Mystery, history, industry,
dynasty, and more
coming your way
this fall
“Downton Abbey meets The Addams Family” might be my favorite book description of an upcoming title this season. It encapsulates one of the fall/winter books recommended by LJ’s review editors, the intriguingly named The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife, and the Missing Corpse. Read below for other approaching releases that are grabbing our attention and that will be great bets for your patrons as the daylight grows shorter and the air more chilly.—Henrietta Verma
Cooking and comedy
In their first book (Harper Perennial; see review, p. 91), which expands and explores the surreal world created in their eponymous, wildly popular podcast, Welcome to Night Vale, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor set two women on a collision course as each tries to solve a mystery in her own life. The audio version (HarperAudio, Oct.), read by Cecil Baldwin, Dylan Marron, Retta, Therese Plummer, and Dan Bittner, should be a treat for fans and newbies alike.
Yotam Ottolenghi (Plenty; Jerusalem) has produced several of the most interesting, accessible cookbooks in the last few years, all of which draw inspiration from diverse Middle Eastern cuisines. His forthcoming Nopi (Ten Speed, Oct.), based on the offerings of the London restaurant for which it is named, features recipes for such inventive dishes as king prawns with Pernod, tarragon, and feta; butternut squash with ginger tomatoes and lime yogurt; roasted pineapple with tamarind and chile; and coconut ice cream.
We have also seen recently a veritable tsunami of vegan cookbooks, but very few of them have focused on high-end vegan cuisine. Tal Ronnen’s Los Angeles restaurant, Crossroads, uses seasonal vegetables, nuts, and grains to produce plant-based food for modern palates: spicy carrot salad, tomato-sauced pappardelle, or crunchy flatbreads piled with roasted vegetables. Crossroads the book (Artisan, Oct.) promises related recipes.
In Carry On (Griffin: St. Martin’s, Oct.), Rainbow Rowell spins off characters from the book-within-a-book contained in her wildly popular Fangirl. The result is this romance between Simon and Baz, the Harry and Draco-esque young magicians who really, really love to hate each other.
Sarah Vowell’s (Assassination Vacation) latest historical work, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States (Riverhead, Oct.), focuses on the Marquis de Lafayette during and after the American Revolution. Vowell explores Lafayette’s experiences of the jarring differences between lofty ideals and bloody realities, his friendship with George Washington, and his status as a beloved symbol of the war—when Lafayette returned to the States in 1824, three quarters of the population of New York City came out to welcome him.—Stephanie Klose
Singular stories
It all began with a flash ballad:
“Oh, if you thought ye’d never see
The death of Colin Eversea
Come along with me, lads,
come along with me
For on a summer day he’ll swing
The pretty lad was mighty bad
So everybody sing!”
In 2008, Julie Anne Long’s “Pennyroyal Green” historical romance series opened with The Perils of Pleasure, and readers came face to face with the Everseas and the Redmonds. Now, with the 11th and concluding title, The Legend of Lyon Redmond (Avon, Oct.), we circle back to Lyon Redmond and Olivia Eversea and the story behind it all, as Lyon returns and Olivia confronts a crisis of love and conscience. Not to be outdone, Lyon has his own song:
“Oh, everyone thought
It was all for naught
And she’d dry up and blow away
But will Redmond return
And make her burn
For the love of yesterday?”
The Pennyroyal Green contingent are bold, braw, and brassy and will be missed, but Long, I’m sure, has a great many tales yet to tell.
Books, books, and more books. What could be better than a paean to my favorite form of entertainment? The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend (Sourcebooks Landmark; starred review, LJ 8/15) is the debut novel from Swedish author Katarina Bivald. Into the economically depleted and socially “bankrupt” Iowa town of Broken Wheel, on the heels of a long correspondence with local book lover Amy Harris, Swedish citizen Sara arrives, at Amy’s invitation, to discover that Amy has died, and now the locals don’t know what to do with “the tourist.” Ultimately, Sara opens a bookstore, in which she talks about books, suggests titles, even slams a few authors (yes, real authors) in the quest to match the townsfolk with their perfect reading experience. We also see the dissection of this insular burg and its inhabitants as the novel addresses not only the need to pursue one’s dreams but the demand that one find a dream worth pursuing.
In 1943 in Rome, Nazis are rounding up Jews and putting them onto trucks. Chiara Ravello knows there is a Resistance group working in her neighborhood—she helps them when she can—but this new activity startles her. Then, though she considers herself somewhat detached, she suddenly finds herself shielding a young Jewish boy and taking him into her home. In Virginia Baily’s deeply moving debut, Early One Morning (Little, Brown, Oct.), we catch up with Chiara again in 1973 and discover what her act of kindness hath wrought.—Bette-Lee Fox
Catching my eye
When my colleague Amanda Mastrull showed me Jennifer Wright’s It Ended Badly: Thirteen of the Worst Breakups in History (Holt, Nov.), I hoped it would include the Borgias. Wright does not disappoint, describing how Lucrezia Borgia got out of her loveless first marriage: “she was exceedingly pregnant and had her marriage annulled by telling everyone her husband was impotent and she was a virgin.” There are clever chapter titles such as, “If you have just sent your ex a very intense emotional email” for the pages profiling the doomed relationship between Lord Byron and Caroline Lamb. Other notorious partners include Henry VIII, Oscar Wilde, and Elizabeth Taylor.
Continuing the royal theme is Aja Raden’s Stoned: Jewelry, Obsession, and How Desire Shapes the World (Ecco: HarperCollins, Dec.). The vibrant cover piqued my interest since jewelry making is one of my hobbies and, in another lifetime, I worked in a jewelry store. Raden delves into the tensions between Mary I and Elizabeth I, both daughters of Henry VIII, as they lusted over La Peregrina, considered the most beautiful pearl in the world, and explains, “Cleopatra used emeralds to look rich and powerful. Elizabeth used pearls to look virginal and holy.” The jewels of the likes of Queen Isabella and Marie Antoinette are detailed, as is Mikimoto and its signature brand of luxury pearls.
On a different note, John Seabrook’s The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory (Norton, Oct.) describes the current state of the music industry and the history of songs that transformed singers into stars. This behind-the-scenes tour features producers such as Max Martin, with Seabrook noting how Swedish producers have launched the careers of a who’s who of teen sensations since the mid-1990s. I was most surprised to learn that Katy Perry was inspired by Alanis Morissette and wanted to emulate her sound, but, “after Britney, an angsty Alanis-esque pop act seemed hopelessly out of date.”
Last year, xkcd.com founder Randall Munroe debuted with the best seller What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. His follow-up, Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words (Houghton Harcourt, Nov.), presents more of his signature drawings to explain the periodic table, the solar system, and even the human body. I’m not usually one to judge a book by its cover, but this cover is creative and eye-catching.
My lone fiction pick is Avenue of Mysteries (S. & S., Nov.), the latest from John Irving, author of the best-selling The Cider House Rules. The saga takes readers to Mexico and the Philippines, with main character Juan Diego dwelling on the past and contemplating the future. Once again, Irving’s lyrical writing grabs readers from the first page.—Stephanie Sendaula
Thrillers real and imagined
Who said the legal thriller is dead? Nick Stone’s The Verdict (Pegasus Crime, Dec., see the LJ starred review, p. 96) superbly demonstrates that the genre is alive and kicking in the UK. Terry Flynt, a struggling law clerk, gets the biggest opportunity of his career when he joins the legal team defending a millionaire accused of killing a woman in his hotel room. The hitch is that the client, Vernon James, is a former friend who betrayed Terry when they were university students. As Terry probes into Vernon’s life, Stone, author of the award-winning Mr. Clarinet, takes us on a fascinating tour of the ins and outs of the British court system. Nicknamed the “London John Grisham” by critics, Stone is giving his American cousin a run for his money.
With his usual wit and style, Irish author Paul Murray (Skippy Dies) confronts the global financial crisis and the demise of the Celtic Tiger in The Mark and the Void (Farrar, Oct.). Frenchman Claude is living a dull and lonely life in Dublin working for the investment bank of Torabundo until a writer named Paul Murray (in a nice metafictional touch) takes an interest in him as a potential subject for his next book. Claude finds his life getting more exciting as Paul shadows him at his job. But is Paul really who he says he is?
The violent chaos of Seattle’s 1999 World Trade Organization protests is the dramatic backdrop for Sunil Yapa’s debut, Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (Lee Boudreaux: Little, Brown, Jan. 2016). Over the course of a turbulent day, the novel follows seven characters, among them a pot-dealing runaway whose father is the police chief in charge of crowd control; a Sri Lankan finance minister desperately trying to make it to his meeting with President Clinton; and two activists struggling to hold on to their principles of nonviolence despite tear gas and the bloody beatings of demonstrators by police. A buzz book at BookExpo America, this intense and engrossing read is a knockout.
It’s Downton Abbey meets The Addams Family in Piu Marie Eatwell’s The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife, and the Missing Corpse (Liveright: Norton, Oct.), a delightfully offbeat history of a bizarre Edwardian legal case that became tabloid fodder and kept the British public spellbound for a decade. In 1898, an elderly widow asked a London court to exhume the body of her late father-in-law, T.C. Druce, claiming he had faked his own death and led a double life as the secretive and mysterious Fifth Duke of Portland (nicknamed “the burrowing duke” owing to his penchant for digging tunnels under his estate). At stake was the issue of who was entitled to claim the Portland millions. Eatwell’s marvelous book reads like a Wilkie Collins gothic novel, but at times truth is stranger than fiction.—Wilda Williams
Ring-a-ding-ding
I hear music—or is that a cocktail shaker? This year, 2015, is the 100th anniversary of Frank Sinatra’s birth, and that calls for a celebration—and a drink! Amid the HBO specials, CD box sets, books, radio programs, poems, and an exhibition at the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts, Charles Pignone’s lollapalooza of a tome, Sinatra 100 (Thames & Hudson, Oct.; Prepub Alert 4/6/15), looks like the toast of the town. This pictorial reminiscence boasts more than 400 illustrations, over half of which have never been published before, forewords by Tony Bennett and Steve Wynn, and afterwords by all three Sinatra “kids”—Frank Jr., Nancy, and Tina.
Distiller Jack Daniel’s is getting in on the act, too, releasing a “Sinatra Select” whiskey; a midcentury maven might use this blend in one of the recipes from Cocktails of the Movies: An Illustrated Guide to Cinematic Mixology (Prestel, Oct.) by Will Francis (text) and Stacey Marsh (illus.). This book sounds perfect for film clubs—a drink-and-watch delight. A grittier drinks-themed read is Scott M. Deitche’s Cocktail Noir: From Gangsters and Gin Joints to Gumshoes and Gimlets (Reservoir Square, Nov.). This title goes beyond film to chronicle the hangouts, drinking habits, and drinks of underworld denizens real and fictional (and of the authors who created the hardboiled dames and detectives as well).
Two other favorite musicians of a slightly more recent vintage have penned memoirs of note. Pretenders front woman Chrissie Hynde’s Reckless: My Life as a Pretender (Doubleday, Sept.; Prepub Alert, 3/30/15) is sure to be as rockin’ and gimlet-eyed as the great Pretender’s songs; then there’s Elvis Costello’s Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink (Blue Rider, Oct.; Prepub Alert 5/4/15), about which LJ Prepub Alert editor Barbara Hoffert wrote, “Billed as unconventional (so expect anything),” and LJ Media editor (and fellow Costello fan) Stephanie Klose said, “Could be great, could be bloviating.” I’ll take the chance.
Finally, it’s back to midcentury madness with a look at Mad Men, the AMC series that wrapped in April after seven seasons, to the dismay of its many fans. Film/TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz teams up with his Wes Anderson books illustrator Max Dalton on Mad Men Carousel (Abrams, Nov.), which gathers all of Seitz’s essays about the cult show. Crime novelist and fellow Mad Men superfan Megan Abbott will contribute a foreword. That, my friends, is a power trio.—Liz French
Mingling and other horrors
Following the success of their fabulously named Extinct Boids (say it aloud!), Ralph Steadman once again draws sumptuous, crazy birds and Ceri Levy once more describes them in Nextinction (Bloomsbury, Sept.). It features, in all their squawky feathers-akimbo glory, birds whose demise might be next but that can still be saved. Quirky commentary in the form of diary entries, emails, and phone conversations between the creators is accompanied by conservation information.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, the first female director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department, quit in 2009—a controversial move that became a firestorm when she wrote about it in an Atlantic article called, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” Unfinished Business (Random, Sept.; see review, p. 115) further explores her decision and its aftermath and the choices women face today; it’s a great antidote to Lean In fatigue.
Boy do I need Jeanne Martinet’s The Art of Mingling: Fun and Proven Techniques for Mastering Any Room (Griffin: St. Martin’s, Oct.). The book, the 1992 version of which was born when Martinet’s friends asked for tips after they saw her mixing with the entire guest list at a wedding, has been revised for the smartphone generation. (Martinet notes astutely that we have atrophied mingling muscles.) No more holding up the wall at American Library Association functions!
My last nonfiction pick is by Harriet A. Washington, author of the award-winning Medical Apartheid. Infectious Madness: The Surprising Science of How We “Catch” Mental Illness (Little, Brown, Oct.; LJ 8/15) presents a germ theory of diseases such as Alzheimer’s and OCD and discusses prevention. The book is sure to be controversial and is worth considering where health titles are popular.
Fan favorite Chris Bohjalian, who has 17 books under his belt, including the recent Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands, is back with The Guest Room (Doubleday, Jan. 2016). A bachelor party gone wrong is unusual fare for Bohjalian, but previously intimate relationships hitting the rocks is not, so the book promises more of what readers have come to love in the author’s emotional novels.
Ready for some chills this fall? Try Charles Lambert’s debut novel, The Children’s Home (Scribner, Jan. 2016). The creepy cover, which shows a picture frame that becomes gnarly tree roots, drew me in, but the story line sounds wonderfully dark, too. The central character is a disfigured recluse who lives on a secluded English country estate (ominous setting: check). He and his doctor start getting visits from mysterious children in a tale that the publisher says is perfect for “fans of Shirley Jackson, Neil Gaiman, Roald Dahl, and Edward Gorey.” Sign me up!—Henrietta Verma
Monarchs and Millennials
Antony Beevor is certainly no stranger to penning the complexities of World War II, and this time he is tackling the monumental Battle of the Bulge in Ardennes 1944 (Viking, Nov.). Here, Hitler made his final stand, forcing the Allies not only to fight their enemies but suffer through a brutal winter with few supplies. As the temperature starts to cool down, I appreciate the safety and warmth of my bedroom all the more while I read about the generation that silently shivered in foxholes. The effects of this war still reverberate profoundly in the stories of parents and grandparents, and Beevor furthers the conversation with precise detail and moving anecdotes from those who sacrificed.
Speaking of history, how about some of the fictional variety? The Tudors have long been a popular subject in this genre, written from a dozen different perspectives, much to my personal delight. Happily get sucked into the black hole that is the writing of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, or pick your favorite of Henry VIII’s queens, and you’ll be blessedly drowning in an abundance of choices. However, Suzannah Dunn, a seasoned author of the period, provides readers with a viewpoint less explored: that of the teenaged Lady Jane Grey, who held the English throne for a mere nine days before being imprisoned and executed for treason. In The Lady of Misrule (Pegasus, Jan. 2016), Dunn focuses on the relationship between Jane and lady-in-waiting Elizabeth Tilney during the months before Jane’s death, bringing heartbreaking sympathy and humanity to these figures who for most are just faceless names in a textbook.
Already published in nonfiction, Sloane Crosley is marking her novel debut with The Clasp (Farrar, Oct.; Prepub Alert, 4/20/15), a story involving a lost necklace, a love triangle among Millennials, and an impromptu trip to France. Those struggling to reconcile what they expected life to look like by a certain age with the harsh reality of falling short will both cringe and breathe a sigh of relief to find kindred spirits staring back at them with the same flailing sense of aimlessness on the page. For me, there’s nothing like a little emotional validation as I make the unwilling climb up the 20s ladder.—Kate DiGirolomo
New York lives
Marvelous and strange, New York is a place that awakens and challenges our greatest dreams; introducing a world we feel we’ve always known but perhaps left behind somewhere along the way. From the New York experience stems insight into all walks of life, from every corner of the globe. Whether it’s the city itself that ignites authors’ creative pulse, or the proximity of its inspired collective of inhabitants, as readers we never tire of a tale set in its midst.
Garth Risk Hallberg’s sophisticated and absorbing debut novel, City on Fire (Knopf, Oct.; starred review LJ 7/15), is a sweeping, 900-plus page epic of 1970s New York. It introduces the interlinked lives of William Stuart Althorp Hamilton-Sweeney III, estranged heir to the prominent Hamilton-Sweeney company; Mercer Goodman, a schoolteacher and aspiring writer; Regan Lamplighter, a mother of two navigating life after the breakup of her marriage to Keith; teenagers Charlie Weisbarger and Samantha Cicciaro; and the evolving punk band Ex Post Facto. The subjects are deep, and I suggest having a dictionary close, but the novel’s setup, which hinges on a serious crime in Central Park, the dissolution of a rock group–turned–revolutionary movement, and relationships teetering on various edges of bliss, destruction, and redemption, will compel readers seeking a solid debut from a talented new author.
The story opens in December 1976 and culminates in the citywide blackout of 1977. Hallberg ingeniously shifts multiple perspectives that move forward and backward in time to characterize the entire decade, as if the author, although too young to have lived during the years he’s writing about, experienced it all firsthand. Descriptions of a richly layered New York culture elicit an array of viewpoints, from the disorienting state of mind that accompanies arriving new to the city to the sometimes-alluring sway of the underground to “the very middle of the middle class” and deceptively sweet success–epitomizing echelons of the upper class. What will we take away from this lively and intellectually astute re-creation of a particular zeitgeist? Most assuredly a new or refreshed appreciation of New York and the artistic and political expressions it cultivates. Yet, depending on your outlook, you might feel closer to your heritage, eager to forge new studies in posthumanism, or you might be affected, as I was, by Hallberg’s eloquent writing and keen command of such a vast and evolving territory. Bravo.—Annalisa Pesek
Politics and pop music
I spend a lot of time poring over the political science shelves here in the LJ office, especially with the 2016 U.S. presidential election fast approaching. We receive many political memoirs, but I’m really looking forward to New Jersey congressman Cory Booker’s United (Ballantine, Jan. 2016). The junior senator from my home state, whom I’ve never met but avidly follow on Twitter, comes across as a politician who genuinely cares about his constituents and the country. The book is said to be a mix of policy and memoir, and it’s one I’ll be sure to pick up.
Moving to another branch of government, I’m also excited about Linda Hirshman’s Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World (Harper, Sept.; starred review LJ 8/15), a joint biography of the first two women appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s a book I thought looked interesting, but after reading LJ reviewer Lynne Maxwell’s thoughtful review, I knew it was a special one. O’Connor and Ginsburg are, Hirshman explains, from different backgrounds, but they have a shared history of being female in a male-dominated field, and on the court, “they made women equal before the law.” For more on Ginsburg, there’s also Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Dey Street: HarperCollins, Oct.), by MSNBC reporter Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik, creator of the “Notorious RBG” Tumblr.
Another title that started off on Tumblr is Erik Didriksen’s Pop Sonnets: Shakespearean Spins on Your Favorite Songs (Quirk, Oct.), which reimagines modern songs as sonnets. The author spans genres and eras, with funny takes on tracks by everyone from the Monkees to Will Smith to Taylor Swift (“But now that we are once again apart, I swear thou’lt ne’er again reclaim my heart,” ends the one for Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”).
A final book I’ve found entirely engrossing is Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan’s The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries (PublicAffairs, Sept.), which looks at the Russian surveillance system. The authors are well versed on the Russian security apparatus (they previously collaborated on The New Nobility), and here they start off with background on the Soviet secret service and a paranoid KGB (in one instance, copy machines were destroyed to control the flow of information; in another, international phone lines) before moving on to the modern FSB (the KGB’s successor), president (and former prime minister) Vladimir Putin, and cyberattacks against Russian oppositionist bloggers and social media.—Amanda Mastrull
Bette-Lee Fox is Managing Editor and Stephanie Klose is Media Editor, LJ; Kate DiGirolomo is SELF-e Community Coordinator, Liz French is Senior Editor, Amanda Mastrull is Assistant Editor, Annalisa Pesek is Assistant Managing Editor, Stephanie Sendaula is Associate Editor, Henrietta Verma is Editor, and Wilda Williams is Fiction Editor, LJ Book Review