Archives de catégorie : Fiction

SORRY: Ich habe es nur für dich getan de Bianca Iosivoni

Love can sweep you away – but what if it drags you into its darkest abysses? Perfect for readers of Colleen Hoover and fans of the Netflix series You.

SORRY:
Ich habe es nur für dich getan
(I’m Sorry: I Did It All For You)
by Bianca Iosivoni
Penguin Germany, March 2023

San Francisco. Robyn, a young and ambitious journalist, is shocked when the police show up on her doorstep. Her ex-boyfriend Julian has been reported missing. At a single stroke, the past comes flooding back: the longing, the pain, the disappointment… Robyn thought she had put it all behind her. She’s deeply worried about Julian. What could have happened? Robyn seeks help from her best friend, Cooper – though she has long felt much more for him than that. When the police suspect Cooper of having something to do with Julian’s disappearance, she doesn’t know what to believe, or what to feel. Who can she trust? Can she even trust herself?
An irresistible mix of powerful emotions, psychological suspense and addictive twists.

Over the years, Bianca Iosivoni has won thousands of fans with her new adult and fantasy bestsellers. She loves heady love stories with all their highs and lows, as well as thrills and twists – and combines both in her books for Penguin. SORRY will give you goosebumps and butterflies with its gripping blend of toxic feelings and psychological suspense.

TIANANMEN SQUARE de Lai Wen

A truly remarkable novel about coming to see the world as it is, TIANANMEN SQUARE is the story of one girl’s life growing up in the China of the 1970s and 80s, as well as the story of the events in 1989 that give the novel its name: the hope and idealism of a generation of young students, their heroism and courage, and the price that some of them paid.

TIANANMEN SQUARE
by Lai Wen
Swift Press, late 2024
(via Emily Randle Editorial & Literary)

It is Beijing in the 1970s, and Lai lives with her parents, grandmother and younger brother in a small flat in a working-class area. Her grandmother is a formidable figure – no-nonsense and uncompromising, but loving towards her granddaughter – while her ageing beauty of a mother snipes at her father, a sunken figure who has taken refuge in his work.
As she grows up, Lai comes to discern the realities of the country she lives is: an early encounter with the police haunts her for years; her father makes her see that his quietness is a reaction to experiences he has lived through; and an old bookseller subtly introduces her to ideas and novels that open her mind to different perspectives. But she also goes through what anyone goes through when young – the ebbs and flows of friendships; troubles and rewards at home and at school; and the first steps and missteps in love.
A gifted student, she is eventually given a scholarship to study at the prestigious Peking University; while there she meets new friends, and starts to get involved in the student protests that have been gathering speed. It is the late 1980s, and change is in the air…
This novel manages to balance both the sense of an individual girl growing up and going through all the changes that every young person goes through – falling in love, realising that grown-ups are people who make mistakes, reckoning with your own character – with the sense of growing up in the China of the time and the tragic events that give the book its title and its culmination.

Lai Wen is a pseudonym. She was born in Beijing in 1970 and left China in 1989 after the Tiananmen Square protests. She now lives in the UK with her husband and two children.

THE LAST CHECKMATE de Gabriella Saab

Readers of Heather Morris’s The Tattooist of Auschwitz and watchers of The Queen’s Gambit won’t want to miss this amazing debut set during World War II. A young Polish resistance worker, imprisoned in Auschwitz as a political prisoner, plays chess in exchange for her life, and in doing so fights to bring the man who destroyed her family to justice.

THE LAST CHECKMATE
by Gabriella Saab
William Morrow/HarperCollins, October 2021

Maria is many things: daughter, avid chess player, and member of the Polish underground resistance in Nazi-occupied Warsaw.  Captured by the Gestapo she is imprisoned in Auschwitz, while her family is sent to their deaths. Realizing her ability to play chess, the sadistic camp deputy, Fritzsch, intends to use her as a chess opponent to entertain the camp guards. However, once he tires of utilizing her skills, he has every intention of killing her.
Befriended by a Catholic priest, Maria attempts to overcome her grief and see the value in survival. Literally playing for her life through four grueling years, her strategy is simple: Live. Fight. Survive. By cleverly provoking Fritzsch’s volatile nature in front of his superiors, Maria intends to orchestrate his downfall. Only then will she have a chance to evade the fate awaiting her and see him brought to justice.
As she carries out her plan and the war nears its end, she discovers Fritzsch has survived.  And so Maria, vowing still to avenge the murder of her family, challenges her former nemesis to one final game, certain to end in life or death, in failure or justice. If Maria can bear to face Fritzsch—and her past—one last time.

List of foreign sales: Brazil (Dos Livros), Bulgaria (Book Travel), Czech Republic (Argo), Hungary (Cartaphilus Kiado), Italy (Newton Compton), Netherlands (Luitingh-Sijthoff), Poland (HC-Polska), Portugal (Casa das Letras), Romania (RAO), Russia (EKSMO), Spain (Newton Compton), Slovenia (HKZ)

Gabriella Saab graduated from Mississippi State University with a Bachelor of Business Administration in marketing, and now works various jobs, including teaching barre classes. In researching for this novel, she traveled to Warsaw and Auschwitz to dig deeper into the experiences and setting of those who lived there.

DISTANT SONS de Tim Johnston

Tim Johnston masterfully interweaves past and present to tell a story of violence, vengeance, and remorse. Poetic, compelling, nuanced, profoundly and achingly beautiful.

DISTANT SONS
by Tim Johnston
Algonquin, October 2023
(via Writers House)

DISTANT SONS is set in a small Wisconsin town on the banks of the Mississippi, where, in the 1970s, three young boys vanished in a series of heart-wrenching, still unsolved disappearances. In the present day, a drifter named Sean arrives in town and gets embroiled in the lives of a waitress and her abusive ex, leading him to love—and a dangerous enemy. At his side is Dan Young, who is fleeing the unspoken specters of his past; together, Sean and Dan take up work for Marion Devereaux, an old man long suspected in the disappearances of the boys. Observing them all is Detective Viegas, a woman whose drive to seek justice is impacted by her own father’s failure to solve the 1970s mystery—and the violence once done to her sister.
In DISTANT SONS Tim Johnston masterfully interweaves past and present to tell a story of violence, vengeance, and remorse. It is a minutely observed novel about men and women living in the small towns and forgotten byways of America, of blue collar people working jobs for cash and just getting by day to day. In observing the grace—and the violence—that can result from the smallest crossings of these so often unheralded lives, Tim Johnston elevates a set of characters distinctive from those that populate most literary fiction these days. His protagonists’ concerns and secrets, joys and sorrows are rooted in a profound sense of place and personality that galvanizes the mysteries they encounter. Throughout DISTANT SONS, we are drawn into broader questions of culpability, the way what we do—or fail to do—can long outlive us. And for each, Tim Johnston tenderly interrogates the way we grow around our losses like trees around scars, bending or lifting with each passing year.

Tim Johnston’s most recent novels include Descent and The Current. Both were New York Times, USA Today and Indie bestsellers. He is also the author of short stories that have appeared in New England Review, New Letters, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, Double Take, Best Life Magazine, and Narrative Magazine, among others.

THIS BIRD HAS FLOWN de Susanna Hoffs

A delightfully funny and romantic debut novel from Susanna Hoffs, celebrated performer and co-founder of The Bangles, that is « part British romcom, part Jane Eyre, and one hundred percent enjoyable » (Tom Perrotta)..

THIS BIRD HAS FLOWN
by Susanna Hoffs
Little, Brown, Spring 2023
(via The Gernert Company)

Music. Fate. Redemption. Love. Jane Start is thirty-three, broke, and recently single. Ten years prior, she had a hit song—written by world-famous superstar Jonesy—but Jane hasn’t had a breakout since. Now she’s living out of four garbage bags at her parents’ house, reduced to performing to Karaoke tracks in Las Vegas. Rock bottom.
But when her longtime manager Pippa sends Jane to London to regroup, she’s seated next to an intriguing stranger on the flight—the other Tom Hardy, an elegantly handsome Oxford professor of literature. Jane is instantly smitten by Tom, and soon, truly inspired. But it’s not Jane’s past alone that haunts her second chance at stardom, and at love. Is Tom all that he seems? And can Jane emerge from the shadow of Jonesy’s earlier hit, and into the light of her own?
In turns deeply sexy, riotously funny, and utterly joyful, THIS BIRD HAS FLOWN explores love, passion, and the ghosts of our past, and offers a glimpse inside the music business that could only come from beloved songwriter Susanna Hoffs.

« In this sexy, page-turning treat, Susanna Hoffs writes as engagingly as she sings.” —Helen Fielding, author of the bestselling sensation Bridget Jones’s Diary
“A little bit romance, a little bit rock-and-roll—this isn’t just a book, it’s a love song, and it should come as no surprise that Susanna Hoffs has crafted the perfect one to put on your playlist.” ―Christina Lauren, New York Times bestselling author of The Unhoneymooners
“A tender, funny, love story wrapped in a guitar-jamming rock-and-roll cloak. I haven’t had this much fun reading a book in a long, long time. » ―Jessica Anya Blau, author of Mary Jane

Boasting one of pop’s most beloved voices, Susanna Hoffs graduated from U.C. Berkeley with a degree in Art. In 1981 she co-founded The Bangles, with whom she recorded and released a string of chart-topping singles including “Manic Monday” (written by Prince), “Walk Like an Egyptian,” “Hazy Shade of Winter,” and “Eternal Flame” (co-written by Susanna), before embarking on a critically acclaimed solo career. She also wrote, recorded music for, and appeared in the Austin Powers movies, and played herself on Season 1 of “The Gilmore Girls.” This Bird Has Flown is her first novel. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, filmmaker Jay Roach.