Archives de catégorie : Nos incontournables

THE DIVIDE de Morgan Richter

A debut mystery with slight speculative elements, which follows an actress turned psychic who finds herself embroiled in a murder investigation when the doppelgänger she never knew existed turns up missing.

THE DIVIDE
by Morgan Richter
Anchor/Knopf, publication date TBD
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary)

When Jenny St. John was eighteen, she moved to Los Angeles from her rural Iowa hometown and scored the lead role in an independent film called The Divide. She was working with the young auteur director Serge Grumet and on her way to becoming the next indie darling. But when the movie tanked and Jenny never caught a second break it seemed her charmed story had a different ending in mind. Now, two decades later, after floundering on the fringes of the entertainment industry, she’s barely keeping afloat running a low-level grift as a psychic life coach.
But when news surfaces that Serge has been murdered, Jenny’s life is turned upside down. Unbeknownst to Jenny, Serge’s ex-wife, painter Genevieve Santos, looks alarmingly similar to Jenny. So much so, that when Gena goes missing, the cops think Jenny is Gena.
Jenny finds herself pulled into Gena’s world and manages to somehow leverage both her resemblance to Gena and her ersatz psychic abilities to infiltrate the affluent yet unstable inner circle of friends, which include a Korean pop idol-turned-social media star and an Oscar-winning actress-turned-wellness guru. It becomes clear that Gena is either the culprit of Serge’s murder or another victim. Soon Jenny’s search to find Gena unearths dark secrets about her own past while putting her squarely in the sights of a killer.
THE DIVIDE is a propulsive, unputdownable novel full of sharp insights on identity, age, success, and the inescapable pitfalls of fractured memory.

Morgan Richter is a graduate of the Filmic Writing program at the University of Southern California’s film school and has worked in production on several television shows including ABC’s America’s Funniest Home Videos and E! Entertainment Television’s Emmy-winning comedy series Talk Soup. An avid popular culture critic, she is the author of Duranalysis: Essays on the Duran Duran Experience and has amassed a cult following on her analyses of classic Duran Duran videos. She has self-published five novels but THE DIVIDE is her first foray into traditional publishing. Morgan currently lives in Seattle.

THE GHOST OF SAM WEBSTER de Craig Higginson

Written in Craig Higginson’s masterful prose, THE GHOST OF SAM WEBSTER is at once a war novel, a murder mystery, a multi-layered love story and a robust reassertion of what it is to remain human during the most challenging times.

THE GHOST OF SAM WEBSTER
by Craig Higginson
Pan Macmillan (South Africa), September 2023
(via The Lennon-Ritchie Agency)

• Winner of the HSS Award for Best Fiction Novel (2024)
• Longlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize (2024)
• Longlisted for the SALA Award for Best Novel (2024)

Writer Daniel Hawthorne is packing up his mother’s house in Johannesburg when he hears about the disappearance of Sam Webster, the beautiful daughter of his friend, the famous historian Bruce Webster. When the body of Sam appears briefly on the banks of the flooded Buffalo River, Daniel decides to visit the Websters’ luxury lodge in the heart of Zululand. Under the guise of researching a new novel about his disgraced ancestor, the lepidopterist Lieutenant Charles Hawthorne who fought in the Battle of iSandlwana, Daniel starts to investigate the reasons for Sam’s disappearance. The lines between loyalty and betrayal, love and hate, cowardice and courage, redemption and shame, soon become blurred as Daniel gets closer to the truth.

Craig Higginson is an acclaimed playwright and award-winning novelist whose plays have been performed and produced in theatres and festivals around the world. His novels include Last Summer (Picador Africa, 2010; Mercure de France, 2017), The Landscape Painter (Picador Africa, 2011), The Dream House (Picador Africa, 2015; Mercure de France, 2016) and The White Room (Picador Africa and St Martin’s Press, 2018). The Dream House was a matric setwork for South African schools from 2019 to 2021.

THE QUALITY OF MERCY de Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu

“In her most magnificent novel yet, award-winning author Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu showcases the history of a country transitioning from a colonial to a postcolonial state with a deft touch and a compassionate eye for poignant detail … Dickensian in its scope, with the proverbial bustling cast of colleagues both good and bad, villagers, guerrillas, neighbours, ex-soldiers, suburban madams, shopkeepers, would-be politicians and more, THE QUALITY OF MERCY proposes that ties of kinship and affiliation can never be completely broken – and that love can heal even the most grievous of wounds.” –Litnet

THE QUALITY OF MERCY
by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
Penguin Random House South Africa, September 2022
(via The Lennon-Ritchie Agency)

On the eve of his country’s independence, Spokes Moloi investigates his first ‘white case’ and finds a very confusing crime scene. Having recently been promoted to Chief Inspector, it is up to Spokes – a man of impeccable rectitude and moral spotlessness who is supported in all things by his paragon spouse, Loveness – to solve long-standing mysteries. His task now is to unravel the alleged murder of a man, Emil Coetzee, but also the tangled web that his life created.
Following on her award-winning novels The Theory of Flight and The History of Man, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s The Quality of Mercy is a novel of comfort and, indeed, mercy. Ndlovu weaves together elements of social comedy and cosy crime while examining the history of a country transitioning from a colonial to a postcolonial state. From the City of Kings and surrounding villages steps a cast of engaging characters who will criss-cross each other’s lives in delightful and poignant ways. Here, where everyone knows everyone else, the ties of kinship and affiliation can never be completely broken.
The final book in the City of Kings trilogy of three overlapping but standalone novels, preceded by The Theory of Flight and The History of Man. Ndlovu is the winner of the Windham Campbell Prize and the 2019 Sunday Times Fiction Prize.

Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu is the author of the bestselling novel The Theory of Flight, winner of the 2019 Sunday Times Fiction Prize and currently a school set work, and its follow-up, The History of Man. A Winner of Yale University’s 2022 Windham Campbell Prize, she is a writer, filmmaker and academic who holds a PhD from Stanford University as well as master’s degrees in African Studies and Film from Ohio University. She has published research on Saartjie Baartman and she wrote, directed and edited the award-winning short film Graffiti. She was born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.

IDLEWILD de James Frankie Thomas

A darkly funny and much gayer imagining of the classic prep school novel, IDLEWILD will appeal to readers of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.

IDLEWILD
by James Frankie Thomas
Overlook/Abrams, Fall 2023
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

Idlewild is a tiny, artsy Quaker high school in lower Manhattan. Students call their teachers by their first names, there are no grades or awards, and every day begins with 20 minutes of contemplative silence. It is during one of those moments of worship that two airplanes hit the World Trade Center.
For two Idlewild outcasts, 9/11 serves as the first day of an intense, 18-month friendship. Fay is a prickly, aloof rich kid who is obsessed with gay men; Nell is a shy, sensitive scholarship student who is obsessed with Fay. The two of them bond fiercely over being the only two openly queer kids at Idlewild. But, as they rehearse for the school’s production of Othello, they notice two sexually ambiguous boys, Theo and Christopher, who are potential candidates for their exclusive Invert Society (née Gay-Straight Alliance). The pairs become mirrors of one another’s desires, anxieties, and loneliness. Their devotion to one another becomes an obsession, driving them to do things that they’ll regret for the rest of their lives.
Looking back on these events as adults, Fay and Nell, who haven’t spoken to each other in fifteen years, are haunted by shame over their Idlewild days. From alternating perspectives, they wonder if they could have done anything to save their friendship, or if it was meant to remain an artifact that couldn’t have existed outside of Idlewild’s walls.

James Frankie Thomas holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Their fiction has been published in the Paris Review online, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and The Toast, among other publications. One of these essays is included in the anthology We Are the Baby-Sitters Club, and another was adapted into a PBS NewsHour segment.

ADULT BRACES de Lindy West

ADULT BRACES will provide exercises, thought experiments, and prescriptions that will help her reader map the fears that prevent her from becoming the attentive, active navigator of her own life.

ADULT BRACES:
A Self-Help Book from a Self-in-Progress, or, How You Can Go from Being a Mess to Being a Way Happier Mess
by Lindy West
Hachette US, 2024
(via David Black Literary)

Through SHRILL, the book and then the Hulu series, Lindy West became an inspiration. To this day she is stopped on the street and told she is a beacon of empowerment by women who felt they couldn’t conform to the categories deemed acceptable—thin, straight, compliant—and felt bad about it. To them she modeled someone who had achieved self-actualization.
But what if casting off society’s pre-conceived notions was only the first part of the journey? What if it all the progress that culminated in SHRILL—the actualized self—turned out not to be a destination but an overnight stay on the way to somewhere else even more fulfilling?
Modeled on the sturdy breed of self-esteem-builders like the Sinceros, Mansons, Hollises, and even The Artist’s Way (which Lindy loves), ADULT BRACES uses Lindy’s own, post-SHRILL emotional implosion to chart her way back to an evolving, non-static happiness, and to the realization that the roads to self-actualization are infinite, unpredictable, and endlessly gratifying—and long as you don’t pull over.
ADULT BRACES takes Lindy back to SHRILL yet leaps ahead to something entirely new. She is providing a guide out of indolence and fear. For her, as has been made quite public, it led to a complete reinvention of her marriage. It doesn’t have to be precisely that for every reader, but that is the bold standard she sets. Whatever the particulars, she wants to help readers find what she has, a map to more love, more sex, more trust, more openness. And the courage to keep driving.

Lindy West is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and a contributor to This American Life. She is the bestselling author of the essay collection The Witches Are Coming as well as Shrill, a memoir, which she adapted into a comedy for Hulu starring Aidy Bryant. She lives in Seattle.