Archives de catégorie : London 2022 Fiction

SALONIKA BURNING de Gail Jones

Propulsive and gripping, SALONIKA BURNING is a formidable work of historical fiction that illuminates not only the devastation of war but also the social upheaval of the times. It shows Gail Jones at the height of her powers.

SALONIKA BURNING
by Gail Jones
Text Publishing (Australia), November 2022

How he wished to paint it. The razed city. The human drama. He saw the old forms broken, shaped in new alignments, the destructible world abstracted in splendid innovations…Already he understood the power of derangement, and how a single window might contain an entire fate.
Greece, 1917. The great city Salonika is ravaged by an enormous fire as Europe is engulfed by war. Amid the destruction, there are those who have come to the frontlines to heal: surgeons, ambulance drivers, nurses, orderlies and other volunteers. Four of these people—Olive, Grace, Stella and Stanley—are at the centre of Gail Jones’ extraordinary new novel, which takes its inspiration from the wartime experiences of Australians Miles Franklin and Olive King, and those of British painters Grace Pailthorpe and Stanley Spenser.

Gail Jones is one of Australia’s most celebrated writers. She is the author of two short-story collections and nine novels, and her work has been translated into several languages. She has received numerous literary awards, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the Age Book of the Year, the South Australian Premier’s Award, the ALS Gold Medal and the Kibble Award, and has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the International Dublin Literary Award and the Prix Femina Étranger. Originally from Western Australia, she now lives in Sydney.

WHAT LIES IN THE WOODS de Kate Alice Marshall

They were eleven when they sent a killer to prison…but they were liars. This is a twisty, adult suspense debut from an author of novels for younger readers.

WHAT LIES IN THE WOODS
by Kate Alice Marshall
Flatiron/St. Martin’s Press, January 2023

Twenty-two years ago, Naomi Shaw believed in magic. She and her two best friends, Cassidy and Olivia, spent that summer roaming the woods of Chester, Washington, imagining a world of ceremony and wonder—the Goddess Game. The summer ended suddenly, with Cass and Liv stumbling onto the road covered in blood. Naomi had been attacked, was nearly dead. But miraculously, Naomi survived her seventeen stab wounds, and lived to identify the man who had hurt her. The girls’ testimony put away a serial killer, wanted for murdering six women. They were heroes. And they were liars. The day she learns that Alan Michael Stahl has died in prison, Naomi gets a call from Olivia. For twenty-two years, the friends have kept a secret worth killing for: a skeleton in the woods that was the center of their rituals and imagined magic that summer. But now Olivia wants to tell, and Naomi is forced back to the town she’d escaped. When Olivia disappears, Naomi sets out to find out what really happened in the woods—no matter how dangerous the truth turns out to be. Naomi thought the Goddess Game was over. But it’s just beginning.

Kate Alice Marshall is the author of the young adult novels I Am Still Alive, Rules for Vanishing, and Our Last Echoes, as well as the Secrets of Eden Eld middle grade series. She lives outside of Seattle, where she spends her time playing board games, tending a chaotic vegetable garden, and wrangling dogs and children.

DON’T CRY FOR ME de Daniel Black

A Black father makes amends with his gay son through letters written on his deathbed in this wise and penetrating novel of empathy and forgiveness, for fans of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robert Jones Jr. and Alice Walker.

DON’T CRY FOR ME
by Daniel Black
Hanover Square Press, February 2022
(via Dystel, Goderich & Bourret)

As Jacob lies dying, he begins to write a letter to his only son, Isaac. They have not met or spoken in many years, and there are things that Isaac must know. Stories about his ancestral legacy in rural Arkansas that extend back to slavery. Secrets from Jacob’s tumultuous relationship with Isaac’s mother and the shame he carries from the dissolution of their family. Tragedies that informed Jacob’s role as a father and his reaction to Isaac’s being gay. But most of all, Jacob must share with Isaac the unspoken truths that reside in his heart. He must give voice to the trauma that Isaac has inherited. And he must create a space for the two to find peace.
With piercing insight and profound empathy, acclaimed author Daniel Black illuminates the lived experiences of Black fathers and queer sons, offering an authentic and ultimately hopeful portrait of reckoning and reconciliation. Spare as it is sweeping, poetic as it is compulsively readable, Don’t Cry for Me is a monumental novel about one family grappling with love’s hard edges and the unexpected places where hope and healing take flight.

Sad and gripping…an example of how fiction is not just a form of literature but a place. We go there for lessons on how to live, how to change and, most important, how to forgive and seek forgiveness. » —New York Times Book Review

Heartbreaking…Poignant and moving… consistently powerful.” —Publishers Weekly

DON’T CRY FOR ME a perfect song: the epistolary dirge of a man singing to his son as he faces death by cancer. At turns intense and funny, tender and brutally honest, Jacob’s letter to his son, Isaac, is revelatory. While the story is an unflinching account of a family and a community in the Black American Midwest coming of age in the modern now, it is also full of that which makes us all human, regardless of where we are from or who we are: full of fathers trying to understand sons, sons trying to understand fathers, parents feeling as if they have failed children, children realizing how they have passed their own traumas on to others and so on. It’s a beautiful book. Read it. ” —Jesmyn Ward

Daniel Black is an author and professor of African American studies and English at Clark Atlanta University. His books include The Coming, Perfect Peace and They Tell Me of a Home. He is the winner of the Distinguished Writer Award from the Middle-Atlantic Writer’s Association and has been nominated for the Townsend Prize for Fiction, the Ernest J. Gaines Award,and the Georgia Author of the Year Award. He was raised in Blackwell, Arkansas, and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

IN THE DARK WE FORGET de Sandra SG Wong

A jolting psychological suspense novel from an up-andcoming crime writer about missing parents, a winning lottery ticket and the lies we tell ourselves in order to survive.

IN THE DARK WE FORGET
by Sandra SG Wong
‎ HarperCollins, June 2022
(via Dystel, Goderich & Bourret)

Some things are better left forgotten. . . When a woman wakes up with amnesia beside a mountain highway, confused and alone, she fights to regain her identity, only to learn that her parents have disappeared—not long after her mother bought a winning $47 million lottery ticket. As her memories painfully resurface and the police uncover details of her parents’ mysterious disappearance, Cleo Li finds herself under increasing suspicion. Even with the unwavering support of her brother, she can’t quite reconcile her fears with reality or keep the harrowing nightmares at bay. As Cleo delves deeper for the truth, she cannot escape the nagging sense that maybe the person she should be afraid of…is herself.
With jolting revelations and taut ambiguity, IN THE DARK WE FORGET vividly examines the complexities of family—and the lies we tell ourselves in order to survive.

A chilling, nerve-jangling journey into lost memories and unforgettable terrors. Sandra Wong knows what scares us all—and what we can never forget.” – Tess Gerritsen, New York Times-bestselling author of Listen to Me

« IN THE DARK WE FORGET is a hair-raising high-wire act. Wong gives us a hero whose search for her identity, and the truth of what happened to upend her life, reveals more than she wants to know, and leaves the reader gasping as much in admiration as in fear. » – Sara Paretsky, award-winning author of Dead Land

Sandra SG Wong writes fiction across genres. She is a finalist for the Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence and a nominee for the Whistler Independent Book Awards. She holds an honours BA in English literature and speaks four languages at varying levels of proficiency, though she usually only curses in one of them. Sandra lives in Edmonton, Alberta, and is too often tweeting from @S_G_Wong or tweaking sgwong.com instead of writing.

FALL BOYS de Penelope Douglas

In the new Hellbent series by New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author Penelope Douglas, discover six love stories–races, chases, adventure, and adrenaline. Get ready for the first book in the series, FALLS BOYS: You’ve met his father. Now meet Hawke. A standalone New Adult romance suitable for ages 18+.

FALL BOYS
(Hellbent, Book 1)
by Penelope Douglas
Digital Originals, March 2022
(via Dystel, Goderich & Bourret)

The kids are growing up—different from their parents but the same in so many ways…”
ARO:
Hawken Trent. So polite. So sweet. Such an upstanding young man. A virgin, too, I hear. He never gets naughty with a girl. Probably because Jesus told him not to. And now here he is, trying to be the hero by protecting another girl from me. He calls me a bully. Irrational. Unreasonable. A criminal. He can call me anything he wants, I’ve heard worse. And he can try to stand between me and my money, but he’s never had to fight for food. That rich, clean, school boy doesn’t have what it takes.
HAWKE:
I surprised her. You should’ve seen her face. Just because I don’t have a record, honey, doesn’t mean I’m clean. It just means I’m better at not getting caught. That is until I realize I might’ve actually gone too far this time. She’s there. I’m there. The scene of the crime. It’s dark. The police show up. We have no choice. We run. Down High Street, into Quinn’s bake shop, and I pull her through the entrance to the old speakeasy that everyone forgot was here decades ago. The door locks, the cops circle the building, never knowing we’re right here, and I’m hidden in plain sight, indefinitely, with someone’s who’s awful. Mean. Rough. Dirty. A thief. A delinquent. Until one night, lost in all of these rooms together, I don’t see any of those things anymore. She’s smart. Daring. Soft. Hot…
Everything’s changing. It’s this place. It does something to people. We have a silly urban legend in Shelburne Falls about mirrors. They’re a gateway. Don’t lean back into them. But we came through front first. I don’t care what the county records say. This was never a speakeasy. It’s Carnival Tower.

Penelope Douglas is a New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author. Their books have been translated into nineteen languages and include The Fall Away Series, The Devil’s Night Series, and the stand-alones, Misconduct, Punk 57, Birthday Girl, Credence, and Tryst Six Venom. They live in New England with their husband and daughter.