HELL OF A COUNTRY de David Cornwell

In 1970s South Africa, desire and desperation have bloody consequences.

HELL OF A COUNTRY
by David Cornwell
(via The Lennon-Ritchie Agency)

Seventeen-year-old Lorraine van Niekerk despises the fact that her boss and lover, middle-aged André Bekker, won’t leave his hateful wife for her.
Driver Alfie Geemooi is horrified when he wakes up in Groote Schuur’s Non-White wing after a car crash with one leg missing.
Alfie and Lorraine’s lives intersect fatefully in André’s consultation rooms. André is an orthopaedic technician, and Lorraine can grant access to the prothesis Alfie so desperately needs.
But at a price.
HELL OF A COUNTRY is a fictionalised retelling of the Scissors Murder—a famous true-crime story from early 1970s South Africa. A pacy and poetic work told in the third person from multiple points of view, it focuses on the meeting-point between political machinery and personal desire, and uses the true-crime genre to tell a fresh and original story about South Africa’s turbulent past in a deeply human and engaging way.

David Cornwell’s debut novel, LIKE IT MATTERS, was published by Penguin Random House in South Africa to critical acclaim. The book was longlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize and shortlisted for the 9mobile Award for Best African Fiction Debut. David’s short film, Die Onderspit, was developed as part of KykNET’s Silwerskermfees festival program. He also co-wrote a screenplay with Damon Galgut. David’s feature film Pou (Peacock) was shown at Idyllwild, the Buffalo International Festival, the Winter Film Awards, Razor Reel and at SA Horror Fest. Born in Grahamstown, he currently lives in Johannesburg.

A WINTER’S RIME de Carol Dunbar

A harrowing and emotional novel set in rural Wisconsin—A WINTER’S RIME explores the impact of generational trauma, and one woman’s journey to find peace and healing from the violence of her past.

A WINTER’S RIME
by Carol Dunbar
Forge, September 2023
(via The Lark Group)

Mallory Moe is a twenty-five-year-old veteran Army mechanic, living with her girlfriend, Andrea, and working overnights at a gas station store while figuring out what’s next. Andrea’s off-grid cabin provides a perfect sanctuary for Mallory, a synesthete with a hypersensitivity to sound that can trigger flashbacks from her childhood.
The getaway that’s largely abandoned during the off season starts out idyllic, until Andrea’s once-loving behavior turns controlling and abusive, and Mallory once again finds herself not wanting to go home. After a particularly disturbing altercation, Mallory escapes into the subzero night and stumbles into Shay, a teenage girl, injured and asking for help. But it isn’t long before she realizes that Shay isn’t the only one who needs saving.
A story about sisterhood and second chances, A WINTER’S RIME looks to nature to find what it can teach us about bearing hardship and expanding our capacity to forgive—not just others, but ourselves.

Carol Dunbar is a ghostwriter of over 50 nonfiction titles, and for the last 15 years she has lived in the house that is the setting for The Net Beneath Us. Her essays about living off the grid air on Wisconsin Public Radio and her work has been published or is forthcoming in The South Carolina Review, Midwestern Gothic, The Midwest Review, Literary Mama, Great Lakes Review, and others. In 2018 she won the Hal Prize for fiction and an earlier draft of this novel was a 2013 finalist for the Dana Award.

THE LIBRARIAN OF LOST STORIES de Janet Skeslien Charles

From the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of The Paris Library comes THE LIBRARIAN OF LOST STORIES, a powerful historical novel that charts the lives of two NYPL librarians across the barrier of decades.

THE LIBRARIAN OF LOST STORIES
by Janet Skeslien Charles
Atria Books, April 2024
(via Kaplan/DeFiore Rights)

1918. World War I. Northern France is a battlefield. The American Committee for Devastated France establish their headquarters just miles from the front. This group of international women help French families who’ve lost everything – homes, livelihoods, and limbs. They save children, restore bombed villages, and evacuate civilians.
Jessie « Kit » Carson takes a leave of absence from the NYPL in order to establish something that the French have never seen – children’s libraries – as well as to escape her boss. She turns ambulances into bookmobiles, creates libraries, and trains the first French female librarians. Then she disappears.
1987. Wendy Peterson stumbles across a mention of Jessie Carson in the NYPL archives and becomes consumed with learning her fate. Fixation is nothing new to Wendy. She’s obsessed with Roberto, her handsome coworker. She worries about her best friend, Leigh, who grows more and more distant. Wendy soon learns that she and Jessie Carson have more in common than their work at the New York Public Library.
With a dazzling cast of real-life characters, THE LIBRARIAN OF LOST STORIES highlights themes of resilience, friendship, and community. Once again, Janet Skeslien Charles brings history alive with this meticulously researched, little-known story of incredible women who face the danger of war to share their love of literature and their belief in books as bridges.

Janet Skeslien Charles’s work has been translated into 35 languages. Her novel about real-life librarians during World War II, The Paris Library, was a New York Times bestseller, #1 Indie Next Pick, and book club favorite. Janet has spoken at over 200 literary events and has been a keynote speaker for venues such as the Association of American Women in Europe commemoration and the Salem Literary Festival. Her debut novel Moonlight in Odessa was translated into 12 languages. She spends her free time at the Red Wheelbarrow bookshop in Paris.

ZODIAC: A GRAPHIC MEMOIR de Ai Weiwei, illustré par Gianluca Costantini

In this beautifully illustrated and deeply philosophical graphic memoir, legendary artist Ai Weiwei explores the connection between artistic expression and intellectual freedom through the lens of the Chinese zodiac..

ZODIAC: A GRAPHIC MEMOIR
by Ai Weiwei
illustrated by Gianluca Costantini
Ten Speed Graphic, January 2024

As a child living in exile during the Cultural Revolution, Ai Weiwei often found himself with nothing to read but government-approved comic books. Although they were restricted by the confines of political propaganda, Ai Weiwei was struck by the artists’ ability to express their thoughts on art and humanity through graphic storytelling. Now, decades later, Ai Weiwei and Italian comic artist Gianluca Costantini present ZODIAC, Ai Weiwei’s first graphic memoir.
Inspired by the twelve signs of the Chinese zodiac and their associated human characteristics, Ai Weiwei masterfully interweaves ancient Chinese folklore with stories of his life, family, and career. The narrative shifts back and forth through the years—at once in the past, present, and future—mirroring memory and our relationship to time. As readers delve deeper into the beautifully illustrated pages of ZODIAC, they will find not only a personal history of Ai Weiwei and an examination of the sociopolitical climate in which he makes his art, but a philosophical exploration of what it means to find oneself through art and freedom of expression.
Contemplative and political, ZODIAC will inspire readers to return again and again to Ai Weiwei’s musings on the relationship between art, time, and our shared humanity.

Ai Weiwei leads a diverse and prolific practice that encompasses sculptural installation, filmmaking, photography, ceramics, painting, writing, and social media. Born in Beijing, China, in 1957, he is a conceptual artist who fuses traditional craftsmanship and his Chinese heritage, moving freely between a variety of formal languages to reflect on contemporary geopolitical and sociopolitical conditions. Ai Weiwei’s work and life regularly interact and inform one another, often extending to his activism and advocacy for international human rights.
Gianluca Costantini is an Italian cartoonist, comic journalist, and activist. He has contributed to numerous publications and is the author of several graphic novels. He is well know for his drawing related to human rights campaigns all over the world. He collaborates with organizations such as the Committee to Protect Journalists, ActionAid, and SOS Méditerranée. In 2019, he received the Art and Human Rights Award from Amnesty International.

THE CHASE de Jenny Wood

This playbook by a high-level executive at Google not only tells readers how to achieve better outcomes, but also exactly what to do, step-by-step, to overcome the most common personal and professional obstacles, from negotiating a raise to finding a mentor to landing a first date.

THE CHASE:
An Unconventional, Uninhibited, and Unapologetic Approach to Getting What You Want in Life
by Jenny Wood
Portfolio, TBD
(via Writers House)

Jenny Wood was working at Google for more than ten years when she set her sights on a much bigger role in the company. It took more than six months and sixty internal coffee chats for Jenny to go from Manager of Analytical Leads, a member of a seven-person sales team, to Head of U.S. West Coast Technical Operations, leading a team of forty-five alongside four other managers.
All her previous roles were easy to get. This one was hard. It took effort, intentionality, and grit. When she landed the job, Jenny wrote notes to herself as a kind of “playbook,” figuring she’d want to remember the details the next time she had to go through the process. The doc was also a tool Jenny could use as she mentored others. Soon people were sharing; hundreds and then thousands of employees at Google found “Jenny’s Job Search Tips” to be invaluable. Fast forward less than two years, and Jenny’s side project—which now includes workshops, keynotes, and tips on everything from email to influence to building a personal brand—is a full-blown global phenomenon called Own Your Career. A Google program with a $250,000 annual budget, Own Your Career is now used by 58,000 Googlers (that’s one-third of the company) and distributed by Google to companies like American Express, Spotify, Target, Indeed, and CVS.
Turns out lots of people want to know how to go from entry level at a place like Google to the top 2% of management, and in THE CHASE: An Unconventional, Uninhibited, and Unapologetic Approach to Getting What You Want in Life, Jenny Wood gives readers the playbook for that and more. Reclaiming labels we often attach to people who transgress social norms to get what they want—Weird, Selfish, Shameless, Nosy, Obsessed, to name a few—Jenny shows that “to get there, you have to be a little bit out there,” and her book transforms the labels into powerful mantras for success. Wood not only tells readers how to achieve better outcomes, she tells them exactly what to do, step-by-step, to overcome the most common personal and professional obstacles, from negotiating a raise to finding a mentor to landing a first date.

Before Google, Jenny Wood was a research associate at Harvard Business School, authoring case studies that have been published and sold to MBA programs worldwide. With her smarts, energy, and platform—and with Google’s full support in her tailwinds (she also flies airplanes)—Jenny Wood is poised to deliver the next must-buy book for the same ambitious readers who made Dare to Lead and Atomic Habits huge bestsellers.