Archives par étiquette : Writers House

THE IMMORTAL KING RAO de Vauhini Vara

An epic, imaginative debut novel about family, modernity, technology, and what it means to be human, told through the soul of an Indian software engineer-entrepreneur and his daughter.

THE IMMORTAL KING RAO
by Vauhini Vara
W.W. Norton, May 2022
(via Writers House)

Will you, dear Shareholder, set Athena free? Athena Rao must reckon with the memory of her father, King Rao―literally. Through biotechnological innovation, he has given her his memories. His Dalit childhood on an Indian coconut plantation in the 1950s is as alive to her as her own existence in a prison cell, accused of her father’s murder.
Egocentric, brilliant, a little damaged, King Rao had a visionary idea: the personal computer known as the Coconut. His wife, Margie, was an artist with a marketing genius. Together they created a new world order, led by a corporate-run government. Athena’s future is now in the hands of its Shareholders―unless she can rejoin the Exes, a resistance group sustaining tech-free lifestyles on low-lying islands.
Lyrical, satirical, and profound, The Immortal King Rao obliterates genre to confront the digital age. This gripping, brilliant debut poses an urgent question: can anyone―peasant laborers, convention-destroying entrepreneurs, radical anarchists, social-media followers―ever get free?

Vauhini Vara has worked as a Wall Street Journal technology reporter and as the business editor for The New Yorker. Her fiction has been honored by the O. Henry Prize and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. From a Dalit background, she lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

 

HEAVEN’S A LIE de Wallace Stroby

When a woman witnesses a fatal car accident outside the Jersey Shore motel she manages, she’s suddenly thrust into a nightmare of gang violence, guns, and money that she can’t outrun.

HEAVEN’S A LIE
by Wallace Stroby
Mulholland Books, April 2021
(chez Writers House – voir catalogue)

Joette’s life brings new meaning to the phrase “paycheck to paycheck.” Struggling to afford her mother’s sky-high medical bills and also keep the lights on in her trailer home, Joette needs a break. So, when she spies a briefcase full of money amongst the fiery wreckage of a fatal car accident, she knows she can’t just let it be. Inside is a bounty better than she could have dreamed—just shy of $300,000 in neatly stacked hundreds and fifties. Enough to pay off her debts, give her mother the care she deserves, and maybe even help out a few of her friends. But, of course, the missing briefcase didn’t go unnoticed by the original owner, Travis—a ruthless dealer that’ll stop at nothing to get back what’s his. Joette is way out of her depth, but can’t seem to stop herself from participating in this cat-and-mouse chase. But can she beat Travis at his own game?

Wallace Stroby is an award-winning journalist and the author of seven novels, four of which feature Crissa Stone, the professional thief labeled “crime fiction’s best bad girl ever.” His first novel, The Barbed-Wire Kiss, was a Barry Award finalist for best debut novel.

THE TORQUED MAN de Peter Mann

Set in Nazi Berlin, THE TORQUED MAN focuses on a German spy handler tortured by pangs of conscience and by his own sexuality, and on the charismatic IRA fighter he springs from prison in Franco’s Spain to enlist as an anti-British saboteur.

THE TORQUED MAN
by Peter Mann
HarperCollins, Winter 2022
(chez Writers House – voir catalogue)

Berlin—September, 1945. Two manuscripts are found in the rubble, each one narrating conflicting versions of the life of an Irish spy during the war in this slow-burn historical thriller with a dark comic edge with echoes of Thomas Mann and Flann O’Brien. One manuscript is the journal of German spy handler Adrian de Groot, written from a cellar during the Berlin air raids of 1943, following the death of his agent, friend, and former lover Frank Pike. In de Groot’s narrative, Pike is a charismatic Irish socialist and IRA fighter recruited by German intelligence to assist with the planned Irish-German invasion of Britain, but who never gets the chance to consummate his deal with the devil and spends his final years languishing in Berlin. While the journal chronicles de Groot’s complicated relationship with Pike and his attempts to keep him in his thrall, it also reveals de Groot’s own psychological struggle—as a bookish homosexual, erstwhile literary translator, and anti-Nazi conservative— to accommodate himself to the murderous regime he works for.
Meanwhile, the other MS—Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia: Concerning his Murderous Exploits in Berlin—gives a very different account of the Irishman’s doings in the Reich. Assuming the alter ego of the Celtic hero Finn McCool, Pike appears here as a double agent gone rogue. His mission: an assassination campaign of highranking Nazi doctors, culminating in the killing of Dr. Theodor Morell, the personal physician of Adolf Hitler. The two manuscripts spiral around each other, leaving only the reader to know the full truth of Pike and de Groot’s relationship, their ultimate loyalties, and their efforts to resist the fascist reality in which they are caught.
THE TORQUED MAN is inspired by the historical figure Frank Ryan, a left-wing Irish Republican who was recruited in 1940 by German foreign intelligence, sprung from prison in Spain, and who spent the remainder of the war stewing in Berlin until his death in 1944. The book draws on British intelligence files from the UK’s National Archives, based on the interrogation of Frank Ryan’s German handler, as well as biographies of Ryan published in Ireland. It also pulls from World War II-era diaries, Celtic myth and epic, recent scholarship on Nazi doctors, drugs, espionage, anti-Nazi resistance, everyday life in the Third Reich, the T4 Euthanasia program, Francoist Spain, and the wartime politics of Ireland in order to give readers a unique window onto the Second World War— all in a story that reads like Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus swallowed Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds and George McDonald Fraser’s The Flashman series and washed it down with a spy novel.

Peter Mann has a PhD in Modern European history and is a past recipient of the Whiting Fellowship. He teaches history and literature at Stanford and the University of San Francisco. He is also a graphic artist and since 2014 has published a weekly online syndicated comic strip with Andrews McMeel Universal called The Quixote Syndrome.

ON A NIGHT OF A THOUSAND STARS de Andrea Yaryura Clark

In this moving, emotional narrative of love and resilience, a young couple confronts the start of
Argentina’s Dirty War in the 1970s, and a daughter searches for truth twenty years later.

ON A NIGHT OF A THOUSAND STARS
by Andrea Y. Clark
Grand Central, Spring 2022
(via Writers House)

New York, 1998. Santiago Larrea, a wealthy Argentine diplomat, is holding court alongside his wife, Lila, and their daughter, Paloma, a college student and budding jewelry designer, at their annual summer polo match and soiree. All seems perfect in the Larreas’ world—until an unexpected party guest from Santiago’s university days shakes his usually unflappable demeanor. The woman’s cryptic comments spark Paloma’s curiosity about her father’s past, of which she knows little.
When the family travels to Buenos Aires for Santiago’s UN ambassadorial appointment, Paloma is determined to learn more about his life in the years leading up to the military dictatorship of 1976. With the help of a local university student, Franco Bonetti, an activist member of H.I.J.O.S—a group whose members are the children of the Desaparecidos, or the “Disappeared,” men and women who were forcibly disappeared by the state during Argentina’s “Dirty War”—Paloma unleashes a chain of events that not only leads her to question her family and her identity, but also puts her life in danger.
In compelling fashion, ON A NIGHT OF A THOUSAND STARS speaks to relationships, morality, and identity during a brutal period in Argentinian history, and the understanding—and redemption—people crave in the face of tragedy.

Andrea Y. Clark grew up in Argentina amid the political violence of the 1970s until her family moved to North America. After completing her university studies, she returned to Buenos Aires to reconnect with her roots. She followed with interest the stories then emerging about the children of the “Disappeared”—the youngest victims of Argentina’s military dictatorship in the 1970s—who were coming of age and grappling with the fates of their families. She conducted numerous interviews documenting their stories, which inspired her debut novel of historical fiction.

THE HUSBANDS de Chandler Baker

From Chandler Baker, the New York Times bestselling author of Whisper Network comes THE HUSBANDS, a novel that asks: to what lengths will a woman go for a little more help from her husband?

THE HUSBANDS
by Chandler Baker
Flatiron/St. Martin’s Press, June 2021
(chez Writers House – voir catalogue)

Nora Spangler is a successful attorney but when it comes to domestic life, she packs the lunches, schedules the doctor appointments, knows where the extra paper towel rolls are, and designs and orders the holiday cards. Her husband works hard, too… but why does it seem like she is always working so much harder? When the Spanglers go house hunting in Dynasty Ranch, an exclusive suburban neighborhood, Nora meets a group of high-powered women—a tech CEO, a neurosurgeon, an award-winning therapist, a bestselling author—with enviably supportive husbands. When she agrees to help with a resident’s wrongful death case, she is pulled into the lives of the women there. She finds the air is different in Dynasty Ranch. The women aren’t hanging on by a thread. But as the case unravels, Nora uncovers a plot that may explain the secret to having-it-all. One that’s worth killing for. Calling to mind a Stepford Wives gender-swap, THE HUSBANDS imagines a world where the burden of the “second shift” is equally shared—and what it may take to get there.

Chandler Baker grew up in Florida, went to college in Pennsylvania, and studied law in Texas, where she now lives with her family and an ever-growing pile of books. Although she loves spinning tales with a touch of horror, she is a much bigger scaredy-cat than her stories would lead you to believe. In addition to the High School Horror series, Chandler is the author of the young adult novel, Alive.