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48 Articles

INDIGO IS IN PLAY

The board of directors of Indigo Books and Music, Canada’s largest bookselling chain, has appointed a special committee to evaluate a proposal to take the company private. The bid, which the retailer confirmed last week, comes from two investment firms controlled by Canadian billionaire Gerald Schwartz, an Indigo board member and the husband of Indigo founder and CEO Heather Reisman. The proposal is to buy all outstanding shares for C$2.25 per share. (The stock has been trading between C$1.04 and C$2.60 over the past year.) News of the buyout bid follows a tumultuous 2023 in which the retailer endured a crippling cyberattack and Reisman announced her retirement as Indigo chair only to return following the resignation in the fall of CEO Peter Ruis, who had been at the helm for less…

INDIGO IS IN PLAY

HarperCollins Profits Soar

With the first six months of its fiscal 2024 in the books, HarperCollins sales are up 4% over the same period in 2022, and profits have jumped a hefty 67%. For the second quarter, which ended Dec. 31, 2023, HC sales rose 4%, led by a 15% increase in digital sales—including a 29% spike in digital audiobooks. On an earnings call last week, representatives from HC parent company News Corp credited the sharp increase in digital sales to a “flourishing” digital audio market, and alluded to the entrance of Spotify, which has contributed “incremental” sales gains since its U.S. launch in November. News Corp attributed the jump in profits, which exceeded expectations, to fewer returns; an improved supply chain; lower manufacturing, freight, and distribution costs; and efforts to lower the…

HarperCollins Profits Soar

Bloomsbury US Taps New President

Ingram v-p and general manager Sabrina McCarthy has been named president of Bloomsbury US, reporting to CEO Nigel Newton. McCarthy will also join Bloomsbury’s global executive committee, and steps into both roles at the beginning of April. McCarthy replaces former president Adrienne Vaughan, who died in a boating accident while on vacation in Italy in August 2023. No interim president was named following Vaughan’s death. “I am thrilled to now be at the helm of Bloomsbury US, a publisher I have admired since my very first visit to their London offices, in 2002,” McCarthy said in a statement. “I look forward to working with the hugely talented Bloomsbury US team to bring great books to life, to lead our U.S. ambitions, and to continue to grow Bloomsbury U.S.”…

Bloomsbury US Taps New President

TRUSTBRIDGE INTEGRATES SALES

Children’s book publishers Candlewick Press, Holiday House, Peachtree, and Pixel + Ink—all owned by private equity firm Trustbridge Global Media—have begun the process of integrating their North American sales and marketing functions. Mary Marotta, most recently senior v-p for Candlewick, will head the combined group as senior v-p of sales, marketing, and business development. Under the reorganization, beginning with the spring 2025 list, the current Candlewick Press in-house sales staff will sell all four houses’ books in North America, and Marotta anticipates adding new sales reps in some areas. Call for Information Feature: 2024 London Book Fair Rights Listings Deadline: Feb. 19 PW will run its annual literary agency rights listings for the 2024 London Book Fair online. Agents wishing to submit titles for which rights will be available at the fair can add…

TRUSTBRIDGE INTEGRATES SALES

Soho Press Gets into Horror

It’s been more than a decade since venerable Manhattan-based indie Soho Press has launched a new imprint (Soho Teen in 2012). But this year, the publisher, known for its literary and crime lists, will enter the haunted house of horror publishing with Hell’s Hundred. The imprint takes its name from “the once bleak, now chic” New York City neighborhood of SoHo—formerly known as “hell’s hundred acres” for its “grim industrial facades and deadly fires,” the publisher’s inaugural catalog explains. The new program will seek to publish “bold visions of horror from voices new and established.” The first two books from Hell’s Hundred will debut this summer. First up, in June, is Youthjuice by former beauty editor E.K. Sathue, which Soho associate editor Taz Urnov bills as “a horror satire about the beauty…

Soho Press Gets into Horror

Finally, Optimism at IPG

Independent Publishers Group has faced challenges since it bought U.K.-based United Independent Distributors (UID) in 2021, IPG CEO Joe Matthews acknowledged in an interview with PW. After a record 2021, sales softened in the U.S. in 2022, due in part to Amazon’s drastic cuts to orders that summer. Though IPG shipped out lots of inventory in the fourth quarter, many of those books were returned, hurting its 2023 results and prompting it to do some restructuring. Then last spring, IPG was impacted by another Amazon move. The e-tailer’s decision to stop importing books from various American companies into its European and U.K. warehouses—instead requiring U.S. publishers to make their books available closer to European points of sale—cost IPG and other distributors and publishers millions. But it also sparked a new idea…

Finally, Optimism at IPG

DEAL OF THE WEEK Watkins Scores Big Deal at Tiny Reparations Pilar Garcia-Brown at Tiny Reparations has secured North American rights to two new books by National Book Award–longlisted author LaToya Watkins. The deal was struck by Samantha Shea at Georges Borchardt Inc. Watkins is the author of the acclaimed story collection Holler, Child and the novel Perish. The publisher said the first book in the deal, The Book of Chuck, is “a multigenerational story about inheritance, community, faith, and the weight of history” that follows a family in which “certain members have the ability to prophesize and change the course of death.” The second book, Starlite/Astro/Galaxy, is a story collection. Chuck will be published in spring 2026, and Starlite in spring 2027. Williams Signs Two with Grand Central Tia Williams, author…

Behind the Bestsellers

House Rules The #1 book in the country is House of Flame and Shadow, the third installment in romantasy author Sarah J. Maas’s Crescent City series. First-week print unit sales eclipsed those of its predecessors, including House of Sky and Breath, which is the top-selling among multiple Maas titles on this week’s trade paperback list. Flame and Shadow, meanwhile, sold more than 11 times as many copies as the #2 book in the country, also by Maas—A Court of Thorns and Roses. ROMANTIC TOMES A trio of books on our nonfiction list offer sex and relationship advice, just in time for the Hallmark holiday but welcome any month of the year. Our starred review called Julie Schwartz Gottman and John Gottman’s Fight Right a “persuasive and plainspoken guide” to conflict, which the Gottmans consider…

Behind the Bestsellers

Heeding the Spiritual Call for Racial Justice

Racial justice is a focus of many religion publishers, as evidenced by nearly a dozen titles releasing in 2024 and early 2025. These books are designed for readers of diverse spiritual backgrounds and aim to provide guidance on eliminating racism, creating an equitable society, and healing Black communities. IVP Academic has three forthcoming titles on the intersection of faith and race. “I’m sure it goes pretty much without saying that racialization and the problems it brings are among our thorniest troubles,” says associate publisher and academic editorial director Jon Boyd, “so I think it’s wise to get all the help we can from every quarter we can.” Releasing in March, Awakening to Justice: Faithful Voices from the Abolitionist Past features the diary of 19th-century abolitionist and missionary David Ingraham. Historian Chris Momany…

Heeding the Spiritual Call for Racial Justice

LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS

Brenda Salter McNeil, an ordained pastor and associate professor of reconciliation studies at Seattle Pacific University, has written four books on racial reconciliation, including Roadmap to Reconciliation 2.0. In her latest, Empowered to Repair: Becoming People Who Mend Broken Systems and Heal Our Communities (Brazos, May), the author presents a model for addressing race-based injustice and revitalizing communities. The book draws on McNeil’s own work as well as the biblical story of Nehemiah, who led the rebuilding of Jerusalem in the fifth century BCE and can be viewed as an example of a person attempting to use leadership and authority to fix a terrible problem. That message, McNeil says, is crucial: “The younger generation wants to see change, and they’re tired of talking.” What led you to write this book? In the…

LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS

REPAIRING POLITICAL RIFTS

With the 2024 presidential race fully underway, religion publishers are exploring deep political divides among faith groups and asking if there is a better way forward in five new books. From Zondervan, The After Party: Toward Better Christian Politics by Curtis Chang and Nancy French (Apr.) encourages Christians to reconsider their approach to politics in order to rebuild relationships strained by partisan divides. “The after-party is referring to how we need to reframe our Christian political identity to one where we radically re-center on Jesus,” says Keren Baltzer, associate publisher at Zondervan. “It’s a call to ‘confront toxic polarization and heal our broken politics,’ as Chang and French detail in the book.” The idea for the book was born out of necessity, says Webster Younce, v-p and publisher at Zondervan. “So many people…

REPAIRING POLITICAL RIFTS

Navajo poet and arts advocate Kinsale Drake started the NDN Girls Book Club last April out of a desire to develop a fun, safe space for her fellow bibliophiles to geek out over Native American literature. She couldn’t have predicted how the initiative would take off—more than 18,000 Instagram followers, well-attended in-person workshops and readings, sold-out merchandise in bedazzled pops of pink, and ongoing donations to fund more than 500 free book care packages sent out to Indigenous youth in 2023. This year, Drake is collaborating with mutual aid organizations and other partners on a big dream: to give every child on the vast Navajo reservation a contemporary Native book. That’s in addition to goals like supporting Indigenous visual artists and finding ways to merge the worlds of literature and fashion.…

Through the Fire

New Zealand poet Tayi Tibble debuted with 2022’s Poukahangatus, whose “rollicking, indignant, and invigorating narratives contend with history and navigate what it means to be millennial, female, and of Maāori descent,” according to PW’s starred review. Ahead of the release of her second collection, Rangikura (Knopf, Apr.), Tibble spoke with PW about her Polynesian roots and how poetry is a source of catharsis. How has your Maāori background influenced you as a writer? First and foremost, my worldview is informed by my heritage and culture; our term for this is te ao Maāori. There are all these ways in which we view the world that I apply in my poetry. In Rangikura, there are a lot of deities, atua, present. I feel like they pop up and ask for veneration, and poetry…

Through the Fire

10 New Books by Indigenous Authors

Coexistence Billy-Ray Belcourt. Norton, May PW gave Belcourt’s first novel, A Minor Chorus, a starred review, lauding it as “achingly gorgeous.” The latest from the author, who is from the Driftpile Cree Nation, comprises 10 interwoven short stories that probe Indigenous love, longing, and loneliness in Canada. Fire Exit Morgan Talty. Tin House, June Talty, a citizen of the Penobscot Nation, racked up awards for his debut collection, Night of the Living Rez, including the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. Fire Exit, his first novel, explores blood quantum, inheritance, and belonging from the perspective of a white man whose Native girlfriend decides to name a different man as their daughter’s father so she can be enrolled in the Penobscot Nation. Mother m.s. RedCherries. Penguin Books, July Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate…

10 New Books by Indigenous Authors

STRENGTHENING THE COLLECTIVE

As a driving force behind Heartdrum, a HarperCollins imprint devoted to Native American children’s book authors, Cynthia Leitich Smith has seen firsthand how Indigenous representation in publishing has evolved. “Only a decade ago, the Native children’s and YA author community, especially those of us publishing at major trade presses, was incredibly small,” says Smith, a citizen of the Muscogee Nation and the author of books including Rain Is Not My Indian Name and Sisters of the Neversea. “For the most part, we were flying solo. It was difficult for us to connect authentic Native-focused publishing manuscripts with editors.” That’s changing thanks to the efforts of Smith and other advocates in the children’s book world, with more Indigenous-written titles coming to market, deeper support for those books, and a reinforcing of ties among…

STRENGTHENING THE COLLECTIVE

Decolonize the Stacks

As more Native-authored books enter the market, children have more opportunity to experience diverse and fact-based representations of Native culture. “Today, parents can reach for books by Native writers and illustrators that accurately reflect who Native people are,” says Debbie Reese, a Nambé Pueblo educator who launched the American Indians in Children’s Literature blog in 2006. “Their books are tribally specific, and most are set in the present day.” Reese says she’s “excited to hear from teachers who are using these books in the classrooms,” but collection development, she cautions, requires legwork. It’s not “simply adding to the collection. It includes taking outdated, inaccurate, and stereotypical materials out of the collection.” Stacy Wells, a member of the Choctaw Nation and a youth services librarian in Southlake, Tex., advises, “The number one thing to…

10 New Children’s and YA Books with Indigenous Representation

Being Home Traci Sorell, illus. by Michaela Goade. Kokila, May. Ages 4–8 Sibert Honoree Sorell, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and Caldecott Medalist Goade, an enrolled member of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, convey the significance of returning to one’s ancestral land through the eyes of a Cherokee girl who’s excited by her family’s move from their urban home to their reservation. (See PW’s starred review, p. 62.) Hearts of Fire and Snow David Bowles and Guadalupe García McCall. Bloomsbury, June. Ages 13–up The Mexican American coauthors of 2023’s Secret of the Moon Conch, which depicted “the treatment of Indigenous communities through engaging presentday and 16th-century lenses,” per PW’s review, return with a romantasy rooted in Nahua lore. The story of star-crossed lovers Popoca, a warrior, and Iztac, a princess, ended…

10 New Children’s and YA Books with Indigenous Representation

“BookTok has been a kind of revolution,” Ana Huang says via Zoom from the blurred but evidently pristine living room of her Jersey City home. Before BookTok, she adds, “you never would have seen romance so front and center in bookstores. It was usually shunned into some dusty corner in the back.” Huang, 32, author of the Kings of Sin series, is a self-proclaimed “romance person.” Even before reading her first Harlequin paperback—at, she says, “probably too young an age, like 10 or 11”—she homed in on the romantic subplots in any movie or television show she watched. Her favorite thing about the genre? “The comfort of knowing that no matter what happens, there will always be a happily ever after at the end,” she says, her beige sweatshirt contrasting sharply with…

We Were the Universe Kimberly King Parsons. Knopf, $28 (288p) ISBN 978-0-525-52185-3 In the spunky debut novel from Parsons (following the collection Black Light), a 20-something woman deals with grief and the demands of motherhood by maintaining a prodigious porn habit. Before Kit was married, she coped with depression by using psychedelic drugs and having sex with strangers. Now, three years after her younger sister Julie’s death in a car accident and overwhelmed by caring for her three-year-old daughter, Kit seeks an escape in gangbang videos and elaborate masturbation fantasies about the men and women she interacts with over the course of her daily routine in suburban Texas. These fantasy partners include her daughter’s gymnastics teacher, a scruffy dad who shops at the same grocery store, and a fellow mom at the…

In the hilarious, sexy, and wonderfully weird latest from July (The First Bad Man), a 40-something artist tries to reinvent herself while reckoning with middle age. The unnamed narrator’s choice to drive instead of fly from Los Angeles to New York City for a two-week writing retreat stems from a desire to “follow beauty,” as her libidinous lesbian friend encourages her to do. In this tenderhearted mode, the narrator barely makes it beyond the city limits before checking into a Monrovia, Calif., motel. The initial draw is a boyish 31-year-old named Davey, whom she first encounters at a gas station where he squeegees her windshield. She also becomes strangely attached to her room, and hires Davey’s decorator wife, Claire, to sink thousands of dollars into a luxe rehab job. While…

Doris Allen Tracie Amirante Padal Beth Atwater Martha K. Baker Robert Beauregard Davina Bell Vicki Borah Bloom William Boisvert Patricia Buckley Beth Cato Arvyn Cerézo Hanna Clutterbuck-Cook Jessica Daitch Dan D’Arpe Maria DeKoning John DiBello Scottie Draughon AJ Frost Shaenon Garrity Eden Gilley Krystyna Poray Goddu Patricia Guy Todd Hafer Isabel Hinchliff Katrina Niidas Holm Justin Jeffryes Steven Kuehn Peggy Kurkowski Diane Langhorst Yong Suk Lee Eloise Lindblom Nicholas Litchfield Linda Lowen Amy E Magnus Niki Marion Constance L. Martin Ana Menchaca Sheri Melnick Jacquelyn Miller Patrick Millikin Diane Molleson Sally Morgan Libby Morse Julie Naughton Dai Newman LJ Pemberton Leonard Picker Ryan Phung Kaye Rains Eugene Reynolds Roger Reynolds Carliann Rittman Lorraine Savage Antonia Saxon Liz Scheier Suzanne Shablovsky Nikki Silvestrini Alyssa Taft Erica Wetter Michael Zimmerman…

★ The Spoiled Heart

Sahota (China Room) returns with a beautifully constructed tale of a British Indian factory worker who attempts to find solace in his labor union and a new romance many years after losing his mother and son in a fire. Nayan Olak, 42, is running for general secretary of the union, which represents workers at the air conditioner factory in Chesterfied, England, where he’s dedicated his life. Megha Sharma, who’s also of Indian descent, opposes him in the race. Though either of them would be the organization’s first nonwhite general secretary, Megha positions herself as the “change candidate,” claiming their fellow workers of color need protection from hateful assaults like the recent one on a retail worker in their union. Nayan, with his “curdled charisma,” focuses his campaign on interracial working-class…

★ The Spoiled Heart

Mystery/Thriller

★ City in Ruins Don Winslow. Morrow, $32 (400p) ISBN 978-0-063079-47-2 Winslow (City of Dreams) concludes his Danny Ryan trilogy—and his career as a novelist—with an addictive finale that charts the Rhode Island mobster turned Las Vegas casino mogul’s turbulent business dealings and deadly feuds. In 1997, Ryan has relocated from California to Sin City, using millions of dollars of stolen cartel money to buy his way into the thriving Tara Group corporation. As director of hotel operations, Ryan owns two leading properties on the Strip, with ambitions to build a third: his elegant dream hotel, Il Sogno. When Ryan’s chief rival, Vernon Winegard, bids on a crumbling 1950s relic in a prime location for Il Sogno, Ryan slyly undermines the sale, blocking Vernon’s plans to dominate the Strip. Retaliatory moves from…

Mystery/Thriller

Iliad on the Strip

When did you get the idea for this series? Decades ago. I wrote the opening sentence in the mid-’90s, and I never changed a syllable. I’d recently read the Greek classics—the Iliad, the Aeneid, the Odyssey—and the reverberations of those great themes in contemporary crime fiction were just striking. That’s where the idea came from: could I take these Greek and Roman classics and make fully contemporary crime novels that you could read without any knowledge of the classics at all, and they would stand alone, but still reflect those stories and themes? Did that assignment ever feel like a curse? Most people who have read the books make no reference to the classics at all, and they’re somewhat surprised to hear it, but it’s the task that I set for myself. That…

Iliad on the Strip

★ Ash Dark as Night

The times, they are a-changing in Phillips’s outstanding sequel to One-Shot Harry. It’s August 1965: Vietnam is heating up; the civil rights movement is marching forward. Escalating tensions between the police and Black Americans have boiled over most recently in the Watts Riots. Black photographer Harry Ingram is in Los Angeles to document the unrest and winds up capturing the police shooting of unarmed activist Faraday Zinum. The widely reproduced photo brings Harry newfound fame, as well as the unwelcome attention of LAPD chief William Parker and his intelligence division. Meanwhile, an acquaintance hires Harry to look into the disappearance of her business associate Moses Tolbert, who ran a building company in the Watts neighborhood and vanished during the riots. As Harry investigates, stumbling into citywide conspiracies along the way,…

★ Ash Dark as Night

SF/Fantasy/Horror

★ The Hemlock Queen Hannah Whitten. Orbit, $30 (480p) ISBN 978-0-316-43529-1 Whitten keeps readers on their toes in this standout romantasy, the second in her Nightshade Crown series. The power has shifted in the kingdom of Auverraine since the events of The Foxglove King: Bastian now sits on the throne with deathwitch Lore as his right hand, while Gabe has risen to fill the vacancy as Exalted Priest, leading the Presque Mort. As the trio adjust to their new roles, the enemy Kirytheans encroach, ready to take advantage of any weaknesses—and Bastian’s palace has plenty. Half his court is under house arrest and the acrimony among the remaining courtiers is exacerbated by Lore’s presence and her closeness to Bastian. This political tension is matched by the romantic tension between the three protagonists…

SF/Fantasy/Horror

Romance/Erotica

★ Happy Medium Sarah Adler. Berkley, $18 trade paper (416p) ISBN 978-0-593-54781-6 Adler solidifies her status as a rising star of the rom-com genre with her wonderfully escapist sophomore romance (after Mrs. Nash’s Ashes). Gretchen Acorn comes from a long line of “bullshit artists.” In fact, Acorn isn’t even her real name. She makes a living as a fake spirit medium, justifying her deception by always trying to leave her marks’ lives better off than when she found them. When her highest-paying client calls her with concerns about a friend’s property, Gretchen heads to a country farm thinking she’ll spend a few days convincing an old man she’s exorcized his problem ghost. She’s not prepared to face Charlie Waybill, who is far too young, handsome, and skeptical for Gretchen’s comfort. Charlie sees…

Romance/Erotica

Unforgiven Shelley Shepard Gray. Revell, $17.99 trade paper ISBN 978-0-8007-4579-0 In this propulsive series opener from Gray (His Risk), two outcasts from the Amish community in Crittenden County, Ky., forge a friendship that might become more if their pasts don’t derail it first. Tabitha Yoder has led a reclusive life in the five years since her divorce from her abusive husband forced her to leave the Amish faith and distance herself from her community. She’s skittish and stays inside whenever Good Samaritan Seth Zimmerman comes by to do chores for her, until the day when the two lock eyes through the window while he’s chopping her firewood. When Tabitha goes outside to thank him, she’s smitten. Seth has been ostracized by the Amish community after he indirectly caused a man’s death and…

★ Woman, Life, Freedom

Satrapi (Persepolis) brings together a sweeping anthology of political essays in comics form that takes its title from the protest chant of the feminist uprising in Iran following the 2022 beating to death of Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by morality police for wearing her head covering “improperly.” In entries representing the stunning breadth and vitality of the Iranian resistance movement, the government’s oppression of women is framed as just one symptom of a diseased and dying system. “The guy who wants to control your body and your life also wants to control what you’re thinking and not thinking…. It’s not just about the veil,” warn Bahareh Akrami and Farid Vahid in the volume’s opener, “Sparking a Revolution.” The following sections dig into state censorship and spy networks; the brutality…

★ Woman, Life, Freedom

Hypericum Manuele Fior, trans. from the French by Matt Madden. Fantagraphics, $29.99 (144p) ISBN 978-1-68396-925-9 Fior’s meditative latest (after Celestia) glides between time periods and story lines to sketch a poignant historical fiction centered on a young Italian researcher. Teresa Guerrero has moved to 1990s Berlin to open a museum exhibit on King Tutankhamun’s treasure, but often finds herself trapped outside of time—she suffers from chronic insomnia and anxiety that warps her perception of reality. In the late hours, she obsesses over a volume by archeologist Howard Carter about his excavation of King Tut’s tomb in the 1920s, drawing comparisons between the ancient Egyptian perception of time and her own distortions. When she meets the brash and forward Ruben, a hobbyist painter and idealistic punk who invites her to stay at his…

A Sense of Shifting: Queer Artists Reshaping Dance Coco Romack and Yael Malka. Chronicle, $27.50 (272p) ISBN 978-1-79721-977-6 For this kinetic illustrated survey, Romack (Queer), assistant managing editor of T magazine, teams up with photographer Malka to capture queer performers who are destabilizing spaces usually reserved for traditional dance. Running the stylistic gamut from hip-hop to ballet, chapters highlight San Francisco’s “Sundance Stompede,” a country western festival where queer dancers reclaim “Wild West aesthetics” from the genre’s sometimes-heteronormative associations; how queer themes subtly animate the work disability arts ensemble Kinetic Light does to challenge mainstream concepts of accessibility; and queer performance artist NIC Kay, who incorporates clips of such internet dance trends as the Renegade into their pieces to demonstrate how Black dance practices have been historically co-opted. While some entries are…

Ambassadors of Jazz

None of your previous books are about music or musicians. What prompted this one? I wrote a book almost 20 years ago about the Pullman porters, who formed the first Black trade union. When I was talking to the porters, they made me promise to write two books: one about their favorite sports figure, Satchel Paige, and the other about their favorite passengers, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie. When these musicians traveled below the Mason-Dixon line, they’d hire Pullman cars to have a safe place to eat and sleep after their performances. After they returned to the Pullman cars, they would often hold late-night private jam sessions for the porters. What do their stories reveal about the history of jazz? They were all born into the nascent jazz world at about…

Ambassadors of Jazz

★ Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims

Brazilian journalist Carranca makes her English-language debut with a riveting report on the “secretive world” of evangelical Christian missionaries proselytizing to Muslims. Focusing on “the dynamics of soul-winning… on the ground” in countries like Afghanistan, Egypt, Indonesia, and Pakistan—where Christian evangelizing is sometimes severely punished—Carranca describes how, because these regions are often hostile or unpalatable to Americans, the missionary work is being done primarily by Christian converts from other countries with a recent history of evangelical proselytizing—Brazil, the Philippines, South Africa, and South Korea. (Meanwhile, evangelicals in America have redirected their efforts toward recently arrived Muslim refugees from Syria.) She profiles Brazilian converts Luiz and Gis, missionaries working in Afghanistan alongside South Africans Hannelie and Werner and Afghan convert Hussain. Operating undercover, the group holds prayer meetings, distributes religious material,…

★ Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims

★ The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

In this twisty and cinematic account, bestseller Larson (The Splendid and the Vile) recreates the five-month period between Abraham Lincoln’s 1861 election and the outbreak of the Civil War, focusing on the intensifying showdown over Fort Sumter in Charleston, S.C., where Maj. Robert Anderson, the U.S. Army commander, faced a swelling Confederate force with his outgunned garrison of 75 soldiers. Larson mirrors Anderson’s struggle to hold his post while avoiding provocations that might lead to war with Lincoln’s tight-rope-walk attempt to stand firm against secession without goading the South into it. As he traveled to Washington, D.C., to take office—arriving in disguise after dodging a rumored assassination plot in Baltimore—Lincoln vacillated over whether to resupply Fort Sumter or surrender it. In Larson’s telling, Anderson’s ordeal makes for a superb war…

★ The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

★ Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals

A colorful menagerie of characters fills this radiant history of the tumultuous first three decades (1866–1896) of America’s animal welfare movement. Wasik, editorial director of the New York Times Magazine, and veterinarian Murphy (coauthors of 2012’s Rabid) describe how after the Civil War, many antislavery activists turned their focus to animal cruelty. Their numbers included abolitionist lawyer George Thorndike Angell, who in 1868 founded the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. In New York City, Henry Bergh’s activism helped pass municipal legislation in 1866 outlawing animal abuse, after which Bergh personally arrested carriage drivers, dog fighters, and even a sea captain transporting turtles under inhumane conditions. Other notable crusaders included Caroline Earle White, who in 1871 opened the first dog shelter, and ornithologist Florence Merriam Bailey, whose…

★ Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals

Religion/Spirituality

Queering Contemplation: Finding Queerness in the Roots and Future of Contemplative Spirituality Cassidy Hall. Broadleaf, $25.99 (224p) ISBN 978-1-50649-339-8 With this ambitious study, filmmaker Hall (coauthor of Notes on Silence) attempts to disentangle spiritual contemplation from the “grasp of Western Christian expression” and reframe it through a queer ethos of “strangeness, oddity, liberation [and] love.” Arguing that queerness contains the “generative materials necessary to awaken our contemplative life,” Hall casts aside the work of Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who “cannot express what it’s like for me to be a queer woman in America,” in favor of such models as “sex worker turned hermit monk” Pelagia, who lived in fourth-or fifth-century Antioch as a trans male, and Walatta Petros, a 17th-century Ethiopian nun believed to be a lesbian. Drawing inspiration from these figures,…

Religion/Spirituality

www.publishersweekly.com FICTION ★ Great Expectations Vinson Cunningham. Hogarth, ISBN 978-0-59344-823-6, Mar. Nefando Mónica Ojeda, trans. by Sarah K. Booker. Coffee House, ISBN 978-1-56689-689-4, Oct. ★ The Year of the Locust Terry Hayes. Atria/Bestler, ISBN 978-1-6680-5578-6, Feb. NONFICTION American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden Katie Rogers. Crown, ISBN 978-0-593-24056-4, Feb. Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence Avril Horner. Manchester Univ., ISBN 978-1-5261-7374-4, Mar. ★ Battle for the Bird: Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and the $44 Billion Fight for Twitter’s Soul Kurt Wagner. Atria, ISBN 978-1-66801-735-7, Feb. ★ Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration Harold Holzer. Dutton, ISBN 978-0-451-48901-2, Feb. Life After Power: Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House Jared Cohen. Simon & Schuster, ISBN 978-1-9821-5454-7, Feb. ★ Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of…

★ Summer Is Here Renée Watson, illus. by Bea Jackson. Bloomsbury, $18.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-547-60586-6 A dark-skinned Black protagonist embraces summer via a litany of seasonal activities in this experiential first-person ode. Waking to the sun beaming through a bedroom window, the young narrator describes the orb “waking me up with her light./ Her sunrays tickle me.” As the day progresses, summer reveals its pleasures through summer fruits (“fat mangoes, bursting with juice/ deep-red strawberries that stain my hands”), pool time with friends (“Our bright swimsuits float… like lily pads”), a game of double Dutch, and a community cookout “under trees full of leaves to shade us.” Jackson (The Twelve Hours of Christmas) employs bright light and sunlit hues to capture the ease and lengthy rhythms of an enjoyable summer’s day, while…

Code Name Kingfisher Liz Kessler. Aladdin, $18.99 (336p) ISBN 978-1-66592-973-8 Kessler (When the World Was Ours) intertwines two poignant stories via four alternating perspectives in this well-paced novel: one of Dutch Jewish sisters Mila, 12, and Hannie, 15, posing as Christians in WWII Amsterdam, the other of contemporary British 13-year-old Liv, who’s navigating friendship troubles and her relationship with her cold, secretive grandmother. A school assignment to create a family tree stumps Liv, who knows nothing about her ancestry. But after her widowed paternal grandmother, Bubbe, moves to a care facility, Liv cleans out her attic and discovers a photograph dated 1942 that might provide clues to Bubbe’s guarded nature—and help with Liv’s assignment. Hannie’s unsent letters to her mother are interspersed throughout Liv and Mila’s dual POVs, and occasional later chapters…

A Song of Gladness: A Story of Hope for Us and Our Planet Michael Morpurgo, illus. by Emily Gravett. Two Hoots, $18.99 (36p) ISBN 978-1-5290-6331-8 Beginning with “a wake-up call,” animals share a conceit that builds to a heartening message of planetary care in this obliquely conceptual picture book. After a pale-skinned human narrator chats with a blackbird, the bird sings to a “fox half asleep in the garden shed”—from there, an “idea” (never fully defined) moves to a deer, then to a kingfisher, otter, and so on, until the communique reaches creatures in sundry globe-spanning habitats. Circling back to the original duo, the message transitions to a “song of forgiveness,” and the blackbird urges human participation: “We want you… to be happy again. Only then will you treat us and the…

FOREST THROUGH THE TREES

Log Life (Tiny Habitats) Amy Hevron. Beach Lane, $18.99 (48p) ISBN 978-1-66593-498-5 Hevron celebrates the vibrant and centuries-spanning life of a nurse log in this spirited tribute. After the dramatic collapse of a fir tree, text utilizes a storybook-like tone as flora and fauna alike begin to call the newly fallen log home. Year one sees a “big, mushroomy party! Hooray!” in spring. “Snails vacayed in the decay” one summer a decade later; the log hosts critters big and little at the autumnal 100-year mark; and at year 500, the woody subject welcomes wintertime mammals as they “cuddled inside.” Very slowly, the log is replaced by a new fir poised to repeat the cycle. Accompanying artwork highlights woodgrain textures as it collages acrylic, marker, and pencil elements, including a bevy of companionable…

FOREST THROUGH THE TREES

Cloud Puppy (Cloud Puppy #1) Kelly Leigh Miller. Atheneum, $12.99 (160p) ISBN 978-1-6659-3212-7 Miller (I Love My Magic) delivers a bright dose of sunshine wrapped in a wondrously silly package in this meta graphic novel series opener. Cloud Puppy is exactly who she says she is: part cloud, part puppy, and all rainbows and sunbeams (except for when she gets mad). She and her best friend Berry Rose, who is part unicorn and part bear, are preparing to attend a convention, where they will cosplay as beloved characters and meet their favorite comic book creator. But conflict arises when Cloud Puppy and Berry Rose each choose to portray the same character, resulting in their first-ever disagreement. Rather than conjuring a battle between the BFFs, Miller nimbly combines humor and heart to depict…

Born Naughty: My Childhood in China Jin Wang with Tony Johnston, illus. by Anisi Baigude. Random House/Schwartz, $16.99 (112p) ISBN 978-0-5935-6361-8 With Johnston (Ten Owies), debut author Wang recounts cheerful memories from her childhood in this captivating chapter book memoir. In 1982, mischievous eight-year-old Wang lives without electricity or running water in Nan Ba Zi, a rural Chinese village in Inner Mongolia that was “so little it was not even on a map.” Living near a desert in “a mud hut so tiny we barely fit inside,” Wang “felt the sting of its sand in the time of wind” and, because water was scarce, she “took baths once, maybe twice a year.” Yet Wang finds joy in the everyday and even during routine outings with her parents, as when her father’s excursion…

“Be in Love with Your Book”

In Emma Stone’s The Blue Iris, Tessa Lewis, who’s at a crossroads following graduate school, impulsively takes a summer job at a flower shop and becomes immersed in the dysfunctional lives of the staff. BookLife called it “a gorgeous literary novel with a nostalgic aesthetic and themes of complex friendships, family trauma, and healing through self-discovery” and named it an editor’s pick. What inspired you to write The Blue Iris? The Blue Iris was born out of personal crisis. A rare tumor in my head, successfully removed years ago, resurfaced out of nowhere, and suddenly my long-held dream of becoming a writer felt very now-or-never. I paused my corporate career to see if I could give that dream a proper go. I never imagined I had a whole novel inside of me,…

“Be in Love with Your Book”

To submit a first line from your book, email booklife@booklife.com. The Art of Forgiveness: A Promise of Peace CAROLYN CJ JONES “My deepest desire in sharing this book is to be useful to those of you who are tired of anger and resentment affecting your life.” But the Heart Does IRIS BLOBEL “Jonah Lewis rushed down the corridor, reaching the lift just in the nick of time before its doors closed behind him.” Candle Light Meals In the Devil’s Comedy Store HAJI OUTLAW “Charles Weinmorre stood looking at himself in a full-length mirror.” Even If We’re Broken A.M. WEALD “Kate Roth pulled her key ring out of her jacket pocket—seven keys, a bottle opener, a small plastic human skull—then slid off the house key now devoid of use.” The Great Forest VALINORA TROY “Spring sunshine shone upon the Rock of Diamonds, warming the stone where…

BookLife Reviews

BookLife Reviews are paid reviews of independently published books. A lightning bolt indicates an Editor’s Pick, a book of outstanding quality. FICTION The Me List Julee Balko | Black Rose Writing 229p, trade paper, $20.95, ISBN 978-1-685-13361-0 This poignant, hilariously relatable story of rivalries, friendship, and starving to squeeze more from life opens with suburban mom Olivia yearning for wine, rifling through clearance underwear at Target, and generally feeling piled upon. Soon, she gazes out the window at her neighbor, Patricia, the top realtor in town, a woman who seems “so perfectly polished when Olivia’s life was so perfectly not.” But when Olivia agrees to be Patricia’s assistant, she discovers that Patricia’s life isn’t exactly what she thought. The list of tasks that Patricia gives her—stage rooms, schedule showings, and update listings—are all expected, but Patricia…

BookLife Reviews

KIMBERLY WITHERSPOON Literary Agent and Founding Partner, InkWell Management “As with all of Lionel’s books, I was immediately hooked by the world she was describing. The fact that it is a world very much like but not precisely our reality makes it an especially compelling and provocative read. Gail Winston, Lionel’s longtime editor at HarperCollins, had recently retired before we submitted this manuscript. Mania is the first novel that we are publishing with Sara Nelson, Lionel’s new editor at HarperCollins.” LIONEL SHRIVER Author “I was disturbed by the 21st century’s many conformist social hysterias, differences over which lost me more than one long-term friendship. Once I’d invented my own mania—there’s no such thing as stupid—writing the book was almost effortless. My only problem writing the novel was continually bursting out laughing.” SARA NELSON V-P and Executive Editor,…

Fiction Chasing Money: A Marty and Bo Thriller Michael Balter. Mission Point, $9.99 e-book (300p) ASIN B0CFYR82P4 Balter introduces bumbling Oregonian business partners Marty Schott and Bo Bishop in this enjoyable debut caper and series launch. When the action kicks off, Marty, Bo, and their silent partner Nico are strapped to kitchen chairs in “a shabby little wood cabin about 20 miles west of Mt. Hood.” The group had intended to pitch a venture capitalist on their startup, Paladin; when they showed up to the meeting, however, they were kidnapped by a gun-toting trio and brought to the cabin. With Marty, Bo, and Nico restrained, a Russian man demands $10 million and a valuable painting, both of which, he says, the captives have stolen. Marty and Bo have no idea what he’s talking…

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