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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.

Nadia Hashimi, author of Sparks Like Stars

Kabul, 1978: The daughter of a prominent family, Sitara Zamani lives a privileged life in Afghanistan’s thriving cosmopolitan capital. But her world is shattered when communists stage a coup, assassinating the president and Sitara’s entire family. Smuggled out of the palace by a guard named Shair, Sitara finds her way to the home of a female American diplomat, who adopts her and raises her in America. In her new country, Sitara takes on a new name --- Aryana Shepherd --- and throws herself into her studies, eventually becoming a renowned surgeon. New York, 2008: Forty years after that fatal night in Kabul, Aryana’s world is rocked again when an elderly patient appears in her examination room. It is Shair, the soldier who saved her, yet may have murdered her entire family.

Sparks Like Stars by Nadia Hashimi

March 2021

I have been a huge fan of Nadia Hashimi’s earlier books, so I was very excited to read her latest, SPARKS LIKE STARS.

The novel opens in 1978. Sitara Zamani is a 10-year-old Afghan girl living a privileged life in Kabul. Her family is warm and loving. There was sadness in the past, as they lost a daughter before Sitara was born, but these days she lives a happy and carefree life with her mother, father and younger brother.

However, their peaceful existence is upended when a coup takes place, and in one terrifying evening, Sitara's entire family is slain.She is squired away by one of the attackers and left in the hands of an American foreign government worker who assumes the role of getting her to safety.

Week of February 7, 2022

Paperback releases for the week of February 7th include Tara Westover's EDUCATED, an unforgettable memoir about a young woman who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University; GOLDEN GIRL, a beach book unlike any other from Elin Hilderbrand, whose protagonist is a Nantucket novelist who has one final summer to protect her secrets while her loved ones on earth learn to live without their golden girl; THE CONSEQUENCES OF FEAR, the 16th installment in Jacqueline Winspear's mystery series featuring Maisie Dobbs, who investigates a possible murder that threatens devastating repercussions for Britain's war efforts as Europe buckles under Nazi occupation; Alex Berenson's THE POWER COUPLE, a supercharged thriller about marriage and the dangerous secrets spouses keep; and SPARKS LIKE STARS, a brilliant and compelling novel in which an Afghan American woman returns to Kabul to learn the truth about her family and the tragedy that destroyed their lives.

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