SUPER BLOOM de Megan Tady

For fans of Emily Henry’s Beach Read and Maria Semple, SUPER BLOOM is a heartwarming and hilarious debut novel about a 30-something massage therapist enlisted by an infamous romance novelist to dish the dirt on the not-so-pristine world of luxury spas.

SUPER BLOOM
by Megan Tady
‎ Zibby Books, Summer 2023
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Icing her hands. Grieving her boyfriend. Trying not to get fired. Each day feels the same for Joan Johnston. Her life gets a boost of excitement when a new massage client—Carmen Bronze, a high-maintenance romance novelist—corners Joan into becoming her research assistant for her next bestseller.
Joan’s notes start off as expected—demanding clients, inane spa rules, wacky colleagues— but she soon finds herself journaling about the sudden death of her boyfriend. What’s more, she starts writing their relationship back into existence through a romance novel of her own. But the longer she spends crafting her own fictional happily ever after, the more she risks losing the possibility of that in real life…

Megan Tady is a writer and editor running the company Word-Lift, and her writing has appeared in The Huffington Post and Ms. Magazine, among others. She was a finalist for the 2021 Penguin Random House Student Fiction Award. Megan lives in Western Massachusetts with her family. SUPER BLOOM is her debut novel.

ALL ELSE FAILED de Dana Sachs

As a million displaced people sought refuge in Europe, the global relief system failed. This is the story of the volunteers who stepped forward to help.

ALL ELSE FAILED:
The Unlikely Volunteers at the Heart of the Migrant Aid Crisis
by Dana Sachs
‎ Bellevue Literary Press, March 2023
(via Kaplan/Defiore Rights)

In 2015, increasing numbers of refugees and migrants, most of them fleeing war-torn homelands, arrived by boat on the shores of Greece, setting off the greatest human displacement since WWII. As journalists reported horrific mass drownings, an ill-prepared and seemingly indifferent world looked on. Those who reached Europe needed food, clothing, medicine, and shelter, but the international aid system broke down completely.
ALL ELSE FAILED is Dana Sachs’s compelling eyewitness account of the successes—and failures—of the volunteer relief network that emerged to meet the enormous need. People from around the globe pitched in to address the crisis. Yet the most dedicated and effective volunteers were often migrants themselves, including Rima, a mother of six, who cooked for four hundred refugees in an abandoned schoolhouse in Athens; Ibrahim, who managed donations flowing to the grassroots effort; and Sami, whose language skills helped fellow migrants navigate a foreign world.
Closely following the odysseys of seven individual men and women, and their families, ALL ELSE FAILED tells a story of despair and resilience, revealing the humanity within an immense humanitarian disaster.

Dana Sachs is a journalist, novelist, and cofounder of the nonprofit Humanity Now: Direct Refugee Relief, which supports grassroots teams providing aid to displaced people. A former Fulbright Scholar, she is the author of three works of nonfiction, The House on Dream Street: Memoir of an American Woman in Vietnam; The Life We Were Given: Operation Babylift, International Adoption, and the Children of War in Vietnam; and All Else Failed: The Unlikely Volunteers at the Heart of the Migrant Aid Crisis (forthcoming from Bellevue Literary Press in March 2023), as well as the novels If You Lived Here and The Secret of the Nightingale Palace. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, and Mother Jones. Sachs lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.

BIGGER BETTER BOLDER de Jennifer Cohen

BIGGER BETTER BOLDER:
Live the Life You Want, Not the Life You Get
by Jennifer Cohen
Hachette Go, December 2022
(via Kaplan/Defiore Rights)

Jennifer Cohen is where she is today because one day, she learned how to be bold. When you become bold, good things start to happen. Then great things start to happen. You break free from what’s holding you back, you aren’t afraid to fail, and you learn from every shot you take—even when you miss the target, especially when you miss the target. And you definitely bust out of the “it’s good enough trap”.
When you become bold, you ask for what you want—and you get it. Why settle for taking what you can get, rather than going after the things you truly want? Instead, Jennifer has a better idea. Do what she did: Live the Life You Want, Not the Life You Get.
Be bold. Identify what you really want—and ask for it.
Be bold. Change your mindset and fail your way to success.
Be bold. Chase what you want, don’t take what you can get.

Jennifer Cohen is a bestselling author of three books in the fitness and wellness space, including Strong Is The New Skinny, with a world-famous clientele that includes Hollywood celebrities, Olympic athletes, and others. She’s a trendspotting entrepreneur who has sold companies for millions of dollars; a sought-after brand strategist and influencer; host of a top-rated podcast she created with more than 3 million downloads and counting; and an in-demand motivational speaker for a range of companies as well as business schools, with a TEDx talk that has more than 2 million views on YouTube, and another 2 million-plus on the TED website.

GEMINI FALLS de Sean Wilson

A gripping, sweeping and unforgettable debut from a writer whose talent cannot be contained.

GEMINI FALLS
by Sean Wilson
Affirm Press Australia, October 2022
(via Kaplan/Defiore Rights)

Australia, 1930, at the peak of the Great Depression: Detective Jude Turner is assigned to investigate a murder in his home town of Gemini. With fear and polio swirling through the city and his wife long passed, Jude decides to take his children, Morris and Lottie, with him to the small town he gladly left many years before.
Thoughtful and a little anxious, twelve-year-old Morris Turner sometimes feels more at home gazing at the stars than with his busy father and distant older sister. Arriving at the ancestral farm he meets relations that are strangers to him – an uncle, an aunt and a cousin, Flo, who has an unhealthy obsession with detective novels. The family is drawn into a community reeling from a murder and a financial crash. Without a clear suspect in the murder, the town’s suspicions turn to the downtrodden, huddled in camps outside the town.
But Morris is sure there is more to this case. With the help of new friends, he turns his attention instead to the people around him, confronting his fears and searching for a killer in a town full of mysteries – a search that will bring secrets old and new to the surface, and leave someone else fighting for their life.

Sean Wilson is an emerging writer and playwright from Melbourne. His short stories and plays have been recognized in many awards including a shortlisting for the 2016 Patrick White Playwrights Award (Sydney Theatre Company).

THE BOOKBINDER OF JERICHO de Pip Williams

The second novel from the international bestselling author of The Dictionary Of Lost Words.

THE BOOKBINDER OF JERICHO
by Pip Williams
‎ Affirm Press Australia, November 2022
(via via Kaplan/Defiore Rights)

Whose truth is lost when knowledge is controlled by men? In 1914, when the war draws the young men of Britain away to fight, it is the women left behind who must keep the nation running. Two of those women are Peggy and Maude, twin sisters who work in the bindery at Oxford University Press. Peggy is intelligent, ambitious and dreams of going to Oxford University, but for most of her life she has been told her job is to bind the books, not read them. Maude, meanwhile, wants nothing more than what she has. She is extraordinary but vulnerable. Peggy needs to watch over her.
When refugees arrive from the devastated cities of Belgium, they send ripples through the community and through the sisters’ lives. Peggy begins to see the possibility of another future where she can use her intellect and not just her hands, but as war and illness reshape her world, it is love, and the responsibility that comes with it, that threaten to hold her back.
THE BOOKBINDER OF JERICHO is a story about knowledge – who makes it, who can access it, and what truth may be lost in the process. In this beautiful companion to the international bestseller The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams explores another rarely seen slice of history seen through women’s eyes. Intelligent, thoughtful and rich with unforgettable characters.

Pip Williams was born in London and grew up in Sydney. She has spent most of her working life as a social researcher and is the author of The Dictionary of Lost Words and two nonfiction books. This is her first novel. Pip lives in the Adelaide Hills, Australia with her partner, two boys and an assortment of animals.