Archives par étiquette : DeFiore and Company

JAX FREEMAN AND THE PHANTOM SHRIEK de Kwame Mbalia

What do you get when you combine Kwame Mbalia’s incredible imagination and world-building talent with trains, history, and ghosts? Nothing less than middle grade magic. The award-winning author of the best-selling Tristan Strong trilogy has created a secret world where kids can wield magic by summoning the power of their ancestors.

JAX FREEMAN AND THE PHANTOM SHRIEK
by Kwame Mbalia
Freedom Fire/Disney-Hyperion, October 2024
(via Defiore and Company)

On his twelfth birthday, Jackson « Jax » Freeman arrives at Chicago’s Union Station alone, carrying nothing but the baggage of a scandal back in his hometown. He’s been sent away from home to live with relatives he barely knows. But even worse are the strangers who accost him at the train station, including a food vendor who throws dust in his face and a conductor who tries to steal his skin.

At his new school, Jax is assigned to a special class for « summoners, » even though he has no idea what those are . . . until he accidentally unleashes an angry spirit on school grounds. Soon Jax is embroiled in all kinds of trouble, from the disappearance of a new friend to full-out war between summoning families.

When Jax learns that he isn’t the first Freeman to be blamed for a tragedy he didn’t create, he resolves to clear his own name and that of his great-grandfather, who was a porter back in the 1920’s. By following clues, Jax and his schoolmates unlock the secrets of a powerful Praise House, evade vengeful ghosts, and discover that Jax may just be the most talented summoner of all.

“Jax Freeman is my new best friend. I loved everything about this book—the characters, the humor, the page-turning adventure. I’m glad Kwame Mbalia is such a prolific writer because I will be bugging him for the sequel immediately.”—Rick Riordan, New York Times #1 best-selling author of Percy Jackson and the Olympians

“Funny, fast-paced, and full of heart and adventure. You’ll be laughing and cheering and racing through the pages—and guessing right up to the end.”—Shannon Messenger, New York Times best-selling author of the Keeper of Lost Cities series and Sky Fall series

Kwame Mbalia is a #1 New York Times best-selling author and the publisher of Freedom Fire, an imprint of Disney Hyperion devoted to stories about the Black diaspora by Black creators. His debut middle-grade novel, Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky, was awarded a Coretta Scott King Author Honor, and it was followed by Tristan Strong Destroys the World and Tristan Strong Keeps Punching.

LOST ARK DREAMING de Suyi Davies Okungbowa

The brutally engineered class divisions of Snowpiercer meets Rivers Solomon’s The Deep in this high-octane post-climate disaster novella written by Nommo Award-winning author Suyi Davies Okungbowa.

LOST ARK DREAMING
by Suyi Davies Okungbowa
Tordotcom, May 2024
(via DeFiore & Company)

Off the coast of West Africa, decades after the dangerous rise of the Atlantic Ocean, the region’s survivors live inside five partially submerged, kilometers-high towers originally created as a playground for the wealthy. Now the towers’ most affluent rule from their lofty perch at the top while the rest are crammed into the dark, fetid floors below sea level.

There are also those who were left for dead in the Atlantic, only to be reawakened by an ancient power, and who seek vengeance on those who offered them up to the waves.

Three lives within the towers are pulled to the fore of this conflict: Yekini, an earnest, mid-level rookie analyst; Tuoyo, an undersea mechanic mourning a tremendous loss; and Ngozi, an egotistical bureaucrat from the highest levels of governance. They will need to work together if there is to be any hope of a future that is worth living―for everyone.

Suyi Davies Okungbowa is an award-winning author of fantasy and science fiction. He lives in Ontario, where he is a professor of creative writing at the University of Ottawa.

CAVE MOUNTAIN de Benjamin Hale

With the immediacy and extraordinary feeling for people and place of Under the Banner of Heaven and Say Nothing, a compelling true crime story about two young girls who went missing in the same Arkansas woods twenty-three years apart and the strange circumstances connecting them.

CAVE MOUNTAIN
by Benjamin Hale
Harper, March2026
(via DeFiore & Company)

This story begins in 2001 on top of Cave Mountain in the Arkansas Ozarks. A six-year-old girl named Haley—Benjamin Hale’s cousin—got lost on a mountain trail, prompting what was at the time the largest search and rescue mission in the state’s history. Her disappearance—and her account, after she was found, of the “imaginary friend” she met in the woods—would eventually become connected to another story that took place in the same wilderness more than twenty years earlier: a dark and bizarre story of a cult, brainwashing, murder, and the apocalyptic visions of a teenage prophet.

Enriched by Benjamin Hale’s own family history and the lore of the Arkansas Ozarks, CAVE MOUNTAIN is a gripping story about nature and survival, religion and skepticism, and good and evil. At its center are two young girls, years apart, both in danger in the verdant wilds of northern Arkansas.

Benjamin Hale is the author of the novel The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (Twelve, 2011) and the collection The Fat Artist and Other Stories (Simon & Schuster, 2016). His writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Paris Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Conjunctions, and has been anthologized in Best American Science and Nature Writing. He is a senior editor at Conjunctions, teaches at Bard College and Columbia University, and lives in a small town in New York’s Hudson Valley.

HEARTBREAK IS THE NATIONAL ANTHEM de Rob Sheffield

An intimate look at the life and music of modern pop’s most legendary figure, Taylor Swift, from leading music journalist Rob Sheffield.

HEARTBREAK IS THE NATIONAL ANTHEM
by Rob Sheffield
Dey Street, August 2024
(via DeFiore & Company)

As Taylor Swift’s preferred and most trusted music journalist, Rob Sheffield has enjoyed closer access to the mega-star than any other writer working today. His unique insight has afforded him a singular perspective of Taylor’s world and her impact on the world. Inspired by his years of this exclusive access, and the Swiftie response to his commentary on their beloved Taylor, Sheffield merges reportage and criticism in a way that only he can.

At once one of the most beloved music figures of the past two decades and one of the most criticized, Taylor Swift is known as much for her life beyond her music as she is for her constant stream of hits—and most of all, how she uses the former to not only create the latter, but market and brand herself throughout the many “eras” of her career. At once both approachable and enigmatic, Taylor Swift has become a master of controlling the narrative surrounding her life and career while keeping fans eager to learn of her every next step.

In the tradition of Sheffield’s award-winning Dreaming the Beatles, Heartbreak Is the National Anthem will inform and delight a legion of fans who hang on every word from Taylor and every word Rob writes on her.

Rob Sheffield is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. He has been a rock critic and pop culture journalist for more than 15 years, and has appeared on various MTV and VH1 shows. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

THE STAR ON THE GRAVE de Linda Margolin Royal

Inspired by the incredible true story of the Japanese diplomat who defied his government to save thousands from the Nazis.

THE STAR ON THE GRAVE
by Linda Margolin Royal
Affirm Press (Australia), February 2024
(via DeFiore and Company)

In 1940, as the Nazis sweep toward Lithuania, Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara defies his own government and secretly issues thousands of visas to Jewish refugees desperate to flee. After the war, Sugihara is dismissed and disappears into obscurity.

In 1968 Australia, Rachael Margol, her father and her grandmother live disconnected from one another and haunted by unspoken tragedies. When Rachel announces her engagement to a Greek Orthodox man, it detonates a long-held secret. The Margols are actually the Margolins: they are Jewish, and her family has concealed their identity from her and the world. But why?

As Rachel struggles to understand this deception, an opportunity arrives to travel to Japan with her beloved grandmother to meet Sugihara, Rachel is determined to go but will a journey to Japan, and the secrets it uncovers, heal the Margolins or fracture them for good?

An extraordinary novel inspired by the true story of Sugihara, and the thousands of people – including the author – who owe him their lives. Chiune Sugihara has been called the « Japanese Schindler » and it’s estimated that 100,000 people are alive today because of him.

Linda Margolin Royal was born in Sydney, forever thankful her father and grandparents received life-saving transit visas from Chiune Sugihara in 1940, which enabled them to enter Japan and escape the Holocaust; and ultimately meant they could find a permanent, safe home in Australia in 1941. The remainder of her family were murdered in concentration camps. This work is a labor of love to which she is now devoting her life. She trained as a graphic designer and then copywriter, and spent 30 years in the advertising industry both in Australia and the US, writing TV, radio and press for major multinationals. THE STAR ON THE GRAVE is her first novel.