Archives de catégorie : Frankfurt 2022 Adult Fiction

HARD GIRLS de J. Robert Lennon

Two estranged twin sisters as they hunt down their elusive mother in this razor-sharp crime novel from « master of the dark arts » J. Robert Lennon (Kelly Link).

HARD GIRLS
by J. Robert Lennon
Mulholland Books, February 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Jane Pool likes her safe, suburban existence just fine. She has a house, a family, (an infuriating mother-in-law,) and a quiet-if-unfulfilling administrative job at the local college. Everything is wonderfully, numbingly normal. Yet Jane remains haunted by her past: her mercurial, absent mother, her parents’ secrets, and the act of violence that transformed her life. When her estranged twin, Lila, makes contact, claiming to know where their mother is and why she left all those years ago, Jane agrees to join her, desperate for answers and the chance to reconnect with the only person who really knew her true self. Yet as the hunt becomes treacherous, and pulls the two women to the earth’s distant corners, they find themselves up against their mother’s subterfuge and the darkness that always stalked their family. Now Jane stands to lose the life she’s made for the one that has been impossible to escape.

Set in both the Pool family’s past and their present, and melding elements of a chase novel, an espionage thriller, and domestic suspense, HARD GIRLS is an utterly distinctive pastiche—propulsive, mysterious, cracked, intelligent, and unexpected at every turn.

J. Robert Lennon is the author of ten novels, including Familiar, Broken River, and Subdivision, and the story collections Pieces for the Left Hand, See You in Paradise, and Let Me Think. He lives in Ithaca, New York.

TO EACH THIS WORLD de Julie E. Czerneda

From an Aurora Award-winning author, a new sci-fi novel follows three intrepid humans caught up in a conflict that stretches across time and space.

TO EACH THIS WORLD
by Julie E. Czerneda
DAW Books, November 2022
(via KT Literary)

Biologist Julie E. Czerneda’s new standalone science fiction novel follows a desperate mission to reconnect with long lost sleeper ships, sent centuries earlier from Earth to settle distant worlds.
A trio of Humans must work with their mysterious alien allies to rescue any descendants they can find on those worlds. Something is out there, determined to claim the cosmos for itself, and only on Earth will Humans be safe. Or will they? The challenge isn’t just to communicate with your own kind after generations have passed. It’s to understand what isn’t your kind at all. And how far will trust take you, when the truth depends on what you are?

“The search for the 21st-century’s Larry Niven is now officially over. Julie E. Czerneda gives us a galaxy-spanning vision of credible aliens and high-stakes conflict. A wonderful book.” —Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author of Hominids

“Czerneda serves up the real stuff—a suspensefully original, sci-tech tale of alien contact, as interstellar humanity seeks a perilous path out of a lethal trap.” —David Brin, author of Earth and Kiln People

Having written twenty-three novels (and counting) published by her beloved DAW Books and Hugo-winning editor Sheila E. Gilbert, as well as numerous short stories, and editing several anthologies over the past 25 years, Julie E. Czerneda was inducted in the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2022. Her work has received international acclaim, multiple awards,and best-selling status. Julie’s works combine her training and love of biology with a boundless curiosity and optimism.

MY NAME IS IRIS de Brando Skyhorse

Brando Skyhorse, the PEN/Hemingway Award–winning author of The Madonnas of Echo Park, returns with a riveting literary dystopian novel set in a near-future America where mandatory identification wristbands make second-generation immigrants into second-class citizens—a powerful family saga for readers of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West and Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind.

MY NAME IS IRIS
by Brando Skyhorse
Avid Reader, May 2023
(via Writers House)

One day, Iris Prince, a middle-class, ideologically conservative Mexican American mother and wife, finds a mysterious wall growing outside her modest Southern California home. In addition to the maddening structure—which is impossible to remove and mutates at random—the rest of the world is also changing. A newly passed law suddenly denies basic rights like drivers’ licenses and steady employment to Americans who cannot prove at least one of their parents was born in the United States. Biometric wristbands are used to identify people who are “of verifiable origin” under the new system, while unverifiables are ignored or harassed with abandon.

Iris has always prided herself on being a model minority and assimilating into White American culture. She and her like-minded Mexican American husband Alex have raised their daughter Melanie to be bilingual, but there are strict rules about when Spanish is and isn’t acceptable, and about what other parts of their culture to selectively embrace. As Alex’s behavior becomes suspicious, Iris soon realizes she may not be eligible for the coveted wristband—at least not without going to dangerous, drastic lengths to get one. Meanwhile, the wall outside their home is growing, and their neighbors are watching more closely than ever…

A powerful story about family, identity, intolerance, and immigration, MY NAME IS IRIS is a brilliant and timely look at what it means to be American as seen through one woman’s tumultuous journey through a world that insists on telling her who she can and can’t be.

Brando Skyhorse’s debut novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park, won the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award and the Sue Kaufman Award for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His memoir, Take This Man, was named one of Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Books of 2014 and one of NBC News’s 10 Best Latino Books of 2014. Skyhorse is a graduate of Stanford University and the MFA Writers’ Workshop program at UC Irvine.

LIMBERLOST de Robbie Arnott

The third novel by the award-winning author of Flames and The Rain Heron, LIMBERLOST is an extraordinary chronicle of life and land: of carnage and kindness, blood ties and love.

LIMBERLOST
by Robbie Arnott
Text Publishing, October 2022

In the heat of a long summer Ned hunts rabbits in a river valley, hoping the pelts will earn him enough money to buy a small boat. His two brothers are away at war, their whereabouts unknown. His father and older sister struggle to hold things together on the family orchard, Limberlost.
Desperate to ignore it all—to avoid the future rushing towards him—Ned dreams of open water.
As his story unfolds over the following decades, we see how Ned’s choices that summer come to shape the course of his life, the fate of his family and the future of the valley, with its seasons of death and rebirth.

Robbie Arnott’s acclaimed debut, Flames (2018), won a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist award and a Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prize, and was shortlisted for a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, a New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award, a Queensland Literary Award, the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction and the Not the Booker Prize. His follow-up, The Rain Heron (2020), won the Age Book of the Year award, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the ALS Gold Medal, the Voss Literary Prize and an Adelaide Festival Award. He lives in Hobart, Australia.

LITTLE PLUM de Laura McPhee-Browne

Bold, dark and sensuous, LITTLE PLUM is the stunning follow-up to the award-winning debut Cherry Beach. With skill and sensitivity, Laura McPhee-Browne takes us inside the mind of an expectant mother.

LITTLE PLUM
by Laura McPhee-Browne
Text Publishing, February 2023

On the cusp of thirty, Coral learns that a thing is growing inside her body. It is not necessarily a complete disaster, she tells herself. I’m okay, she tells herself. Soon the thing inside her is the size of a plum. ‘Little Plum,’ she says, ‘Little Plum, I love you.’ And she wants to love it, the little plum. It’s just that she can’t yet think of it as what it is becoming: a baby, and not just a fruity morsel.
Coral is tapping and shrugging more than usual. She is trying to stop the creature in her head from taking hold. Coral might not be okay—or she might be seeing more clearly than anyone.

Laura McPhee-Browne is a writer and social worker living in Melbourne, on Wurundjeri land. Her short stories have been published widely in Australia. Cherry Beach (2020), her first novel, won a NSW Premier’s Literary Award.