FRANKFURT
BOOK FAIR
2016
FICTION
Agence Eliane Benisti – Highlights Fiction Frankfurt 2016 (PDF)
Random House Germany Fiction Frankfurt 2016
« Marica Bodrožić is regarded as one of the most interesting writers in our country. » – Cicero
DAS WASSER UNSERER TRÄUME
(The Water of Our Dreams)
by Marica Bodrožić
Luchterhand, September 2016
He has no name. He cannot speak. The man does not even know where he is, and time is also a stranger to him. For a whole year, the nameless one lies in a coma and practices coming round again. But then he returns to the world, and his senses unexpectedly link up. He can remember everything. An accident, it seems, put him in this situation. He cannot move his body but he is nevertheless conscious of himself – and not only that: he can read both the thoughts and longings of other people. In this higher home, he begins to feel that he will be able to return to life and his body. The friendship of a man and the love of two women make him into a person imbued with hope. With linguistic brilliance, Marica Bodrožić sets off on a journey to fascinating spiritual landscapes and writes of what remains in life – and what in the end is important. This novel is the culmination of her poetic trilogy about the love triangle between the painter Arik and the two friends Arjeta and Nadeshda.
Marica Bodrožić was born in Croatia in 1973 and has been living in Germany since 1983. She has published poems, stories, novels and essays. For her writing she has been honoured with many prizes and scholarships.
A compelling family story and a long-kept secret – told with a humour as dry as dust
GESTORBEN WIRD IMMER
(There’s Always Someone Dying)
by Alexandra Fröhlich
Penguin, October 2016
Death was Agnes’s business. For decades she ran the Weisgut & Sons stonemasonry firm in Hamburg, keeping all that went on in the family well and truly under her thumb. Now, at the age of 91, Agnes has had enough of everything and everyone; she wants to make a clean breast of it and finally and at last air the secrets she has been carrying around with her for far too long. She gets her granddaughter Birte, who has been cast in the same mould as she has, to round up the whole clan – by no means an easy task, for they all hate each other’s guts. It is time for the truth.
Alexandra Fröhlich freelances as the head copy editor of various women’s magazines. Her novel “My Russian Mother-in-Law and Other Catastrophes” (2012) was in the Spiegel bestselling list for weeks.
An unsettling literary game with the limits of erotic desire
MÄDCHEN FÜR MORRIS
(Girl for Morris)
by Roman Graf
Knaus, September 2016
Albert Keller, a retired lecturer in literature, is still mourning his son, who was killed in a tragic road accident at the age of fourteen. That Morris never had the chance to experience love is a scarcely bearable injustice for Albert. He keeps looking out for girls that would have been suitable for Morris. Albert lives alone and he also finds consolation in the books by Jean Mason, in which he believes he can find Morris again. When Mason dies, Albert visits his family to do some research for a biography. There, he meets Mason’s daughter, twelve-year-old Joëlle: He chooses her to be the « Girl for Morris », until one day he realises that in reality he desires the girl for himself – and finally goes too far. MÄDCHEN FÜR MORRIS is an ingenious play on the famous works by Vladimir Nabokov and Lewis Carroll, and it skillfully oscillates between fiction and reality…
Roman Graf trained in forestry, worked in various jobs and studied at the Leipzig Literature Institute. For his first novel, “Mr. Blanc”, and a volume of poetry he was awarded several prizes, including the 2009 Mara Cassens Prize and the promotion prize of the 2010 Bremen Literature Prize. His novel “Downfall” (2013) was nominated for the Swiss Book Prize.
Patience is the hunter’s virtue… A revenge thriller from a bestseller author
DREI METER UNTER NULL
(Three Meters Below Zero)
by Marina Heib
Heyne Encore, March 2017
A smart, attractive young woman is perfect on the outside but deeply damaged within. The more she becomes aware of the events causing her pain, the more powerful is her desire for revenge and freedom. She becomes a murderer, and a reckless one…
A powerful novel about unrequited love, a mysterious murder, and a thrilling search for clues
DER SCHNEE, DAS FEUER, DIE SCHULD UND DER TOD
(Snow, Fire, Guilt and Death)
by Gerhard Jäger
Blessing, September 2016
The autumn in 1950 sees the arrival of the young Viennese historian Max Schreiber at a village up in the mountains of Tyrol, where he is to research the murder of a witch in the 19th century. In the face of an archaic alpine world and a closed and distrustful village community, he feels alienated and isolated. In his loneliness, Schreiber increasingly loses himself in his love for Maria, a young mute woman, who is also being wooed by another man. When winter erupts with brute force, the situation in the village comes to a head: A peasant dies under mysterious circumstances, a barn goes up in flames, and numerous avalanches descend on the village. The inhabitants are gripped by claustrophobia and fear of death, and in the end Maria is dead and Schreiber has disappeared without trace.
More than half a century later an old man is determined finally to get to the bottom of what happened all those years previously. Pursued by his own shadow, he, too, goes to the village to use one last chance.
Gerhard Jäger is a trained journalist and editor.
Love in times of revolution
DER FLUG NACH MARSEILLE
(The Flight to Marseille)
by Michael Wallner
Luchterhand, August 2016
Winter in Munich, 1918/1919. The war has been lost, the Bavarian king toppled, and a workers’ and soldiers’ council is trying to get hold of power while conservative and German National forces are beginning to resist. In a hospital somewhere in Munich, young Dr. Julie Landauer day and night performs surgery on war wounded and invalids that have been brought back home from the battle fields. Julie has no trust in love and can at the most let herself in for superficial affairs empty of all emotion. At least not until she meets the liberal newspaper editor Karl Kupfer, whose wife Nina she is treating for incurable diabetes. Loving a patient’s husband would be breaking a taboo for Julie – and yet she can suppress her feelings as little as Karl, who is magically attracted to the young doctor. When Nina’s condition deteriorates dramatically, there is only one hope for her: she has to be taken to Marseille, where a revolutionary new way of treating diabetes is being developed…
Michael Wallner has worked as an actor and director and now lives in Berlin. His bestselling novel “April in Paris” was an international success, with translation rights being sold to more than 20 countries.
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A domestic noir crime novel, told from the unusual perspective of a teenage anorexic, where layers are pulled away until the family home is revealed as the most dangerous place of all. First stand alone novel by the CWA winning author
MY SISTERS AND OTHER LIARS
by Ruth Dugdall
Amazon Publishing, May 2017
Sam is 17, starving herself and longing for oblivion; Jena is 30, left brain-damaged and desperate to remember. This is the story of two sisters and the secrets and lies at the heart of their world.Piecing Jena’s fragmented words together, sneaking looks into police evidence, Sam resolves to find her sister’s attacker. At any cost. A chocolate box full of old photos forces her to speak and to remember. But this journey of discovery also means a loss of innocence for Sam, with devastating consequences.
For readers of Elizabeth Haynes, Sharon Bolton and Louise Doughty.
Ruth Dugdall has been described by critics as `the British Gillian Flynn` (review). She has been compared to Jodi Picoult (by the CWA panel who awarded her the Debut Dagger) and is interested in deviance. Her writing is uncompromising and can be graphic, but is always authentic.
A compelling, gripping psychological thriller perfect for fans of “The Girl on the Train”, “I Let You Go” and “The Girl with no Past”
THE SISTER
by Louise Jensen
Bookouture, July 2016
Grace hasn’t been the same since the death of her best friend Charlie. She is haunted by Charlie’s last words, and in a bid for answers, opens an old memory box of Charlie’s. It soon becomes clear there was a lot she didn’t know about her best friend. When Grace starts a campaign to find Charlie’s father, Anna, a girl claiming to be Charlie’s sister steps forward. For Grace, finding Anna is like finding a new family, and soon Anna has made herself very comfortable in Grace and boyfriend Dan’s home. But something isn’t right. Things disappear, Dan’s acting strangely and Grace is sure that someone is following her. Is it all in Grace’s mind? Or as she gets closer to discovering the truth about both Charlie and Anna, is Grace in terrible danger? There was nothing she could have done to save Charlie …or was there?
Louise Jensen is a USA Today Bestselling Author. THE SISTER is Louise’s debut novel and it reached No.1 on the Amazon Kindle chart in both the UK and Canada and No.1 on iBooks. Louise’s second book, “The Gift”, will be published on 16th December 2016.
Rights sold: Italy (Sperling & Kupfer), Chinese Taiwan (Global Group), Poland (Burda), Croatia (Mozaik), Russia (AST), Holland (A.W. Bruna), Spain (Suma-Penguin/RH), Hungary (Muvelt Nep), Turkey (Pegasus)
The 1,6 million copy-selling series, translated in almost 20 languages!
The D.I. KIM STONE Series
by Angela Marsons
Bookouture
In BLOOD LINES #5 (November 2016), a victim killed with a single, precise stab to the heart appears at first glance to be a robbery gone wrong. A caring, upstanding social worker lost to a senseless act of violence. But for Detective Kim Stone, something doesn’t add up. In PLAY DEAD #4 (May 2016), a girl’s smashed-in face stared unseeing up to the blue sky, soil spilling out of her mouth. A hundred flies hovered above the bloodied mess. can Kim uncover the truth before a twisted, damaged mind claims another victim? In LOST GIRLS #3 (November 2015), two girls go missing and only one will return. Untangling a dark web of secrets from the families’ past might hold the key to solving this case. But can Kim stay alive long enough to do so? Or will someone’s child pay the ultimate price? IN EVIL GAMES #2 (May 2015), when a rapist is found mutilated in a brutal stabbing, Detective Kim Stone and her team are called in to bring a swift resolution. But as further disturbing events come to light, it soon becomes clear that there is someone even more sinister at work. In SILENT SCREAM #1 (February 2015), five figures gather round a shallow grave. They had all taken turns to dig. An adult-sized hole would have taken longer. An innocent life had been taken but the pact had been made. Their secrets would be buried, bound in blood … As the body count rises, Kim needs to stop the murderer before they strike again. But to catch the killer, can Kim confront the demons of her own past before it’s too late?
Part domestic thriller, part gripping romance, for anyone who loved THE NOTEBOOK, THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY and for fans of Dorothy Koomson, Nicholas Sparks, Lucie Whitehouse, Rosie Thomas and Liane Moriarty
AFTER YOU LEFT
by Carol Mason
Amazon Publishing, Autumn 2016
Beautifully written, this suspenseful, mysterious novel is a collision of parallel life stories, heart-wrenching choices, and the healing power of art and love.
Carol Mason is the author of THE SECRET OF MARRIED WOMEN.
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A dark, sexy noir about the intensity of female relationships—whether mother to daughter or friend to friend—that lies behind the hedgerows of beautifully manicured Los Angeles, from the New York Times bestselling author of CALIFORNIA
WOMAN NO. 17
by Edan Lepucki
Hogarth, May 2017
High in the Hollywood Hills, writer Lady Daniels has decided to take a break from her husband. She’s going to need a hand with her young son if she’s ever going to finish her memoir. In comes S., a magnetic young artist, who will live in the secluded guest house out back, care for Lady’s young toddler, and also keep a watchful eye on her older, teenage son. S. performs her day job beautifully, quickly drawing the entire family into her orbit, and becoming a confidante for Lady. But as the summer wears on, S.’s connection to Lady’s older son takes a disturbing, and possibly destructive, turn. Lady and S. will move closer to one another as they both threaten to harm the things they hold most dear.
Edan Lepucki is the New York Times bestselling author of the novel “California” (Little, Brown 2014) as well as the novella “If You’re Not Yet Like Me”. A contributing editor and staff writer at the Millions, she has also published fiction and nonfiction in McSweeney’s, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Cut, and elsewhere. She is the founder of Writing Workshops Los Angeles.
An ambitious, gripping, darkly funny family drama about the reckoning of three adult children with their profoundly flawed parents, set during Passover in a speculative, near-future America rife with anti-Semitism and terror, from an award winning short story writer
TELL ME HOW THIS ENDS WELL
by David Samuel Levinson
Hogarth, April 2017
The Jacobsons are gathering for one last Passover. Eldest son Mo will host at his home in Los Angeles, with Edith (Thistle) arriving from Atlanta, and youngest son Jacob flying in from Berlin with his German boyfriend. They will gather around the table as a full family one last time. With a plot to murder their father. The Jacobson offspring have begun to suspect that Julian is hastening their mother Ruth’s demise, and years of resentment reach a climax as the siblings debate whether they will go through with the real reason for their reunion: an ill-considered plot to murder their father and end his iron rule once and for all. That is, if they can put their bickering, grudges, festering relationships with their partners, and distrust of one another to the side long enough to act. And God help them if their mother finds out…
David Samuel Levinson is an American short-story writer and novelist. He won an award for his fiction in The Atlantic Monthly and has published stories in Slushpile, Prairie Schooner, The Brooklyn Review, Post Road, and West Branch.
A brilliantly atmospheric masterpiece that glows with the sparkling intensity of the Mediterranean sunshine
BEAUTIFUL ANIMALS
by Lawrence Osborne
Hogarth, July 2017
On a hike during a white-hot summer break on the Greek island of Hydra, Naomi and Samantha make a startling discovery: a man, sleeping heavily, exposed to the elements, but still alive. Naomi, the daughter of a wealthy British art collector who has owned a villa in the exclusive hills for decades, convinces Sam, a younger American girl on vacation with her family, to help this stranger, but are her motives borne of altruism – he is, by all appearances, a refugee – or a more selfish desire to bring some excitement into her life? As the two young women learn more about the man and his past, their own burgeoning friendship takes a darker turn, and when a murder occurs on the island, a private investigator arrives and forces them to determine where their true loyalties lie. In BEAUTIFUL ANIMALS, Osborne returns to the themes that made The Forgiven his breakout novel: the class tensions between wealthy white Europeans and the natives and immigrants who serve them, and the way a violent incident can cause reverberations both psychic and cultural that lay bare our own hypocrisies.
Lawrence Osborne is the critically acclaimed author of “Hunters in the Dark”, “The Ballad of a Small Player”, “The Forgiven” and “The Wet and the Dry”.
A twisty, compulsive new thriller featuring a deliciously devious unreliable narrator who will do anything to give her family a better life, by the New York Times bestselling author of Mother, Mother and Smashed
THE DRAMA TEACHER
by Koren Zailckas
Crown, Spring 2018
Gracie Mueller seems like an average person. Married, mother of two. Owns a house with her husband, Randy, in upstate New York. Life is balanced and (relatively) honest. But she has a lot to hide —she’s not even a US citizen—and when Randy’s failing career as a real estate agent makes finances tight, he leaves town for a better job, their home goes into foreclosure, and Gracie turns back to the creatively illegal lifestyle of her past to keep things afloat for her kids. After all, how many times can a woman lose everything? An expert in fake identities, she becomes Tracey Bueller, who later becomes Mariana DeFelice. She’s an architect and designer, a musician and an actress. After a deadly stint upstate when a friend asks too many questions, she leaves town for New York City, finding her way into the best school in Manhattan for her kids, where she gets a job as the drama teacher. But as she struggles to keep her web of lies spun taut and her secrets hidden, more questions about her past are raised. She never intended to be a cheat, a liar, a thief, or a killer; she just can’t afford for anyone to know what she’s done.
Koren Zailckas is an internationally bestselling writer, and has contributed to The Guardian, U.S. News & World Report, Glamour, Jane, and Seventeen magazine.
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Every child prodigy grows up eventually. For the Promise sisters, escaping their mother’s narcissism and the notoriety that came with her bestselling book hasn’t been easy
THE PROMISE GIRLS
by Marie Bostwick
Kensigton, March 2017
Minerva Promise claimed that her three test tube daughters gifted pianist Joanie, artistic Meg, and storyteller Avery were engineered and molded to be geniuses. In adulthood, their modest lives fall far short of her grand ambitions. But now, twenty years after the book’s release, she hopes to redeem herself by taking part in a new documentary. Meg, who hasn’t picked up a paintbrush in years, adamantly refuses to participate, until a car accident leaves her with crushing medical bills. While she recuperates in Seattle, the three sisters reluctantly meet with filmmaker Hal Seeger, another former prodigy. Like them, he’s familiar with the weight of failed potential. But as he digs deeper, he uncovers secrets they’ve hidden from each other and a revelation that will challenge their beliefs, even as it spurs them to forge their own extraordinary lives at last.
Marie Bostwick is a New York Times and USA Today bestseller author.
A fiercely unapologetic and compulsively readable debut set among squatting artists in Brooklyn in the early ’90s
SELF PORTRAIT #400
by Rachel Lyon
Scribner, TBA
SELF PORTRAIT #400 is set among squatting artists in DUMBO, Brooklyn in the early ’90s. Lu Rile is hungry – physically as an impoverished young photographer, in terms of her creative ambition, and emotionally as an abandoned daughter – on the day she accidentally captures an image of a boy falling to his death in the background of a self-portrait. Once exposed, it turns out to be a clearly terrific photo: her own naked body leaping in front of her window from the inside with the boy’s form symmetrically falling in counterpoint outside the pane — a photograph so good that it could change Lu’s life….if she lets it. The decision is not simple. The boy is her neighbor’s son, and while she had no relationship with her neighbors prior to his death, the tragedy brings the whole warehouse together and especially Lu with his beautiful grieving mother Kate. Not only does Lu get embroiled with the drama and mounting expense of the building’s real estate politics as developers close in, she also quietly falls in love with her devastated neighbor…
Rachel Lyon’s work has appeared most recently or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s, Joyland, Bustle, The Toast, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She attended Princeton (BA) and Indiana University (MFA), where she was fiction editor of the Indiana Review.
A hilarious new novel from a bestselling author
NOIR
A Novel
by Christopher Moore
William Morrow, Spring 2018
Summer, San Francisco, 1947. Sammy Tiffin is tending bar when an enigmatic and comely dame named Stilton (a.k.a. Cheese) sidles in, followed by an Air Force general. The general needs a favor and he’s hoping Sammy’s the guy to get the job done. Turns out that the first flying saucer has just been spotted up by Mount Rainer and there’s been a mysterious crash in Roswell, New Mexico. Lured by the beauteous Stilton, Sammy must face his own dark secrets on the mean streets of the City by the Bay. Think Raymond Chandler meets Damon Runyon with more than a dash of Bugs Bunny. It’s all very, very Christopher Moore.
Christopher Moore is the author of fifteen previous novels, many New York Times bestsellers, including “Lamb”, A Dirty Job”, “Sacre Bleu”, “The Serpent of Venice” and “Secondhand Souls”.
Donadio & Olson, Inc.
L I T E R A R Y R E P R E S E N T A T I V E S
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“A lost American classic to rival anything by Faulkner” – The Spectator
THE LAND BREAKERS (Reprint)
by John Ehle
New York Review Books, November 2014
“John Ehle is our foremost writer of historical fiction”—Harper Lee
First published in 1964, this novel of two daring settlers confronting in the Appalachian wilderness in 1789 is the first in Ehle’s epic series of seven books. All set in North Carolina, they together paint a portrait of American rural life from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. This New York Review Books Classic edition has garnered high praise.
John Ehle is the author of numerous classics of American historical fiction, including The Road, Lion on the Hearth, The Journey of August King (feature film starring Jason Patric and Thandie Newton), The Winter People (feature film starring Kelly McGillis and Kurt Russell), and many others. His nonfiction account on the forced removal of the Cherokee Nation, Trail of Tears, has sold hundreds of thousands of copies and become the book on this shameful chapter of American history. It is currently in development as a television film. John Ehle is the husband of actress Rosemarie Harris and father of actress Jennifer Ehle.
The New York Times bestselling fantasy author Jacqueline Carey’s gorgeous fantasy retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest
MIRANDA AND CALIBAN
by Jacqueline Carey
Tor Books, February 2017
Miranda has grown up in isolation, daughter of a powerful magus who spirited her away to a deserted island to keep her safe. She is dutiful and tenderhearted and terribly lonely when she befriends Caliban, the strange feral boy her father has bewitched to serve him. The two find solace and companionship in each other as her father Prospero weaves his magic and dreams of revenge against the brother who usurped him. Miranda and Caliban battle the dark, unknowable forces that bind them to the island even as the pangs of adolescence create a new awareness of each other and their doomed relationship. But they are always under Prospero’s jealous eye.
Jacqueline Carey is the author of sixteen novels, including the New York Times bestselling Kushiel’s Legacy series of historical fantasy novels. Her books have been internationnaly published.
The first novel of a new space-opera sequence set in an all-new universe by the Hugo Award-winning, New York Times-bestselling author John Scalzi
THE COLLAPSING EMPIRE
by John Scalzi
Tor, March 2017
Humanity flows away from Earth, into space, and in time forgets our home world and creates a new empire, the Interdependency, whose ethos requires that no one human outpost can survive without the others. It’s a hedge against interstellar war — and a system of control for the rulers of the empire. The Flow is eternal — but it is not static. Just as a river changes course, The Flow changes as well, cutting off worlds from the rest of humanity. When it’s discovered that The Flow is moving, possibly cutting off all human worlds from faster than light travel forever, three individuals — a scientist, a starship captain and the Empress of the Interdependency — are in a race against time to discover what, if anything, can be salvaged from an interstellar empire on the brink of collapse.
John Scalzi is one of the most popular and acclaimed SF authors to emerge in the last decade. His massively successful debut “Old Man’s War” won him science fiction’s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. His New York Times bestsellers include “The Last Colony”, “Fuzzy Nation”, and “Redshirts”; which won 2013’s Hugo Award for Best Novel.
In this utterly unique novel, which combines shades of “The Lovely Bones” with the guilty pleasure of a pirate romance, Sharon Pywell explores romance and its darker underside
THE ROMANCE READER’S GUIDE TO LIFE
by Sharon Pywell
April 2017
Neave and Lilly Terhune are two sisters who are coming of age in Lynn, Massachusetts at the end of World War II. Neave and Lilly couldn’t be more different. Lilly is a beauty who runs through men like water. Neave always has her head in a book, most often The Pirate Lover, a romance novel about a young woman who refuses marriage to the highest bidder and instead escapes to the high seas where she meets the love of her life. Neither Neave nor Lilly are content to settle into a life as a housewife, so the two begin a makeup business. But just as their business begins to take off, Lilly disappears and Neave must figure out what happened. Luckily she has Lilly’s assistance helping from above, even if she doesn’t know it quite yet. Alternating between Neave and Lilly’s story and that of Neave’s beloved Pirate Lover book, Pywell shows how in all romantic relationships, there are undercurrents of darker forces if we allow them to surface, how even the most cerebral amongst us enjoy a swashbuckling page turning pirate romance, and how sometimes the guiltiest of pleasures might contain some essential kernels of truth.
Sharon Pywell is the author of three novels, WHAT HAPPENED TO HENRY, EVERYTHING AFTER and MY OTHER MOTHER
Rights sold: Italy (Mondadori)
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A compelling emotional suspense by bestselling author Spencer Quinn and his first-ever standalone novel, which also features—in true Quinn fashion—a captivating canine companion named Goody
THE RIGHT SIDE
by Spencer Quinn
Atria, June 2017
LeAnne Hogan has returned home from war a different person—both inside and out. Once confident and driven, she is now volatile, sharp-tongued, prone to muddied thinking. Once beautiful, her right eye is now an empty crater, the side of her face horribly scarred. Wracked with guilt over a mission gone wrong, the only solace she finds is with her hospital roommate, Marci, but when the woman unexpectedly dies, LeAnne reaches a breaking point. Wearing her injury like a gruesome badge of honor, a defiant LeAnne goes AWOL and sets out on a cross-country journey, but the world she encounters is an unfamiliar one, filtered as it is through one good eye with no depth perception, a damaged psyche, and a body in withdrawal from medication. Her bitterness at her disfigurement and the loss of her career eats away at her as she clashes with everyone in her path—family, friends, and strangers alike. LeAnne, in a word, is lost. Eventually LeAnne finds herself in a rain-soaked small town in Washington state, the very place Marci called home. As she puts down tentative roots LeAnne makes a troubling discovery: Marci’s eight-year-old daughter has vanished. Determined to find her, LeAnne discovers a newfound resolve and a second chance to get things right. And the LeAnne who will emerge at the end of this new mission will not be the one who went off to war nor will she be the shattered woman who returned. She will be someone new.
Spencer Quinn is the author of eight bestselling Chet and Bernie mystery novels as well as the middle grade novels Woof and Arf.
Told from the perspectives of the naïve, unblinking Chula and the mysterious Petrona (and inspired by the author’s own childhood), THE FRUIT OF THE DRUNKEN TREE depicts a world where the threat of violence lurks in even the safest of spaces and sensitively explores the even greater emotional cost of living in its shadow
THE FRUIT OF DRUNKEN TREE
by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Doubleday, August 2018
In 1990s Bogotá the Santiago family lives in a gated community, safe from the drug-fueled violence devastating Colombia. Young sisters Chula and Cassandra enjoy carefree lives thanks to this middle-class bubble, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hovers just outside the neighborhood walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar continues to elude authorities as he in turn captures the attention of a nation. The sisters enjoy a childlike yet morbid fascination with this just-out-of-reach danger, but when the family hires a live-in maid named Petrona from the city’s guerrilla-occupied slums, the outside world begins to creep closer. As a drought causes citywide power and water outages, car bombs kill little girls, presidential candidates are assassinated in front of horrified crowds, and grandmothers are caught in the crossfire between the warring guerrillas and paramilitaries. And in the Santiago home, teenage Petrona’s simple nature hides a dark secret that will eventually upend their lives.
Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born in Bogotá and holds an MFA from Columbia College Chicago. She is the 2014 recipient of the Mary Tanenbaum Literary Award in Nonfiction and was a 2015 fellow at the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, Electric Literature, Los Angeles Review of Books, Wise Latinas (University of Nebraska Press) and American Odysseys: Writings by New Americans (Dalkey Archive Press).
An intellectual and emotional jigsaw puzzle that will appeal to readers of A.S. Byatt’s POSSESSION and Geraldine Brooks’ THE PEOPLE OF THE BOOK
THE WEIGHT OF INK
by Rachel Kadish
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, June 2017
Like Possession, this novel is set in two time periods: the 1660s, just before the plague hits, and the early 21st century. It’s the interwoven tale of two women of remarkable intellect: Ester Velasquez, an emigrant from Amsterdam (of Sephardic origin; many Jews who fled the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal wound up in the Netherlands) who, in defiance of Jewish tradition, is serving as a scribe for a blind rabbi; and Helen Watt, an ailing historian and academic with a love of Jewish history.
As the novel opens, Helen has been summoned by a former student to view a cache of 17th century Jewish documents newly discovered in his home during a renovation. Enlisting the help of Aaron Levy, an American graduate student as impatient as he is charming, and in a race with another fast-moving team of historians, Helen embarks on one last project: to determine the identity of the documents’ scribe, the elusive “Aleph.” Electrifying and ambitious, sweeping in scope and intimate in tone, this novel explores the choices and sacrifices women have always made in their attempts to reconcile the life of the heart and mind. This is a sophisticated work of historical fiction.
Rachel Kadish is the award-winning author of the novels “From a Sealed Room” and “Tolstoy Lied”, and a novella, “I Was Here”.
In an English cathedral city, obsessive bibliophile and Holy Grail fanatic Arthur Prescott works to uncover a long-lost secret about the cathedral’s past—and its connections to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table
THE LOST BOOK OF THE GRAIL
by Charlie Lovett
Viking, February 2017
Professor Arthur Prescott is happiest when surrounded by the ancient books and manuscripts of the Barchester Cathedral library, where he researches his perennially unfinished guidebook to the cathedral and nurtures his secret obsession with the Holy Grail. But when a beautiful young American named Bethany Davis arrives at Barchester Cathedral with the task of digitizing the library’s collection, Arthur’s tranquility is broken. Appalled by the threat modern technology poses to the library he loves, he sets out to thwart Bethany, only to find in her a kindred spirit with a similar love for books and knowledge— and a fellow Grail fanatic. Bethany soon joins Arthur in a quest to find the lost Book of Ewolda, the ancient manuscript telling the story of the cathedral’s founder that was last seen being carried away by a mysterious figure on one of Barchester Cathedral’s most dangerous nights.
Charlie Lovett is a former antiquarian bookseller, an avid book collector, and a member of The Grolier Club, the oldest and largest club for bibliophiles in North America. He is the author of “The Bookman’s Tale”, “First Impressions”, and “The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge”.
From the author of SOFT APOCALYPSE and DEFENDERS
FALLER
by Will McIntosh
Tor Books, October 2016
Day One: No one can remember anything—who they are, family and friends, or even how to read. Reality has fragmented and Earth consists of an island of rock floating in an endless sky. Food, water, electricity—gone, except for what people can find, and they can’t find much.
Faller’s pockets contain tantalizing clues: a photo of himself and a woman he can’t remember, a toy solider with a parachute, and a mysterious map drawn in blood. With only these materials as a guide, he makes a leap of faith from the edge of the world to find the woman and set things right. He encounters other floating islands, impossible replicas of himself and others, and learns that one man hates him enough to take revenge for actions Faller can’t even remember.
Will McIntosh is a Hugo award winner and Nebula finalist whose previous novel, Defenders, has been optioned by Warner Brothers for a feature film. His novel “Love Minus Eighty” was named the best science fiction book of 2013 by the American Library Association, and was on both Io9.com and NPR.org’s lists of the best SF novels of 2013. His debut novel, “Soft Apocalypse”, was a finalist for a Locus Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Compton Crook Award.
An homage to the themes of redemption and forgiveness found in The Tempest, PROSPERO BOOKS is a lyrical love story
PROSPERO BOOKS
by Amy Meyerson
On submission, TBA
On her twenty-seventh birthday, Miranda Brooks receives unexpected news from home: her mother’s brother has died and left her his bookstore in Los Angeles. Miranda has hazy but intense memories of her unpredictable Uncle Billy and the zany scavenger hunts he used to create for her. But no one had spoken to Uncle Billy in years, ever since he and Miranda’s mother had a bitter fight and cut one another out of their lives.
Everyone encourages Miranda to sell the bookstore before it sinks into bankruptcy, but as she explores Prospero Books for herself, she begins to find clues that Billy has hidden for her: inside novels on the store’s shelves, in locked drawers of his apartment upstairs, in the name of the store itself. Miranda soon finds herself drawn into a journey across America to meet people from Billy’s past, people whose stories reveal a history that Miranda’s mother has kept hidden—and the nature of the terrible secret that tore her family apart.
Amy Meyerson teaches in the Writing Department at the University of Southern California, where she completed her graduate work in creative writing. She has been published in Reed Magazine, The Manhattanville Review, The Bloomsbury Review, The Fanzine, and Obit Magazine, and was a finalist in Open City’s RRofihe Trophy Short Story Contest and in Summer Literary Seminars’ Unified Literary Contest. This is her first novel.
Rights sold: Germany (HarperCollins Germany), Italy (Nord, pre-empt)
A powerful and beautifully written novel of love and war in a young country marred by dictatorship and ethnic tension, MISS BURMA is the story of one family weathering the most turbulent years of Burma’s history, from the British Empire to the dictatorship of the 1960s
MISS BURMA
by Charmaine Craig
Grove Press, May 2017
Benny is a Jewish businessman, part of India’s Jewish diaspora, who after being educated in Calcutta settles in Burma. One day, while working at Rangoon’s seaport, he is transfixed by a woman with shining hair hanging down to her ankles. This is Khin, a woman who belongs to a long-persecuted ethnic minority group, the Karen. The two fall in love at first sight. As World War II comes to Southeast Asia, Benny and Khin are forced to go into hiding with Khin’s Karen countrymen, who are mounting a strong resistance to the Japanese occupation. After the war, Aung San and the Burman nationalists take over the country, and Benny and Khin’s eldest child, Louisa, comes of age during the dictatorship. She possesses the coldness of someone who has known the true hardship of war, and a beauty and grace that seems almost otherworldly. That beauty will make Louisa Burma’s first beauty queen and a well-known actress, but also attract the attention of men including Burma’s dictator, Ne Win…
Charmaine Craig is a faculty member in the Department of Creative Writing at UC Riverside, and the descendant of significant figures in Burma’s modern history. A former actor in film and television, and a Burma activist privy to negotiations at the highest level in the current conflict, she studied literature at Harvard University and received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine. Her first novel, “The Good Men” (Riverhead, 2002), was a national bestseller translated into six languages.
From an acclaimed Hollywood writer/director and author
NK3
by Michael Tolkin
Atlantic Monthly Press, February 2017
In post-NK3 Los Angeles, a sixty-foot-tall fence surrounds the hills where the rich used to live, but the mansions have been taken over by those with the only power that matters: the power of memory…
In deliciously dark prose, Tolkin winds a noose-like plot around a melee of despots, prophets, and rebels as they struggle for command and survival in a town that still manages to exert a magnetic force, even as a ruined husk.
Michael Tolkin is an award-winning writer, director, and producer. His novels include “The Player”, “The Return of the Player”, “Among the Dead”, and “Under Radar”. For the film adaptation of “The Player”, Tolkin won the Writers Guild Award, the British Academy Award, the PEN Center USA West Literary Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best crime screenplay, and was nominated for an Academy Award.
A deadly bombing takes Navajo Tribal cops Bernadette Manuelito, Jim Chee, and their mentor, the legendary Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, back into the past to find a vengeful killer in this riveting Southwestern mystery
SONG OF THE LION
by Anne Hillerman
Harper, April 2017
When a car bomb kills a young man in the Shiprock High School parking lot, Officer Bernadette Manuelito discovers that the intended victim was a mediator for a multi-million-dollar development planned at the Grand Canyon. But what seems like an act of ecoterrorism turns out to be something far more nefarious and complex. Piecing together the clues, Bernadette and her husband, Sergeant Jim Chee, uncover a scheme to disrupt the negotiations and inflame tensions between the Hopi and Dine tribes. Retired Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn has seen just about everything in his long career. As the tribal police’s investigation unfolds, he begins to suspect that the bombing may be linked to a cold case he handled years ago. As he, Bernadette, and Chee carefully pull away the layers behind the crime, they make a disturbing discovery: a meticulous and very patient killer with a long-simmering plan of revenge.
Anne Hillerman is the bestselling author of “Spider Woman’s Daughter” and “Rock with Wings”. In SONG OF THE LION, she depicts the beauty and mystery of Navajo Country and the rituals, myths, and customs of its people in a mystery that builds on and complements the beloved, bestselling mysteries of her acclaimed father, Tony Hillerman.
Megan Abbott meets M.O. Walsh in Christine Lennon’s compelling debut novel about a group of friends on the cusp of graduating from college when their lives are irrevocably changed by a brutal act of violence
THE DRIFTER
by Christine Lennon
William Morrow Paperbacks, February 2017
Present Day: for two decades, Elizabeth has tried to escape the ghosts of her past…tried to erase the painful memories…tried to keep out the terrifying nightmares. But twenty years after graduating from the University of Florida, her carefully curated life begins to unravel, forcing her to confront the past she’s tried so hard to forget.
1990s, Gainesville, Florida: Elizabeth and her two closest friends, Caroline and Ginny, are having the time of their lives in college—binge watching Oprah, flirting for freebies from Taco Bell, and breaking hearts along the way. But without warning, their world is suddenly shattered when a series of horrific acts of violence ravage the campus, changing their lives forever.
Sweeping readers from the exclusive corners of sorority life in the South to the frontlines of the drug-fueled, slacker culture in Manhattan in the ‘90s and early ‘00s, when Elizabeth is forced to acknowledge her role in the death of a friend in order to mend a broken friendship and save her own life, The Drifter is an unforgettable story about the complexities of friendships and the secrets that can ultimately destroy us.
THE DRIFTER is Christine Lennon’s debut novel.
Jabberwocky 2016 Frankfurt Rights Guide
Welcome to Mexico City… An Oasis In A Sea Of Vampires…
CERTAIN DARK THINGS
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Crown, May 2017
Domingo, a lonely garbage-collecting street kid, is busy eeking out a living when a jaded vampire on the run swoops into his life. Atl, the descendant of Aztec blood drinkers, must feast on the young to survive and Domingo looks especially tasty. Smart, beautiful, and dangerous, Atl needs to escape to South America, far from the rival narco-vampire clan pursuing her. Domingo is smitten. Her plan doesn’t include developing any real attachment to Domingo. Hell, the only living creature she loves is her trusty Doberman. Little by little, Atl finds herself warming up to the scrappy young man and his effervescent charm. And then there’s Ana, a cop who suddenly finds herself following a trail of corpses and winds up smack in the middle of vampire gang rivalries. Vampires, humans, cops, and gangsters collide in the dark streets of Mexico City. Do Atl and Domingo even stand a chance of making it out alive?
Silvia Moreno-Garcia is the author of the critically-acclaimed novel “Signal to Noise”―long listed for a Sunburst Award and finalist of the British Fantasy, Locus, and Aurora awards―and the short story collection “This Strange Way of Dying”, which was a finalist for the Sunburst Award in Canada. She was a finalist for the Manchester Fiction Prize, and a recipient of the Gloria Vanderbilt/Exile Award for Best Emerging Writer.
A debut crime novel about a missing child, brilliantly plotted and with shocking twists and turns; the first in a brilliant new series centred on the character of D.I. Adam Fawley and based in modern Oxford
CLOSE TO HOME
by Cara Hunter
Viking, January 2018
When 8-year-old Daisy Mason goes missing DI Adam Fawley knows that nine times out of ten it’s someone close to home. And Daisy’s family is certainly strange. Her mother is obsessed with keeping up appearances, while her father is cold and defensive under questioning. Then there’s Daisy’s little brother – so withdrawn and uncommunicative… DI Fawley is recovering from a recent personal tragedy and is all too familiar with the tell-tale signs of an unhappy family. As the Masons come under closer scrutiny, secrets begin to unravel and accusations fly. But will the unfolding drama and scandal bring the police any closer to the truth?
Cara Hunter studied English at Oxford returning to complete a doctorate on Samuel Richardson.
Rights sold: Norway (Cappelen Damm), Sweden (Modernista), Germany (Aufbau), China (Beijing United Creation Culture Media).
The first book in a planned trilogy of Mongolian-inspired epic fantasy
THE TIGER’S DAUGHTER #1
by K Arsenault Rivera
Tor Books, Fall 2017
This is the stirring, tantalizing opening of an epic tale spanning the lives of the infamous Qorin warrior Shefali Arsalayaa, and O-Shizuka, the feared Divine Empress of Hokkaro—and a love that can reach through time and space to save a land from a demonic invasion. Fated to meet by both prophecy and by the deep bond between their mothers—themselves the warrior heirs to rival thrones—Shefali and O-Shizuka grow up together between various courts and landscapes; they learn the harsh vivacity of the Qorin steppes as well as navigating the fraught political waters of the Hokkaran court, always together, and yet always at a remove. But as they reach adulthood, the two fearsome champions find themselves plagued by their own notoriety after defeating an influx of demons in a border village between their countries–and now it may be impossible to save themselves.
Born in Puerto Rico, K Arsenault Rivera and her family moved to New York when K was three. THE TIGER’S DAUGHTER is her first novel.
« Kill all humans. »
A RED PEACE
Book #1 in the STARFIRE trilogy
by Spencer Ellsworth
Tor Books, August 2017
“Once I found the characters, this story took off, a wild chase across the galaxy. I was raised on Star Wars and its five thousand licensed & unlicensed bastard children and as such, I have seen a lot of galactic empires fall, and a lot of Rebellions rise. But as this story took shape, inspired by that first scene, I gravitated toward the uglier revolutions of history. STARFIRE is about Russia 1918, not Rome 476. The questions the charactersface–about martial loyalty, atrocity, state control and the meaning of combat–are the questions that haunt the 20th and 21st century. Oh, there’s also space battles between giant bugs, sun-sized spiders, planets of cyborgs and a heroine with enough grit to bring down the galaxy’s newest warlord.” – Spencer Ellsworth
Rights sold to: Heyne (Germany)
Book #2 scheduled to release in November 2017, Book #3 scheduled to release in February 2018
Spencer Ellsworth’s short fiction has previously appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and many other places.
One hundred years ago, two young girls from Cottingley, Yorkshire, convinced the world that they had done the impossible and photographed fairies in their garden. Now, in her newest novel, international bestseller Hazel Gaynor reimagines their story…
THE COTTINGLEY SECRET
by Hazel Gaynor
William Morrow, Summer 2017
1917… It was inexplicable, impossible, but it had to be true – didn’t it? When two young cousins, Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright from Cottingley, England, claim to have photographed fairies at the bottom of the garden, their parents are astonished. But when one of the great novelists of the time, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, becomes convinced of the photographs’ authenticity, the girls become a national sensation, their discovery offering hope to those longing for something to believe in amid a world ravaged by war. Frances and Elsie will hide their secret for many decades. But Frances longs for the truth to be told. One hundred years later… When Olivia Kavanagh finds an old manuscript in her late grandfather’s bookshop she becomes fascinated by the story it tells of two young girls who mystified the world. But it is the discovery of an old photograph that leads her to realize how the fairy girls’ lives intertwine with hers, connecting past to present, and blurring her understanding of what is real and what is imagined. As she begins to understand why a nation once believed in fairies, can Olivia find a way to believe in herself?
Hazel Gaynor’s debut novel “The Girl Who Came Home” was a New York Times and USA Today bestseller, as was her novel “The Girl From Savoy” (both were international bestsellers).
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A gripping novel about two sisters who are left homeless by their mother’s death, and the lengths the fierce older sister will go to protect her beloved young charge
THE SISTERS CHASE
by Sarah Healy
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, June 2017
THE SISTERS CHASE is a story about love, but it is not, at its heart, a love story. Mary Chase is a force of nature: fierce, beautiful, free-spirited; her much younger sister, Hannah, who Mary affectionately calls Bunny, is imaginative, her head full of stories of princesses and adventures. The Chase women – Mary, Hannah and their mother Diane – have been eking out a living running a tiny seaside motel that has been in the family for several generations, and invited trouble into their lives for just as long. However, their quiet life is derailed when Diane dies in a car accident, and Mary discovers the motel is worth less than the back taxes they owe. With few options, Mary’s finely-tuned instincts for survival kick in, and she and Hannah begin a journey that will expose secrets she had promised she would never tell, the lengths she will go to to find – and hold onto — love, and the true nature of family. What it will leave behind is a lesson in forgiveness.
Sarah Healy was born in New Jersey in 1977. She is the author of “Can I Get an Amen?” (NAL, 2012) and “House of Wonder” (NAL, 2014), as well as the New York Times Modern Love column, “When the Words Don’t Fit”. Like other authors who have found the power of their voice after a couple of early, more narrowly commercial novels – notably Sara Gruen, Liane Moriarty, Paula Hawkins – Sarah has written a novel that is on a such a different level than her earlier work, it feels like a debut.
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A stunning Southern epic of tremendous heart and scope
THE RIVER OF KINGS
by Taylor Brown
Saint Martin’s Press, March 2017
Flowing 137 miles from central Georgia to the coast, the Altamaha River is more than a body of water: it’s an ancient place, still in its natural state, home to hundreds of rare plant and animal species and bearing traces of both native tribes and the recently-discovered remnants of the oldest European settlement in North America. In THE RIVER OF KINGS, award-winning author Taylor Brown artfully weaves three narrative strands—the story of two brothers, Hunter and Lawson Loggins, as they set off to kayak the length of the river, bearing their father’s ashes toward the sea; the story of their father, Hiram, an enigmatic fisherman who loved the river, and whose death remains a mystery that his sons hope to resolve; and the dramatic buried history of the river’s earliest people, a 1564 French settlement at the river’s mouth, which began as a search for riches and ended in a bloody confrontation with both Spanish soldiers and native tribes.
THE RIVER OF KINGS is Taylor Brown’s second novel. His widely praised debut, FALLEN LAND, was a SIBA bestseller, an Indie Next pick, and an Amazon Best Book of the Month.
“My favorite Katherine Center ever” – Jenny Lawson
HOW TO WALK AWAY
by Katherine Center
Saint Martin’s Press, Winter 2018
Margaret Jacobson has a bright future ahead of her, with a handsome boyfriend and a promising career, until an accident on what should be one of the happiest days of her life takes it all away. In the hospital and forced to face the possibility that nothing will ever be the same again, Margaret must figure out how to move forward on her own terms while facing family secrets, heartbreak, and the idea that love might find her in the last place she would ever expect.
Katherine Center is the author of five bittersweet comic novels about love and family, including “The Bright Side of Disaster” and “The Lost Husband”.
A ghost story, a revenge story, a dog story, a family story, and a love story—this remarkable debut will haunt you and hold you captive
THE NEXT
by Stephanie Gangi
Saint Martin’s Press, October 2016
Is there a right way to die? If so, Joanna DeAngelis has it all wrong. She spends her numbered days obsessing over Ned McGowan, her much younger ex, and watching him thrive in the spotlight with someone new, while she wastes away. She is every woman scorned, fantasizing about revenge…except she’s out of time. As Joanna falls from her life, from the love of her daughters and devoted dog, into an otherworldly landscape, a bleak infinity she can’t escape until she rises up and returns and sets it right—making Ned pay—so she can move on, she embarks on a sexy, spiritual odyssey. As she travels beyond memory, beyond desire, she is transformed into a fierce female force of life, determined to know how to die, happily ever after.
Stephanie Gangi is a NYC novelist, poet, and by day, a corporate communications strategist. She is working on her second novel
The stunning sequel to Hart’s most beloved book, “The Last Child”
THE HUSH
by John Hart
Thomas Dunne Books, July 2017
It’s been ten years since the shattering events that changed Johnny Merrimon’s world and shocked his North Carolina town. Johnny now lives a secluded life in the woods near Hush Arbor, avoiding the spotlight that still shines on him. Johnny is struggling to save his land from lawsuits and asks his best friend Jack, who now works at a prestigious law firm, for his help. As they dig into the history of Hush Arbor, old secrets rise from the grave and death follows. Johnny becomes the prime suspect and Jack, forever in Johnny’s debt, works to save him. But even Jack has questions. Reviewers across the country have heaped praise on John Hart, comparing his writing to that of Pat Conroy, Cormac McCarthy and Scott Turow. With each novel Hart has made his way onto the New York Times bestseller list. His masterful writing and assured evocation of place have won readers around the world and earned history’s only consecutive Edgar Awards for Best Novel. But it was The Last Child that truly launched him into the stratosphere of critical acclaim and bigger and bigger sales. Now he returns with the literary thriller his fans everywhere have been waiting for.
John Hart is the author of REDEMPTION ROAD, and of four New York Times bestsellers, THE KING OF LIES, DOWN RIVER, THE LAST CHILD and IRON HOUSE. He is the only author in history to win the best novel Edgar Award for consecutive novels. His novels have been translated into thirty languages and can be found in over seventy countries.
Janet Peery’s new novel
THE EXACT NATURE OF OUR WRONGS
by Janet Peery
Saint Martin’s Press, September 2017
National Book Award finalist (for “The River Beyond the World”), NEA and Guggenheim fellow, Whiting Writers and Rosenthal award-winner Janet Peery‘s beautifully-written new novel THE EXACT NATURE OF OUR WRONGS, chronicling the fractious Campbell family’s reunion at their aging parents’ Kansas home, as the secrets and rivalries of childhood are re-kindled between adult brothers and sisters still vying for their once-powerful, now-eccentric father’s attention, while their mother contends with her husband’s unpredictable demands, schemes, and the memories of their long marriage.
“An absolute rocket” – Joe Hill
THE FORGOTTEN GIRL
by Rio Youers
Thomas Dunne Books, June 2017
Twenty-six year old Harvey Anderson likes his peaceful life, but everything he knows is turned upside down when he is abducted and beaten by a group of thugs working for a sinister man known as “The Spider.” They are searching for Harvey’s girlfriend, Sally Starling. But Harvey has never heard of Sally. He learns that Sally has the unique ability to selectively erase a person’s memories, an ability she has used to delete herself from Harvey’s mind. Long ago Sally erased The Spider’s memories, too—everything that made him human—and in the process stealing all but a shred of his once formidable psychic power. And there is nothing he won’t do to get it back. As Harvey recovers from his beating, he discovers that Sally left him with one partial memory—a dancing girl in a blue dress. Harvey soon realizes that he feels something for Sally, even if he has no idea who she is. As he sets out to look for a girl he loves but can’t remember, he uncovers a path of corruption and manipulation dating back decades, a killer’s dark secrets, and a man with an appetite for absolute, terrible power. Life isn’t peaceful for Harvey anymore, and he soon finds himself in a war he can never win.
Rio Youers is the British Fantasy Award–nominated author of “End Times” and “Point Hollow”. His short fiction has been published in many notable anthologies, and his novel, “Westlake Soul”, was nominated for Canada’s prestigious Sunburst Award.
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One of the most original voices in American literature
CENSUS
by Jesse Ball
HarperCollins / Ecco, Spring /Fall 2018
Jesse Ball’s newest novel, CENSUS, is a courageous creation and his most personal work to date. The novel follows the travels of a father and son who are census takers across a tapestry of towns in the wake of the father’s fatal diagnosis. Knowing that his time is menacingly short, the father takes his son, who requires close and constant adult guidance, on a trip of indefinite length, their feelings for each other challenged and bolstered as they move in and out of a variety of homes. The book stems from Jesse’s experience as a brother to a Down syndrome boy, and the story of this journey is a bracing corrective to the frequently cruel and problematic treatment of the condition. Jesse is writing with unprecedented force and conviction about the most elemental challenges we all face: the inevitability of suffering and the grace and wonder that fuel the compassion that is expressed by those who withstand it. It’s a tender, wrenching and furious novel about what it means to be alive and it gets to these elemental stakes in a way no other writer could. As kindness and tragedy weave in and out of view, locked in their endless struggle, Jesse has written a category-defying, deeply felt tribute to our better natures that will leave an enduring mark on our literature.
Jesse Ball is the author of fourteen books, most recently the novel “How to Set a Fire” and “Why”. His works have been published to acclaim in many parts of the world and translated into more than a dozen languages. He is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, won the 2008 Paris Review Plimpton Prize, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and has been a fellow of the NEA, Creative Capital, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
What happens when five young people, marginalized from society and all living with the consequences of their families’ decisions, form their own version of a family?
THE LIVELY SKELETONS OF EVERY SEASON
by Ishmael Beah
Riverhead, Winter 2017
Elimane, the elder at age 20, was the first to find refuge in the abandoned airplane that serves as the group’s home on the outskirts of a small African town; the youngest member, Namsa, is only 11. They share the responsibilities of finding food, keeping watch, and leading daily excursions between the five of them. An old, handwritten book is their sole treasure in the world, but when they realize the value of this text, the group undertakes a dangerous journey to reap what benefits they can. Grappling with deception, separation, young love, and cultural pressures, the group must find a way to save their manuscript—and themselves—from the crooked world outside of their little family. A story that questions the meaning of freedom, youth, family, and the stories we tell ourselves to soldier on.
Ishmael Beah, born in Sierra Leone, West Africa, is the New York Times bestselling author of “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier” and the novel “Radiance of Tomorrow”, both published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. His memoir has been published in over 40 languages and was nominated for a Quill Award in the Best Debut Author category for 2007. Time Magazine named the book as one of the Top 10 Nonfiction books of 2007, ranking at number 3.
Twists come fast and furious like a movie cut, killers plot against reality and set the stage for their most brutal desires
THE DARK ROAD
by Jennifer Bosworth
Grand Central, Spring 2018
Olivia “Liv” Hendricks, a washed-up reality TV detective, decides to set up a new career for herself as a real-life private investigator. Liv asks her fans to crowdfund her in a scheme where the highest bidder can tell her what to investigate. She will post daily videos of her progress to keep her fans tantalized and satisfied. Liv is convinced it’s a safe bet to make some quick money and an easy way to resurrect her reputation in the industry, but when an infamous horror movie director, Jonas Kron, is ready to throw cash at Liv to solve a mystery surrounding six missing girls, a different and darker game is about to begin. Drawn in by the money and the mystery’s similarity to her own sister’s disappearance decades ago, she takes the case.
Liv soon finds herself on the same single stretch of road outside a small California town called Stone’s Throw where the abduction of the young women took place. In the quaint tourist town, Liv is introduced to a spectrum of characters: from the plain-seeming but sexy hotel porter, to the almost-too-helpful owner of an animal sanctuary, to animal-mask-wearing teenagers, to girls wanting to die on camera; and soon it’s clear that someone is watching, or filming, Liv’s every move. Through social media, someone is leaving breadcrumbs for Liv to follow. And the Internet is eager to watch her every move—perhaps even at the cost of the heroine’s own life.
THE DARK ROAD is Jennifer Bosworth’s debut.
A widely celebrated novelist gives us a generous collection of exhilarating short stories, proving that he is a master of this genre as well
SIGNALS: NEW AND SELECTED STORIES
by Tim Gautreaux
Knopf, January 2017
Tim Gautreaux ranges freely through contemporary life with twelve new stories and eight from previous collections. Most are set in his beloved Louisiana, many hard by or on the Mississippi River, others in North Carolina and even in midwinter Minnesota. Generally it’s heat, humidity, and bugs that beset his people as they wrestle with affairs of the heart, matters of faith, and the pros and cons of tight-knit communities. These stories feature a remarkable cast of characters, primarily of the working class, proud and knowledgeable about the natural or mechanical world, their lives marked by a prized stereo or a magical sewing machine retrieved from a locked safe, boats and card games and casinos, grandparents and grandchildren and those in between, their experiences leading them to the ridiculous or the scarifying or the sublime; most of them striving for what’s right and good, others tearing off in the opposite direction.
Tim Gautreaux is the award-winning author of three novels and three collections of short stories.
From the award-winning, much loved writer: a deeply moving novel about an American woman’s place during the Spanish Civil War, the lessons she took from it, and how her story will shape her granddaughter’s path
THERE YOUR HEART LIES
by Mary Gordon
Pantheon, May 2017
Marian cut herself off from her conservative, wealthy Irish Catholic family when she volunteered during the Spanish Civil War—experiences she has always kept to herself. Now in her 90s, she shares her Rhode Island cottage with her granddaughter Amelia, a young woman of good heart but only a vague notion of life’s purpose. As the narrative unfolds, their daily existence is intertwined with Marian’s secret past—the blow to her youthful idealism when she witnessed the brutalities on both sides of Franco’s war, and the romance that left her adrift in Spain with yet another family who misunderstood her. When Marian is diagnosed with cancer, she speaks at last about what happened to her in Spain—which compels Amelia to journey to Spain herself, to reconcile Marian’s past with her own uncertain future.
Mary Gordon is an American writer whose work runs the gamut from novels and short stories to essays, memoir, and biography. Her work is considered a significant contribution to Irish-American literature.
A cinematic, darkly comic, and completely sui generis psychological thriller that could only have been written by J. Robert Lennon
BROKEN RIVER
by J. Robert Lennon
Graywolf Press, May 2017
A modest house in upstate New York. It’s one in the morning. Three people—a couple and their child—hurry out the door, but it’s too late for them. As the virtuosic and terrifying opening scene of J. Robert Lennon’s latest novel unfolds, a spectral presence seems to be watching with cold and mysterious interest. Soon the house lies abandoned, and years later a new family moves in. Karl, Eleanor, and their daughter Irina arrive from New York City in the wake of Karl’s infidelity to create a new life for themselves. Karl tries to stabilize his flailing career as a sculptor. Eleanor, a successful commercial novelist, eagerly pivots in a new creative direction. Meanwhile, twelve-year-old Irina becomes obsessed with the brutal murders that occurred in the house years before. And, secretly, so does her mother. As the ensemble cast grows to include Louis, a hapless salesman in a carpet warehouse who is haunted by his past, and Sam, a young woman newly reunited with her jailbird brother, the seemingly unrelated crime that opened the story becomes ominously and relentlessly relevant. Hovering over all this activity looms The Observer, a gradually awakening narrative consciousness that watches these characters conceal secrets from others and from themselves.
J. Robert Lennon is the author of eight novels and two short story collections.
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The seventh installment in Garry Disher’s celebrated Peninsula Crimes series sets up new challenges, both professional and personal, for Challis and Destry. And Disher delivers with all the suspense and human complexity for which readers love him
SIGNAL LOSS
by Garry Disher
November 2016
A small bushfire, but nasty enough for ice cooks to abandon their lab. Fatal, too. But when the bodies in the burnt-out Mercedes prove to be a pair of Sydney hitmen, Inspector Hal Challis’s inquiries into a local ice epidemic take a darker turn. Meanwhile, Ellen Destry, head of the new sex crimes unit, finds herself not only juggling the personalities of her team but hunting a serial rapist who leaves no evidence behind.
Garry Disher has published almost fifty titles—fiction, children’s books, anthologies, textbooks, the Wyatt thrillers and the Mornington Peninsula mysteries. He has won numerous awards, including the German Crime Prize (twice) and two Ned Kelly Best Crime novel awards, for Chain of Evidence (2007) and Wyatt (2010).
An extraordinary novel from a gifted writer
THE RESTORER
by Michael Sala
March 2017
‘Michael Sala has a rare gift: in prose that takes your breath away, he tells a story of heart-rending sorrow without a trace of sentimentality.’ – Raimond Gaita
After a year apart, Maryanne returns to her husband, Roy, bringing their seven-year-old son Daniel and his teenage sister Freya with her. The family move north from Sydney to Newcastle, where Roy plans to restore a derelict house on the coast. Roy is happiest when he is busy, working with his hands. As he painstakingly patches the holes in the floorboards and plasters over cracks in the walls, Maryanne believes, for a while, that they can shore up their relationship and rebuild a life together. But Freya doesn’t want a fresh start—she just wants out—and Daniel drifts around the sprawling, run-down house in a dream, infuriating his father, who soon forgets the promises he has made. Some cracks can never be smoothed over, and tension grows between Roy and Maryanne until their uneasy peace is ruptured—with devastating consequences.
THE RESTORER explores the insufficiency of love, the way trauma shapes identity and the frightening power parents have over the lives of their children.
Michael Sala was born in the Netherlands in 1975 to a Greek father and a Dutch mother, and first came to Australia in the 1980s. His critically acclaimed debut, “The Last Thread”, a blend of memoir and fiction, was compared to J. M. Coetzee’s “Scenes From Provincial Life” and Michael Ondaatje’s “Running in the Family”. It won the 2013 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.
This highly compelling debut novel is the first in a police procedural series set in Derbyshire, and will appeal to fans of Broadchurch and readers who love a strong, relatable female central protagonist
THE DEVIL’S DICE
by Roz Watkins
HQ/HarperCollins (UK), August 2018
DI Meg Dalton has never recovered from the death of her teenage sister when she was a child. After a breakdown, Meg’s promising fast-track career stalled when she chose to move back to her home town in the Peak District to be closer to her mum and grandmother. When a local man is found poisoned in a cave, not everyone in the force thinks she’s up to the job, but Meg is determined to prove herself and solve the case along with her colleague DS Jai Sanghera. But with talk of ghosts, witchcraft and family curses she needs to unravel what is really happening before the killer strikes again. Finding a note on the victim’s computer adds another dimension to the case: was he murdered or was it suicide? And who really has the right to decide who lives and dies? Meg needs to learn who she can and can’t trust as appearances can be deceptive – even her own mother may be implicated.
Roz Watkins studied Engineering at Cambridge University and was previously a partner in a firm of patent attorneys. This helped inspire THE DEVIL’S DICE in which a patent attorney is found poisoned in a cave. Roz is also a qualified hypnotherapist and an animal trainer, which gives plenty of scope for planning creative murders.
Rights sold: Germany (Fischer/ 2-book pre-empt)
A bleakly comic tour de force that’s by turns poignant, uproariously funny, and viscerally unsettling, this debut novel has shades of Bernhard, Beckett and Bowles—and it announces a singular new voice
SORRY TO DISRUPT THE PEACE
by Patty Yumi Cottrell
McSweeney’s, March 2017
Helen Moran is thirty-two years old, single, childless, college-educated, and partially employed as a guardian of troubled young people in New York. She’s accepting a delivery from IKEA in her shared studio apartment when her uncle calls to break the news: Helen’s adoptive brother is dead. According to the internet, there are six possible reasons why her brother might have killed himself. But Helen knows better: she knows that six reasons is only shorthand for the abyss. Helen also knows that she alone is qualified to launch a serious investigation into his death, so she purchases a one-way ticket to Milwaukee. There, as she searches her childhood home and attempts to uncover why someone would choose to die, she will face her estranged family, her brother’s few friends, and the overzealous grief counselor, Chad Lambo; she may also discover what it truly means to be alive.
Patty Yumi Cottrell‘s work has appeared in BOMB, Gulf Coast, and Black Warrior Review, among other places.
Bonnie Nadzam returns with this scorching, haunting portrait of a rural community in a “living ghost town” on the brink of collapse, and the individuals who are confronted with either chasing their dreams or—against all reason—staying where they are
LIONS
by Bonnie Nadzam
Grove/Atlantic, July 2016
LIONS is set on the high plains of Colorado, a nearly deserted place, steeped in local legends and sparse in population. Built to be a glorious western city upon a hill, it was never fit for farming, mining, trading, or any of the illusory sources of wealth its pioneers imagined. The Walkers have been settled on its barren terrain for generations—a simple family in a town otherwise still taken in by stories of bigger, better, brighter. When a traveling stranger appears one day, his unsettling presence sets off a chain reaction that will change the fates of everyone he encounters… A story of awakening, LIONS is an exquisite novel that explores ambition and an American obsession with self-improvement, the responsibilities we have to ourselves and each other, as well as the everyday illusions that pass for a life worth living.
Bonnie Nadzam’s first novel, “Lamb”, has been translated into several languages and made into a film that will be released in 2016. She is also co-author with Dale Jamieson of “Love in the Anthropocene” (OR Books, 2015).
A darkly comic exploration
CALL ME ZEBRA
by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Fall 2017
The novel follows an oddball heroine named Zebra on an irresistible literary quest to Catalonia to mine the scattershot wisdom of the great writers and break free from her past—even as she may be derailed by the mysteries of love. Zebra embarks on a literary rabbit hole akin to Ben Lerner’s Adam Gordon in “Leaving the Atocha Station”,but with the suspicious, obsessive churning of Rivka Galchen’s “Atmospheric Disturbances”. Throughout, the author’s hand over the story is tightly controlled even as Zebra’s own reality cracks.
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the author of “Fra Keeler” (Dorothy, A Publishing Project). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Reader, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Denver Quarterly, Words without Borders, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2015 Whiting Writers’ Award, a MacDowell Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Catalonia, Spain. She has lived in Italy, Spain, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and the U.S.A..
In the twelfth knockout Cotton Malone thriller, Berry’s trademark mix of fact, fiction, history and flat-out action, is all here, front and center
THE LOST ORDER
by Steve Berry
Minotaur Books, April 2017
The Knights of the Golden Circle was the largest and most dangerous clandestine organization in American history. It amassed billions in stolen gold and silver, all buried in hidden caches across the United States. Since 1865 treasure hunters have searched, but little of that immense wealth has ever been found. Now, one hundred and sixty years later, two factions of what remains of the Knights of the Golden Circle want that lost treasure ―one to spend it for their own ends, the other to preserve it. Thrust into this battle is former Justice Department agent Cotton Malone, whose connection to the knights is far deeper than he ever imagined…
Steve Berry is the New York Times bestselling author of THE 14THCOLONY, THE PATRIOT THREAT, THE LINCOLN MYTH, THE KING’S DECEPTION, THE COLUMBUS AFFAIR, THE JEFFERSON KEY, THE EMPEROR’S TOMB, and THE TEMPLAR LEGACY.
from the author of the national bestseller ALL WE EVER WANTED WAS EVERYTHING
WATCH ME DISAPPEAR
by Janelle Brown
Spiegel & Grau, July 2017
Olive, a lovely, introverted, eccentric girl is a junior in high school mourning the loss of her eco-conscious, stay-at-home loving mom. Her father, Jonathan, a tech magazine editor and all around good guy drinks while awaiting the closure that a body and a death certificate will bring. But then Olive starts having waking dreams–hallucinations?–in which her very vibrant mother urges the girl to look for her, and Olive begins to believe that Billie is still alive and in trouble. Jonathan believes the trauma and anxiety of losing her mother is making Olive ill, until he uncovers a secret that that compels him to consider that Billie may not be dead after all and sends him on his own quest for the truth–about Billie, their marriage, and whether it is ever truly possible to know another person fully, even those we love the most.
Janelle Brown is the author of the nationally bestselling ALL WE EVER WANTED WAS EVERYTHING, published in May 2008 by Spiegel & Grau. An essayist and journalist, her writing appears regularly in Vogue, The New York Times, Elle, Wired, Self, The Los Angeles Times, and numerous other publications.
For all of those who equate holidays with warm feelings of spending time with family there are equal number of those who feel dread and remorse, resentment and defenses girded up for recrimination. It is for those that this book is intended
IF I KNEW THE WAY
by Joshua Feldman
Morrow, Fall 2017
Two lonely people meet in a hotel lobby: Adam, a former musician and recovering alcoholic, who has fled his suburban family’s Thanksgiving celebration; and Marissa, a flight attendant in a failing marriage, pregnant from a one-night stand. Over the course of a by turns hilarious and heart-rending day, the two form an unlikely bond as they reckon with their families, their pasts, and the choices that will determine where their lives go from here. In Joshua Feldman’s remarkably fluid and eloquent writing, keen ear for true and deft dialogue, this novel entertains while it probes the nature of relationships, family bonds and our struggles to know and be our best selves.
Joshua Feldman is the author of THE BOOK OF JONAH, his first novel that met universal acclaim and was sold in ten foreign territories.
Jennifer McMahon’s latest thriller teems with dark, fascinating characters whose stories are woven together in the shadow of several murders
BURNTOWN
by Jennifer McMahon
Doubleday, Spring 2017
On a pleasant summer afternoon, 10-year old Miles is playing hide and spy –when a man in disguise approaches his mother sunbathing on the lawn. He makes her laugh, then murders her, leaving behind a clue that no grown up will believe. Years later, Miles’s teenage daughter Necco is on the run after emerging from another brutal crime—the murder of her boyfriend—she has no memory of committing.
To survive, Necco will rely upon the kindness of strangers: the mystical women who give her shelter in a camp by the river. Or, as they call themselves, “the fire eaters.” As Necco searches for the truth, her journey unites her with two women who are on desperate quests of their own. And as the trio follows the clues to solving the mystery of Necco’s past, they discover that sometimes it’s the smallest towns that hold the strangest secrets.
Once again, Jennifer McMahon weaves a complex narrative of character and crime, a literary high wire act as entertaining as it is chilling.
Jennifer McMahon is the author of six novels, including the New York Times bestsellers THE WINTER PEOPLE and PROMISE NOT TO TELL. She graduated from Goddard College and studied poetry in the MFA Writing Program at Vermont College.
Vintage Unger, UNDER MY SKIN is filled with twists and turns, psychological suspense, and traumatic betrayals, all narrated by a sympathetic but unreliable heroine who has lost control
UNDER MY SKIN
by Lisa Unger
Park Row Books, TBA (Manuscript due June 2017)
Before the murder of her husband, and the breakdown that left a four-day gap in her memory, Poppy Lang had the life she’d always envisioned: a thriving business, a trendy apartment in New York City, and a loving husband with whom to share it. A year after her husband was brutally beaten to death, Poppy is finally beginning to move on. When a hooded stranger who seems to be stalking her triggers dreams about a self she doesn’t recognize, and new leads to her husband’s murder begin to surface, Poppy is forced to question everything: what was, what is, and what lies ahead.
Lisa Unger is the New York Times and internationally bestselling, award-winning author of fourteen novels, including her latest thriller INK AND BONE. Her books are published in twenty-six languages worldwide, have sold millions of copies and have been named “Best of the Year” or top picks by the Today show, Good Morning America, Entertainment Weekly, Amazon.com, Independent Booksellers, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and the Sun Sentinel to name a few.
Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR and Travel+Leisure Magazine.
From the New York Times bestselling author of FLIGHT PATTERNS comes a stunning new women’s fiction novel
THE NIGHT THE LIGHTS WENT OUT
by Karen White
Berkley, April 2017
THE NIGHT THE LIGHTS WENT OUT is about a young single mother who discovers that there’s no such thing as the perfect neighbor and that finding out who your true friends are is the most important lesson of all. When recent divorcee and mother Merilee moves to Sweet Apple, Georgia, she is hoping for a fresh start with her children. But behind the practiced smiles and spotless manners of the southern, suburban mothers, there is a dark secret that scars this place. And Merilee’s new landlady, the tough-as-nails, mysterious Sugar, may be the key to what happened here –and to what Merilee’s future holds.
Karen White is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. THE NIGHT THE LIGHTS WENT OUT is her 21st novel.
The wonderfully talented author of Mislaid returns with a fierce and audaciously funny novel of families-both the ones we’re born into and the ones we create-a story of obsession, idealism, and ownership, centered around a young woman who inherits her bohemian late father’s childhood home
NICOTINE
by Nell Zink
Ecco, June 2015
Penny Baker has rebelled against her family her whole life-by being the conventional one. Her mother, Amalia, was a member of a South American tribe called the Kogi; her much older father, Norm, long ago attained cult-like deity status among a certain cohort of aging hippies while operating a psychedelic “healing center.” But all that changes when her father dies, and Penny inherits his childhood home in New Jersey. She goes to investigate the property and finds it not overgrown and abandoned, but rather occupied by a group of friendly anarchist squatters whom she finds unexpectedly charming, and who have renamed the property “Nicotine.” In NICOTINE, Nell Zink exquisitely captures the clash between Baby-Boomer idealism and Millennial pragmatism, between the have-nots and want-mores, in a riotous yet tender novel that brilliantly encapsulates our time.
Nell Zink is the author of the internationally sold “Mislaid” and “Wallcreeper”.
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