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End-of-the-Year Contest 2018

Congratulations to the winners of our 2018 End-of-the-Year Contest! One Grand Prize winner received all 45 of Carol Fitzgerald's Bookreporter.com Bets On picks from 2018, while nine others won a selection of five of these titles. You can see all the winners below, along with 2018's Bets On books.

Marie Benedict, author of Carnegie's Maid

Clara Kelley is not the experienced Irish maid who was hired to work in one of Pittsburgh's grandest households. She's a poor farmer's daughter with nowhere to go and nothing in her pockets. But the other woman with the same name has vanished, and pretending to be her just might get Clara some money to send back home. Serving as a lady's maid in the household of Andrew Carnegie requires skills he doesn't have, answering to an icy mistress who rules her sons and her domain with an iron fist.

Carnegie's Maid by Marie Benedict

January 2018

Carnegie. It’s a name I know well; after all, Carnegie Hall is just blocks from my office. But I confess that I knew little about Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish businessman who made his fortune in America. Marie Benedict’s CARNEGIE’S MAID drew me into his world through historical fiction. In it, Clara Kelley has made inroads into his family’s Pittsburgh home in the role of an experienced Irish maid. Actually she is a poor farmer’s daughter who sailed to America to help save her family by sending money back home.

Week of October 1, 2018

Paperback releases for the week of October 1st include LEONARDO DA VINCI, in which Walter Isaacson weaves a narrative that connects Leonardo's art to his science, showing how his genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves --- such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy; Liza Mundy's CODE GIRLS, the award-winning national bestseller about the American women who secretly served as codebreakers during World War II; CARNEGIE'S MAID by Marie Benedict, which tells the story of one brilliant woman who may have spurred Andrew Carnegie's transformation from ruthless industrialist into the world's first true philanthropist; and IT'S ALL RELATIVE, A.J. Jacobs' hilarious, heartfelt quest to understand what constitutes family --- where it begins and how far it goes --- and his attempt to untangle the true meaning of the “Family of Humankind.”