Archives par étiquette : DeFiore and Company

THE CARPENTER AND THE CATHEDRAL de Hank Silver

At once an insider account of the historic restoration and a celebration of craft and what the act of making and building reveals about being human in our modern world. For readers of Patrick Hutchison’s Cabin (St. Martin’s Press), Callum Robinson’s Ingrained (Ecco), and Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft (Penguin).

THE CARPENTER AND THE CATHEDRAL:
The Meaning of Craft and the Reconstruction of Notre-Dame de Paris
by Hank Silver
Viking, Spring 2028
(via DeFiore and Company)

Six hundred logs. When American carpenter Hank Silver arrived at a workshop in Normandy, he was surrounded by heaping piles of oak logs. His small, international team’s task was to hew all them by hand, using reproductions of medieval axes, into more than a thousand individual beams, then lay out and cut fifty-seven roof trusses and framing that would become the nave of the Notre-Dame de Paris. They had just eight months.

When fire engulfed the iconic Notre-Dame Cathedral on April 15, 2019, few believed it could be restored to its former glory using the original materials and methods of the thirteenth century. But thanks to a small group of traditional craftsman, the restoration was indeed possible. THE CARPENTER AND THE CATHEDRAL: The Meaning of Craft and the Reconstruction of Notre-Dame de Paris, is Silver’s behind-the-scenes account of one of the most significant architectural restorations of all time. But it is so much more.

Hank Silver was the only American who worked on site at the cathedral, and his path to Notre-Dame was anything but traditional. Born and raised in an observant Jewish family in New York City, he came to carpentry in college when he happened upon a stash of woodworking books at his grandmother’s house. After graduating, he pursued carpentry and learned traditional timber framing—and what it means to work with one’s hands and with centuries-old tools that have been worn smooth by countless hands before. In captivating prose, he reflects on the connection between the maker and the materials, between craftsmanship and what endures.

For readers of Patrick Hutchison’s Cabin (St. Martin’s Press), Callum Robinson’s Ingrained (Ecco), and Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft (Penguin), THE CARPENTER AND THE CATHEDRAL is at once an insider account of the historic restoration and a celebration of craft and what the act of making and building reveals about being human in our modern world. 

Hank Silver is a master carpenter and the founder of Ironwood Timberworks. He built custom timber frame structures throughout New England for more than 10 years. Since 2018, he has been a member of the volunteer crew Carpenters Without Borders, whose mission is the restoration of world carpentry heritage and the transmission of traditional skills and techniques to future generations of craftspeople. Silver has been featured in two documentaries and was awarded the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art’s 2025 Arthur Ross Award in Artisanship & Craftsmanship. He has been featured in The New York TimesNational Geographic, and GQ and on CBS News, NBC’s Weekend Nightly News, and Good Day New York. This is his first book.

THE GREAT WHEREVER de Shannon Sanders

A multigenerational story—a dazzling portrait of a family and its history in the American South, from Reconstruction through the 1930s to the present day.

THE GREAT WHEREVER
by Shannon Sanders
Holt, Spring 2026
(via DeFiore and Company)

THE GREAT WHEREVER is a multigenerational story—a dazzling portrait of a family and its history in the American South, from Reconstruction through the 1930s to the present day. As she’s done in her previous short story work, Sanders sends the reader on a kind of intellectual treasure hunt through generations. She is especially brilliant about invisible legacies—not only family secrets, but also lineages hidden in plain sight; aspects of a family tree that are consciously and unconsciously shaped, especially by women; and inheritances that are interrupted or thwarted, sometimes violently.

The novel is about a family, but it also breaks open the idea of what a family is, how a family interacts with land, history, time. Sanders conveys this all while being so attentive to the life and character and thoughts and feelings of one very specific and very relatable millennial.

In the tradition of expansive family sagas The Love Songs of W.E.B. Dubois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Memphis by Tara M. Stringfellow, and with the thoroughly modern anxieties and crackling social commentary of novels like Such a Fun Age. The Great Wherever is a story of race and generational wealth, family and ambition, and a young woman’s coming-to-terms with her legacy.

Exploring the many people, places, and events that can shape our inheritances without our knowing Sanders puts forth the notion that each generation exerts an influence on the ones to follow, even when that influence isn’t consciously felt and people are challenged to find their own emotional truths. This is an intricate meditation on the ways we learn to define ourselves in—and out of—our loved ones’ orbits, how we carry forward after loss, and what is choice and what is fate in the tumultuous conveyance of an ancestral home across generations.

Shannon Sanders lives and works near Washington, DC. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in One Story, Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Electric Literature, Joyland, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere, and was a 2020 winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Sanders’ debut story collection Company won the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, was named a Best Book of 2023 by Publishers Weekly, was an Indie Next Pick, and was shortlisted for the 2024 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.

ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS de Hank Phillippi Ryan

Is a debut author’s blockbuster bestseller about to ruin her life? A glamorous book tour becomes a deadly cat-and-mouse chase in this new and captivating thriller by « master of suspense » (Publishers Weekly) and USA Today bestselling author Hank Phillippi Ryan.

ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS
by Hank Phillippi Ryan
Minotaur, September 2025
(via DeFiore and Company)

Debut sensation Tessa Calloway is on a whirlwind book tour for her instant bestseller, All This Could Be Yours. In a different city every night, Tessa receives standing ovations from adoring fans while her husband Henry and their two children cheer her on from their brand-new dream house.

But there’s a chilling problem with Tessa’s triumphant book tour―she soon discovers she is being stalked by someone who’s obsessed not only with sabotaging her career, but also with destroying her perfect family back home.

Tessa fears the fallout from an impossible decision she once made―what felt like a genuine deal with the devil―appears to be coming due. And she’s realizing that every high-stakes bargain comes with a high-stakes price. If Tessa can’t untangle who’s threatening to expose her darkest secrets, she’ll lose her career, her family―and possibly her life.

« A nail-biting thriller. » ―People

« ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS is a captivating and irresistible portrayal of the deals we make, the stories we tell ourselves, and what happens when the fine lines between fiction and reality blur under the searing pressure of fame, fans, family ― and a secret sinister bargain. A propulsive page-turner with a hugely satisfying reveal. »
Elle Cosimano, New York Times bestselling author of Finlay Donovan is Killing It

USA Today bestselling author Hank Phillippi Ryan has won five Agatha Awards, five Anthony Awards, the Daphne, the Macavity, and the Mary Higgins Clark Award. As on-air investigative reporter for Boston’s WHDH-TV, she’s won thirty-seven Emmy Awards and many more journalism honors. A past president of national Sisters in Crime, a founder of Mystery Writers of America University, and a board member of International Thriller Writers, Ryan lives in Boston.

THE MOUNTAIN CROWN de Karin Lowachee

An epic dragon-rider quest where Empress of Salt and Fortune meets Temeraire.

THE MOUNTAIN CROWN
(The Crowns of Ishia, Book 1)
by Karin Lowachee
Rebellion Publishing UK, October 2024
(via DeFiore and Company)

Méka must capture a king dragon, or die trying.

War between the island states of Kattaka and Mazemoor has left no one unscathed. Méka’s nomadic people, the Ba’Suon, were driven from their homeland by the Kattakans. Those who remained were forced to live under the Kattakan yoke, to serve their greed for gold alongside the dragons with whom the Ba’Suon share an empathic connection.

A decade later and under a fragile truce, Méka returns home from her exile for an ancient, necessary rite: gathering a king dragon of the Crown Mountains to maintain balance in the wild country. But Méka’s act of compassion toward an imprisoned dragon and Lilley, a Kattakan veteran of the war, soon draws the ire of the imperialistic authorities. They order the unwelcome addition of an enigmatic Ba’Suon traitor named Raka to accompany Méka and Lilley to the mountains.

The journey is filled with dangers both within and without. As conflict threatens to reignite, the survival of the Ba’Suon people, their dragons, and the land itself will depend on the decisions – defiant or compliant – that Méka and her companions choose to make. But not even Méka, kin to the great dragons of the North, can anticipate the depth of the consequences to her world.

THE MOUNTAIN CROWN is the first entry into an unmissable fantasy trilogy about resistance, loyalty, and resilience in the fact of colonial domination.

Karin Lowachee was born in South America, grew up in Canada, and worked in the Arctic. She has been a creative writing instructor, adult education teacher, and volunteer in a maximum security prison. Her novels have been translated into French, Hebrew, and Japanese, and her short stories have been published in numerous anthologies, best-of collections, and magazines. When she isn’t writing, she serves at the whim of a black cat.

ANIMA RISING de Christopher Moore

From New York Times bestselling author Christopher Moore comes a deranged tale of a mad scientist, a famous painter, two psychiatrists and an undead woman’s empowering journey of self-discovery.

ANIMA RISING
by Christopher Moore
William Morrow, May 2025
(via DeFiore and Company)

1911. Gustav Klimt, the most famous painter in Vienna, finds a young woman floating in the Danube canal, who has no idea of who she is or where she came from. He names her Judith, after the Hebrew heroine who beheaded an Assyrian general and thus saved her people. Back at his studio, Klimt and his model-turned-muse, Wally, tend to the girl, but she is almost feral, blurts out nonsense in a variety of languages, and generally scandalizes Viennese café society.

With help from famous psychiatrists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Judith recalls being stranded in the arctic one hundred years ago, locked in a crate by a man named Victor Frankenstein, being kidnapped by an enormous patchwork monster, before he murders her for trying to escape him and then finds herself with the gods of the Inuit Underworld. She is of course, the bride of Frankenstein.

But how did she turn up in Vienna more than a century later? And why are so many people keen to find her, including Geoff, the giant croissant-eating dog who also shares her superhuman strength, endurance and immortality?

Welcome to Anima Rising, Christopher Moore’s most ingenious and most hilarious novel yet.

With a body of work that boasts some of the most outlandish plots and outrageous characters ever to make it onto the printed page, Christopher Moore has made a name for himself as the clown prince of contemporary fiction. He is the author of The Serpent of Venice, Second Hand Souls, and other novels. He lives in San Francisco.