FICTION
Agence Eliane Benisti – Fiction Frankfurt 2017 (PDF)
lorella belli literary agency
A kidnapped little girl locked in a stranger’s van. No help for miles. What would you do?
NO EXIT
by Taylor Adams
Joffe Books, June 2017
Darby Thorne is a college student stranded by a blizzard at a highway rest stop in the middle of nowhere. She’s on the way home to see her sick mother. She’ll have to spend the night in the rest stop with four complete strangers. Then she stumbles across a little girl locked inside one of their parked cars. There is no cell phone reception, no telephone, no way out because of the snow, and she doesn’t know which one of the other travellers is the kidnapper. Who is the little girl? Why has she been taken? Why? And how can Darby save her and herself?
Rights sold: Czech: under offer; Hungary: Tericum; Israel: Ivrit Publishing; Italy: De Agostini at auction; Slovak: under offer. Film rights acquired in a pre-empt by 20th Century Fox.
Taylor Adams directed the acclaimed short film “And I Feel Fine” in 2008 and graduated from Eastern Washington University with the prestigious Edmund G. Yarwood Award. His directorial work has screened at the Seattle True Independent Film Festival and his writing has been featured on KAYU-TV’s Fox Life blog. Taylor lives in Washington state and has written three novels, published by Joffe Books.
Perfect for fans of Rachel Abbott, Robert Bryndza, Mel Sherratt, Angela Marsons, Colin Dexter, or Ruth Rendell
DI Jackman & DS Evans Series
by Joy Ellis
Joffe Books
THE FOURTH FRIEND #3
August 2017
Police detective Carter McLean is the only survivor of a plane crash that kills his four best friends. He returns to work but he is left full of guilt and terrible flashbacks. So for each of his four friends he decides to complete something that they left unfinished. Eighteen months before the crash, Suzanne Holland disappeared, leaving a room with traces of blood, but no other leads. Suzanne was the wife of one of Carter’s four best friends. Adding to the pressure, the boss’s daughter has a stalker. Due to the sensitivity of the Holland case, Carter is put on this investigation. DS Marie Evans is the only person Carter can confide in. But even she begins to doubt whether he can really cope and whether he is actually losing his mind.
THEIR LOST DAUGHTERS #2
March 2017
Two girls go to a party, only one returns alive. Toni, the surviving teenager, is found delirious, wandering the muddy fields. She has been drugged and it’s uncertain whether she’ll survive. She says she saw her friend Emily being dragged away from the party. But no one knows who Emily is or even if she’s still alive. Meanwhile the drowned body of another girl has been found on an isolated beach. ;And how does this all relate to the shocking disappearance of a little girl nearly a decade ago, a crime which was never solved? The girl’s mother is putting immense pressure on the police to re-open the high-profile case…
THE MURDERER’S SON #1
January 2017
Twenty years ago: a farmer and his wife are cut to pieces by a ruthless serial killer. Now: a woman is viciously stabbed to death in the upmarket kitchen of her beautiful house on the edge of the marshes. Then a man called Daniel Kinder walks into Saltern police station and confesses to the murder. But DI Rowan Jackman and DS Marie Evans of the Fenland Constabulary soon discover that there is a lot more to Daniel than meets the eye.
Joy Ellis is the author the “Nikky Galena” Series.
In order to survive they lied. In order to be allowed to love they had to hide
WIE DER WIND UND DAS MEER
(Like the Wind and the Sea)
by Lilli Beck
Blanvalet, September 2017
Munich in April 1945. After a devastating air raid eleven-year-old Paul wanders through the landscape of rubble clutching a suitcase. While looking for somewhere to hide, he comes across a little girl. Her name is Sarah and she, like him, has lost her whole family – and she looks amazingly like Paul’s sister. So as not to be alone in the city ruins and in order not to be separated by the authorities, they make a pact: from now on they will say they are brother and sister. Their plan is successful. But how could they know that many years later their little white lie would be their undoing – and that they would have to hide in order to be able to love …
Lilli Beck was born in 1950 and trained as a wholesaler. In 1968 she went to live in Munich, where she was discovered by a model agent in the popular disco Blow up. She spent ten years working for magazines such as Brigitte, Burda-Moden and TWEN and was a Pirelli bonnet mascot.
Max Bentow’s latest thriller – so close to the villain that you can feel his heart beating …
DAS PORZELLANMÄDCHEN
(The Porcelain Girl)
by Max Bentow
Goldmann, July 2017
Luna Moor is a celebrated young author at the zenith of her success. No one else writes such gripping page-turners about the abysses of the human soul as she does, and her books send shivers down readers’ spines.
Nobody suspects that as a young girl Luna herself fell into the hands of a madman and only just managed to get away. Ever since, memories of the villain have been haunting her, and one day she makes the bold decision to go back to the place of her martyrdom. She wants to immerse herself in the menacing atmosphere of the remote building in which she was once imprisoned in an attempt to understand what happened all those years ago.
Together with Leon, a friend’s son, she sets herself up in the abandoned house in the woods. She very quickly realises, however, that she has got caught up in a nightmare she can’t seem to be able to wake up from. But is Luna really the innocent victim she claims to be?
Max Bentow was born in Berlin. After studying acting he performed at various theatres, and he has been awarded many prestigious prizes and stipends for his work as a dramatist. The crime novels he has hitherto written featuring the Berlin detective inspector Nils Trojan have all made the Spiegel bestseller lists.
A mystifying parcel. A missing manuscript from the 8th century. A librarian facing a riddle
DAS PÄCKCHEN
(The Parcel)
by Franz Hohler
Luchterhand, September 2017
When he happens to be in Bern on business, Zurich librarian Ernst gets a phone call that is obviously a wrong connection. There is a woman at the other end he does not know and she begs him to come to see her immediately. On a whim Ernst goes to the nearby address. Here an elderly woman gives him a small parcel, which, so she claims, is from her deceased husband’s estate and Ernst is to look after it so as to prevent it from falling into wrong hands. Very much to his own amazement, Ernst agrees. Back home, he opens the parcel and discovers an old manuscript he recognises as the missing original of the Abrogans, a Latin-Old High German dictionary thought to be the probably oldest German-language book ever. What, Ernst wonders, is this mysterious find all about? And what should he best do with it.
Franz Hohler lives in Zurich and is considered to be one of his country’s most prominent revue performers and writers. Franz Hohler has been awarded many prizes, including the Kassel Literature Prize for Grotesque Humour in 2002, the 2005 Art Award of the City of Zurich, the 2013 Solothurn Literature Prize, the 2014 Alice Salomon Prize and the Johann Peter Hebel Prize.
A manor house, a family and a dramatic destiny …
DAS GUTSHAUS – GLANZVOLLE ZEITEN
(The Manor House – Glamorous Times)
by Anne Jacobs
Blanvalet Paperbacks, November 2017
Franziska can’t believe it’s true: she is at last back home on the Dranitz estate. The turmoil of World War II forced her to leave the stately home in the East. For a long time there was no return. Yet her longing never ceased to haunt her, unable as she was to forget the glamorous times before the war, her dreams of a life with Walter Iversen, her great love. Everything seemed to be possible. But the war separated the lovers and destroyed her dreams. And yet Franziska never gave up hope … After the bestselling series featuring The Cloth Villa, Anne Jacobs has now embarked on a new compelling saga.
Anne Jacobs thrilled readers and took the charts by storm with her “Cloth Villa” trilogy. With “The Manor House” she is following in her own successful footsteps with her tale of an old stately home in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania and its destiny and that of its inhabitants in dramatic times.
When a never-read letter changes a whole life …
LIEBE M. DU BRINGST MEIN HERZ ZUM ÜBERLAUFEN
(Dear M. You Make my Heart Overflow)
by Anna Paulsen
Penguin Verlag, January 2018
Whereas other people long for Friday to come around, Matilda can hardly wait for Monday, for there is nothing she loves more than her job in the office for undeliverable post, where she is responsible for the letters K to M.
But then the day comes when Matilda is so moved by a love letter that was never delivered that she decides to leave her usual path and track down the receiver – no matter how difficult it will be. She stumbles across a painful love story going back several decades. But it is never too late for a happy ending after all, is it?
Anna Paulsen lives with her family in southwest Germany and North Holland.
A major mystery novel centred on guilt, justice, and a crime that leaves no one cold
DIE VERGESSENEN
(The Forgotten Ones)
by Ellen Sandberg
Penguin Verlag, December 2017
Munich, 1944. Young Kathrin Mändler starts a job as a nurse and, for the first time in her life, feels she is doing something useful. When she meets the charismatic doctor Karl Landmann she can’t help but feel attracted to him. Not until it is too late does she realise what Landmann’s work consists of and that it is putting the lives of many people at risk – including hers.
2013. Manolis Lefteris is given the task of getting hold of some mysterious files. He does not suspect that he is on the verge of digging up a crime that has outlasted generations …
Ellen Sandberg is the pseudonym of a successful author whose crime novels are regularly on the bestseller lists. She first worked in advertising before devoting herself entirely to writing.
Raw, rough, authentic: Fritz Schaap goes where the heart of darkness beats
HOTEL ISTANBUL
Stories
by Fritz Schaap
Knaus, October 2017
Fritz Schaap searches for the dark side of our present day. He finds it in the scene of our nightmares in the Middle East and North Africa. The people he meets, the stories he finds there tell of a life beyond the pictures we see every day on television. He hangs around with war tourists on the Syrian border; visits a schnapps distillery in Gaza; spends the night clubbing in Damascus; looks for human traffickers on the Sinai; follows gays in Palestine; loves, grieves and drinks his way through Cairo; and shares a flat with some Salafists.
HOTEL ISTANBUL is a personal story about people and a region on the threshold to change, a region that is very much leaving its mark on global events. Schaap writes his texts like a free solo climber conquering the most difficult of cliffs without a rope – directly and recklessly.
Fritz Schaap was born in Berlin in 1981, studied first literature and communication sciences, later journalism and Islamic studies in Leipzig and Berlin, Damascus and Alexandria. He works as a reporter for Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazine, Neue Zürcher Zeitung and many others. For his reports he has received the CNN Award, the German Journalist Prize and the Prälat Ungar Prize as well as the media prize of the Kindernothilfe children’s charity.
A crime/suspense novel about a woman who returns to her house from a trip to find all the locks on her house changed, and a stranger living inside
ONE LAST SECRET
by Laura Benedict
Little Brown USA/Mulholland UK, Fall 2018
One hot August night, Kimber Hannon returns from a trip to find the locks on her house changed, and a stranger living inside. When the police arrive, a man calling himself Lance Wilson produces a lease with Kimber’s signature on it. Incensed, she impulsively attacks him, and as they grapple, he whispers something to her, something no one else knows. Shocked, she retreats. To her lawyer and friends, Kimber maintains that she knows nothing about the stranger, though privately she suspects he must be someone from her past. Someone who knew her before her sister’s death, twenty-five years earlier, a death she was secretly responsible for. Why are all these things happening to her? And why now? In order to return peacefully to the home she loves, Kimber will have to reconcile her losses, and learn to forgive herself.
Laura Benedict is the Edgar- and ITW Thriller Award-nominated author six novels of dark suspense, including the “Bliss House” gothic trilogy: “The Abandoned Heart”, “Charlotte’s Story”, and “Bliss House”. Her short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, PANK, on NPR, and in numerous anthologies like “Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads”, “The Lineup: 20 Provocative Women Writers”, and “St. Louis Noir”.
Two new novels coming from Jessie Burton, the million-copy bestselling author of THE MINIATURIST and THE MUSE
TWO NEW NOVELS
by Jessie Burton
The first of the two as yet untitled novels tells the story of three women, Elise Morceau, Rebecca Holden and Laura Simmons, and the complex connections they have shared across decades and con^nents. This is a novel about love, sex, work, motherhood, how we construct our pasts and dream our futures – and the wildly divergent paths our lives can take.
• THE MINIATURIST was published in 37 countries around the world and has been an international bestseller. It was a NY Times bestseller, Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller, and has sold over 1 M copies worldwide.
• THE MUSE has sold in 31 countries around the world, spent 10 weeks straight on the Sunday Times Bestseller list peaking at No. 1, and has sold over 400,000 copies
• The 2-part TV adapta8on of THE MINIATURIST will air December 2017
Jessie Burton studied at Oxford University and the Central School of Speech and Drama, where she appeared in productions of “The House of Bernarda Alba”, “Othello”, “Play” and “Macbeth”. In April 2013 her first novel, “The Miniaturist”, was sold at an 11-publisher auction at the London Book Fair.
“The Secret History” meets “The Craft”
THE FURIES
by Katie Lowe
In 1998, a sixteen-year-old girl is found dead on school property, dressed in white and posed on a swing, with no known cause of death. The novel opens with this image, as related to us by the narrator, Violet, looking back on the night it happened from the present day, before returning to relate the series of events leading up to the girl’s murder. After an accident involving her Dad and sister, Violet joins Elm Hollow Academy, a private girls school in a quiet coastal town, which has an unpleasant history as the site of famous 17th century witch trials. Violet quickly finds herself invited to become the fourth member of an advanced study group, alongside Robin, Grace, and Alex – led by their charismatic art teacher, Annabel. While Annabel claims her classes aren’t related to ancient rites and rituals – warning the girls off the topic, describing it as little more than mythology – the girls start to believe that magic is real, and that they can harness it. But when the body of a former member of the society – Robin’s best friend, with whom Violet shares an uncanny resemblance – is found dead on campus nine months after she disappeared, Violet begins to wonder whether she can trust her friends, teachers, or even herself.
Katie Lowe has an MPhil in Literature and Modernity and a BA(Hons) in English, plus a half-completed PhD on the influence of the rise of the far-right on Franco-American literature of the 1930s-50s. In 2012, Katie started her blog, Fat Girl PhD – writing about body image, feminism and health, and finding an audience across outlets including the Guardian, Independent, and the BBC, as well as a number of media in the US, Canada and Australia. She averages 20,000 hits a month.
Crown Publishing Group Fall 2017
A raucous, bawdy, bloodsoaked adventure fantasy debut that’s The Lord of the Rings reimagined by way of Sons of Anarchy
THE GREY BASTARDS
by Jonathan French
Crown, June 2018
Jackal is proud to be a Grey Bastard, member of a sworn brotherhood of half-orcs. Unloved and unwanted in civilized society, the Bastards eke out a hard life in the desolate no-man’s-land called the Lots, protecting frail and noble human civilization from invading bands of vicious full-blooded orcs. But as Jackal is soon to learn, his pride may be misplaced. Because a dark secret lies at the heart of the Bastards’ existence–one that reveals a horrifying truth behind humanity’s tenuous peace with the orcs, and exposes a grave danger on the horizon. On the heels of the ultimate betrayal, Jackal must scramble to stop a devastating invasion–even as he wonders where his true loyalties lie.
Jonathan French’s debut novel, “The Exiled Heir”, was nominated for Best First Novel at the Georgia Author of the Year Awards in 2012. His second book, “The Errantry of Bantam Flyn”, rose to #6 on the Kindle Norse/Viking Fantasy bestseller list, proudly sharing the top ten with Joe Abercrombie. An engaging and energetic speaker, Jonathan has led panel discussions at conventions such as DragonCon, TimeGate, and CONjuration.
A twisty, compulsive new thriller featuring a deliciously devious unreliable narrator who will do anything to give her family a better life, by the New York Times bestselling author of Mother, Mother and Smashed
THE DRAMA TEACHER
by Koren Zailckas
Crown, April 2018
Gracie Mueller seems like an average person. Married, mother of two. Owns a house with her husband, Randy, in upstate New York. Life is balanced and (relatively) honest. But she has a lot to hide —she’s not even a US citizen—and when Randy’s failing career as a real estate agent makes finances tight, he leaves town for a better job, their home goes into foreclosure, and Gracie turns back to the creatively illegal lifestyle of her past to keep things afloat for her kids. After all, how many times can a woman lose everything? An expert in fake identities, she becomes Tracey Bueller, who later becomes Mariana DeFelice. She’s an architect and designer, a musician and an actress. After a deadly stint upstate when a friend asks too many questions, she leaves town for New York City, finding her way into the best school in Manhattan for her kids, where she gets a job as the drama teacher. But as she struggles to keep her web of lies spun taut and her secrets hidden, more questions about her past are raised. She never intended to be a cheat, a liar, a thief, or a killer; she just can’t afford for anyone to know what she’s done.
Koren Zailckas is an internationally bestselling writer, and has contributed to The Guardian, U.S. News & World Report, Glamour, Jane, and Seventeen magazine.
A novel of greed and power, with the pace of a thriller, set in Atlanta, Georgia, with characters you will love to hate
PAPER GODS
by Goldie Taylor
All Points Books/ St. Martin’s Press, Fall 2018
Victoria Dobbs Overstreet is the mayor of Atlanta. She’s a Harvard-trained attorney, married to a celebrated heart surgeon (who’s cheating on her), mother to beautiful twin girls, and a political genius. When her mentor, ally, and family friend, Congressman Ezra Hawkins, is gunned down in church, Victoria finds a strange piece of origami – a “paper god” – tucked inside his Bible. Dirty politics is one thing, but now people are dying. Someone is terrorizing those who are close to Mayor Dobbs. And each time, a paper god appears. Hampton Bridges, a recently demoted reporter and recovering alcoholic, has been covering Victoria Dobbs for years. He’s not shedding any tears for the arrogant mayor who has announced she will run for her “mentor’s” seat in congress before his body is even cold. But somebody doesn’t want Hampton poking around, and he’s being terrorized too.
Goldie Taylor is a journalist, TV news executive, and political consultant who has been featured on nearly every major American network. Currently editor-at-large at The Daily Beast, Taylor has been a guest on programs such as HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, The Dr. Phil Show, The Steve Harvey Show, and Good Morning America. A sought-after public speaker, with over 110,000 followers on Twitter (@goldietaylor), she has addressed audiences at— among others— the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Harvard University, Morehouse College, Emory School of Law, Princeton University, Duke School of Law, National Association of Black Journalists, University of Missouri School of Journalism, and The King Center.
A revisionist crime thriller, a page-turning hybrid of literary and genre fiction for fans of Elmore Leonard or Patrick deWitt
MARRY, BANG, KILL
by Andrew Battershill
Goose Lane Editions, March 2018
For a guy who mugs people for their laptops, Tommy Marlo isn’t such a bad guy. He can’t help trying to make the people he meets — even those he mugs — feel better about their situation. Unfortunately for Tommy, he rips off the daughter of a psychotic, high-ranking member of a notorious motorcycle gang. Even worse, the laptop that he pilfered contains proof of a few gruesome murders and the location of a huge stash of money. Flat broke and marked for death, his only shot at surviving is to rob the motorcycle gang, use the cash to get out of town, and hide out on the small island where his mother now lives. Deftly combining crackling dialogue with biting wit, MARRY, BANG, KILL hums with the thrill of chaos as Tommy runs to a quiet island to escape a swelling cast of characters who are trying to arrest, rob, kill, or save him. The island won’t be quiet for long.
Andrew Battershill‘s first novel, “Pillow”, was longlisted for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the 2016 Sunburst Award and shortlisted for the 2016 Kobo Emerging Writer Award. “Pillow” was also selected by the Walrus as one of the Best Books of 2016 and by CBC Books as one of the Best Debuts of the year. Battershill is the co-founder and former fiction editor of Dragnet magazine, and now the fiction editor of This Magazine.
An exploration of human resilience and community in times of crisis
THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE
by Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Rare Bird Books, May 2018
Lily Jones has always embraced the ordinary. She married her high school sweetheart and runs a gardening business in her town of Fair Oaks, Nebraska. But when a massive earthquake rocks the San Francisco Bay Area, and her sister Vicky goes missing, Lily is launched out of her holding pattern. Risking everything, she travels to the earthquake zone in search of her. What Lily finds in Berkeley is more desperate than she could have imagined: The National Guard has failed in its relief efforts, and in the absence of order many residents have organized themselves into vigilante groups that are turning towards violence. In this startling world, Lily befriends a group of survivors: Annie and Binky, two orphans who dream of a better future; Kalisha, the leader of a free meals program at a local church; and Wesley, a mysterious writer who has been documenting the earthquake’s aftermath. Lily also hopes to meet Travis Grayson, a primatologist who moved to California from the Congo and with whom she’s corresponded for twenty years, ever since a pen-pal assignment. When she does meet Travis—the man whose research into human evolution has been her defining influence—she discovers that he is someone quite different from the person he presented in his letters. Lily must quickly decide whom to trust, whom to love, and above all, how to save her sister.
Lucy Jane Bledsoe is an award-winning science writer and novelist for adults and children. Her most recent novel “A Thin Bright Line” was a finalist for several awards, including the Lambda Literary Award for Fiction and the Ferro-Grumley Award.
“Making good moonshine isn’t that different from telling a good story, and no one tells a story like a woman…”
‘SHINER
by Amy Jo Burns
Riverhead Books, Fall 2018
So begins Amy Jo Burns’ ‘SHINER, a multi-voiced, Appalachian-set contemporary debut about the cloistered members of the Bird family, whose secrets are coiled as tightly as the snakes their patriarch handles, and tucked deep in their hidden mountain marshland shack. The novel bears witness to those secrets’ tragic unwinding, alternatingly from the points of view of the daughter, Wren Bird, father, Briar Bird, and mother, Ruby Bird, along with perspectives from Briar’s and Ruby’s best friends, one a moonshiner and one a martyr.
Conjuring the lonesome lyrics of Gillian Welch and covering two generations’ worth of Appalachian heartbreak and resolve, ‘SHINER is a book about modern female myth-making in the land of men, in the land of True Grit, where no woman is supposed to hear—let alone tell—her own story. A story of operatic proportions, it is full of shattered hearts, stolen faith, mistaken identities, untimely deaths, she-balsams and royal empress trees, enough sorrow to fill a river and enough strength to swim against its relentless current.
Amy Jo Burns is the author of the literary memoir “Cinderland” (Beacon Press, 2014), and her writing has since appeared in Salon, Good Housekeeping, The Rumpus, and Jezebel.
A debut graphic novel from “Bojack Horseman”’s Production Designer and Producer
COYOTE DOGGIRL
by Lisa Hanawalt
Drawn and Quarterly, Fall 2018
In COYOTE DOGGIRL, Netflix TV show Bojack Horseman’s Production Designer and Producer, James Beard Award Winner and multiple Ignatz Award-winning cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt pays homage to and lampoons classic Westerns in a debut graphic novel featuring a fiercely independent female protagonist who sews her own crop tops and has no patience for etiquette. A gifted equestrian, Coyote Doggirl is half dog, half coyote, and a whole lot of attitude. She and her steed Red are on the run from a trio of vengeful bad guys when Coyote gets clobbered by a few well-placed arrows. Her attackers, a clan of wolves, take her in and nurse her back to health so she can get back on the road, track down Red, and evade the men who are hunting her. By turns delightfully absurd and intensely emotional, COYOTE DOGGIRL charts one weird woman’s escape into the wild.
Lisa Hanawalt is producer and production designer of the Netflix original series, Bojack Horseman, now in its fourth season. Her quarterly food column for Lucky Peach magazine won her a James Beard Award for humor. She co-hosts the podcast Baby Geniuses with comedian Emily Heller. Hanawalt’s first collection with Drawn & Quarterly was 2013’s critically acclaimed “My Dirt Dumb Eyes”. Her second book with D+Q, 2016’s “Hot Dog Taste Test”, won her the Ignatz Award, appearing on best of the year lists from the Washington Post, Guardian, NPR, and more.
Sweeping from dockside gangs to tony mansions, THE DEVIL’S HALF MILE is a riveting debut perfect for fans of “Cooper”, “Ripper Street”, “Gangs of New York”, and historical thrillers like “The Alienist”
THE DEVIL’S HALF MILE
by Paddy Hirsch
Forge, May 2018
1799 was a hell of a year.
Seven years after a financial crisis nearly topples America, traders chafe at government regulations, racial tensions are rising, and corrupt financiers make back-door deals with politicians. Thanks to Alexander Hamilton, America recovered from the financial panic of 1792, but the new country is still finding its way. When a young lawyer returns to America to prove his father’s innocence, he exposes a massive financial fraud that the perpetrators are determined to keep secret at any cost. And reaching the highest levels, the looming crisis could topple the nation.
Paddy Hirsch has worked in public radio at NPR and Marketplace. He came to journalism after serving as an officer in the British Royal Marines, and lives in Los Angeles. The author of the nonfiction book explaining economics, “Man VS. Markets”, THE DEVIL’S HALF MILE is his fiction debut, and he is currently working on the sequel.
A tense, eerie thriller that explores the unbreakable bonds of family, THE WAKING is a book that will get under your skin and haunt your dreams.
THE WAKING
by James Dashner
Ballantine/Bantam, Spring 2019
David Player is a widower who’s spent his adult life running from the events of his childhood, when a serial killer plagued his town and David witnessed one of the brutal murders in the woods. But when he takes his family home to visit his parents, he is forced to confront the horrors all over again. The son of the serial killer who’d tormented the town years earlier has taken his place, and his new target is David’s son, Wesley. When Wesley goes missing, David is terrified, but nothing is quite what it seems. Evidence emerges that Wesley has committed a horrific murder, and David begins to realize that other forces are at work. Is it possible that a ritual he wrote off as the ravings of a madman all those years ago in the woods is real? And if so, how can he rescue his son from whatever darkness has possessed him?
James Dashner’s THE WAKING is the adult debut of the #1 New York Times and international bestselling author of the Maze Runner series and the Mortality Doctrine series. 20th Century Fox has adapted The Maze Runner (2014), The Scorch Trials (2015), and The Death Cure (2018) into a film trilogy. James Dashner’s young adult books have sold to more than 50 publishers in more than 45 languages
Lush and sensual, STARLESS introduces us to an epic world where exiled gods live among us, and a hero whose journey will resonate long after the last page is turned
STARLESS
by Jacqueline Carey
Tor Books, June 2018
Destined from birth to serve as protector of the princess Zariya, Khai is trained in the arts of killing and stealth by a warrior sect in the deep desert; yet there is one profound truth that has been withheld. In the court of the Sun-Blessed, Khai must learn to navigate deadly intrigue and conflicted identity…but in the far reaches of the western seas, the dark god Miasmus is rising, intent on nothing less than wholesale destruction. If Khai is to keep Zariya alive, their only hope lies with an unlikely crew of prophecy-seekers on a journey that will take them farther beneath the starless skies than anyone can imagine.
Jacqueline Carey is the author of sixteen novels, including the New York Times bestselling Kushiel’s Legacy series of historical fantasy novels. Her books have been published in Germany (Droemer, Klett-Cotta, Heyne), Netherlands (Muelenhoff), Italy (Nord), Poland (MAG, Jaguar), Israel (Graff), Czech Republic (Triton), France (Bragelonne), Portugal (Saida de Emergencia), Japan (Hayakawa), Turkey (Pegasus), and Hungary (Konyvmolykepzo).
From the author of the international bestseller “Last Girl Standing”
LAST GIRL STANDING
by Amy Gentry
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, October 2018
Comedian Dana Diaz has tried and failed at “making it” in Los Angeles, where an incident she’d sooner forget with a well-known comedian destroyed a long-time writing partnership and sent her back home to Austin, Texas, to start all over again. Paying her dues onstage at a small-time comedy club, she finds a fan in Amanda, a former programmer for a popular app who was driven out of Silicon Valley by a supervisor’s advances. Over a fateful beer, the two bond over their experiences in boys-club professions and come up with a plan: each will find and punish the men who’ve made the other’s life a living hell. For Dana, it’s just another joke. But Amanda soon puts the idea into practice, using her programming expertise to enact revenge on Dana’s nemesis—and nudging the reluctant Dana to return the favor. With the first thrill of vengeance, Dana begins to wake up to the evidence of abuse all around her—among coworkers at her day job, her fellow female comics, and in her own career—and the second time, she doesn’t need convincing. Liberated by her rage, her comedy act takes off, and Dana finds herself nearing the success she’s always wanted. But as Amanda’s cathartic swapping game veers toward uncontrollable violence, Dana is pulled ever closer to a revelation about her own past she is desperate to avoid. Learning Amanda’s secrets, Dana wonders—is Amanda out to help her or destroy her? And what will Amanda do if Dana doesn’t hold up her end of a lethal bargain? In the end, Dana must decide whether the truth is worth dying—or killing—for.
LAST GIRL STANDING is the second thriller by the acclaimed author of international bestseller Good As Gone, which was a New York Times Book Review “Editor’s Choice,” an Entertainment Weekly “Must List” pick, a Refinery 29 “Suspense Thriller You’ll Love”, and an Amazon Best Book of the Month. Good As Gone sold in more than 20 territories, mostly in pre-empts and at auction.
Part Lisbeth Salander, part Jack Reacher, Nikki Griffin is a character readers will root for and will look forward to seeing return in the next book in the series
SAVE ME FROM DANGEROUS MEN
by Saul Lelchuk
June 2018
Motorcycle-riding bookseller Nikki Griffin is also a private investigator, willing to handle special jobs for the right client. On the side, Nikki delivers her special brand of justice to men who have committed domestic violence, making sure that their victims are safe from them forever. When she is hired by a mysterious, wealthy CEO to track one of his employees, Nikki follows the woman, but blows her cover to intervene when she sees that her target is in danger. Soon, Nikki finds herself caught in a perilous situation. While trying to keep the innocents she protects safe, Nikki realizes that she’s no longer just solving a case—she’s trying hard to stay alive.
Saul Lelchuk graduated cum laude from Amherst College, earning a B.A. in English, and went on to attend the Dartmouth MALS Program with a creative writing concentration. SAVE ME FROM DANGEROUS MEN is his first novel.
From the author of the acclaimed The Resurrection of Joan Ashby comes a tightly knit novel about a family and how each member must confront the lies upon which their lives are built
THE FAMILY TABOR
by Cherise Wolas
July 2018
Harry Tabor is about to receive the Man of the Decade award. As he enters his twilight years, this distinction seems like the culmination to a life well lived. A perfect life. A life spent helping Jewish refugees from all over the globe find a better life in America. Giving them a second chance. And Harry knows all about second chances. He has the perfect marriage–-his wife, Roma, is a distinguished eminent child psychologist, and they tell each other almost everything. His three grown children, Phoebe, Camille, and Simon, are all accomplished. But his life could have very well taken a different turn if, seemingly a different lifetime ago, he hadn’t uprooted everyone from their life in Connecticut and brought them out to the desert, literally, where they knew no one and he could start again. In The Family Tabor, Cherise Wolas examines the five members of the Tabor family as they prepare to celebrate Harry. Through each of their points of view, we see family members whose lives are built on lies, both to themselves and to others, and how these all come crashing down during a twenty-four-hour period.
Cherise Wolas is a writer, lawyer, and film producer. A native of Los Angeles, she lives in New York City with her husband. With her debut novel, THE RESURRECTION OF JOAN ASHB, she has been compared to J.D. Salinger, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote and Joan Didion.
The Friedrich Agency Fall 2017
THE FRUIT OF THE DRUNKEN TREE depicts a world where the threat of violence lurks in even the safest of spaces and sensitively explores the even greater emotional cost of living in its shadow
THE FRUIT OF THE DRUNKEN TREE
by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Doubleday, Summer 2018
In 1990s Bogotá the Santiago family lives in a gated community, safe from the drug-fueled violence devastating Colombia. Young sisters Chula and Cassandra enjoy carefree lives thanks to this middle-class bubble, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hovers just outside the neighborhood walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar continues to elude authorities as he in turn captures the attention of a nation.
The sisters enjoy a childlike yet morbid fascination with this just-out-of-reach danger, but when the family hires a live-in maid named Petrona from the city’s guerrilla-occupied slums, the outside world begins to creep closer. As a drought causes citywide power and water outages, car bombs kill little girls, presidential candidates are assassinated in front of horrified crowds, and grandmothers are caught in the crossfire between the warring guerrillas and paramilitaries. And in the Santiago home, teenage Petrona’s simple nature hides a dark secret that will eventually upend their lives.
Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born in Bogotá and holds an MFA from Columbia College Chicago. She is the 2014 recipient of the Mary Tanenbaum Literary Award in Nonfiction and was a 2015 fellow at the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto.
Leavened by the same infectious intelligence that made Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore such a sensation, Sourdough marks the triumphant return of a unique and beloved young writer
SOURDOUGH
by Robin Sloan
FSG, September 2017
Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions. She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall from which she orders dinner every evening. Then, disaster! Visa issues. The brothers close up shop, and fast. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. She must keep it alive, they tell her―feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it. Lois is no baker, but she could use a roommate, even if it is a needy colony of microorganisms. Soon, not only is she eating her own homemade bread, she’s providing loaves daily to the General Dexterity cafeteria. The company chef urges her to take her product to the farmer’s market, and a whole new world opens up. But who are these people, exactly?
Robin Sloan is the author of the novel “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore”.
)
A fast-paced debut about a man who wakes to 108 visions of specific predictions of the future, and monetizes those predictions to become the most famous person in the world —perfect for fans of Joe Hill and Brad Meltzer
THE ORACLE YEAR
by Charles Soule
HarperPerennial, April 2018
Knowledge is power. So when an unassuming Manhattan bassist named Will Dando awakens from a dream one morning with 108 predictions about the future in his head, he rapidly finds himself the most powerful man in the world. Protecting his anonymity by calling himself the Oracle, he sets up a heavily guarded Web site with the help of his friend Hamza to selectively announce his revelations. In no time, global corporations are offering him millions for exclusive access, eager to profit from his prophecies. He’s also making a lot of high-powered enemies, from the President of the United States and a nationally prominent televangelist to a warlord with a nuclear missile and an assassin grandmother. Legions of cyber spies are unleashed to hack the Site—as it’s come to be called—and the best manhunters money can buy are deployed not only to unmask the Oracle but to take him out of the game entirely. With only a handful of people he can trust—including a beautiful journalist—it’s all Will can do to simply survive, elude exposure, and protect those he loves long enough to use his knowledge to save the world.
Delivering fast-paced adventure on a global scale as well as sharp-witted satire on our concepts of power and faith, Marvel writer Charles Soule‘s audacious debut novel takes readers on a rollicking ride where it’s impossible to predict what will happen next.
Moshe Sakal
Moshe Sakal is the writer of 5 Hebrew novels. In 2011, Sakal’s best-selling novel “Yolanda” was shortlisted for the Sapir Prize (the Israeli Booker). Sakal was awarded the title of Honorary Fellow in Writing by the University of Iowa, USA; the Eshkol prize for his work, and a Fulbright grant (the America-Israel Education Trust). He has published essays and opinion pieces in several major Israeli outlets (including Ha’aretz), as well as in Le Monde (France) and Forward (USA).
A best seller in Israel
MY SISTER
MY SISTER tells the story of Neta and her relationships with her two younger brothers. She is single and longs to adopt a child from Russia. The youngest brother, Tomer, a brilliant and mysterious young man, earns money as a sperm-donor in Israel and in the USA, to help his sister raise the funds for adopting his future niece. The adopted girl, Nadia, becomes very attached to her young uncle—thanks to whom she was, in a sense, “reborn.” But things get complicated as Nadia grows up and begins to wonder about her biological father back in Russia. Tomer, on the other hand, is terrified by the thought of his many biological children. Nadia and Tomer each experience their separate crises of identity and find their ways to surprising resolutions.
The novel is narrated by the eldest brother, Lior, who has a very close relationship with his sister (“Sometimes you can’t tell where she ends and I begin”). He is married to a German woman, and has a strained relationship with his parents.
MY SISTER explores the different forms modern families can take, and looks at the ethical and practical questions related to sperm donation, and the ways in which new and different technologies impact today’s reproductive norms.
“Moshe Sakal’s novel “The Diamond Setter” is a wonderfully lovely book, gentle and poetic yet at the same time profound and topical…. It is my hope that this book will be translated into many languages and reach the readership it deserves.” -David Grossman
THE DIAMOND SETTER
Other Press, March 2018
The uneventful life of a jeweler from Tel Aviv changes abruptly in 2011 after Fareed, a handsome young man from Damascus, crosses illegally into Israel and makes his way to the ancient port city of Jaffa in search of his roots. In his pocket is a piece of a famous blue diamond known as « Sabakh. » Intending to return the diamond to its rightful owner, Fareed is soon swept up in Tel Aviv’s vibrant gay scene, and a turbulent protest movement. He falls in love with both an Israeli soldier and his boyfriend–the narrator of this book–and reveals the story of his family’s past: a tale of forbidden love beginning in the 1930s that connects Fareed and the jeweler. Following Sabakh’s winding path, THE DIAMOND SETTER ties present-day events to a forgotten time before the establishment of the State of Israel divided the region. Moshe Sakal’s poignant mosaic of characters, locales, and cultures encourages us to see the Middle East beyond its violent conflicts.
The 24th book in Martha Grimes’s New York Times bestselling Richard Jury mystery series
THE KNOWLEDGE
by Martha Grimes
Athlantic Monthly Press, April 2018
Robbie Parsons is one of London’s finest, a black cab driver who knows every street, every theater, every landmark in the city by heart. In his backseat is a man with a gun in his hand—a man who shot Robbie’s previous pair of customers point-blank in front of the Artemis Club, a rarefied art gallery-cum-casino, then jumped in and ordered Parsons to drive. As the killer eventually escapes to Nairobi with ten-year-old Patty Haigh, one of a crew of stray kids who serve as the cabbies’ eyes and ears at Heathrow and Waterloo, in pursuit, superintendent Richard Jury comes across the double-homicide in the Saturday paper. Two days previously, Jury had met and instantly connected with one of the victims, a professor of astrophysics at Columbia and an expert gambler. Jury considers the murder a personal affront and soon enlists series characters Melrose Plant, Marshall Trueblood, and his whole gang of merry characters to contend with a case that takes unexpected turns into Tanzanian gem mines, a closed casino in Reno, Nevada, and a pub that only London’s black cabbies, those who have “the Knowledge,” can find. THE KNOWLEDGE is prime fare from “one of the most fascinating mystery writers today” (Houston Chronicle).
Martha Grimes is the bestselling author of more than thirty books, twenty-four of them featuring Richard Jury, and she is the recipient of the 2012 Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award. Martha Grimes is a world-class crime writer: her work has been published in seventeen countries and she has sold some 10 million copies of her books in the United States alone.
Levine Greenberg Rostan Fall 2017
A suspenseful novel about a new teacher at a not-so-elite boarding school who accidentally incites a gender war among the students and staff
THE SWALLOWS
by Lisa Lutz
Simon & Schuster, September 2018
When Alexandra Witt arrives at Stonebridge Academy and insists on moving into a ramshackle cottage in the woods, curiosity among the student body and the staff skyrockets. Who is this young teacher who came here alone, dresses like the kids, and left her last school under a cloud of speculation? With its picturesque campus and classic uniforms, Stonebridge might look the part, but as Alex soon learns, it’s anything but old school. When she advises one of her new students to stand up for herself, the girl takes her advice a little too much to heart. Long-simmering tensions between the boys and girls boil over into a fight. And then total war. By the time Gemma, Alex’s favorite student, starts uncovering Stonebridge’s darkest secrets with the help of some unlikely allies, Alex’s bumpy start has become a nightmare. Cast into a role she never wanted, she watches the spark she ignited consume everything around her. And the only way out might carry an even higher cost.
Told by four narrators, none of whom inspires total confidence, The Swallows unfolds with brilliant timing, puzzle-like plotting, and riveting storytelling that will shock and delight readers everywhere.
Lisa Lutz is the New York Times bestselling author of nine novels, including “The Passenger” (2016), “How to Start a Fire”, and the six novels in the “Spellman” series. Lutz has won the Alex award and has been nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel. She is currently a writer on the critically acclaimed HBO series “The Deuce”, starring James Franco. 
JABberwocky 2017 Frankfurt Newsletter
An epic fantasy series for readers tired of waiting for the next chapter of Game of Thrones
The HALLOWED WAR Series
by Tim Akers
Titan Books
THE IRON HOUND #2
August 2017
Ruling with an iron hand, the Church has eliminated the ancient pagan ways. Yet demonic gheists terrorize the land, hunted by the Inquisition, while age-old hatreds rage between the north and the south. Three heroes, Malcolm and Ian Blakeley and Gwendolyn Adair must end the bloodshed before chaos is unleashed.
THE PAGAN NIGHT #1
January 2016
The Celestial Church has all but eliminated the old pagan ways, ruling the people with an iron hand. Demonic gheists terrorize the land, hunted by the warriors of the Inquisition, yet it’s the battling factions within the Church and age-old hatreds between north and south that tear the land apart. Malcolm Blakley, hero of the Reaver War, seeks to end the conflict between men, yet it will fall to his son, Ian, and the huntress Gwen Adair to stop the killing before it tears the land apart. The Pagan Night is an epic of mad gods, inquisitor priests, holy knights bound to hunt and kill, and noble houses fighting battles of politics, prejudice, and power.
Tim Akers was born in deeply rural North Carolina, the only son of a theologian. He is the author of the “Burn Cycle” from Solaris Books, as well as “The Horns of Ruin”, featuring Eva Forge, published by Pyr Books.
A critically acclaimed debut short story collection
TREATS
(US Title: A Selfie as Big as the Ritz)
by Lara Williams
Freight Books, October 2016 (UK) – Flatiron Books, October 2017 (US)
The women in TREATS navigate the tumultuous interval between early twenties and middle age. In the title story, a relationship implodes against the romantic backdrop of Paris. In “One of Those Life Things,” a young woman struggles to say the right thing at her best friend’s abortion. In “Penguins,” a girlfriend tries to accept her boyfriend’s bizarre sexual fantasy. In “Treats,” a single woman comes to terms with her loneliness. As Williams’ characters attempt to lean in, fall in love, hold together a family, fend off loneliness, and build a meaningful life, we see them alternating between expectation and resignation, giddiness and melancholy, the rollercoaster we all find ourselves on.
TREATS has been shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Edinburgh First Book Award, the Saboteur Awards and longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Lara Williams has had essays, features, and opinion pieces published by The Guardian, the New Scientist, the Times Literary Supplement, The Debrief, Vice, Grazia, SomeSuch Stories and many more.
“Edwards takes all the familiar pawns of Urban Fantasy and makes royalty of them in his debut” – Scott Reintgen
THE TAROT SEQUENCE
THE LAST SUN (#1)
by K.D. Edwards
Pyr Books, April 2018
Decades ago, when Yuri Gagarin circled the planet in Vostok 1, something unimaginable happened. From that distance, he saw through the illusions that had kept Rune’s people hidden for millennia. He saw a massive island, in the northern Atlantic, where none should be. Atlantis. In the modern world — and in the aftermath of the war that followed Atlantis’s revealing – Atlanteans have resettled on the island of Nantucket, in a city built from extravagant global ruins. Rune Saint John is the son of a fallen Court, and the survivor of a brutal adolescent assault that remains one of New Atlantis’s most enduring mysteries. He and his Companion, Brand, operate on the edges of the city’s ruling class. An assignment from their benefactor, Lord Tower, will set them on a search for the kidnapped scion of an Arcana’s court. Rune will have to follow leads through the halls of power that he knew as a youth, to face down a legendary creature connected to the secret of his Court’s massacre.
K.D. Edwards lives and writes in North Carolina.
The closer he gets to death, the more he starts to live
A ROCK AND A HIGH PLACE
by Dan Mooney
April 2018
Joel lives in a nursing home and he’s not one bit happy about it. He doesn’t like being told when to eat, when to sleep, when to take his pills. In fact, he doesn’t like living at all, and he’s decided he’s going to end his life on his terms. When he tells retired soap-actor Frank about his dark plan, Frank urges him to go out with a bang. Together, they embark on a mission to find the perfect suicide, and along the way, discover the strength of friendship when you really feel alone.
Dan Mooney is a writer, air traffic controller and amateur filmmaker, with one of his short films broadcast on national TV. His previous book is “Me, Myself and Them”.
Brad Parks delivers another riveting, emotionally powerful stand-alone domestic suspense thriller perfect for fans of “The Couple Next Door” and “What She Knew”
CLOSER THAN YOU KNOW
by Brad Parks
Dutton, March 2017
Disaster, Melanie Barrick was once told, is always closer than you know. It was a lesson she learned the hard way growing up in the constant upheaval of foster care. But now that she’s survived into adulthood–with a loving husband, a steady job, and a beautiful baby boy named Alex–she thought that turmoil was behind her. Until one Tuesday evening when she goes to pick up Alex from childcare only to discover he’s been removed by Social Services. And no one will say why. It’s a terrifying scenario for any parent, but doubly so for Melanie, who knows the unintended horrors of what everyone coldly calls « the system. » Her nightmare mushrooms when she arrives home to learn her house has been raided by sheriff’s deputies, who have found enough cocaine to send Melanie to prison for years. The evidence against her is overwhelming, and if Melanie can’t prove her innocence, she’ll lose Alex forever. Meanwhile, assistant commonwealth’s attorney Amy Kaye–who has been assigned Melanie’s case–has her own troubles. She’s been dogged by a cold case no one wants her to pursue: a serial rapist who has avoided detection by wearing a mask and whispering his commands. Over the years, he has victimized dozens of women. Including Melanie. Yet now her attacker might be the key to her salvation . . . or her undoing.
A former reporter with The Washington Post, Brad Parks is the only author to have won the Shamus, Nero, and Lefty Awards, three of crime fiction’s most prestigious prizes.
“…a harrowing, ripped-from-the-headlines story of lives altered in the blink of an eye, once again proving her eloquence and dexterity as an author.”—Mary Kubica
RUST & STARDUST
by T. Greenwood
Saint Martin’s Press, August 2018
Based on the life of Sally Horner, whose story inspired Nabokov’s Lolita, Rust & Stardust is the fictionalized account of Sally’s abduction and the following twenty-one-month cross-country journey. Told from Sally’s point of view, the novel explores her heart breaking ordeal as she survives the mental and physical abuse, while also showing the repercussions of the kidnapping on her family, her friends, and those she encounters along the way. This is not only a heart-pounding literary thriller, but also a lyrical and kaleidoscopic portrait of a family.
T. Greenwood is an award-winning author of eleven novels.
;
;
;
The next book in Ausma Khan’s powerful, critically acclaimed series
A DANGEROUS CROSSING
by Ausma Zehanat Khan
Minotaur Books, February 2018
Muslim detective Esa Khattak and his partner, Rachel Getty, travel across Europe in search of an old friend, who’s gone missing while working to help expedite immigration for Syrian refugees in Greece. The Syrian refugee crisis becomes personal for Inspector Esa Khattak and Sergeant Rachel Getty when they are called in to search for a missing Canadian volunteer. Nathan Clare’s sister, Audrey, has vanished from the Greek islands, where she was working to fast-track refugees to Canada. What’s more, she’s implicated in the double murder of a French Interpol agent and a young man who’d fled to Greece from the devastated city of Aleppo. Esa and Rachel stand in for their government as they follow a trail that takes them from Greece to the Turkish-Syrian border, to England, Holland and France. Did Audrey Clare get in over her head? Or did she discover something about the dangers of the refugee route that put a target on her back? Working against time, with Interpol at their backs, Esa and Rachel must find Audrey Clare and uncover the truth about the double murder.
Ausma Zehanat Khan is an award-winning author of eleven novels.
From the author of international bestseller, “The Map that Leads to You”
SEVEN LETTERS
by Joe Monninger
Saint Martin’s Press, TBA
The new Joe Monninger’s novel is about a woman whose ex-husband is missing and presumed dead. But when she finds seven clues (and seven letters), she realizes that he might still be alive and involved in helping those in crisis in the war-torn middle east. For readers of Nicholas Sparks.
Joe Monninger is the bestselling author of “The Map that Leads to You” whose rights have been sold in eighteen foreign territories.
An innocent night of fun takes a shocking turn in this page-turner from Jessica Strawser
NOT THAT I COULD TELL
by Jessica Strawser
Saint Martin’s Press, March 2018
When a group of neighborhood women gathers, wine in hand, around a fire pit where their backyards meet one Saturday night, most of them are just ecstatic to have discovered that their baby monitors reach that far. It’s a rare kid-free night, and they’re giddy with it. They drink too much, and the conversation turns personal. By Monday morning, one of them is gone…
Everyone knows something about everyone else in the quirky small Ohio town of Yellow Springs, but no one can make sense of the disappearance. Kristin was a sociable twin mom, college administrator, and doctor’s wife who didn’t seem all that bothered by her impending divorce―and the investigation turns up more questions than answers, with her husband, Paul, at the center. For her closest neighbor, Clara, the incident triggers memories she thought she’d put behind her―and when she’s unable to extract herself from the widening circle of scrutiny, her own suspicions quickly grow. But the neighborhood’s newest addition, Izzy, is determined not to jump to any conclusions―especially since she’s dealing with a crisis of her own. As the police investigation goes from a media circus to a cold case, the neighbors are forced to reexamine what’s going on behind their own closed doors―and to ask how well anyone really knows anyone else.
Jessica Strawser is the Editor-at-Large of Writer’s Digest magazine and the author of “Almost Missed You”, named to Barnes & Noble’s Best New Fiction list for March 2017 and PopSugar’s Best Spring Reads. She has written for The New York Times, Publishers Weekly and other fine venues.
When long-buried secrets come back to the surface…
Ryan DeMarco Mysteries
by Randall Silvis
Sourcebooks Landmark
WALKING THE BONES #2
January 2018
A year after the gruesome homicide case in which Ryan DeMarco put a bullet through the heart of the madman who killed his only friend’s family, he can’t face another day on the force. Now, heading out on an extended road trip with Jayme, his former colleague and current girlfriend, DeMarco is ready to let his old wounds heal. But when the pair arrives in Jayme’s tiny hometown for her grandmother’s funeral, they’re quickly recruited to help solve a long-dead case involving the skeletons of seven young girls.
—————————
TWO DAYS GONE #1
January 2017
What could cause a man, when all the stars of fortune are shining upon him, to suddenly snap and destroy everything he has built? This is the question that haunts Sergeant Ryan DeMarco after the wife and children of beloved college professor and bestselling author Thomas Huston are found slaughtered in their home. Huston himself has disappeared and so is immediately cast as the prime suspect. DeMarco knows―or thinks he knows―that Huston couldn’t have been capable of murdering his family. But if Huston is innocent, why is he on the run? And does the half-finished manuscript he left behind contain clues to the mystery of his family’s killer?
Sterling Lord Literistic Fall 2017
The master of science fiction and inventor of cyberpunk brings his prophetic mind and technologically astute talents to the modern day and beyond
AGENCY
by William Gibson
Berkeley, Fall 2018
Agency will be “both a prequel and a sequel” to Gibson’s 2014 novel, The Peripheral, which was set in the near future in the 22nd century. Like The Peripheral, Agency will involve a form of time travel, and will play out in a pair of alternate futures: one set in 2017 in which Hillary Clinton was elected president, and one in a post-apocalyptic 22nd century London.
This is the novel our world doesn’t yet know it needs.
William Gibson’s first novel, Neuromancer, won the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and the Nebula Award in 1984. He is also the New York Timesbestselling author of Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Burning Chrome, Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History, Distrust That Particular Flavor, and The Peripheral.
^^
^^
A former Special Forces operative is recruited by the New York underworld to obliterate a terror cell about to kill millions
THE BOUNCER
by David Gordon
Mysterious Press, November 2018
Joe Brody is not your average New York bouncer. When you work for the Mafia, it’s more than guarding clubs and kicking out drunks. And for an elite Special Forces veteran like Joe, it’s all in a day’s work. But when his boss Gio calls with a special request, even Joe is stretched to the limit. A colossal terrorist attack is imminent. With millions set to die, but no-one yet in custody, the FBI cracks down on the criminal underworld in search of results. Gang headquarters are being raided across the city. To survive, Gio strikes a deal with the FBI: catch the terrorists and the heat is off. The result is an unlikely alliance of Chinese Triads, Italian Mafia, and the Irish Mob. Joe is their man, a suave professional and fierce patriot. Gio gives him one order: detect and destroy the terrorists. To succeed, he must survive double crossings, fatal firefights, and escape top secret government facilities, all under the nose of the authorities. Meanwhile, a smart, resourceful FBI agent is hungry for a big break. Donna Zamora is tired of working the tip-off desk, and she can’t shake the feeling that at the heart of all this is mysterious bouncer, Joe Brody. She dives into the case, and as the action rockets towards it heart-pounding conclusion, she finds herself chasing Joe—on the job, and off.
David Gordon’s first novel, The Serialist, won the VCU/Cabell First Novel Award and was a finalist for an Edgar Award; in Japan, it won the Kono-Mys Award for Best Mystery in Translation, the Bunsun’s Best Mystery Award, and the Hayakawa Best Mystery Award—the first time a novel had won all three mystery awards. It was made into a major motion picture in Japan. He is also the author of the novel Mystery Girl (2013) and a short story collection, White Tiger on Snow Mountain (2014.) His work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Times, Purple, and Fence, among other publications.
What is gained, and what is lost, when a woman becomes a mother?
MOTHERHOOD
by Sheila Heti
Henry Holt, May 2018
In her late thirties, at an age when most of her friends are asking themselves when they will become mothers, Ms. Heti’s narrator considers, with the same urgency, the question of whether she will do so at all. In a narrative spanning several years, casting between the influence of her peers, her partner, and her duties to her forbearers, the narrator struggles to make a wise and moral choice. After seeking answers from philosophy, theology, mysticism and chance (in the form of the three coins of the I Ching), she finally discovers the answer much closer to home.
The result is a courageous, keenly felt and deeply funny novel that will surely spark a cultural and political conversation about womanhood, about parenthood, and about how—and for whom—to live.
Sheila Heti is the author of seven books, including the critically acclaimed How Should a Person Be? and the New York Times bestseller Women in Clothes (edited with Heidi Julavits and Leanne Shapton). She is the former interviews editor at The Believer magazine, and has been published in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, n+1, The London Review of Books, and more. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages.
The debut novel by acclaimed young adult writer Dana Reinhardt
TOMORROW THERE WILL BE SUN
by Dana Reinhardt
Pamela Dorman Books, Spring 2019
Two upper-middle-class Los Angeles families—who are life-long friends—rent an ultra-luxe villa in Mexico for the vacation of their dreams. But even before they can enjoy the sunshine, the cracks in all their relationships begin to show, and a local political situation threatens to bring big trouble to paradise. This novel is part The Vacationers, part Siracusa, part something all its own.
TOMORROW THERE WILL BE SUN is a story about family, friends, secrets, and betrayal, set in a sultry tourist town where the sun’s rays shine as brightly as the glaring hypocracies in these characters’ lives.
Dana Reinhardt is the author of the young adult novels Tell Us Something True, A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life, Harmless, How to Build a House, The Things a Brother Knows, The Summer I Learned to Fly, Odessa Again, and We Are the Goldens.
The momentous first novel by the New York Times bestselling memoirist Domenica Ruta
THE LAST DAY
by Domenica Ruta
Spiegel & Grau, Winter 2019
It’s the end of the world as we know it. Maybe. Today, it is May 8th: The Last Day. Some search for patterns in the clouds, others watch the stars, holding their breath for a sign of Armageddon. There are many stories that attempt to explain the holiday, rite, celebration, lamentation and thanksgiving that is Last Day, the occasion around which Domenica Ruta’s momentous first novel rotates. In the fraught hours leading to a contemporary May 8, we are guided by four quest stories, three set in and around Boston—one follows a hapless, searching, group home resident who works at the YMCA, another is planted at a tattoo parlor called Redemption, a third follows an impatiently precocious teen determined to lose her virginity—while another is set aloft on the orbiting International Space Station. The paralleling fates of these narrative strands intermingle as we hurry towards a Last Day of potentially irrevocable significance, each character is determined to find or affirm something totemic. Domenica points her lens at these desperate characters with unbounded imagination and sympathy, orchestrating an epic fantasia in which these individual fates feed into something impossibly vast and vital. The novel is a symphonic blend of genres and tonal varieties, a re-configuration of easy expectations that reaches beyond what any a reader could have entertained. This is fiction in its most energized state—engaged in the turmoil of vividly etched individuals who stand in for the fate of our troubled, earthly whole. Every strand is indelible and the cumulative effect is transcendent, harrowing and moving.
Domenica Ruta is a graduate of Oberlin College and holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir With or Without You (2013). She was a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature and has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, Jentel, and Hedgebrook.
From its opening sentence—’Our mother returned to us two days after we spread her ashes over Notley Fern Gorge’—Robbie Arnott’s debut novel reveals a world as old as storytelling itself
FLAMES
By Robbie Arnott
May 2018
A young man named Levi McAllister decides to build a coffin for his twenty-three-year-old sister, Charlotte—who promptly runs for her life. A water rat swims upriver in quest of the cloud god. A fisherman named Karl hunts for tuna in partnership with a seal. And a father takes form from fire.
The drumbeat of this tale about grief and love and the bonds of family connects these stories, tracing a journey that takes us full circle. Set on the island of Tasmania, from Hawley in the north to Cradle Mountain and the southern wilderness, FLAMES sings out with joy and sadness. Utterly original in its conception, spellbinding in its descriptions of nature and its celebration of the power of language, this first book by twenty-seven-year-old Tasmanian writer Robbie Arnott announces the arrival of a thrilling new voice in contemporary fiction.
Robbie Arnott was born in Launceston in 1989. He is a sixth-generation Tasmanian who now lives in Hobart where his day job is writing advertising copy. He won the Scribe Nonfiction Prize in 2014 and the Tasmanian Young Writer’s Fellowship in 2015.
The author of the critically acclaimed The Book of Jonah explores questions of love and choice, disappointment and hope in the lives of two strangers who meet by chance in this mesmerizing tale that unfolds over one Thanksgiving Day
UNDER THE COLD BRIGHT LIGHTS
by Garry Disher
October 2017
The young detectives call Alan Auhl a retread, but that doesn’t faze him. He does things his own way—and gets results. He still lives with his ex-wife, off and on, in a big house full of random boarders and hard-luck stories. And he’s still a cop, even though he retired from Homicide some years ago. He works cold cases now. Like the death of John Elphick—his daughters still convinced he was murdered, the coroner not so sure. Or the skeleton that’s just been found under a concrete slab. Or the doctor who killed two wives and a girlfriend, and left no evidence at all. Auhl will stick with these cases until justice is done. One way or another.
Garry Disher has published fifty titles—fiction, children’s books, anthologies, textbooks, the Wyatt thrillers and the Peninsula Crimes series. His previous standalone novel, “Bitter Wash Road”, won the German Crime Prize in 2016.
A novel about love and art, grief and happiness. About memory and the mystery of time
THE DEATH OF NOAH
by Gail Jones
April 2018
At the age of sixty-seven, having just returned from a trip to Sicily, the art historian Noah Glass is discovered floating face down in the swimming pool at his Sydney apartment block. His grieving children Martin and Evie must come to terms not only with the shock of their father’s death, but also with his involvement in a sculpture missing from a museum in Palermo. Noah is a suspect and the police are investigating. None of it makes any sense. Martin sets off to Palermo in search of answers about his father’s activities, while Evie moves into Noah’s apartment in Elizabeth Bay, waiting to learn where her life might take her. Retracing their father’s steps in their own way, neither of his children can see the path ahead.
Gail Jones’s mesmerising new novel tells a story about parents and children, and explores the overlapping patterns of life.
Gail Jones is one of Australia’s most celebrated fiction writers. Her work has been translated into nine languages, and has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. It has been shortlisted for the IMPAC Award, and the Prix Femina Etranger. In addition, Gail Jones has been shortlisted three times for the Miles Franklin Award.
A fable about trust and fear, blindness and sight, what it means to bear witness, what it means to have nothing
THE CAGE
by Lloyd Jones
February 2018
At the front of a little hotel in a country town, a flickering sign says, ‘All welcome’. The dining room and guest rooms are upstairs, the kitchen below. There is a broken swing under the willow in the garden.
Fleeing a catastrophe they cannot describe, two strangers stagger into town, scarecrows in rags. At the hotel, Uncle Warwick, Dawn and the Trustees nickname them Doctor and Mole, and offer them shelter. No one knows where they’ve come from, including the young man who takes it upon himself to make a note of everything they do.
Lloyd Jones is the bestselling author of “Mister Pip”, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His other books include “Hand Me Down World”, “The Book of Fame” and “A History of Silence”.
From the author of “The Hands: an Australian Pastoral”
INCREDIBLE FLORIDAS
by Stephen Orr
2018 (TBA)
The year is 1962, and Roland Griffin is one of Australia’s great artists. The only problem is his son, a young man who resents his father’s obsession with art, and who is gradually becoming out of control. In INCREDIBLE FLORIDAS, Miles Franklin-longlisted author Stephen Orr has used the life of Russell Drysdale as inspiration for a family story that will beguile and inspire.
Stephen Orr has worked as a teacher and writer-inresidence at various secondary schools. He also writes for the Advertiser and the Adelaide Review. His previous novels include “Dissonance”, “Time’s Long Ruin” (which was longlisted for the 2011 Miles Franklin Award), “Attempts to Draw Jesus” (runner-up in the 2000 Vogel/Australian award), “One Boy Missing” (Text Publishing) and “Hill of Grace”.
Wolf Literary Services Fall 2017
In the spirit of Italo Calvino, a media-age metaphysical picaresque about a dead man whose soul travels from body to body, discovering the grim and comic realities in every strata of modern life
SAMUEL JOHNSON’S ETERNAL RETURN
by Martin Riker
Coffee House Press, Fall 2018
The book’s narrator, Samuel Johnson, is living a woefully passive life when a fluke accident kills him. His soul is cast out into the world in a mundane viewer-like purgatory, traveling from one stranger to the next, watching television through their eyes but unable to touch, smell, taste, or change the channel. Meanwhile, having left his son parentless, and him stuck in mortal purgatory, Samuel determines that in death he will be a better person than he was in life. His only purpose now is to return to his son and protect him from the world—once he can find a means of doing so.
The ensuing quest takes him through fifty years and several different lives, from an angry businessman to a debilitated elderly woman and her young caretaker, almost as ambitionless as Samuel himself. It is a mediated death oddly similar to his own past life, yet he is tortured by something real: fatherly love. Through Samuel Johnson’s adventures, we track a variety of personas and ways of being alive—or nearly dead—in the world.
Martin Riker is publisher of “Dorothy”, a publishing project, and a former associate director of Dalkey Archive Press. His fiction and criticism have appeared widely including in the London Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Book Review, The Baffler, and Conjunctions. He teaches fiction and literary criticism at Washington University in St. Louis.
The author of the critically acclaimed The Book of Jonah explores questions of love and choice, disappointment and hope in the lives of two strangers who meet by chance in this mesmerizing tale that unfolds over one Thanksgiving Day
START WITHOUT ME
by Joshua Feldman
Morrow, October 2017
Adam is a former musician and recovering alcoholic who is home for Thanksgiving for the first time in many years. Surrounded by his parents and siblings, nieces and nephews—all who have seen him at his worst—he can’t shake the feeling that no matter how hard he tries, he’ll always be the one who can’t get it right. Marissa is a flight attendant whose marriage is strained by simmering tensions over race, class, and ambition. Heading to her in-laws for their picture-perfect holiday family dinner, her anxiety is intensified by the knowledge she is pregnant from an impulsive one-night-stand. In an airport restaurant on Thanksgiving morning, Adam and Marissa meet. Over the course of this day fraught with emotion and expectation, these two strangers will form an unlikely bond as they reckon with their family ties, their pasts, and the choices that will determine their way forward.
Joshua Max Feldman is the author of “The Book of Jonah”. Born and raised in Amherst, Massachusetts, he has lived in England, Russia, and Switzerland, and currently resides in Brooklyn.
A new page-turning mystery about science, faith, love and belonging, set in a friendly desert community where ghosts, angels, aliens, and government conspiracies are commonplace parts of everyday life. Welcome to Night Vale…
IT DEVOURS!
A Welcome to Night Vale Novel
by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor
HarperPerennial, October 2017
Nilanjana Sikdar is an outsider to the town of Night Vale. Working for Carlos, the town’s top scientist, she relies on fact and logic as her guiding principles. But all of that is put into question when Carlos gives her a special assignment investigating a mysterious rumbling in the desert wasteland outside of town. This investigation leads her to the Joyous Congregation of the Smiling God, and to Darryl, one of its most committed members. Caught between her beliefs in the ultimate power of science and her growing attraction to Darryl, she begins to suspect the Congregation is planning a ritual that could threaten the lives of everyone in town. Nilanjana and Darryl must search for common ground between their very different world views as they are faced with the Congregation’s darkest and most terrible secret.
Joseph Fink created the Welcome to Night Vale and Alice Isn’t Dead podcasts. Jeffrey Cranor cowrites the Welcome to Night Vale and Within the Wires podcasts. He also cocreates theater and dance pieces with choreographer/wife Jillian Sweeney.
A fast-paced thriller by New York Times bestselling author Joseph Fink, based on his hit podcast Alice Isn’t Dead, about a truck driver who searches across America for the wife she had long assumed was dead
ALICE ISN’T DEAD
by Joseph Fink
HarperPerennial, October 2018
Keisha Lewis lived a quiet life with her wife, Alice, until the day that Alice disappeared. After months of searching, presuming she was dead, Keisha held a funeral, mourned, and gradually tried to get on with her life. But months later, Keisha saw her wife, again and again, in the background of news reports from all over America. Alice isn’t dead, and she is showing up at every major tragedy and accident in the country. Following a line of clues left behind, Keisha takes a job with a trucking company, Bay and Creek Transportation and begins searching for Alice. In the course of her search, she will encounter not-quite-human serial murderers, towns literally lost in time, and a conspiracy that goes way beyond one missing woman.
Joseph Fink is the creator of the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, and the author of the New York Times bestelling novel of the same name.
A wildly irreverent take on the coming-of-age story that turns a search for belonging into a riotous satire of identity politics
INAPPROPRIATION
by Lexi Freiman
Ecco, July 2018
Starting at a prestigious private Australian girls’ school, fifteen year-old Ziggy Klein is confronted with analienating social hierarchy that hurls her into the arms of her grade’s most radical feminists. Tormented by a burgeoning collection of dark, sexual fantasies, and a biological essentialist mother, Ziggy sets off on a journey of self-discovery that moves from the Sydney drag scene to the extremist underbelly of the internet. As PC culture collides with her friends’ morphing ideology and her parents’ kinky sex life, Ziggy’s understanding of gender, race and class begins to warp. Ostracized at school, Ziggy seeks refuge in Donna Haraway’s seminal feminist text, A Cyborg Manifesto, and discovers an indisputable alternative identity. Or so she thinks. A controversial Indian guru, transgender drag queen, and her own Holocaust surviving grandmother propel Ziggy through a series of mis-identifications culminating in a date-rape revenge plot so confused, it just might work. Uproariously funny, but written with extraordinary acuity about the intersections of gender, sexual politics, race and technology, INAPPROPRIATION is literary satire at its best. With a deft finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, Lexi Freiman debuts on the scene as a brilliant and fearless new talent.
Lexi Freiman is a fiction editor at George Braziller, a publisher in New York, and a recent Columbia University MFA grad. She was a Center for Fiction Writing Fellow in 2013 and has published in The Literary Review.
A murder mystery, a social critique, and a hallucinatory dream of America at the dawn of a turbulent new age, OHIO ingeniously captures the fractured zeitgeist of a nation through the viewfinder of a wheezing, midwestern town
OHIO
by Stephen Markley
Simon & Schuster, August 2018
Four former classmates converge on the rustbelt town they grew up in—a region ravaged by the Great Recession, an opioid crisis, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—each of them with a mission, all of them haunted by regrets, secrets, losses and love. Since the turn of the century, a generation has come of age who have only known war, recession, political gridlock, and a growing sense of environmental calamity. Death rates for rural whites have skyrocketed, fueled by alcohol, addiction and the rampant sense of marginalization and disillusionment. This is the world that the characters in Stephen Markley’s brilliant debut novel, OHIO, have inherited. This is New Canaan. With lyrical expansiveness and emotional poignancy, Markley introduces us to a sprawling cast of indelible characters. There’s Bill Ashcraft, an alcoholic, drug-abusing activist, whose flailing, fruitless ambitions have taken him from Cambodia to Zuccotti Park to post-BP New Orleans and now back to “The Cane” with a mysterious package strapped to the underside of his truck; Stacey Moore, a doctoral candidate reluctantly confronting her family and the mother of her former lover; Dan Eaton, a shy veteran of three tours in Iraq obsessed with American history, home for a dinner date with the high school sweetheart he’s tried desperately to forget; and the beautiful, fragile Tina Ross, whose rendezvous with the captain of the football team triggers the novel’s shocking climax. Bringing all of them together are the alluring, precocious Lisa Han, whose disappearance spurs the mystery at the heart of the novel, and Rick Brinklan, a former athlete irrevocably transformed by the events of 9/11 he watched unfold on the television in his high school classroom.
Stephen Markley is an author, screenwriter, and journalist. His previous books include the memoir “Publish This Book: The Unbelievable True Story of How I Wrote, Sold, and Published This Very Book”, published when he was 25, and the travelogue “Tales of Iceland”.
A novel that gives John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera a meta-fictional, contemporary twist
CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX
by Jordy Rosenberg
One World, June 2018
In 1723, London is in chaos over reports of a return of the Plague. The Mayor has declared a citywide emergency and authorized swarms of sentinels and thief-catchers to arrest, detain or deport any “suspicious” persons. In this city of intense, polarizing conflict between the rulers and the ruled, Jack Sheppard – a transgender carpenter’s apprentice – has fled his master’s house to become a notorious prison break artist, and Bess Munshi has escaped the draining of the fenlands to become a revolutionary mastermind determined to discover the root of the plague rumors. Together, they find themselves at the center of a web of corruption leading back to the Thief-Catcher General, Jonathan Wild. While Wild hunts Jack and Bess, the duo uncover Wild’s macabre profiteering enterprise, located at the mysterious “House of Waste”…
Transgender author Jordy Rosenberg is an associate professor of literature at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, specializing in 18th-century Britain as well as in transgender and queer theory. Along with an academic monograph with Oxford University Press and numerous articles and scholarly works, Rosenberg has published fiction and creative nonfiction in publications such as Fence, The Common, Avidly, and Salvage Quarterly.
A new standalone novel from Wallace Stroby!
SOME DIE NAMELESS
by Wallace Stroby
Mulholland Books, Summer 2018
An ex-mercenary and an embattled journalist find themselves unlikely allies against a corrupt defense contractor. Ray Devlin is retired, living a simple life off the grid in Florida, when a visit from an old colleague stirs some bad memories – and ends with a gunshot. Soon Devlin is forced to again face a past he’d hoped to leave behind, as a member of a mercenary force that helped put a brutal South American dictator into power. Tracy Quinn is an investigative reporter at a struggling Philadelphia newspaper decimated by layoffs and cutbacks. Then one day what appears to be a straightforward homicide – a body left in an abandoned rowhouse – draws her and Devlin together, and ultimately enmeshes the two in a conspiracy that stretches over twenty years and reaches to the highest levels of the U.S. government. Before long, they’re both the targets of a ruthless assassin haunted by his own wartime experiences. For Devlin, it could all mean a last shot at redemption. For Tracy, the biggest story of her career could cost her life.
Wallace Stroby is an award-winning journalist and author. His debut, “The Barbed-Wire Kiss”, was a finalist for the 2004 Barry Award for Best First Novel.
Other lists: