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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.

Paula McLain, author of Love and Ruin

In 1937, 28-year-old Martha Gellhorn travels alone to Madrid to report on the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War and becomes drawn to the stories of ordinary people caught in the devastating conflict. It’s the adventure she’s been looking for and her chance to prove herself a worthy journalist in a field dominated by men. But she also finds herself unexpectedly falling in love with Ernest Hemingway, a man on his way to becoming a legend. When Ernest publishes the biggest literary success of his career, FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, they are no longer equals, and Martha must make a choice: surrender to the confining demands of being a famous man’s wife, or risk losing Ernest by forging a path as her own woman and writer.

Love and Ruin by Paula McLain

May 2018

To me, Paula McLain is a gold standard writer of historical fiction. THE PARIS WIFE, with its brilliant account of Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Richardson, brought readers a new look at the writer through the eyes of a woman he loved. Her latest book, LOVE AND RUIN, gives us another look at a wife of Hemingway as here she explores the life of his third wife, Martha Gellhorn.

Paula never thought she would write about Hemingway again, but as she shares, “I had a crazily vivid and powerful dream. I was fishing with Hemingway on his boat, the Pilar, and Martha Gellhorn was there, hand-feeding a marlin that had leapt from the sea. The next morning, still gripped by the dream and feeling it was some sort of sign,” she started researching Gellhorn, who she knew surprisingly little about. The more she read, the more she wanted to tell her story --- not just as the wife of Hemingway, but also for the brilliant writer she was in her own right. And that she does.

Week of January 14, 2019

Paperback releases for the week of January 14th include LOVE AND RUIN, in which Paula McLain brings to life the story of Martha Gellhorn --- a fiercely independent, ambitious woman ahead of her time, who would become one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century; NO TIME TO SPARE, the collected best of Ursula K. Le Guin's blog that presents perfectly crystallized dispatches on what mattered to her late in life, her concerns with the world and her wonder at it; THE RECOVERING by Leslie Jamison, which turns our understanding of the traditional addiction narrative on its head, demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself; and Sara Shepard's debut novel for adults, THE ELIZAS, a Hitchcockian double narrative composed of lies, false memories and a protagonist who must uncover the truth for survival.

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