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End-of-the-Year Contest 2021

Congratulations to the winners of our 2021 End-of-the-Year Contest! One Grand Prize winner received all 44 of Carol Fitzgerald's Bookreporter.com Bets On picks from 2021, while 11 others won a selection of four of these titles. You can see all the winners below, along with 2021's Bets On books.

Spring Preview 2021

The arrival of spring signals the end of our Spring Preview contests. Many thanks to all who entered --- and a big congratulations to all our winners! You can see the winners here, and below are the books that we believe you’ll be talking about over the next few months.

Lisa Scottoline, author of Eternal

Elisabetta, Marco and Sandro grow up as the best of friends despite their differences. Elisabetta is a feisty beauty who dreams of becoming a novelist; Marco the brash and athletic son in a family of professional cyclists; and Sandro a Jewish mathematics prodigy, kindhearted and thoughtful, the son of a lawyer and a doctor. Their friendship blossoms to love, with both Sandro and Marco hoping to win Elisabetta's heart. But in the autumn of 1937, all of that begins to change as Mussolini asserts his power, aligning Italy's Fascists with Hitler's Nazis and altering the very laws that govern Rome. In time, everything that the three hold dear --- their families, their homes and their connection to one another --- is tested in ways they never could have imagined.

Eternal by Lisa Scottoline

March 2021

I love when authors step out of their comfort zone, stretch and leap --- and then land the jump. That is what Lisa Scottoline did in writing ETERNAL, a historical novel set in Italy in the late 1930s as Fascism is sweeping through the country, as well as anti-Semitism. While I confess to World War II reading fatigue, here I dashed that thought, as I fell in love with her three characters --- Elisabetta, Marco and Sandro --- who are childhood friends in Rome. Also, while I knew much about the war setting in England, France and Germany, I knew very little about the rise of Fascism in Rome and the terrible toll it took on the country.

Week of January 31, 2022

Paperback releases for the week of February 1st include Jeanine Cummins' AMERICAN DIRT, a rare exploration into the inner hearts of people willing to sacrifice everything for a glimmer of hope; Lisa Scottoline's first work of historical fiction, ETERNAL, the tale of a love triangle that unfolds in the heart of Rome...in the creeping shadow of fascism; THE VANISHING HALF, Brit Bennett's stunning novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds --- one Black and one white; Elizabeth McCracken's short story collection, THE SOUVENIR MUSEUM, in which the mysterious bonds of family are tested, transformed, fractured and fortified; and WHEN HARRY MET MINNIE, "CBS Sunday Morning News" correspondent and Emmy Award winner Martha Teichner's memoir of love and loss, being in the right place at the right time, and the mysterious ways that a beloved pet can bring people together.