Archives de catégorie : Frankfurt 2023 Adult Fiction

THE SUNFLOWER HOUSE d’Adriana Allegri

Shedding light on a little-known aspect of the Nazi regime, this is a heartfelt, emotional novel of friendship, love, and secrets that is sure to resonate with historical fiction fans.

THE SUNFLOWER HOUSE
by Adriana Allegri
St. Martin’s Press, September 2024

In a sleepy German village, Allina Gottlieb’s life is idyllic: she works at the bookshop with her uncle, makes strudel with her aunt, and spends the weekends with her friends and fiancé. But it’s 1939, and on one fateful night, her life changes forever.

THE SUNFLOWER HOUSE is a meticulously-researched debut historical novel set at Hochland Home, part of the notorious Lebensborn Program in Nazi Germany—a real-life Handmaid’s Tale. Women of “pure” blood resided there for the sole purpose of perpetuating the Aryan population, giving birth to hundreds of babies who were then raised—and neglected—in this state-run baby factory.

With her life on the line, Allina is forced to work as a nurse in Hochland Home. Her Jewish identity must remain a secret in order for her to survive, but when she discovers the neglect occurring within the home, she is determined not only to save herself, but also the children in her care. When Allina meets Karl, a high-ranking SS officer with secrets of his own, the two must decide how much they are willing to share with each other—and how much they can stand to risk. The threads of this poignant and heartrending novel weave a tale of loss and love, friendship and betrayal, and the secrets we bury in order to save ourselves.

As a first-generation American with parents who lived in Europe during World War II, Adriana Allegri grew up on stories about how small acts of compassion and kindness saved lives. That theme shows up in everything she writes, regardless of genre. She has worked in education, as a high school teacher and program administrator; as a writer/project manager for a leading data analytics company, and as an author. 2015 was her Big Risk Year, as she left her corporate job to concentrate on writing. THE SUNFLOWER HOUSE is her first novel.

THORN TREE de Max Ludington

The dark side of the 1960s returns to haunt a contemporary Los Angeles family in this new novel from a critically acclaimed author. Prefect for readers of Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone and A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.

THORN TREE
by Max Ludington
St. Martin’s Press, April 2024

From the acclaimed author of Tiger in a Trance (Doubleday, 2003) comes a suspenseful and beautifully wrought novel about the aftershocks of the late 1960s and the relationship between trauma and the creative impulse. Now in his seventies, Daniel lives in quiet anonymity in a converted guest cottage in the Hollywood Hills. A legendary artist, he’s known for one seminal work—Thorn Tree—a hulking, welded, scrap metal sculpture that he built in the Mojave desert in the 1970s. The work emerged from tragedy, but building it kept Daniel alive and catapulted him to brief, reluctant fame in the art world.
Daniel is landlord and neighbor to Celia, a charismatic but fragile actress living in the main house on his property. She too experienced youthful fame, hers in a popular television series, but saw her life nearly collapse after a series of bad decisions. Now, a new movie with a notorious director might re-ignite her career. A single mother, Celia leaves her young son, Dean, for weeks at a time with her father, Jack, who stays at her house while she’s on location. Jack and Daniel strike up a tentative friendship as Dean takes to visiting Daniel’s cottage—but something about Jack seems off. Discomfiting, strangely intimate, with flashes of anger balanced by an almost philosophical bent, Jack is not the harmless grandparent he pretends to be.
Weaving the idealism and the darkness of the late 1960s, the glossy surfaces of Los Angeles celebrity today, and thrumming with the sound of the Grateful Dead, the mania of Charles Manson and other cults, and the secrets that both Jack and Daniel have harbored for fifty years, THORN TREE is an utterly-compelling novel.

Max Ludington’s first novel, Tiger in a Trance was a New York Times Notable Book. He received his M.F.A. from Columbia University and now lives in New York. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Tin House, Meridian, Nerve, and On the Rocks: The KGB Bar Fiction Anthology.

THE DAUGHTERS’ WAR de Christopher Buehlman

This standalone novel follows young warrior Galva dom Braga on her journey from untested academy swordswoman to feared and bloodied veteran knight, set during the war-torn, goblin-infested years just before The Blacktongue Thief.

THE DAUGHTERS’ WAR
by Christopher Buehlman
Tor Books, June 2024

The goblins have killed all of our horses and most of our men. They have enslaved our cities, burned our fields, and inflicted a waking nightmare on the known world. Now, our daughters take up arms. Galva—Galvicha to her three brothers, two of whom the goblins will kill—has defied her family’s wishes and joined the army’s untested new unit, the Raven Knights. They march toward a once-beautiful city overrun by the goblin horde, accompanied by scores of giant war corvids. Made with the darkest magics, these fearsome black birds may hold the key to stopping the goblins in their war to make cattle of mankind. The road to victory is bloody, and goblins are clever and merciless. The Raven Knights can take nothing for granted—not the bonds of family, nor the wisdom of their leaders, nor their own safety against the dangerous war birds at their side. But some hopes are worth any risk.

Christopher Buehlman (he/him) is an author, comedian, and screenwriter from St. Petersburg, Florida, whose books include The Blacktongue Thief and Those Across the River. He tours the country most years, writing fantasy and horror and performing at Renaissance festivals. He and his wife, Jenn, travel with their rescue dog, Duck, and a black cat named Jane Mansfield, who is proficient in ninjutsu.

CUCKOO de Gretchen Felker-Martin

IT meets But I’m a Cheerleader and Invasion of the Bodysnatchers in a brand new horror novel from the acclaimed author of Manhunt.

CUCKOO
by Gretchen Felker-Martin
Tor Nightfire, June 2024

In 1993, five young queer kids, whose parents want them “fixed,” find themselves thrown together at a secretive “tough love” camp deep in the Utah desert. Tormented and worked to the point of collapse by hardline religious zealots intent on straightening them out, they slowly become aware that something in the mountains north of the camp is speaking to them in their dreams and that the children who return home to their families aren’t the ones they sent away.

Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of Manhunt, is a Massachusetts-based horror author and film critic. You can read her fiction and film criticism on Patreon, Nylon Magazine, The Outline, and more.

ELAINE de Will Self

From the Booker-shortlisted author of Umbrella, a brilliant portrait of motherhood, sublimated desire, and the reverberations of the Cold War in a novel that investigates and reimagines the life of the author’s mother.

ELAINE
by Will Self
Grove Press, September 2024

Will Self is one of the most inimitable contemporary writers in the English language, dubbed “the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation” (Guardian). His work has been shortlisted for awards including the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award for Novel of the Year, and selected for best of the year lists, including those of the Times, Guardian, Independent and Financial Times. He also earns rapturous reviews, with his last novel, Phone, hailed as “one of the most significant literary works of our century” (New Statesman). Following a blistering personal account of addiction in his memoir Will, Self turns his forensic eye to the life of his own equally troubled mother, Elaine, in this brilliantly conceived new novel.

Standing by the mailbox outside 1100 Hemlock Street in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her child and husband, an Ivy League academic and former Communist Party member, inside her house and wonders: is this . . . it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that ends her marriage and upends her life.

Based on the intimate diaries Self’s mother kept for over forty years, ELAINE is a writer’s attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm of a parent’s interior life prior to his own existence. Perhaps the first work of auto-oedipal fiction, ELAINE shows Will Self working in an exciting new dimension, utilizing his stylistic talents to tremendous effect.

Will Self is the author of many novels and books of nonfiction, including Great Apes; How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year; The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction; Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Shark; Phone; the memoir Will; and the essay collection Why Read. He lives in South London.