves—not until he solves the mysteries of his family’s past and finds out who shot his father. Though the two erupt in flames whenever they’re together, the secrets they both harbor could destroy any chance for a future together.” Wright Rival by KA Linde is now live!! — “No one on this planet pushes my buttons like Hollin Abbey. I don’t know if it’s the rugged, sexy cowboy look or the Harley Davidson motorcycle or the cocky swagger. Or just him. But whenever we’re together we fight like cats and dogs. Now our vineyards are rivals in the annual wine competition, and I’m determined to win. I just have to take out my Wright rival.” WEEKLY NEW RELEASES RECAP Juniper Hill by Devney Perry (small town neighbors to lovers romance, standalone in The Edens series) The Girl in the Mist by Kristen Ashley (romantic thriller, Misted Pines series) The Summer Proposal by Vi Keeland (sports romance, standalone) Only One Mistake by Natasha Madison (surprise pregnancy romance, standalone in Only One series) Baden by Sawyer Bennett (hockey romance, standalone in Pittsburgh Titans series) Wright Rival by KA Linde (enemies to lovers romance, standalone in Wright Vineyard series) Shielding Sierra by Susan Stoker (romantic suspense, standalone in Delta Team Two series) Flame by Helen Hardt (romantic suspense, Steel Brothers Saga) now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase UPCOMING BOOK RELEASES Jan 18 Pre-Order Jan 18 Pre-Order Jan 18 Pre-Order Jan 24 Pre-Order Jan 25 Pre-Order Jan 25 Pre-Order Jan 25 Pre-Order Jan 25 Pre-Order Jan 25 Pre-Order Feb 01 Pre-Order Feb 01 Pre-Order Feb 08 Pre-Order WHAT KIND OF BOOKS ARE YOU LOOKING FOR? __________________________________ Let me know if there are any other books you’re loving right now too!! LET’S STAY CONNECTED To get these lists sent to you every week, subscribe by email. FOLLOW THE BLOG Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Pinterest | BlogLovin’ | Google+ | Goodreads

BOOKWORM NEWS: Shelter by Kristen Proby is now live!! — “Remi Carter has survived her fifteen minutes of fame and is putting LA in her rearview mirror. As a former reality show contestant, she’s trading staged expeditions and faked wilderness tours for real adventures. Only one fluke storm in Glacier National Park has her stranded ...Read More  >

BOOKWORM NEWS: Shelter by Kristen Proby is now live!! — “Remi Carter has survived her fifteen minutes of fame and is putting LA in her rearview mirror. As a former reality show contestant, she’s trading staged expeditions and faked wilderness tours for real adventures. Only one fluke storm in Glacier National Park has her stranded with a handsome man, and adventure takes on a whole new meaning. Seth King is as rugged and sexy as he is annoyed to be trapped with Remi. Probably because she ghosted him at the local bar not three days ago. But she’s got her reasons for ditching him, and twenty-four hours in an abandoned Montana cabin with the wildlife biologist isn’t nearly enough time to explain. As tempting as he is by firelight, she’s been burned too many times. Except one day together and suddenly her travel van doesn’t hold as much appeal. The open road feels lonely. Remi’s about to learn that shelter is more than a safe place to weather a storm. Shelter might just be the man himself. If he can give her a reason to stay.” Code Name: Disavowed by Sawyer Bennett is now live!! — “Life works in mysterious ways. Jameson Force Security has just received notice of a disavowed CIA agent in need of rescue in Central America. My blood runs cold when I learn that agent is none other than Greer Hathaway—my former fiancée. Having gone our separate ways more than a decade ago, I still have bitter feelings toward Greer and the demise of our relationship. Those feelings don’t change the fact that I loved her more than anything, so I’m on the next flight out to embark on a rescue mission. Besides, Greer once saved my life, so now it’s time to return the favor and put her firmly in my past. Face-to-face for the first time since ending our engagement, Greer and I are left with not only anger, unanswered questions and regrets, but also the undeniable chemistry we apparently still have. Will the promise of a new future together be enough, or will the same obstacles tear us apart again?” Homecoming King by Penny Reid is now live!! — “Rex “TW” McMurtry’s perpetual single-hood wouldn’t bother him so much if all his ex-girlfriends didn’t keep marrying the very next person they dated, especially when so many of those grooms are his closest friends. He may be a pro-football defensive end for the Chicago Squalls, but the press only wants to talk about how he’s always a groomsman and never a groom. Rex is sick of being the guy before the husband, and he’s most definitely sick of being the best man at all their weddings. Bartender Abigail McNerny is the gal-pal, the wing-woman, the she-BFF. She’s dated. Once. And once was more than enough. Privy to all the sad stories of her customers, ‘contentment over commitment’ is her motto, and Abby is convinced no one on earth could ever entice her into a romantic relationship . . . except that one guy she’s loved since preschool. The guy who just walked into her bar. The guy who doesn’t recognize her. The guy who is drunk and needs a ride home. The guy who has a proposition she should definitely refuse.” My Unexpected Surprise by Piper Rayne is now live!! — “I never thought of myself as dad material. Until my one-night stand showed up in my small Alaskan town five months pregnant. But I don’t shy away from responsibility. First, because I’m a Greene and not to boast but we’re kind of a big deal in Sunrise Bay. Second, I’m the Sheriff. I couldn’t have predicted how protective I’d become for the safety of her and my unborn baby to the point of asking her to move in with me and be my roommate. Just when I think I have the situation under control, another surprise knocks me over, but it only spurs me to double down. I’ll be the first to admit, I didn’t think it through. Somewhere between the dinners, the TV show binging, the doctor appointments, and me walking in on her naked, lines blurred. In what feels like warp speed, my bachelor for life status is in jeopardy and I’m fighting for the most important thing of all—my family.” Dark Alpha’s Silent Night by Donna Grant (Reapers series) is now live!! — “There is no escaping the Reapers. We are elite assassins, part of a brotherhood that only answers to Death. But when Death says it’s our time to live, we are more than happy to obey. We have suffered betrayal, heartbreak, chaos, and even death. Despite another foe lurking around the corner, most of us have found happiness and love. While some still search, there is contentment—a sense of peace and purpose. And with the holidays upon us, it is time to celebrate the family we have made. The one we chose. The season is for revelry, and we intend to take advantage. Whatever may come next will still be there after the last present is unwrapped.” WEEKLY NEW RELEASES RECAP Shelter by Kristen Proby (close proximity romance, standalone in Heroes of Big Sky series) Code Name: Disavowed by Sawyer Bennett (second chance romance/suspense, standalone in Jameson Force Security series) Homecoming King by Penny Reid (small town romance, standalone in Three Kings series) My Unexpected Surprise by Piper Rayne (pregnancy/roommates, standalone in The Greene Family series) Dark Alpha’s Silent Night by Donna Grant (paranormal Christmas tale from Reapers series) now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase WHAT KIND OF BOOKS ARE YOU LOOKING FOR? __________________________________ Let me know if there are any other books you’re loving right now too!! LET’S STAY CONNECTED To get these lists sent to you every week, subscribe by email. 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BOOKWORM NEWS: Dream Keeper by Kristen Ashley (Dream Team series) is now live!! — “Pepper Hannigan is determined to keep any romance off the table while her daughter Juno is still young. Sure, a certain handsome commando is thoughtful, funny, and undeniably hot, but Pepper’s had her heart broken before, and she won’t let it ...Read More  >

BOOKWORM NEWS: Dream Keeper by Kristen Ashley (Dream Team series) is now live!! — “Pepper Hannigan is determined to keep any romance off the table while her daughter Juno is still young. Sure, a certain handsome commando is thoughtful, funny, and undeniably hot, but Pepper’s had her heart broken before, and she won’t let it happen again. Not to her or her little girl, even if this hero could melt any woman’s resolve. Augustus “Auggie” Hero can’t deny his attraction to beautiful, warm-hearted Pepper or how much he wants to make a home with her and her little girl, but Pepper’s mixed signals have kept him away. That is, until Juno decides to play matchmaker. Her efforts finally bring Pepper into his arms, but they expose the danger Pepper is in. To protect Pepper and Juno, Auggie will have to live up to his last name and prove happy endings aren’t just for fairy tales.” Go Tell The Bees That I Am Gone by Diana Gabaldon (Outlander series) is now live!! — “Jamie Fraser and Claire Randall were torn apart by the Jacobite Rising in 1746, and it took them twenty years to find each other again. Now the American Revolution threatens to do the same. It is 1779 and Claire and Jamie are at last reunited with their daughter, Brianna, her husband, Roger, and their children on Fraser’s Ridge. Having the family together is a dream the Frasers had thought impossible. Yet even in the North Carolina backcountry, the effects of war are being felt. Tensions in the Colonies are great and local feelings run hot enough to boil Hell’s teakettle. Jamie knows loyalties among his tenants are split and it won’t be long until the war is on his doorstep. Brianna and Roger have their own worry: that the dangers that provoked their escape from the twentieth century might catch up to them. Sometimes they question whether risking the perils of the 1700s—among them disease, starvation, and an impending war—was indeed the safer choice for their family…” Change With Me by Kristen Proby (With Me In Seattle series) is now live!! — “Zane Cooper. Hollywood royalty. Fourth generation superstar. He knows what it is to be one of the biggest celebrities in the world. And how lonely that title truly is. When scandal hits, his career hangs in the balance, and Zane flees LA for Seattle, laying low with his newly married best friend. Things will eventually blow over, and he’ll have his life back soon enough. Aubrey Stansfield arrives in Seattle excited to start a new job, and eager to settle into her new home. But when she arrives at her rental, Aubrey’s sure she’s imagining things because the uber sexy Zane Cooper is unpacking in her new bedroom. Thanks to a rental snafu, and unwilling to relocate on such short notice, Aubrey and Zane are thrust into being roommates…” WEEKLY NEW RELEASES RECAP Dream Keeper by Kristen Ashley (alpha romance, Dream Team series) Go Tell The Bees That I Am Gone by Diana Gabaldon (latest book in Outlander series) Change With Me by Kristen Proby (novella in With Me In Seattle series) Wrapped in Black by Tiffany Reisz (Christmas novella in Original Sinners series) now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase WHAT KIND OF BOOKS ARE YOU LOOKING FOR? __________________________________ Let me know if there are any other books you’re loving right now too!! LET’S STAY CONNECTED To get these lists sent to you every week, subscribe by email. FOLLOW THE BLOG Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Pinterest | BlogLovin’ | Google+ | Goodreads

BOOKWORM NEWS: The Wolf by JR Ward (Black Dagger Brotherhood Series, Prison Camp spinoff) is now live!! — “Return to the sizzling glymera’s prison camp in this dark and sexy second novel in the new Black Dagger Brotherhood Prison Camp spin-off series from the #1 New York Times bestselling author J.R. Ward. In the next ...Read More  >

BOOKWORM NEWS: The Wolf by JR Ward (Black Dagger Brotherhood Series, Prison Camp spinoff) is now live!! — “Return to the sizzling glymera’s prison camp in this dark and sexy second novel in the new Black Dagger Brotherhood Prison Camp spin-off series from the #1 New York Times bestselling author J.R. Ward. In the next installment of bestselling author J.R. Ward’s Prison Camp series, things get steamy when Lucan, a wolven forced into bartering drug deals for the infamous Prison Colony, meets Rio, the second in command for the shadowy Caldwell supplier, Mozart. After a deal goes awry, a wolf with piercing golden eyes swoops in to save her from certain death. As shocking truths unfurl, Rio is uncertain of who to trust and what to believe—but with her life on the line, true love rears its head and growls in the face of danger.” Next Time I Fall by Scarlett Cole is now live!! — “Love rocks. Heavy guitars, a voice with the burn of pure single malt, and lyrics that distill the meaning of love are the greatest things. If only the man singing didn’t have a temperament as foul as the Michigan winter. Jase sitting in her car while yelling at her to get him out of there is a surprise. Why she hits the accelerator and takes him to her father’s cabin on the lake is an even greater mystery. How was she supposed to know they’d end up snowed in for days? Or that when they got out again, their relationship, and her views on love, would be changed irrevocably?” 14 Days of Christmas by Louise Bay is now live!! — “I hate Christmas. As CEO of my company, I’ve banned decorations from the office, festive music from the lobby and any kind of secret Santa gifts between employees are strictly forbidden. I’m heading to the airport, away from the Christmas lights and the mulled wine, heading for sunshine and margaritas when I get a call from Granny. She’s sprained her ankle and needs my help filling in for her as head of the village Christmas Committee. Snowsly is the Christmas Capital of England and the last place I want to be in the lead up to Christmas. But there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for Granny. When I arrive in Snowsly, I’m introduced to Celia Sommers who is Christmas’ biggest fan and therefore my own personal nightmare before Christmas. Worse than that, I have to work with her to make Snowsly’s Christmas market a success. Celia is determined to get me in the festive spirit. It’s not going to work. It doesn’t matter if she’s smart and funny and easy to flirt with—if she doesn’t stop looking at me with her sparkling eyes and pouting her completely kissable lips, Celia is going straight to the top of my naughty list.” The Enigma by Jodi Ellen Malpas is now live!! — “After leaving her fiancé at the altar and quitting her job as a Miami cop, Beau Hayley stumbles through life, feeling only resentment. Injustice. Loss. Her mom’s death was called an accident. She’s not convinced. Grieving, she becomes numb to everything except the constant, biting pain of heartbreak and hate. She can see no light. Until she meets James Kelly, a man who seems as damaged as she is, inside and out. And yet despite his twisted, cold façade, he stimulates feelings. Pleasure. He is a respite from her own flaws. A complete mystery.” The Christmas Bookshop by Jenny Colgan is now live!! — “Laid off from her department store job, Carmen has perilously little cash and few options. The prospect of spending Christmas with her perfect sister Sofia, in Sofia’s perfect house with her perfect children and her perfectly ordered yuppie life does not appeal. Frankly, Sofia doesn’t exactly want her prickly sister Carmen there either. But Sofia has yet another baby on the way, a mother desperate to see her daughters get along, and a client who needs help revitalizing his shabby old bookshop. So Carmen moves in and takes the job. Thrown rather suddenly into the inner workings of Mr. McCredie’s ancient bookshop on the picturesque streets of historic Edinburgh, Carmen is intrigued despite herself. The store is dusty and disorganized but undeniably charming. Can she breathe some new life into it in time for Christmas shopping?” Beard in Hiding by Penny Reid is now live!! — “Propositioning the Iron Wraiths’ money man seemed like a good idea at the time… Diane Donner—recently divorced pillar of polite society—is craving danger. She’s tired of playing it safe and she knows just the sexy criminal motorcycle man to proposition for a good time. Problem is, she doesn’t actually know his name. Jason “Repo” Doe never takes risks. So when the queen of local commerce walks into his club, looking to get risky and frisky, Jason knows the smartest thing to do is save himself a headache while saving the new divorcee from her worst impulses. But then one thing leads to another, and the memory of just-one-night doesn’t feel like enough. Theirs is a story with no future, because how can a dangerous criminal win (and keep) a queen?” Head Over Hooves by Erin Nicholas is now live!! — “You know in movies where the big city girl lands in a small town for the holidays and falls for the hunky guy who saves Christmas? This isn’t that story. But this guy does look fantastic in flannel. And out of flannel… Finding true love with his one-and-only soul mate? Drew Ryan’s given up on that. But a hot holiday fling in Louisiana, far from his responsibilities and good guy image back home, is now on the top of his list for Santa. So when he’s knocked on his ass—literally—by a Christmas elf who’s stealing a sleigh full of gifts and using his reindeer to commit the crime, he definitely doesn’t expect to fall head over heels.” The Singles Table by Sara Desai is now live!! — “After a devastating break-up, celebrity-obsessed lawyer Zara Patel is determined never to open her heart again. She puts her energy into building her career and helping her friends find their happily-ever-afters. She’s never faced a guest at the singles table she couldn’t match, until she crosses paths with the sinfully sexy Jay Dayal. Former military security specialist Jay has no time for love. His life is about working hard, staying focused, and winning at all costs. When charismatic Zara crashes into his life, he’s thrown into close contact with exactly the kind of chaos he wants to avoid. Worse, they’re stuck together for the entire wedding season. So they make a deal. She’ll find his special someone if he introduces her to his celebrity clients. But when their arrangement brings them together in ways they never expected, they realize that the perfect match might just be their own.” WEEKLY NEW RELEASES RECAP The Wolf by JR Ward (Black Dagger Brotherhood Series, Prison Camp spinoff) Next Time I Fall by Scarlett Cole (rockstar romance, standalone in Excess All Areas series) The 14 Days of Christmas by Louise Bay (CEO/small town holiday romance, standalone) The Enigma by Jodi Ellen Malpas (romantic suspense, Unlawful Men series) The Christmas Bookshop by Jenny Colgan (heartwarming holiday novel, standalone) Beard in Hiding by Penny Reid (small town romcom, Green Valley world) Head Over Hooves by Erin Nicholas (holiday fling, standalone in Boys of the Bayou Gone Wild series) Kingdom Come by Aleatha Romig (dark romance, standalone) The Singles Table by Sara Desai (romantic comedy, standalone in The Marriage Game series) now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase LATEST BOOK SALES UPCOMING BOOK RELEASES WHAT KIND OF BOOKS ARE YOU LOOKING FOR? __________________________________ Let me know if there are any other books you’re loving right now too!! LET’S STAY CONNECTED To get these lists sent to you every week, subscribe by email. FOLLOW THE BLOG Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Pinterest | BlogLovin’ | Google+ | Goodreads

  BOOKWORM NEWS: Heard It in a Love Song by Tracey Garvis Graves is now live!! — “Love doesn’t always wait until you’re ready. Layla Hilding is thirty-five and recently divorced. Struggling to break free from the past—her glory days as the lead singer in a band and a ten-year marriage to a man who ...Read More  >

BOOKWORM NEWS: Heard It in a Love Song by Tracey Garvis Graves is now live!! — “Love doesn’t always wait until you’re ready. Layla Hilding is thirty-five and recently divorced. Struggling to break free from the past—her glory days as the lead singer in a band and a ten-year marriage to a man who never put her first—Layla’s newly found independence feels a lot like loneliness. Then there’s Josh, the single dad whose daughter attends the elementary school where Layla teaches music. Recently separated, he’s still processing the end of his twenty-year marriage to his high school sweetheart. He chats with Layla every morning at school and finds himself thinking about her more and more. Equally cautious and confused about dating in a world that favors apps over meeting organically, Layla and Josh decide to be friends with the potential for something more. Sounds sensible and way too simple—but when two people are on the rebound, is it heartbreak or happiness that’s a love song away?” Just One Chance by Carly Phillips is now live!! — “As a former Marine, Xander Kingston’s writing keeps him sane. Bonus? His thrillers made him one of Hollywood’s most desired screenwriters—and also introduced him to a fledgling starlet who broke his heart. With his close-knit family in New York, Xander returned home and found peace. Until Sasha Keaton shows up at his Hamptons retreat. Now an A-Lister, she’s as beautiful as he remembers. And just as dangerous to his heart. Sasha learned from watching her mother to never sacrifice her dreams for anyone—only to discover how empty life could be without the man she loved. Now cast in Xander’s latest movie, she needs his insight to play the part, but secretly hopes for a second chance.” My Sister’s Flirty Friend by Piper Rayne is now live!! — “I broke the cardinal rule and slept with my sister’s best friend. Granted, I’d just found out that I was now a single father to a three-year-old little girl and was low on willpower. It should also be noted that there’s been sexual tension between us for years. There’s no way it would be a surprise if anyone in our small town found out. That is if we were telling people, which we’re not. We’re in agreement to keep our affair a secret, especially since neither one of us do relationships. You’ve probably figured it out already, but things didn’t go as planned.” More Than Hate You by Shayla Black is now live!! — “I’m Sebastian Shaw—CFO, pragmatist, and moneymaker. I’ve mismanaged love in the past, but when it comes to business, I’m pure shark, able to cut down any threat to my success…except Sloan O’Neill. We’re vying for the same major client, so I do what any self-respecting cutthroat does to gain the upperhand: spy on the ball-busting piece of work. She may be gorgeous and unnervingly clever, but I have skills. My gutsy roadblock doesn’t stand a chance. Until I realize I’m falling for her. Suddenly, everything from my objectives to my morals is cloudy. Stay loyal to my best friend and boss to win this critical client at any cost…or give my heart another chance? But the more time I spend with my redheaded adversary, the more I realize she’s not just ambitious but kind, vulnerable…and perfect…” Dark Tarot by Christine Feehan is now live!! — “Sandu Berdardi continues to exist only to protect his people. An ancient Carpathian, his entire long life has been dedicated to honor above all else. He knows his time has passed, especially since he has not been able to find his lifemate—the anchor to keep him sane in a world he no longer understands. But just as he truly starts to give up hope, a voice reaches out to him in the night and his world explodes into color. Adalasia enters Sandu’s mind seamlessly, as if she has been a part of him forever. While she can see the shape of things to come in her deck of cards, her gift is both a blessing and a curse. The true course of Sandu’s quest remains unclear, with danger waiting at every turn. She cannot see everything the future holds, but she does know it is a journey they will take together.” The Rhythm Method by Kylie Scott (Stage Dive novella) is now live!! — It all started in Vegas… After a wild and tumultuous beginning to their relationship, Evelyn Thomas and her rock star husband David Ferris have been happily married for years. Nothing needs to change, their life together is perfect. Which means that change in the shape of an unexpected pregnancy is bound to shake things up some. But could it be for the better? WEEKLY NEW RELEASES RECAP Heard It in a Love Song by Tracey Garvis Graves (starting over & second chances, standalone) The Rhythm Method by Kylie Scott (novella in Stage Dive series) Just One Chance by Carly Phillips (second chance romance, standalone in The Kingston Family series) My Sister’s Flirty Friend by Piper Rayne (single dad romance, standalone in The Greene Family series) More Than Hate You by Shayla Black (enemies to lovers, standalone in Reed Family Reckoning series) Dark Tarot by Christine Feehan (paranormal romance, The Dark series) now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase WHAT KIND OF BOOKS ARE YOU LOOKING FOR? __________________________________ Let me know if there are any other books you’re loving right now too!! LET’S STAY CONNECTED To get these lists sent to you every week, subscribe by email. FOLLOW THE BLOG Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Pinterest | BlogLovin’ | Google+ | Goodreads

  BOOKWORM NEWS: Indigo Ridge by Devney Perry is now live!! — “Winslow Covington believes in life, liberty and the letter of the law. As Quincy, Montana’s new chief of police, she’s determined to prove herself to the community and show them she didn’t earn her position because her grandfather is the mayor. According to ...Read More  >

BOOKWORM NEWS: Indigo Ridge by Devney Perry is now live!! — “Winslow Covington believes in life, liberty and the letter of the law. As Quincy, Montana’s new chief of police, she’s determined to prove herself to the community and show them she didn’t earn her position because her grandfather is the mayor. According to her pops, all she has to do is earn favor with the Edens. But winning over the town’s founding family might have been easier if not for her one-night stand with their oldest son. In her defense, it was her first night in town and she didn’t realize that the rugged and charming man who wooed her into bed was Quincy royalty. Sleeping with Griffin Eden was a huge mistake, one she’s trying to forget. He’s insufferable, arrogant and keeps reminding everyone that she’s an outsider. Winslow does her best to avoid Griffin, but when a woman is found dead on Eden property, the two of them have no choice but to cross paths. As clues to the murderer lead to one of Quincy’s own, Griffin realizes Winslow is more than he gave her credit for. Beautiful and intelligent, she proves hard to resist. For him. And the killer.” Riggs by Sawyer Bennett is now live!! — “As a professional hockey player, people think I live a charmed life. On the surface, I do. But they don’t know the horrors of my childhood, or the real reason that I have custody of my seventeen-year-old sister, Janelle. And that’s exactly the way I like it. They may think I’m a prick because I don’t like to share, but that’s fine. They don’t know me, and they don’t need to. In an effort to help Janelle get settled in Phoenix and stay out of trouble at school, I set her up with a job at Clarke’s Corner, the local bookstore owned by the girlfriend of a teammate. It’s there that she makes friends with Veronica Woodley, the extremely annoying, arrogant, money-hungry divorcee who I don’t want anywhere near my sister. Janelle insists I’m completely wrong about Veronica, but I refuse to accept that. I have to keep reminding myself that that the gorgeous blond with legs for days is off limits. Through a series of events, I start to see Veronica for what she really is—an amazing woman who has survived her own hell to come out even stronger. I have to admit, we’re more alike than not…” Until April by Aurora Rose Reynolds is now live!! — “With happily ever after being something that happens to other people, April Mayson has decided to put all her energy into her career and living her best life, and things are better than ever. Little does she know that her world is about to be turned upside down when she’s asked to help out a family friend, Maxim Kauwe. Now, she’s dealing with a man unlike any she’s ever met before, her ex—a famous musician who’s decided he wants her back—and a possible serial killer. With all the drama suddenly swirling around her, she will have to figure out if she is brave enough to trust Maxim with her heart and maybe even her life.” Rebel North by JB Salsbury is now live!! — “In a city where image is everything, Gabriella turns heads for all the wrong reasons. The marks that slash across her neck and face turn people away. But I see the beauty that lies beneath, feel a kinship to her pain. I regret the way she found me—mugged and left for dead. I should walk away, follow the rules, but I can’t. I want to see her again. There’s only one problem. My brother convinced her I’m gay. I use that lie to my advantage, persuade her to be my pretend girlfriend, to help protect my fake-sexual identity from my judgmental family. But what starts as a shameless excuse to be near her leads to crossed lines and midnight confessions. I’m not who I led her to believe. I’m sin wrapped in silk. Betrayal masked by beauty. And she’s not the only one with scars…” Inked Devotion by Carrie Ann Ryan is now live!! — “Brenna Garrett watched her best friend fall in love with another woman all the while keeping his darkest secrets from her. Now she’ll have to figure out who she is without him while not letting the rest of the Montgomerys see her break. When her family forces her on a road trip, she finds herself bringing Benjamin Montgomery with her. The problem? He’s her best friend’s twin, so there’s no escaping that familiar face. Benjamin didn’t want to leave his family in a lurch, but Brenna isn’t the only one who needs a break. Only a drunken mistake leads to a night of passion with unintended consequences. When it turns out they can’t walk away, they’ll have to make a choice: remain just friends or start something new and possibly risk everything. Including themselves.” Rules for Heiresses by Amalie Howard is now live!! — “Born to a life of privilege, Lady Ravenna Huntley rues the day that she must marry. She’s refused dozens of suitors and cried off multiple betrothals, but running away—even if brash and foolhardy—is the only option left to secure her independence. Lord Courtland Chase, grandson of the Duke of Ashvale, was driven from England at the behest of his cruel stepmother. Scorned and shunned, he swore never to return to the land of his birth. But when a twist of bad luck throws a rebellious heiress into his arms, at the very moment he finds out he’s the new Duke, marriage is the only alternative to massive scandal. Both are quick to deny it, but a wedding might be the only way out for both of them. And the attraction that burns between them makes Ravenna and Courtland wonder if it’ll truly only be a marriage of convenience after all…” Man For Me by Laurelin Paige is now live!! — “Brett Sebastian is the very best kind of friend. Who else would get me a job at one of the biggest corporations in America? And hook me up with his uber-rich cousin to boot? And let me cry on his shoulder every time said cousin blows me off? Okay, it’s pretty obvious that Brett cares about me in a different way than I do for him, but he seems fine with how things are, and our friendship works. Until one fateful night when I’m mooning over his cousin, and Brett utters four words that should make me happy for him, should make me relieved, should balance out our uneven relationship: “I met a girl.” Suddenly my world is crashing down around me, and I’m forced to ask myself—am I only interested in Brett now that he’s taken? Or have I been looking at the wrong man all along?” Moonstone by Helen Hardt is now live!! — “As Moonstone, she was held captive. Now Katelyn Brooks is starting fresh and is determined to reclaim her life. With the help of the Wolfe family, she’s working toward healing…which doesn’t necessarily include falling for a gorgeous waiter. Luke Johnson is a recovering alcoholic who just wants to fly under the radar. He’s not looking for love, but when Katelyn walks through the doors of the restaurant where he works, he’s struck by her beauty and her meekness. Circumstances throw them together, and neither is able to resist the attraction that sparks between them. But Luke has a secret—a big one—that could spell danger for both of them.” Archangel’s Light by Nalini Singh (Guild Hunter series) is now live!! — “Illium and Aodhan. Aodhan and Illium. For centuries they’ve been inseparable: the best of friends, closer than brothers, companions of the heart. But that was before—before darkness befell Aodhan and shattered him, body, mind, and soul. Now, at long last, Aodhan is healing, but his new-found strength and independence may come at a devastating cost—his relationship with Illium. As they serve side by side in China, a territory yet marked by the evil of its former archangel, the secret it holds nightmarish beyond imagining, things come to an explosive decision point. Illium and Aodhan must either walk away from the relationship that has defined them—or step forward into a future that promises a bond infinitely precious in the life of an immortal…but that demands a terrifying vulnerability from two badly bruised hearts.” Home for a Cowboy Christmas by Donna Grant is now live!! — “Tis the season—for everyone except Emmy Garrett. She’s on the run after witnessing a crime. But when it becomes clear that trouble will continue following her, the US Marshal in charge takes her somewhere no one will think to look–Montana. Not only is Emmy in a new place for her protection, but now, she’s stuck with a handsome cowboy as her bodyguard…and she wants to do more than kiss him under the mistletoe. Dwight Reynolds left behind his old career, but it’s still in his blood. When an old friend calls in a favor, Dwight opens his home to a woman on the run. He tries to keep his distance, but there’s something about Emmy he can’t resist. She stokes his passion and turns his cold nights into warm ones. When danger shows up looking for Emmy, Dwight risks everything to keep her safe.” One Christmas Wish by Brenda Jackson is now live!! — “Vaughn Miller’s Wall Street career was abruptly ended by a wrongful conviction and two years in prison. Since then, he’s returned to his hometown, kept his head down and forged a way forward. When he is exonerated and his name cleared, he feels he can hold his head up once again, maybe even talk to the beautiful café owner who sets his blood to simmering. Sierra Crane escaped a disastrous marriage—barely. She and her six-year-old goddaughter have returned to the only place that feels like home. Determined to make it on her own, Sierra opens a soup café. Complication is the last thing she needs, but the moment Vaughn walks into her café, she can’t keep her eyes off the smoldering loner.” WEEKLY NEW RELEASES RECAP Indigo Ridge by Devney Perry (small town enemies to lovers romance, The Edens series) Riggs by Sawyer Bennett (hockey romance, standalone in Arizona Vengeance series) Until April by Aurora Rose Reynolds (contemp romance, standalone in Until Him/Her series) Rebel North by JB Salsbury (NA romance, standalone in The North Brothers series) Inked Devotion by Carrie Ann Ryan (roadtrip romance, standalone in Montgomery Ink series) Rules for Heiresses by Amalie Howard (historical romance standalone) Man For Me by Laurelin Paige (friends to lovers, standalone novella in Man in Charge series) Moonstone by Helen Hardt (love after hardship, new series) Archangel’s Light by Nalini Singh (paranormal romance, Guild Hunter series) Home for a Cowboy Christmas by Donna Grant (holiday romance, standalone) One Christmas Wish by Brenda Jackson (small town holiday romance, Catalina Cove series) now live Purchase now live Pre-Order now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase WHAT KIND OF BOOKS ARE YOU LOOKING FOR? __________________________________ Let me know if there are any other books you’re loving right now too!! LET’S STAY CONNECTED To get these lists sent to you every week, subscribe by email. FOLLOW THE BLOG Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Pinterest | BlogLovin’ | Google+ | Goodreads

BOOKWORM NEWS: Window Shopping by Tessa Bailey is now live!! — “Two weeks before Christmas and all through Manhattan, shop windows are decorated in red and green satin. I’m standing alone in front of the famous Vivant department store, when a charming man named Aiden asks my opinion of the décor. It’s a tragedy in ...Read More  >

BOOKWORM NEWS: Window Shopping by Tessa Bailey is now live!! — “Two weeks before Christmas and all through Manhattan, shop windows are decorated in red and green satin. I’m standing alone in front of the famous Vivant department store, when a charming man named Aiden asks my opinion of the décor. It’s a tragedy in tinsel, I say, unable to lie. He asks for a better idea with a twinkle in his eye. Did I know he owned the place? No. He put me on the spot. Now I’m working for that man, trying to ignore that he’s hot. But as a down on her luck girl with a difficult past, I know an opportunity when I see one—and I have to make it last. I’ll put my heart and soul into dressing his holiday windows. I’ll work without stopping. And when we lose the battle with temptation, I’ll try and remember I’m just window shopping.” Only One Regret by Natasha Madison is now live!! — Him: “My name came with big skates to fill. . At the top of my game, I had everything I wanted, or so I thought. . Being traded to Dallas was not what I was expecting but neither were the divorce papers I was served. . Now I’m a single dad in a city that isn’t my home.” | Her: “Handed my biggest client when I was twenty-two made my dreams come true. . Over time, our work relationship changed, and we grew closer, leaning on each other for support. . He was my rock, my best friend.. Then one drunken night changed everything, and I saw what was in front of me all along. . I just hope that when the dust settles, we won’t regret it.” Promise Me Forever by Layla Hagen is now live!! — “As a divorced single father, I live by three rules: 1. Make sure every day my daughter, Paisley, knows she’s number one in my life. No. Matter. What. 2. Keep contact with my cheating ex-wife to a minimum. 3. Turn Maxwell Wineries into a legacy that keeps Paisley set for life. When I hire Lexi to look after my daughter, I realize I need another rule: don’t pursue Paisley’s nanny. But even if I had that rule it wouldn’t matter. Because I’m breaking it already.” Boyfriend by Sarina Bowen is now live!! — “The hottest player on the Moo U hockey team hangs a flyer on the bulletin board, and I am spellbound: Rent a boyfriend for the holiday. For $25, I will be your Thanksgiving date. I will talk hockey with your dad. I will bring your mother flowers. I will be polite, and wear a nicely ironed shirt… Now everyone knows it’s a bad idea to introduce your long-time crush to your messed-up family. But I really do need a date for Thanksgiving, even if I’m not willing to say why. So I tear his phone number off of that flyer… and accidentally entangle our star defenseman in a ruse that neither of us can easily unwind. Because Weston’s family is even nuttier than mine. He needs a date, too, for the most uncomfortable holiday engagement party ever thrown. There will be hors d’oeuvre. There will be faked PDA. And there will be pro-level awkwardness…” Sealed With A Kiss by Erin Nicholas is now live!! — “What’s a girl to do when faced with a hurricane, her celebrity crush, and a power outage in their shelter? Keep her damned feelings to herself. And her clothes on… Naomi LeClaire is just a small-town girl who loves her quiet, simple life. Donovan Foster is a sexy, charming, wildlife rescuing internet sensation who loves the spotlight. What do these opposites have in common? Only an impossible-to-resist chemistry that, when they’re stuck together in a storm becomes, well, impossible to resist. But the aftermath of the storm gives them something else in common—a rescue mission to help victims. Oh, and a heat-of-the-moment kiss caught on camera by the local paparazzi. Not to mention an offer for a reality TV show documenting them falling in love while saving animals from crazy, dangerous situations…” Well Matched by Jen DeLuca is now live!! — “Single mother April Parker has lived in Willow Creek for twelve years with a wall around her heart. On the verge of being an empty nester, she’s decided to move on from her quaint little town, and asks her friend Mitch for his help with some home improvement projects to get her house ready to sell. Mitch Malone is known for being the life of every party, but mostly for the attire he wears to the local Renaissance Faire—a kilt (and not much else) that shows off his muscled form to perfection. While he agrees to help April, he needs a favor too: she’ll pretend to be his girlfriend at an upcoming family dinner, so that he can avoid the lectures about settling down and having a more “serious” career than high school coach and gym teacher. April reluctantly agrees, but when dinner turns into a weekend trip, it becomes hard to tell what’s real and what’s been just for show…” Serendipity by Kristen Proby (Bayou Magic series) is now live!! — “My sight is a gift and also a curse. It cost me the love of my life. We may have been young, but some things you don’t get over. Like being the cause of the biggest tragedy of your boyfriend’s life. It’s something I’ll never forget, and a reflection of who I am. But now that Jackson’s back in town, with scars and a hero’s badge of honor, it’s time for me to be brave, too. A malevolent evil hell-bent on making my sisters and me pay for rebuffing him is still stalking my family, and some ancient writings portended that the six were the only ones who could defeat him. Jackson Pruitt and I round out that magical number, which means I have to face the evil and the things Jack makes me feel, to save my family and my city…” Infamous Like Us by Krista & Becca Ritchie (Like Us Series: Billionaires & Bodyguards) is now live!! — “22-year-old Sullivan Meadows knew dating Akara & Banks would be complicated, but now that her relationship is public, everything has been put on blast: @HeatherB: Can’t believe Sullivan Meadows is dating TWO men and they’re like all together. Like OMG. Totally didn’t think the rumors were true. @YuiK: anyone know what happened to Sullivan Meadows? News is saying something bad went down. Seems bad. @PaulieP: Why is there no reporting on the thing that “allegedly” happened to that Meadows girl? They aren’t saying whether her boyfriends were there??? @TiffanyW: Y’all I can’t with Sullivan’s boyfriends. They just sandwiched her in PUBLIC to avoid cameras lmao @RiverT: Banks Moretti & Akara Kitsuwon are totally banging. I don’t make the rules @CarlaR: OMGOMGOMG Sullivan Meadows qualified for the Olympics! THIS IS NOT A DRILL! @LacieA: Celebrity Crush is saying ALL the families will be at the Olympics to root for Sullivan. Im dead #HalesMeadowsCobalts @GeorgieO: Dude no way she wins a gold medal. Sulli the Slut is too busy screwing anything that walks @VenusQ: I bet her boyfriends will distract her. Last Olympics, she was single. This one, she’s a MESS. Messiness isn’t getting gold #sorrynotsorry” A Shadow in the Ember by Jennifer L Armentrout is now live!! — “Born shrouded in the veil of the Primals, a Maiden as the Fates promised, Seraphena Mierel’s future has never been hers. Chosen before birth to uphold the desperate deal her ancestor struck to save his people, Sera must leave behind her life and offer herself to the Primal of Death as his Consort. However, Sera’s real destiny is the most closely guarded secret in all of Lasania—she’s not the well protected Maiden but an assassin with one mission—one target. Make the Primal of Death fall in love, become his weakness, and then…end him. If she fails, she dooms her kingdom to a slow demise at the hands of the Rot. Sera has always known what she is. Chosen. Consort. Assassin. Weapon. A specter never fully formed yet drenched in blood. A monster. Until him…” House of Shadows by KA Linde (Royal Houses series) is now live!! — “Kerrigan Argon, a half-human, half-Fae, has joined the Dragon Society against almost everyone’s wishes. A year of training is required with her dragon. First she must travel with the dark Fae prince, Fordham Ollivier, back to his home in the House of Shadows. Nothing but slavery and death has ever awaited a half-Fae in their halls. But something is wrong within their wicked world. A thousand year old spell is weakening. Cracks forming in the foundation. And Kerrigan may just be their ruin or their salvation.” WEEKLY NEW RELEASES RECAP Window Shopping by Tessa Bailey (feel-good holiday romance, standalone) Only One Regret by Natasha Madison (single dad hockey romance, standalone in Only One series) Promise Me Forever by Layla Hagen (single dad romance, standalone) Boyfriend by Sarina Bowen (hockey romance, standalone in Moo U Hockey series) Sealed With A Kiss by Erin Nicholas (opposites attract romcom, Boys of the Bayou Gone Wild series) Well Matched by Jen DeLuca (friends to lovers romance, standalone) Serendipity by Kristen Proby (paranormal romance, Bayou Magic series) Infamous Like Us by Krista & Becca Ritchie (Like Us Series: Billionaires & Bodyguards) A Shadow in the Ember by Jennifer L Armentrout (spinoff of Blood and Ash series) House of Shadows by KA Linde (fae romance, Royal Houses series) now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase WHAT KIND OF BOOKS ARE YOU LOOKING FOR? __________________________________ Let me know if there are any other books you’re loving right now too!! 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BOOKWORM NEWS: A Moment For Us by Corinne Michaels is now live!! — “I was totally over Joshua Parkerson. Sure, I had a teenage crush on him way back when—and everyone knew it—but he never saw me as anything but his little brother’s friend, the girl who got tongue-tied any time he walked into a ...Read More  >

BOOKWORM NEWS: A Moment For Us by Corinne Michaels is now live!! — “I was totally over Joshua Parkerson. Sure, I had a teenage crush on him way back when—and everyone knew it—but he never saw me as anything but his little brother’s friend, the girl who got tongue-tied any time he walked into a room. I had long ago accepted the fact that his strong arms would never hold me, his lush lips would never claim mine, and his blue eyes would never see me as anything more than who I used to be. But now he’s back in Willow Creek Valley, and there’s a brand-new spark between us—even he can’t fight it. Our chemistry is explosive, and every time we’re together, I swear I can feel the earth shake. It doesn’t mean anything… how could it? I’m over him. Until I see that little pink plus sign, and the earth stops turning completely. Now I want it all again, a life with him. But Joshua built walls around his heart for a reason, and his secrets haunt him. How can I show him that the ghosts of his past don’t have to define our new family’s future?” Not Without Your Love by Lexi Ryan is now live!! — “Two and a half years ago, I hit rock bottom and lost everything. Since then, I’ve turned my life around—no more booze, no more drugs, no more self-sabotage. With a new business to run and old promises to keep, the last thing I need is smart-mouthed hellcat Veronica Maddox disrupting my world. Veronica’s as beautiful as she is infuriating. She pushes all my buttons. Maybe that didn’t matter before, but now she’s working for me. She keeps this place running. As a business owner, I appreciate that. As the man she hates and the one who can’t forget our wild night together, I’m slowly losing my mind. I told myself I could resist her, but we only get along when our hands are doing the talking. Before I know it, our relationship is anything but professional [and] no matter how much I try to convince myself otherwise, what started as two enemies has developed into something neither of us imagined possible. And while Veronica’s a complication I never wanted, she is exactly what I need.” Hold On To My Heart by Bella Andre is now live!! — “Nash Hardwin has been on the road full time since leaving his rough childhood behind when he was sixteen. Beloved by millions of fans around the world, he’s never had a real home and never trusted anyone enough to fall in love. Not until he meets Ashley Sullivan. After she unexpectedly steps in to help him out of a very tricky situation, he ends up having the best day of his life with her in Vienna. Ashley is sweet, beautiful and intelligent…with the biggest heart of anyone he’s ever met. When their perfect day together inevitably turns into an even more perfect night, there’s no denying that they make incredibly beautiful music together. But is there even the slightest chance that the small-town single mom and the road warrior rock star can make things work? Or will the realities of lives that are polar opposites make it impossible to hold on to each other’s hearts?” Fallen Royal by Rachel Van Dyken (Mafia Royals #4) is now live!! — “I grew up knowing it would happen one day. Believing that I would fall into my father’s footsteps… So I fought it. I lived. I loved. I teased. And then one day… I destroyed… She saw my rage, my madness, and tried to stop me from destroying myself, and I hated her for it, pushing her away past the point of no return. She was supposed to be mine. But there are some things people can never come back from. I hurt her, she hurt me, and now I’m living a lie. Telling the ones I love that I’m on one side when for years I’ve been forced to play both. I’m no angel. I’ve fallen… I will win her back… She fell for the bad one. She fell for the sinner. So why does that make me smile?” The Blood That Binds by Madeline Sheehan & Claire C Riley (Thicker Than Blood #3) is now live!! — “Two brothers. A childhood sweetheart. Life has never been easy for this trio, and especially not after the end of civilization as they knew it. Having had their formative years ripped from them, they were thrust into a shattered, savage world, a world where they only had each other. Love and loss. Weary travellers on the brink, there is a storm brewing, a turbulent tempest that has nothing to do with the weather. When tragedy strikes, everything changes in the blink of an eye– facades come undone, and loyalty is pushed to a breaking point. A diamond in the rough. Immersed back into something akin to normal society, a safe-haven in the midst of misery, our travellers are forced to finally confront their demons–long-kept secrets that have been haunting them for nearly a decade. Love is never easy; And love during the end of the world is a hell of a lot more complicated.” The Butler by Danielle Steele is now live!! — “Joachim takes a job working for Olivia as a lark and enjoys the whimsy of a different life for a few weeks, which turn to months as the unlikely employer and employee learn they enjoy working side by side. At the same time, Joachim discovers the family history he never knew: a criminal grandfather who died in prison, the wealthy father who abandoned him, and the dangerous criminal his twin has become. While Olivia struggles to put her life back together, Joachim’s comes apart. Stripped of their old roles, they strive to discover the truth about each other and themselves, first as employer and employee, then as friends. Their paths no longer sure, they are a man and woman who reach a place where the past doesn’t matter and only what they are living now is true.” WEEKLY NEW RELEASES RECAP A Moment For Us by Corinne Michaels (surprise baby/unrequited love romance, standalone) Not Without Your Love by Lexi Ryan (enemies-to-lovers office romance, standalone in The Boys of Jackson Harbor series) Hold On To My Heart by Bella Andre (single mom/rock star romance, standalone in The Sullivans series) Fallen Royal by Rachel Van Dyken (mafia romance, Mafia Royals series) The Blood That Binds by Madeline Sheehan & Claire C Riley (love triangle, Thicker Than Blood series) The Butler by Danielle Steele (women’s fiction, standalone) now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase LATEST BOOK SALES 45% OFF ★ Purchase 65% OFF ★ Purchase under $2 ★ Purchase 50% OFF Purchase 50% OFF Purchase under $1 Purchase under $2 Purchase under $1 Purchase under $3 ★ Purchase under $3 ★ Purchase 50% OFF ★ Purchase under $1 ★ Purchase UPCOMING BOOK RELEASES Oct 13 Pre-Order Oct 18 Pre-Order Oct 19 Pre-Order Oct 19 Pre-Order Oct 19 Pre-Order Oct 19 Pre-Order Oct 26 Pre-Order Oct 26 Pre-Order Oct 26 Pre-Order Oct 26 Pre-Order Oct 26 Pre-Order Nov 02 Pre-Order WHAT KIND OF BOOKS ARE YOU LOOKING FOR? __________________________________ Let me know if there are any other books you’re loving right now too!! LET’S STAY CONNECTED To get these lists sent to you every week, subscribe by email. FOLLOW THE BLOG Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Pinterest | BlogLovin’ | Google+ | Goodreads

BOOKWORM NEWS: A Small Hotel by Suanne Laqueure is now live!! — “It’s the summer of 1941. Europe is at war, but New York’s Thousand Islands are at the height of the tourist season. Kennet Fiskare, son of a hotel proprietor, is having the summer of a lifetime, having fallen deeply in love with a ...Read More  >

BOOKWORM NEWS: A Small Hotel by Suanne Laqueure is now live!! — “It’s the summer of 1941. Europe is at war, but New York’s Thousand Islands are at the height of the tourist season. Kennet Fiskare, son of a hotel proprietor, is having the summer of a lifetime, having fallen deeply in love with a Swedish-Brazilian guest named Astrid Virtanen. But the affair is cut short and the young lovers permanently parted, first by Astrid’s family obligations, then by America’s entry into the war. The rigors of military life help dull his heartache, but when Kennet’s battalion reaches France, he is thrown into the crucible of front line combat. As his unit crosses Europe, from the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, Kennet falls into a different kind of love: the intense camaraderie between soldiers. It’s a bond fierce yet fragile, vital yet expendable, here today and gone tomorrow. Sustained by his friendships, Kennet both witnesses and commits the unthinkable atrocities of warfare, altering his view of the world and himself. To the point where a second chance with Astrid in peacetime might be the most terrifying and consequential battle he’s ever fought…” Wild at Heart by Zoe York is now live!! — “Everyone in Pine Harbour loves Will Kincaid—except the one person he cares about actually impressing. Can grown men have crushes on their frenemies? When Catie joins the small town’s Search and Rescue team, Will finds himself spending every Thursday night swapping glares with the hairdresser while they get in each other’s way. Catie Berton has a long list of reasons why Will is an arrogant jerk. But the more time she spends with him, the more she’s forced to admit sometimes they make a good team. That doesn’t change the fact that Will has always been her right crush, wrong guy. When the SRT goes on a road trip to a competition, she surprises herself by agreeing to ride shotgun in his truck. The long drive could be a chance to repair a shredded friendship, if Catie can get past her complicated feelings for the too-attractive-for-his-own-good school principal.” Mr. Park Lane by Louise Bay is now live!! — “I haven’t seen him in over a decade, but Joshua Luca can still get to me. And I hate it. At twenty-nine, I’m a doctor and I’ve traveled the world, but just the thought of him has me sliding my sweaty palms down my jeans and wishing I could steady my racing heartbeat. Joshua was an almost obsession until, at seventeen, he cost me my future. In one night, I grew up and let go of my silly crush. My infatuation for Joshua is dead and buried. Forever. It doesn’t matter that he’s my new roommate. Or that he still has that same sexy smile. I barely notice how, despite his billions, he’s the kindest man I know. Or that when he touches me, a thousand tiny fireworks explode all over my body. I’m completely over Joshua Luca.” Spark by Helen Hardt (Steel Brothers Saga) is now live!! — “Donovan “Donny” Steel is on a partnership track with a major Denver law firm. He loves his city career and his luxurious downtown loft, and life is going just how he planned it…until his mother, the city attorney for his hometown of Snow Creek, Colorado, asks him to move back and work for her when her assistant retires. Mom asks? Donny goes. Because he’ll do anything for the family who took him in twenty-five years ago. The fact that he can pick up where he left off with gorgeous Callie Pike is simply a fringe benefit. Caroline “Callie” Pike was looking forward to finally beginning law school at age twenty-six, but the western slope fire that destroyed most of her family’s vineyards put that plan on hold. At least she has Donny Steel’s return to look forward to. After she spent an evening with him at a recent party, he hasn’t strayed far from her mind…” Eight Perfect Hours by Lia Louis is now live!! — “On a snowy evening in March, thirty-something Noelle Butterby is on her way back from an event at her old college when disaster strikes. With a blizzard closing off roads, she finds herself stranded, alone in her car, without food, drink, or a working charger for her phone. All seems lost until Sam Attwood, a handsome American stranger also trapped in a nearby car, knocks on her window and offers assistance. What follows is eight perfect hours together, until morning arrives and the roads finally clear. The two strangers part, positive they’ll never see each other again but fate, it seems, has a different plan. As the two keep serendipitously bumping into one another, they begin to realize that perhaps there truly is no such thing as coincidence.” A Reckless Match by Kate Bateman is now live!! — “Madeline Montgomery grew up despising––and secretly loving––the roguish Gryffud “Gryff” Davies. Their families have been bitter rivals for hundreds of years, but even if her feelings once crossed the line between love and hate, she’s certain Gryff never felt the same. Now, she’s too busy saving her family from ruin to think about Gryff and the other “devilish” Davies siblings. Since he’s off being scandalous in London, it’s not like she’ll ever see him again…” Wild Heart by Laurelin Paige (Dirty Wild #3) is now live!! — “Secrets, surprises, and second chances. This trip down memory lane with Jolie has mended as much as it’s torn up. I promised her I could handle anything. Whatever she was hiding, my wild heart would always belong to her. But I could never have imagined this truth. And she can’t blame me for how this will all end.” WEEKLY NEW RELEASES RECAP A Small Hotel by Suanne Laqueure (military/love/family fiction) Wild at Heart by Zoe York (frenemies to lovers romance, standalone in The Kincaids of Pine Harbor series) Mr. Park Lane by Louise Bay (second chance/roommates romance, standalone) Wild Heart by Laurelin Paige (contemp romance, book #3 in Dirty Wild series) Eight Perfect Hours by Lia Louis (snowstorm/strangers romance, standalone) More Than Possess You by Shayla Black (romance novella, standalone in More Than series) Spark by Helen Hardt (romantic suspense, Steel Brothers Saga) A Reckless Match by Kate Bateman (historical romance, Ruthless Rivals) now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase now live Purchase WHAT KIND OF BOOKS ARE YOU LOOKING FOR? __________________________________ Let me know if there are any other books you’re loving right now too!! 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196 countries, countless stories...

This writer came onto my radar thanks to Keith Kahn-Harris, author of The Babel Message: A Love Letter to Language, with whom I did a musical incomprehension experiment a few years back. He shared some information with me about Llanito, the language of Gibraltar (a British Overseas Territory at the southern tip of the Iberian […]

This writer came onto my radar thanks to Keith Kahn-Harris, author of The Babel Message: A Love Letter to Language, with whom I did a musical incomprehension experiment a few years back. He shared some information with me about Llanito, the language of Gibraltar (a British Overseas Territory at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula). It was, he told me, an amalgam of Spanish and English with bits of Maltese and Genoese thrown in. In fact, the literary scene in Gibraltar was similarly fascinating, a kind of experiment in answering the question of how small a population you need to establish a literary culture. Yorkshire-based M.G. Sanchez is a key player in this, having co-founded Patuka Press, which publishes anthologies of Gibraltarian writing. Indeed, several of Sanchez’s own books feature Llanito and his most recent has both an English and a Llanito edition. The title that caught my eye on his back catalogue, however, was Diary of Victorian Colonial and other Tales, my latest Book of the month. Originally published in 2008 through Rock Scorpion Books, a now-defunct publishing forum that Sanchez also founded after he struggled to find an outlet for Gibraltarian work, Diary is Sanchez’s second work of fiction. It features one novella and two shorter works that, according to its marketing material centre on ‘themes of emotional and geographical displacement’. The title work is the most ambitious piece. Chronicling the return of ex-convict Charles Bestman to Gibraltar, the land of his birth, in the nineteenth century, it explores what it means to belong and how history can entrap us in many senses. After this comes ‘Intermission’, a stream-of-consciousness account of a UK-based magazine publisher’s snap decision to give up the world and enter a French monastery. Last and, for my money, least is ‘Roman Ruins’, the story of an Italian lawyer’s attempt to save a homeless Kosovan man. Voice is one of the key strengths of Sanchez’s writing. The first two pieces lift off the page thanks to compelling, energetic and distinctive first-person narrators. The diary form is not easy to pull off and sustain for a whole work of fiction, and it’s credit to Sanchez that Bestman’s account is engaging, and peppered with telling observations. Meanwhile, the would-be monk of ‘Intermission’ is often extremely funny. His claim that the notorious British serial killer Fred West looked ‘a bit like an ugly Tom Jones’ had me laughing out loud. Although his spiel is occasionally repetitious and tips over into raw ranting on a few occasions, lines like this meant that I was more than happy to stay with him for the ride. There is a rich, mischievous seam to the writing in the first two-thirds of the book that put me in mind of anglophone authors such as Helen DeWitt and C.D. Rose, as well as the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis. It’s also fascinating to see colonialism and Britishness discussed from fresh angles, as Sanchez does in the first two pieces. There is a Trojan horse element to many of the passages, with certain ostensibly harmless or familiar formulations being used to smuggle in sentiments that challenge the status quo or reframe ideas. Some of these, such as the magazine publisher’s reflections on political correctness gone mad, now feel a little dated, but many are still disconcertingly fresh. There’s a meta element to the title work too. At the end of the text, an editor’s note informs us of the way in which the diary was discovered and praises Rock Scorpion Books for publishing it after it was rejected by many other outlets. Finding a way to be heard and recognised is, it seems, part of the story. Language has a big role to play in this. Llanito and Spanish feature in dialogue in the opening piece, while French appears in ‘Intermission’, and Italian and Serbian ring the changes in the final story. Multilingualism and pluralism are part of the fabric of this literary world, with Sanchez rarely choosing to translate on the page. Bewilderment and codeswitching are de rigueur. All that said, the final story is an odd fit in this collection. Whereas the first two pieces complement each other tonally, stylistically and thematically, ‘Roman Ruins’ feels as though it is out on a limb. From the retail blurb, I see that a story called ‘The Old Colonial’ is listed in its place in the collection, and I wonder if a late need for a substitution has led to this piece being shoehorned in. Certainly, there is a stilted, slightly unfinished quality to it. Characters often seem to exist to make arguments rather than to act in their own right, with several conversations featuring long expositions of the history of the former Yugoslavia and the atrocities committed during and since its collapse (although as I write this, I’m conscious that numerous literary traditions have a much higher tolerance for political and historical discussion than is generally accepted in anglophone literature – it may be that Gibraltarian literature does too). Coming after the mischievous, subversive antics of the first two pieces, the straightness of ‘Roman Ruins’ is hard to take. I also found the female lawyer less convincing than Sanchez’s male creations. All in all, the story felt uneven. But then perhaps evenness isn’t necessarily a virtue, or a quality essential to every work or literary tradition. It may be that Sanchez and his fellow Gibraltarian writers are nurturing a literary culture that works according to other standards – one that has no need to appeal to the sensibilities of a citizen of the country that once colonised their homeland. Sanchez has since published numerous works that may have taken his writing in any number of directions. I’m intrigued to learn more. Diary of a Victorian Colonial and other Tales by M.G. Sanchez (Rock Scorpion Books, 2012) Picture: ‘Gibraltar’ by John Finn on flickr.com

Last Thursday, I had the unusual experience of giving a paper at an academic conference. The event was about the future of English studies, and I was there because of a call for papers put out in association with Wasafiri magazine, a British publication championing international contemporary writing. I suggested that I might speak about […]

Last Thursday, I had the unusual experience of giving a paper at an academic conference. The event was about the future of English studies, and I was there because of a call for papers put out in association with Wasafiri magazine, a British publication championing international contemporary writing. I suggested that I might speak about my work with embracing not-knowing in reading, which forms the basis of my Incomprehension Workshops and forthcoming book, Relearning to Read. The organisers liked the sound of this, and so, last Thursday morning, I found myself joining other speakers and delegates in the gracious surroundings of York’s Guildhall for the start of the three-day event. The University of York’s Professor Helen Smith opened proceedings, saying that she felt the event was about survival and finding positive ways that the field of English studies could continue. As an English literature graduate myself, I was a bit taken aback – surely the subject couldn’t be in so much trouble? But as the discussion opened up and academics from universities across the UK began to speak, it became clear that there are many challenges facing those teaching English literature, language and related disciplines today. From the declaration last year that the English GCSE isn’t fit for purpose and the increased testing of performance all through school, to the encroachment of AI on students’ work practices, the sector seems increasingly restricted and hobbled. The main issue, as several of the people sitting near me said, was a lack of joy in the classroom these days. This made me sad. For me, reading has always been about joy. I was eight when I decided that I wanted to study English literature at university, having been entranced by L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Reading was magic, it seemed to me. I couldn’t imagine a better thing than spending three years reading stories. How miserable to think of today’s young readers having all that pleasure squashed out of them. Still, when I thought about it, I could recognise what was being said. Last year, I ran an Incomprehension Workshop at a sixth-form college near where I live in Folkestone. It being World Book Day, I started the session by asking participants to write down how they would complete three sentences: Reading is… The world is… Stories are… At the end of the session, I invited students to read out what they’d written. One said this: Reading is boring The world is crazy Stories are exciting It was clear that something of that disconnect the university lecturers were describing had happened for that sixth-former. Although they still felt the power of stories, this had somehow become separated from reading for them. Books were not the source of connection and electricity they had been for me. I hope my panel helped propose some ways in which that gap might be rebridged. Titled, ‘Incomprehension and Living Between’, it opened with Turkish writer and translator Elif Gülez reading from her memoir about the culture clash she experienced growing up. The extract was powerful and resonated with the small but highly engaged audience, showing how personal narrative can cut through barriers and make experience live in other minds. Then, I spoke about incomprehension and how I try to foster a spirit of play in my work with this. I was particularly touched when one audience member said afterwards that the demonstration I had given had taken her back to the wonder of reading like a child once more. Lastly, we were joined remotely by Indian academic Gokul Prabhu, who delivered a fascinating paper on ‘Queer Opacity in Translation’ – considering how the attempt to make things legible and understandable may sometimes work against the spirit of a text, and how translators may sometimes need to leave gaps and jolts in work that does not intend to make its meaning plain. There was a marvellous electricity in the room, and this carried on into the afternoon, in a session on teaching creative writing, chaired by poet Anthony Vahni Capildeo, whose work-in-progress memoir I read as my Trinidadian pick back in 2012. The panel featured four writers who all teach at UK universities: J.R. Carpenter (University of Leeds), Joanne Limburg (University of Cambridge), Juliana Mensah (University of York), and Sam Reese (York St John University). They were honest about the challenges facing the industry and sector, but so full of enthusiasm and powerful insights that it was impossible not to be encouraged. I was particularly struck by Carpenter’s statement that a poem ought to unfold in the same way that it was gathered up, although, as Mensah observed, this idea is faintly terrifying when I think about the chaotic nature of my own creative process! I came away heartened to think that the academic branch of the field I love has such people working in it. And grateful that so many of those labouring under such pressure at the UK’s universities felt it was worth taking three days out of their hectic schedules to consider how better to foster and share a love of reading stories. I also felt a renewed energy for and commitment to the possibilities of embracing not-knowing and incomprehension too. More soon! Picture: ‘Municipal Offices and Guildhall, York, North Riding of Yorkshire, England’ by Billy Wilson on flickr.com

‘I’ve got a book I think you’d like,’ said bookseller Erin when I wandered into my local bookshop, The Folkestone Bookshop, a few weeks back. They were right. Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, translated by Joshua L. Freeman, is a memoir by Tahir Hamut Izgil, one of the leading contemporary Uyghur poets. It tells […]

‘I’ve got a book I think you’d like,’ said bookseller Erin when I wandered into my local bookshop, The Folkestone Bookshop, a few weeks back. They were right. Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, translated by Joshua L. Freeman, is a memoir by Tahir Hamut Izgil, one of the leading contemporary Uyghur poets. It tells the story of his decision to flee his homeland, along with his wife and children, in the late 2010s, following decades of mounting discrimination and persecution of the Uyghur population in Xianjiang, a nominally autonomous region in northwestern China. Through Izgil’s eyes, we live the experience of seeing your world contract to the point where there is no longer space for you to exist. The accounts of the imprisonments of many of Izgil’s friends and associates – often for minor or even unspecified breaches of the ever-shifting rules – are chilling and heartrending, yet it is the cruel absurdity of many of the directives that restrict everyday life that sticks in the mind. The requirement, for example, for Muslim clerics to participate in televised disco dancing competitions (and the brave attempt of one to embrace this insult as good exercise). Or the Looking Back Project, under which ‘many previous legal things had become illegal’, rendering authors vulnerable to being arrested for books that had been published with the censors’ blessing in previous years. Perhaps most horrifying of all is the List of Prohibited Names, a sporadically updated inventory setting out which names may no longer be used. In light of this, anyone may suddenly find themselves banned from using the appellation by which they have been known all their lives. ‘A name is a person’s most personal possession,’ as Izgil, writing through Freeman, reflects. ‘If he cannot hold on to his own name, what hope does he have of keeping anything else?’ The way language is weaponised to curb and control is similarly disturbing. As the Chinese government’s restrictions on the Uyghurs grow ever tighter, seemingly innocuous words turn traitor. People called in for questioning are said to be taking ‘tea’, those removed to the concentration and re-education camps have been sent to ‘study’, if you have a black mark on your record, you are said to carry a ‘dot’. Uyghurs too, learn to bury their meaning to keep safe: ‘A political campaign was a “storm”, while innocent people caught up in mass arrests or in a Strike Hard Campaign were said to be “gone with the wind”. A “guest” at home often meant a state security agent. If someone had been arrested, they were “in the hospital”. Yet, language is also a source of great joy and beauty in this book. As Freeman explains in his introduction, poetry is a way of life in Izgil’s homeland: ‘Verse is woven into daily life – dropped into conversation, shared constantly on social media, written between lovers. Through poetry, Uyghurs confront issues as a community, whether debating gender roles or defying state repression. Even now, I wake up many mornings to an inbox full of fresh verse, sent by the far-flung poets of the Uyghur diaspora for me to translate.’ Poetry is central to this memoir too. Several of Izgil’s poems appear. What’s more, there is a beautiful litheness and directness to the prose, which captures key moments in the story with memorable clarity. When Izgil’s wife, Marhaba, learns that after years of fighting bureaucracy the family have finally received the visas that will enable them to escape to the US, her face opens ‘like a flower’. Because of the quality of the writing, we feel the Izqil family’s bravery and the loss that goes with uprooting yourself from all you know (including necessarily severing ties with those who stay behind for their safety). As the best writing does, the story speaks for itself, urging itself on the reader, making the pages fly past. Nevertheless, as I read, I found a question surfacing repeatedly in my mind. There are many urgent and brilliant stories by writers from persecuted minorities in the world today. Most of them do not find homes with some of the English-speaking world’s biggest publishers as this one has (coming out through Penguin Random House on both sides of the Atlantic). If they make it into English at all, such stories are usually released by small presses, which, as I often say on this blog, are where most of the risky, exciting, boundary-pushing publishing happens these days. (Books like Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse’s The Convoy, translated by Ruth Diver and published in February by Open Borders Press, for example.) So what is it about this story that has enabled it to cut through? I think there are a couple of reasons. The first is that the book paints the West in a relatively flattering light. Although Izgil likens the contempt of the Han Chinese authorities to the attitudes of European colonialists and quotes a friend saying they wish China would conquer the world because the rest of us are so ignorant about the realities they are facing, the US is a place of safety for Izgil. It is where he can finally taste freedom once more and thrive. I think this is a picture that fits with what many of us in the English-speaking global north would like to believe about our homelands. The second is that the story necessarily reinforces certain narratives about China that happen to serve Western agendas. This portrayal of the Chinese authorities as harsh and unpredictable feels familiar and relatively comfortable. In this respect, although it may challenge other preconceptions, this book will resonate with significant aspects of many people’s prevailing world view. This is not to call into question anything Izgil has written: the atrocities he describes are well documented. Nor is it to detract at all from the brilliance of this book. Rather, it is to say that this may be a story to which many in the English-speaking world may be able to listen to more easily than we can to comparable narratives that do not align with Western agendas so neatly. If anything, this may make this book even more important. It may speak more directly and powerfully about the refugee experience to many anglophone readers because it will not invite the sort of resistance that can often arise when we read challenging books from elsewhere. By happening to echo ideas that feel familiar and safe, it may move us to deepen our sense of humanity and connection with those forced to leave their homelands. Waiting to Be Arrested at Night by Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated from the Uyghur by Joshua L. Freeman (Vintage, 2024)

This book came on my radar through fellow international bibliophile Suroor Alikhan, who kindly hosted me at an online event organised by the Hyderabad Literary Festival last year. A few weeks ago, she contacted me saying that she had found a website that she thought I’d be interested in, featuring a list of more than […]

This book came on my radar through fellow international bibliophile Suroor Alikhan, who kindly hosted me at an online event organised by the Hyderabad Literary Festival last year. A few weeks ago, she contacted me saying that she had found a website that she thought I’d be interested in, featuring a list of more than 100 books by Pacific Islanders. I was intrigued. The Pacific Island nations were among the most difficult countries to source stories from during my 2012 quest to read a book from every country. And although the criteria of the list’s compiler were a little different from mine – she included a number of titles by writers with Pacific Island heritage (including herself) – there were many fascinating-sounding works. The book I’ve picked to feature – Is Anyone Out There? And Other Stories by Julian Maka’a from the Solomon Islands – didn’t strike me as the most satisfying of those I read from the list, but I found it interesting for several reasons. The Solomon Islands are hard to source stories from: back in 2012, the best option I could find was The Alternative, a 1980s boarding school novel. So I was curious about what this much more recent short story collection would be like. My interest was also piqued by Maka’a’s statement on the back cover that the collection – which he self-published in 2012, 27 years after his first collection was brought out by the University of the South Pacific – draws on various aspects of his professional life, including efforts to build staff understanding about sexual reproductive health in his capacity as the manager of Wantok FM, part of the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation. This is reflected in frank descriptions of the treatment of and stigmas around sexually transmitted diseases in several of the earlier pieces. As with many of the books I read ‘from’ Pacific Island nations in 2012, the collection seems written with a consciousness of needing to represent its nation. ‘The themes and general messages [of the stories] are different and varied,’ writes Maka’a, ‘but the one thing that is common is they reflect what life is like in Solomon Islands’. To an outsider like me, this manifests itself most tellingly in the glimpses into local beliefs and customs, presented most richly in the title story, in which a legend about a philandering man ritually killed for breaking taboos haunts the narrator. The emphasis on education, so apparent in The Alternative, is also strong in Maka’a’s work. The most ambitious piece in the collection, a three-part story called ‘Is This Fair?’ centres on a teenage pregnancy at a boarding school and makes clear the sacrifices that the nation’s geography and economic situation demand of families keen to give their children opportunities. Some eight thousand students drop out of education every year, we learn, and just getting to school at the start of term often requires many stomach-churning hours in a boat. As is so often the case in books from elsewhere, it is the assumptions and things taken for granted that prove most intriguing. One of the central characters in ‘Is This Fair?’, for example, seems not to bat an eyelid at the notion that her parents will decide her career path, as set out in a letter her mother sends her: ‘In her brief letter which she wrote in language and pijin, she explained that she and dad always discussed about me. About the future that I would give them from my education – benefits to cut a long story short. She said they had differences in the job I should take up after I graduate in form five. My mother said she wanted me to become a nurse – that way I would help her when she gets sick or even my father. My father on the other hand wanted me to be a teacher.’ For all its interest, however, this book is a challenging and occasionally bewildering read. My knee-jerk reaction is to pin this on the fact that it has probably not been through the editorial processes of many traditionally published books in mainstream anglophone literature, with the result that there are structural idiosyncrasies, and spelling and grammatical oddities that are sometimes distracting. There seem to be some inconsistencies in the character names between the different parts of ‘I Am Fair?’ that make it hard to follow. There is also an abruptness to certain emotional shifts and transitions that risk interrupting the flow of the story. But I’m also aware that what I read as errors or idiosyncrasies may in many cases not be considered as such by readers in the Solomon Islands. There, a different form of English is used, one in which certain formulations and word uses that sound odd to me may be customary. Similarly, shifts between registers and emotional states that jar for me may simply reflect different norms or storytelling traditions beyond my experience feeding into this book. Regardless of how I read it, what remains is a sense of urgency. A desire to communicate. A hand stretched out from this place we in the UK rarely hear of, seeking connection and the chance to convey something. This is me, this book says. This is us. This is where we are. Is Anyone Out There? And Other Stories by Julian Maka’a (Xlibris, 2012)

One of the joyous things that has come out of this project is the way that I’m frequently invited to take part in discussions about writing and the ways stories travel. Often, these conversations take place at literary festivals or conferences, but they sometimes involve podcasts too. Last year, I was asked to produce a […]

One of the joyous things that has come out of this project is the way that I’m frequently invited to take part in discussions about writing and the ways stories travel. Often, these conversations take place at literary festivals or conferences, but they sometimes involve podcasts too. Last year, I was asked to produce a new podcast for the Royal Literary Fund, a UK charity that has supported professional writers for more than 200 years and with which I’ve been involved since 2017. Over the preceding decade, the RLF had built a sound archive featuring recordings of hundreds of writers talking about the creative process, and the challenge and joys of putting words on the page. Now the team wanted a new format to bring this rich bank of material to a wider audience. The Collected podcast is the result. Built around clips from the RLF archive, the episodes bring special guests into conversation with those recorded voices. Hosted by a brilliant team of presenters, including South Asia Speaks founder Sonia Faleiro, award-winning poet Julia Copus, and musician and crime writer Doug Johnstone, the conversations present a lively, funny, surprising and often moving account of what it means to be a writer in the early twenty-first century. The aim is to offer a more nuanced picture than we often see in the media, and it’s been wonderful to hear guests including Women’s Prize founder Kate Mosse, crime writer Howard Linskey, and visual artist and poet Ella Frears embracing the concept with warmth and frankness. Although the writers RLF supports are UK-based, it’s been a joy to reflect my interest in international storytelling in the line-up too. Examples include discussions with Kerala-born novelist Deepa Anappara, who talks thought-provokingly about the gap between the expectations of mainstream anglophone publishers and the sort of writing that interests her, and Colin Grant, director of RLF’s WritersMosaic platform for writers of the global majority, who draws on his Caribbean heritage in his writing on race and migration. Collected is available on all the usual platforms. I’d love to know what you think.

I’m not really a book blogger. Yes, I write about books on this blog – and yes, I did once upon a time review close to 200 books in a year here – but the commitment, stamina and output of other book reviewers in the virtual sphere now leave me and my once-a-month writeups in […]

I’m not really a book blogger. Yes, I write about books on this blog – and yes, I did once upon a time review close to 200 books in a year here – but the commitment, stamina and output of other book reviewers in the virtual sphere now leave me and my once-a-month writeups in the dust. In the international-literature arena, some of the names that spring to mind include Marina Sofia, Stu Allen and Tony Malone. These bloggers and others like them maintain an astonishing pace, easily equally my efforts in 2012 in many cases. And they’ve been going for years, bringing attention to thousands of titles that deserve to be better known by readers of the world’s most published language. Within the anglophone literature sphere, there is a whole raft of other, equally industrious reader/reviewers. I knew little about them until my publisher, Renard Press, organised a blog tour for my novel Crossing Over two years ago. For a month leading up to the release of the book, I had the initially daunting but ultimately lovely experience of seeing my story thoughtfully and generously reviewed by a different book blogger each day. It helped build buzz around the book and, at what can often be an oddly lonely and unsettling time for an author, allowed me to enjoy seeing my work going out into the world. I was so impressed by the blog tour that I wrote an article about it for The Author, the member’s magazine of the UK’s Society of Authors. As part of my research for this, I interviewed former English teacher Linda Hill of Linda’s Book Bag. I was amazed by what she told me: the volume of books she features is such that she operates a traffic light and scoring system to help her keep track of them, and she schedules her posts many months in advance. It sounds like a full-time job, except that, of course, for Linda and most other bloggers like her, it is unpaid: the only material reward they get for the hours and hours they spend reading, planning and reviewing are free advance copies. Because blog tours are less of a thing when it comes to international literature, and because I only rarely feature brand-new books (preferring to promote older titles that deserve a second look) and only do one review a month, I have never taken part in a blog tour. This month, however, I am making an exception for a title that is close to my heart. Where Snowbirds Play, Gina Goldhammer’s debut novel (published by Renard Press’s imprint Hay Press on 6 May 2025), takes us into the privileged world of 1990s Palm Beach, where British graduate Philip has just secured a placement at a new marine life institute. But all is not what it seems both among the super rich who fund him and in Philip’s own story. Soon, secrets, rivalries and financial scandals are bubbling to the surface, and as hurricane season looms it seems unlikely that everyone will escape unscathed. I love this book for two reasons. Firstly, I love it because I’ve had the privilege of seeing it develop over several years in my capacity as a mentor/editor to its author. Working with a writer and seeing their ideas fill and rise until they find their fullest expression is an extraordinary process, and one that I’ve had the joy of experiencing a number of times since I was published, most frequently as a mentor for the Ruppin Agency Writers’ Studio. But I particularly love this book because it is so singular and true to itself. Only Goldhammer could have written it. As I say in the supporting blurb I gave for the book, the novel offers an arresting perspective on a lifestyle few experience firsthand. Taking readers into the heart of privilege, Goldhammer spins a compelling story that lays bare the tensions, frailties, desires and self-deceptions that drive human beings everywhere. Sumptuous, witty and surprising, this novel will transport you to a world that is at once absorbingly fresh, and a charming – and alarming – reflection of our own. And I’m delighted to see that other readers are already recognising the book’s uniqueness. On one of the earlier stops in the Where Snowbirds Play blog tour, bobsandbooks wrote that they were ‘left feeling like this was something a little bit different’. I couldn’t agree more. Where Snowbirds Play by Gina Goldhammer (Hay Press, 6 May 2025)

A few months ago, I was contacted by Bridget Farrell, founder of Bullaun Press, an Irish publisher dedicated to translations. Would I be interested in reading an advance copy of The Rarest Fruit, translated by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert, the second novel they were publishing by Gaëlle Bélem and also the second novel by […]

A few months ago, I was contacted by Bridget Farrell, founder of Bullaun Press, an Irish publisher dedicated to translations. Would I be interested in reading an advance copy of The Rarest Fruit, translated by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert, the second novel they were publishing by Gaëlle Bélem and also the second novel by a writer from Réunion ever to make it into English? Since then, the first, There’s a Monster Behind the Door, also translated by Fleetwood and Saint-Loubert, has been longlisted for the International Booker Prize. To my mind, The Rarest Fruit, which comes out in the UK and Ireland later this week, easily maintains this standard. Based on the true story of Edmond Albius – an orphan slave raised by Ferréol Beaumont, a white botanist on Bourbon Island, as Réunion was known until 1848 – the novel explores appropriation and the injustices embedded in the economic forces that govern international trade to this day. When Edmond unlocks the secret to the pollination of vanilla, the consequences ripple out around the world, changing the Western palate and enriching many of those engaged in the commodity’s exploitation. But for its bright young discoverer, who harbours ambitions ‘to become the first Black botanist in this world of Rich Whites’ but ‘doesn’t have the right colour skin to have callings’, the repercussions are much darker and more painful, bringing him up against the systemic injustices and human cruelty that robbed him of his natural parents in the first place. Rhetoric and rhythms are at the heart of Bélem’s craft. She wields repetition with a barrister’s flair, driving home the force of what she’s presenting and, by getting the reader to look and look again, forcing us to recognise injustices and assumptions that we might at otherwise choose to ignore, or else be habituated to. Take this early passage obliging us to unpack the significance of the first question Ferréol asks when he lays eyes on baby Edmond: ‘What is it?’ ‘It’ – this ebony child that casts him into partial shadow as it comes between the curve of a pale sun and his screwedup eyes. ‘It’ – three kilos and six hundred grams of tender flesh, wrapped up like a black lamb in a woollen cloth. ‘It’ – a living bundle of obvious trouble. Juxtaposition plays a similar role. As Edmond’s life turns towards ruin and jail, and, in the wake of so-called emancipation, he, like many others, finds himself bound by a ‘freedom that shackles him’, we read of the vanilla-infused delicacies dreamed up by leading chefs to grace the tables of the beau monde. Structures like these make the injustices at the heart of the story evident without Bélem needing to state them. By writing in this way, she leads us to construct the points for ourselves rather than proclaiming them. We collaborate with her and the book seems to throw its arms around us, bringing all readers into the human story rather than excluding and shaming those who might take criticism of colonialism as a personal attack. This profound understanding of human motivation soaks the novel in empathy. Instead of two-dimensional actors in a morality play, Bélem gives us human beings in the round. For all his blind spots and hypocrisy, Ferréol is a vulnerable, lonely creature whose world is enriched by the relationship he forms with his adopted son. Likewise, Edmond for all his hopefulness and brilliance, is not immune to exhibiting internalised racism and double standards. We see systemic injustice, but we also see human ingenuity and specificity – the ability to manoeuvre around seemingly immovable obstacles and build bridges against the odds. All of which makes Edmond’s betrayal and the fallout from it particularly poignant. That these two people should be able to hold themselves aloof from social mores for so long only to collapse beneath the weight of expectations and their own conditioning is a tragedy – a painful revelation of the dangers of failing to recognise the limits on our own thinking when we imagine ourselves to be free. Bullaun Press’s edition of The Rarest Fruit publishes in the UK and Ireland on 1 May. And for readers in the US, another version, translated by Hildegarde Serle, comes out from Europa in June. It would be very interesting to compare both English versions. The fact of their release only a month apart is surely testament to the power of the original text. The Rarest Fruit by Gaëlle Bélem, translated from the French by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert (Bullaun Press, 2025) Photo: ‘Vanilla’ by Linda De Volder on flickr.com

I’m not a travel writer. At least, that’s what I’ve always thought. This year, however, I do seem to be spending quite a lot of time speaking, writing and thinking about travel. Not only am I preparing to cover the literary trip of a lifetime for a national newspaper later this summer (watch this space), […]

I’m not a travel writer. At least, that’s what I’ve always thought. This year, however, I do seem to be spending quite a lot of time speaking, writing and thinking about travel. Not only am I preparing to cover the literary trip of a lifetime for a national newspaper later this summer (watch this space), but I’ve also taken the stage at two travel writing festivals. The second of these was the Sherborne Travel Writing Festival, which took place earlier this month. Now in its third year, the three-day event in Dorset, UK, is the brainchild of Rory MacLean, who is celebrated for writing genre-busting books about moving across and beyond national borders. His debut, Stalin’s Nose: Across the Face of Europe, was published in 1992 and is still startlingly relevant (and very funny) today. Much like MacLean’s work, the festival celebrates travel writing in the broadest sense. The traditional formula of the white European reporting on how he finds remote corners of the globe was not much in evidence in this year’s line up. Instead, the programme included an extraordinary range of speakers, from the brilliant Nandini Das, who held the audience captive with a talk on Britain’s first bungling attempts to forge diplomatic relations with the Mughal Empire, to Kapka Kassabova, who spoke movingly of the three months she spent living with Europe’s last moving pastoralists in the mountains of her native Bulgaria while researching her latest book Anima. I was privileged to take the stage twice. I started off in the interviewee’s chair, spending a wonderful hour talking about Reading the World with journalist and fellow translation champion Rosie Goldsmith (you can see us pictured above). Ten years on from the launch of the first edition of that book, it was a pleasure to reflect back on the journey so far and look forward to the publication of Relearning to Read this September. Goldsmith is one of the best in the business when it comes to chairing literary discussions. If you’re a fan of book podcasts, the Slightly Foxed Podcast, which she hosts, is well worth a listen. Then it was my turn to ask the questions. I was joined on stage by Xiaolu Guo, who I had the privilege of chairing at Cheltenham Literature Festival last year. An artist who has travelled in many senses (across the world, between languages, between media, through books and across numerous periods of literary history), Guo is a fascinating writer and speaker. We focused on her memoir, My Battle of Hastings, which draws on a year she spent living in the British seaside town of Hastings, where William the Conqueror routed the Anglo-Saxons in 1066. But it was also great to touch on her new novel, Call Me Ishmaelle, a feminist retelling of Moby Dick. Offstage, there were many similarly fascinating discussions. It was a joy to meet many enthusiastic readers and writers, and a testament to the warm welcome Rory MacLean and his team offer that so many authors from the first two editions of the festival were also in attendance. The weekend was crowned by the announcement of a new annual travel writing prize attached to the festival, the Sherborne Prize for Travel Writing, which will be awarded for the first time next year to a published British or European author whose work encourages understanding between peoples and across societies. Given the breadth and creativity of the team’s vision of travel writing, it’s exciting to think of what this new award might do to broaden the field. And I wonder if in future years the organisers might be persuaded to expand the remit even further to include works published in English from all over the world. In my experience, there are two kinds of literary festival – those that capitalise on culture and those that nurture it. Sherborne Travel Writing Festival is firmly in the second camp. I left fizzing with ideas and thrilled by new connections. It will be exciting to see where the festival takes us next. Picture: courtesy of Rosie Goldsmith.

This book was given to me by the Cameroonian writer Ernis, who I was lucky to meet in Assam last month. Conscious that I had not read any Cameroonian literature since Peter Green’s translation of Mongo Beti’s 1956 classic Mission to Kala, I asked her what contemporary writing from the country (in addition to her […]

This book was given to me by the Cameroonian writer Ernis, who I was lucky to meet in Assam last month. Conscious that I had not read any Cameroonian literature since Peter Green’s translation of Mongo Beti’s 1956 classic Mission to Kala, I asked her what contemporary writing from the country (in addition to her own, of course) I should know about. Her response was to press this novel into my hands. Days Come and Go by Hemley Boum, translated by Nchanji Njamnsi, is the story of three generations of women navigating a changing and turbulent world. Obliged to accept her daughter Abi’s care as she faces death, the historically aloof Anna reflects back on the events that have led her from Cameroon to Paris, and the education that at once enriched and distanced her from her roots. Abi, meanwhile, must contend with family breakdown and the pressures of caring, while Tina, a friend of her son Max’s back in Cameroon, finds herself caught up in a violent new threat sweeping her home region. This is a book that disarms with its directness. Boum’s insights and the clarity with which she expresses them through her characters’ voices are startling and winning. Whether it’s the familiar setting of Paris made strange through Abi’s critical gaze or ‘the undeniable, exquisite delight in succumbing to violence and corruption’ that comes through in several of the episodes, there is a frankness to the writing that speaks to the humanity in people everywhere. Often, this frankness centres on the ruptures caused by colonialism and the imposition of a foreign way of seeing, thinking and learning on a culture that operates by other means. ‘Today, I believe Western knowledge is both simple and despotic,’ states Anna. ‘There is only one God and he is present in church. Education is found only in textbooks. Art is separate from spirituality, confined to specific spaces. The law applies equally to everyone and all values have a price.’ Such thinking jars with the more sensuous, embodied, holistic ways of knowing that used to be common in her home region. ‘Our people never claimed detachment from the world nor dominion over it.[…] We were the world and the world was us: water, wind, sand, the past, the future, the living, the dead… we were all woven into the fabric of the world.’ Falling into the gulf between these two ways of being is a violent experience from which none of the characters in Days Come and Go escape unscathed. Boum makes us feel what this is like, taking us through the stages by which the women are led to conspire in their oppression and suffering so that we seem to live their experiences, from Anna’s grappling with maternal ambivalence and the toll this may have taken on her relationship with her daughter to Abi’s struggle to parent amid marital breakdown. The most powerful section in the book is Tina’s account of how she and two friends got drawn into the terrorist group Boko Haram. This is an astonishingly insightful and compelling delineation of how people can be made to commit the worst acts, including suicide bombing. ‘Nobody asks a grenade about to explode, “Why?”‘ says Tina. ‘The reason is obvious: it has been unpinned. All they do is pull out our pins and throw us at good people.’ Boum makes us feel how those pins get pulled out. And in so doing, she commits a deeply humane act – making it impossible to ignore the humanity we share with those who do the worst things we can imagine, with all the hope and challenge that comes with this. With this understanding, we can make sense of things that might seem unfathomable to us, such as Tina’s silent appeal to Michelle Obama to stop speaking out against Boko Haram because such well-intentioned, distant activism only makes her tormentors crueller. Yet an embodied approach to knowing does not mean a reduction in intellectual rigour. This is, in many ways, one of the most erudite novels I’ve read in a long time. It includes critiques of the work of John Steinbeck, Michelangelo and Frantz Fanon – Anna is not a fan of the latter: ‘my disinclination resides in the fact that there are people indeed more invisible than the damned of the earth – their wives.’ This is a novel that walks to a different beat than the sort of writing commonly celebrated in the anglophone literary world. As a result, readers used to mainstream English-language literature may stumble here and there over pacing that will not meet their expectations, and the inclusion or exclusion of certain statements or details. There is also drama-offstage, some declamatory monologuing and various other things traditionally frowned upon on creative writing courses. And that’s precisely the point. Boum’s storytelling operates by standards other than Western norms, knitting together the emotional, spiritual, physical and intellectual, and presenting these things as a glorious, moving, troubling unity. It is a book of extraordinary range and power. ‘What does a life boil down to?’ asks Anna. This, Boum shows us. This. Days Come and Go by Hemley Boum, translated from the French by Nchanji Njamnsi (Bakwa Books, 2022)

I heard about this title from María Reimóndez, a brilliant Galician writer, translator, interpreter, academic and feminist campaigner who I met at Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival earlier this month. Moved by what she had to say about the erasure the Galician language and culture has battled, I asked for her recommendations. She mentioned several […]

I heard about this title from María Reimóndez, a brilliant Galician writer, translator, interpreter, academic and feminist campaigner who I met at Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival earlier this month. Moved by what she had to say about the erasure the Galician language and culture has battled, I asked for her recommendations. She mentioned several intriguing authors whose work ought to be translated into English, among them Begoña Caamaño (whose two published novels rewrite male-authored classics) and María Xosé Queizán. And for work that has already made it through the translation bottleneck into the world’s most published, language, she directed me to Small Stations Press, an indie that carries an impressive number of works in translation by Galician female authors, including Luísa Villalta and Anxos Sumai. The title that stood out for me, however, was and they say by Susana Sanches Arins, translated by Kathleen March. Drawing on the author’s family’s involvement in the atrocities of the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War, it is, according to Reimóndez, ‘a wonderful lesson in how to answer the question that many people in the West sometimes ask – what do we do with people in our families who have been perpetrators or complicit with the most terrible crimes in history?’ As soon as I got back to the UK, I ordered a copy. It’s just as well that Reimóndez recommended the book so warmly because I might have found the blurb and surrounding text a little offputting had I picked it up independently. The book is framed as uncategorisable, written ‘its own genre’ as translator March puts it or a ‘mosaic of miniature narrations’ according to María Xesús Nogueira in her introduction – descriptions that struck me as a little self-conscious and effortful, as though the writing would try too hard to be clever and impress. But then I started to read. My goodness. The cleverness is there in spades, yes, but it is an embodied cleverness, suffused with feeling. As Arins grapples with the actions and omissions of her forebears, particularly, those of the sinister uncle manuel, she smashes up against the limits of a storytelling framework designed to silence dissent and minimise the transgressions of the powerful. ‘they say history is written by the victors, but it’s also true that they unwrite it. that’s how uncle manuel, who was bad and acted badly, is only in the registers of local history as the mayor of his town for a few years. and that’s all.’ All structures, including language itself, this book demonstrates, have been set up to muffle the truths the author needs to express. As such, the radical, genre-busting elements of the book establish themselves as attempts to break free from constraints and embrace a larger, more generous mode of expression. From the eschewal of capitalisation and the use of repetition, revisions and contradiction, to the presentation of the text as fragments and the striking deployment of line breaks, we experience this text as a remaking of what it is to use language to explore the human condition. While the book may forge its own kind of genre, as March claims, it has kinship with a number of other titles that smash accepted frameworks in order to approach unmentionable truths. Two that spring to mind are A Book, Untitled, by Shushan Avagyan and translated from Armenian by Deanna Cachoian-Schanz (which I discuss in my forthcoming Relearning to Read) and Zong! Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip’s radical excavation of the murder of around 130 African slaves for insurance purposes in 1781 told solely in words taken from the 1783 court case that determined their drowning was legal. As in those works, an extraordinary empathy flows through the pages of and they say. The text considers the suffering and joys of all the living beings it enfolds, from oxen dragging heavy loads through to school children arguing over what duty they have to consider the wrongs of the past decades after the fact. One of the book’s most striking elements is its readiness to embrace and own the fallibility of the author herself. Several times, we see accounts being challenged and revised. Readers even pop up in the text, disputing what was claimed pages before or correcting details. Memory, Arins repeats, is a ‘slippery eel’ and it would be ridiculous to claim that she has some sort of unquestionable authority (the sort of authority paraded by uncle manuel, perhaps) simply because she has set her words down in a book. As a result of this, the book never ends. The edition I own is an ‘expanded version’, incorporating feedback and stories supplied by the first wave of Galician readers. ‘stories are always undone, and redone. voices are like hands that remove brick after brick.’ Indeed, in the acknowledgements, Arins writes, ‘the best thing that came out of the book for me was a phrase: i have to tell you a story.’ Even the notion of closing the final page and stepping away is undone in and they say. This is a book that invites us in rather than proclaiming a narrative we must meekly accept. It is one in which we participate, regardless of our knowledge of the events it explores, joining its community by virtue of our shared humanity. and they say by Susana Sanches Arins, translated from the Galician by Kathleen March (Small Stations Press, 2021)