Archives de catégorie : Women’s Fiction

DANZIG de Hilke Sellnick

Love in a time of upheaval: the bestselling author’s captivating new saga set in Danzig.

DANZIG
by Hilke Sellnick
Penguin Germany, June 2023

Danzig, 1856. When young Johanna Berendt finds herself standing in front of the big villa in Langgasse Street, she feels deeply embarrassed. She eloped with a pianist just a few months ago, but now she’s back and hoping that her family will forgive her. Yet a shock awaits Johanna: her father has died, and her brother is now in charge of the family and their long-established merchant business. And he has no time for his freedom-loving sister.
When Berthold Forster, a good-natured and considerably older shipyard owner, proposes to Johanna, she seizes the opportunity to free herself from her brother’s sway. At Forster’s side, she even develops an interest in shipbuilding, and Georg, Forster’s son from his first marriage, is put out when she expresses a desire to help run the place. Yet Johanna is intelligent and courageous enough to pursue her vision, and Georg soon realises he has met his match – in business, of course. Or do his feelings run deeper?

Volume 2 (May 2024) and volume 3 (June 2025) also available:

Hilke Sellnick‘s bestselling historical novels have won her hundreds of thousands of fans over the years. With this first book in a brilliant new series for Penguin, she is now showing her readers a different side to herself. Set in nineteenth-century Danzig, it tells the addictive story of a young woman who defies social convention, turns an old shipyard into a successful business, and fights for love.

EINE FAST PERFEKTE DEBÜTANTIN de Hannah Conrad

True love and scandals in nineteenth-century Munich…

EINE FAST PERFEKTE DEBÜTANTIN
[An Almost Perfect Debutante]
The Lily Palace Saga, vol. 1
by Hannah Conrad
‎ Heyne/Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe, November 2022

Munich, 1827. Johanna von Seybach has moved from Königsberg to the magnificent Lily Palace, her uncle’s family seat – where an exciting season awaits her! Even before her official debut, it looks like a proposal from the eligible bachelor Friedrich Veidt is all but certain. But then Johanna has an unguarded moment of passion, and her reputation is suddenly in tatters. Friedrich drops her, and she’s left broken-hearted. Will anyone want to marry her, after such a scandal? Then she meets Alexander von Reuss at a glittering masked ball. That same evening, they grow closer than they should, experiencing a sensuous moment of surrender. But Johanna’s scandalous past is making such waves that even true love may not be enough to save her.

Hannah Conrad has already published many popular novels across various genres. She studied German and cultural journalism, and has won several awards, including the DeLiA Book Prize, the Selfpublisher prize and a short-story prize. She uses her extensive travels to research her novels, and is at home in several German cities.

THE SUNSET CROWD de Karin Tanabe

In 1970s Los Angeles, everyone is fighting to reach the top, but very few have the talent, ambition, and luck to get there.

THE SUNSET CROWD
by Karin Tanabe
St. Martin’s Press, July 2023

Fame. Fortune. Love. You can’t have them all.
Meet L.A. darling Evra Scott. The daughter of an Oscar-winning director and a Brazilian bombshell actress, Evra is the city’s reigning style queen. By day, she’s at the helm of Sunset on Sunset, the store beloved by Hollywood’s young and beautiful. By night, she’s on the arm of Kai de la Faire, Hawaii’s hottest export, and the screenwriter of the moment. 
Enter Theodora Leigh. The twenty-something Paramount assistant looks like a big screen star, but her sights are firmly set behind the scenes, as she fights to become a movie producer in a town where sex and sexism sell. Theodora’s got the talent and instincts, but she’s not willing to wait. Luckily, getting ahead by any means necessary is L.A.’s mantra.      
Observing it all is Bea Dupont, a photographer for Rolling Stone and Vogue, who never misses the party, but always keeps to its fringes. A Manhattan blue blood turned West Coast bohemian, Bea holds Evra’s Sunset crowd together. She’s also Kai’s oldest friend, and she’s harbored a not-so-secret flame for him since they met at an elite Swiss boarding school. 
But in Hollywood, no one stays on top forever. And it’s not long before Theodora’s unrelenting ambition sets in motion a dramatic quest for power in an industry that is as glamorous as it is duplicitous.
From the pulsating Sunset Strip to the French Riviera, Tanabe’s new novel is a story of survival and reinvention, of faking it until you make it, and the glittering appeal of wealth and power, as it seeks to answer that timeless question—who gets to have the American dream? 

Karin Tanabe is the author of several novels, including A Woman of Intelligence, A Hundred Suns and The Gilded Years (soon to be a major motion picture starring Zendaya, who will produce alongside Reese Witherspoon/Hello Sunshine). A former Politico reporter, her writing has also been featured in The Washington Post, Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, and Newsday. She has appeared as a celebrity and politics expert on Entertainment Tonight, CNN, and CBS Early Show. A graduate of Vassar College, Karin lives in Washington, DC.

THE WAYS WE HIDE de Kristina McMorris

From the New York Times bestselling author of Sold On A Monday―over a million copies sold!―comes a sweeping World War II tale of an illusionist whose recruitment by British intelligence sets her on a perilous, heartrending path.

THE WAYS WE HIDE
by Kristina McMorris
Sourcebooks, September 2022

As a little girl raised amid the hardships of Michigan’s Copper Country, Fenna Vos learned to focus on her own survival. That ability sustains her even now as the Second World War rages in faraway countries. Though she performs onstage as the assistant to an unruly escape artist, behind the curtain she’s the mastermind of their act. Ultimately, controlling her surroundings and eluding traps of every kind helps her keep a lingering trauma at bay.
Yet for all her planning, Fenna doesn’t foresee being called upon by British military intelligence. Tasked with designing escape aids to thwart the Germans, MI9 seeks those with specialized skills for a war nearing its breaking point. Fenna reluctantly joins the unconventional team as an inventor. But when a test of her loyalty draws her deep into the fray, she discovers no mission is more treacherous than escaping one’s past.
Inspired by stunning true accounts, THE WAYS WE HIDE is a gripping story of love and loss, the wars we fight―on the battlefields and within ourselves―and the courage found in unexpected places.

Kristina McMorris is a New York Times bestselling author of two novellas and six novels, including the runaway bestseller Sold on a Monday. Initially inspired by her grandparents’ WWII courtship letters, her works of fiction have garnered more than twenty national literary awards. Prior to her writing career, she owned a wedding-and-event planning company until she had far surpassed her limit of YMCA and chicken dances. She also worked as a weekly TV-show host for Warner Bros. and an ABC affiliate, beginning at age nine with an Emmy Award-winning program. A graduate of Pepperdine University, she lives near Portland, Oregon, where (ironically) she’s entirely deficient of a green thumb and doesn’t own a single umbrella.

SERPENT’S CRESCENT de Vivian de Klerk

Vivian de Klerk’s sharp observations and brilliantly acerbic satirical wit make this multi-layered novel at once horrifying, shocking and poignant – and very, very funny.

SERPENT’S CRESCENT
by Vivian de Klerk
‎Picador Africa, APril 2022
(via The Lennon-Ritchie Agency)

In the small rural town of Qonda, South Africa, the power and water supplies are unreliable, property prices are down, and citizens are slowly suffocating in the acrid smoke from the municipal dump. Recently retired English teacher Megan Merton has lived here all her life, most of it at No. 8 Serpent Crescent. So who better than this self-styled pillar of society to shine a spotlight on the decline and dysfunction, not to mention the dubious activities, past and present, of many of her neighbours. Nefarious deeds and bad behaviour deserve harsh treatment and appropriate retribution, if not consignment to one of Dante’s fiendish nine circles of hell. At least that’s what Megan believes – in fact she’s been taking matters into her own hands, unnoticed, for years. And now she has decided to write it all down, to shake all of the skeletons loose, and rejoice in the inventive punishments she devised and personally delivered to the wicked.
Then her neighbour Elizabeth Cardew, a lecturer in Classical Studies, suffers a stroke and Megan is entrusted with the keys to No. 9. While Elizabeth begins a long recovery at the local care facility, Megan relishes the chance to snoop. Curious as to ‘what a stroke victim looks like’, she decides to visit and see for herself. A bond develops between the two women – one a cold and calculating sociopath, the other a courageous and lonely academic – something that takes both of them by surprise.

Vivian de Klerk was born in 1954 in Grahamstown, South Africa. She served as Professor of Linguistics at Rhodes University, where she spent 24 years as an academic, devoted to teaching and research, and then 7 years as Dean of Students. She has published numerous scholarly articles and 2 academic books during that time, but now she is having fun, enjoying herself, indulging in writing pure fiction. Her debut novel, Not to Mention was awarded the Gerald Kraak writing grant.