Spring Book Preview: April 2016, Part III |

Yes, there’s more. This is the final post, wrapping up all the April titles I’m excited about. I’ve included the publisher’s summary, as well as a few words about why I’m interested in the particular title.

The Darkest Corner by Kara Thomas (April 19):

For fans of Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places and Sara Shepard’s Pretty Little Liars, The Darkest Corners is a psychological thriller about the lies little girls tell, and the deadly truths those lies become.

There are ghosts around every corner in Fayette, Pennsylvania. Tessa left when she was nine and has been trying ever since not to think about it after what happened there that last summer. Memories of things so dark will burn themselves into your mind if you let them.

Callie never left. She moved to another house, so she doesn’t have to walk those same halls, but then Callie always was the stronger one. She can handle staring into the faces of her demons—and if she parties hard enough, maybe one day they’ll disappear for good.

Tessa and Callie have never talked about what they saw that night. After the trial, Callie drifted and Tessa moved, and childhood friends just have a way of losing touch.

But ever since she left, Tessa has had questions. Things have never quite added up. And now she has to go back to Fayette—to Wyatt Stokes, sitting on death row; to Lori Cawley, Callie’s dead cousin; and to the one other person who may be hiding the truth.

Only the closer Tessa gets to the truth, the closer she gets to a killer—and this time, it won’t be so easy to run away.

I love me a dark and twisty psychological thriller! That this is compared to Gillian Flynn, I’m sold!

The Dark Lady’s Mask by Mary Sharratt (April 19):

London, 1593. Aemilia Bassano Lanier is beautiful and accomplished, but her societal conformity ends there. She frequently cross-dresses to escape her loveless marriage and to gain freedoms only men enjoy, but a chance encounter with a ragged, little-known poet named Shakespeare changes everything.

Aemilia grabs at the chance to pursue her long-held dream of writing and the two outsiders strike up a literary bargain. They leave plague-ridden London for Italy, where they begin secretly writing comedies together and where Will falls in love with the beautiful country — and with Aemilia, his Dark Lady. Their Italian idyll, though, cannot last and their collaborative affair comes to a devastating end. Will gains fame and fortune for their plays back in London and years later publishes the sonnets mocking his former muse. Not one to stand by in humiliation, Aemilia takes up her own pen in her defense and in defense of all women.

The Dark Lady’s Mask gives voice to a real Renaissance woman in every sense of the word.

Though this time period is one I don’t typically read, I’m a fan of this author’s work. She writes strong, determined women. I can’t wait to “meet” Aemilia.

Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld (April 19):

Lizzy Bennett is smart, beautiful, witty, successful—a high-powered magazine editor in New York—but when her father falls ill, she and her sister Jane return to Ohio and the home they thought they’d left behind forever. There, the thirty-somethings find their family in chaos: sisters Kitty and Lydia are wild over the Cincinnati Bengals, the city’s football team; Mary is becoming a rabbi (even though the Bennetts aren’t Jewish); and their creepy cousin Willie Collins, a Silicon Valley wunderkind, is paying the five sisters a little too much attention. And then there are Cincinnati’s newest and most eligible bachelors, handsome doctor and reality TV star Chip Bingley…and his utterly infuriating friend, neurosurgeon Fitzwilliam Darcy.

I don’t know what has me more excited about this: the fact that it’s a retelling of Pride and Prejudice or that Curtis Sittenfeld wrote it!

Father’s Day by Simon Van Booy (April 26):

The moving story of an orphaned girl named Harvey and the troubled uncle who raises her—an unforgettable tale of loss and redemption from the author of The Illusion of Separateness.

At the age of six, a little girl named Harvey learns that her parents have died in a car accident. As she struggles to understand, a kindly social worker named Wanda introduces her to her only living relative: her uncle Jason, a disabled felon with a violent past and a criminal record. Despite his limitations—and his resistance—Wanda follows a hunch and cajoles Jason into becoming her legal guardian, convinced that each may be the other’s last chance.

Moving between past and present, Father’s Day weaves together the story of Harvey’s childhood and her life as a young woman in Paris, as she awaits her uncle’s arrival for a Father’s Day visit. To mark the occasion, Harvey has planned a series of gifts for Jason—all leading to a revelation she believes will only deepen their bond.

With extraordinary empathy and emotional impact, the award-winning writer Simon Van Booy has crafted a simple yet luminous novel of loss and transcendence, second chances and forgiveness: a breakthrough work from one of our most gifted chroniclers of the human heart.

I love everything Simon Van Booy writes! He captures the human emotion so expertly. I cannot wait to experience this book!

Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel (April 26):

World War Z meets The Martian. This inventive first novel will please devoted fans of sci fi as well as literary readers hoping a smart thriller will sneak up on them.

17 years ago: A girl in South Dakota falls through the earth, then wakes up dozens of feet below ground on the palm of what seems to be a giant metal hand. Today: She is a top-level physicist leading a team of people to understand exactly what that hand is, where it came from, and what it portends for humanity. A swift and spellbinding tale told almost exclusively through transcriptions of interviews conducted by a mysterious and unnamed character, this is a unique debut that describes a hunt for truth, power, and giant body parts.

This one sounds like it could be very very good….or very very bad. I’m willing to take the risk.

When the Moon is Low by Nadia Hashimi (April 26):

Mahmoud’s passion for his wife Fereiba, a schoolteacher, is greater than any love she’s ever known. But their happy, middle-class world—a life of education, work, and comfort—implodes when their country is engulfed in war, and the Taliban rises to power.

Mahmoud, a civil engineer, becomes a target of the new fundamentalist regime and is murdered. Forced to flee Kabul with her three children, Fereiba has one hope to survive: she must find a way to reach her sister’s family in England. With forged papers and help from kind strangers they meet along the way, Fereiba make a dangerous crossing into Iran under cover of darkness. Exhausted and brokenhearted but undefeated, Fereiba manages to smuggle them as far as Greece. But in a busy market square, their fate takes a frightening turn when her teenage son, Saleem, becomes separated from the rest of the family.

Faced with an impossible choice, Fereiba pushes on with her daughter and baby, while Saleem falls into the shadowy underground network of undocumented Afghans who haunt the streets of Europe’s capitals. Across the continent Fereiba and Saleem struggle to reunite, and ultimately find a place where they can be a family again.

When the Moon Is Low is a heartfelt revelation of a novel with characters who will haunt the reader long after the last page is turned.

The cover, the premise, the setting…there’s nothing about this book that doesn’t have me intrigued.

Murder at the 42nd Street Library by Con Lehane (April 26):

The first book in an amazing new series that features crime a la library at some of America’s most famous institutions of higher reading.Murder at the 42nd Street Library opens with a murder in a second floor office of the iconic, beaux-arts flagship of the New York Public Library. Ray Ambler, the curator of the library’s crime fiction collection, joins forces with NYPD homicide detective Mike Cosgrove in hopes of bringing a murderer to justice.

In his search for the reasons behind the murder, Ambler uncovers hidden–and profoundly disturbing–relationships between visitors to the library. These include a celebrated mystery writer who has donated his papers to the library’s crime fiction collection, that writer’s missing daughter, a New York society woman with a hidden past, and one of Ambler’s colleagues at the world-famous library. Those shocking revelations lead inexorably to the tragic and violent events that follow.

Mysteries set in libraries?! Yes, please!!

There you have it! All of the April titles I’m looking forward to! Time to plan your book budget/add to your hold list at the library! What titles are you looking forward to most?