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The Lost Baker of Vienna by Sharon Kurtzman

September 2025

I, like many of you, have read my fair share of fiction about World War II. What my historical education lacks is what happened after the war. I am not naïve. I did not think that people left the concentration camps, bought new clothes, and had a few good meals to celebrate their liberation. But I also was not sure how their stories would unfold. THE LOST BAKER OF VIENNA gave me the chance to see how one fictional family navigated the weeks and months after their release.

The book has its history rooted in stories that Sharon Kurtzman’s mother shared with her of how her family survived after the fighting ended. They lived in Vienna, a city that was controlled by four different countries (I did not know this) and where violence still sprang up, food was scarce, and the black market was in full operation.

September 12, 2025

Last night, Tom (Editorial Director Tom, not Husband Tom) and I went into the city for a party that was hosted by the Publishers Publicity Association, which is made up of book publicists. We got to see a lot of industry folks, including a former staffer and a former intern. A number of the people we talked to mentioned how “ahead of the curve” we were.

First, by starting an online book site 29 years ago. Second, for creating a home for book groups with ReadingGroupGuides.com over 25 years ago (big celebration news is coming in the next few weeks). And third, how in early 2019, we were shooting videos in our office (primitively with a camera) talking about the books that were out that week.

Interview: Jack Du Brul, author of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm: An Isaac Bell Adventure

Sep 11, 2025

Detective Isaac Bell faces the horrors of the Great War while battling a mysterious anarchist group intent on bringing brutality to the shores of America in THE IRON STORM, Jack Du Brul’s latest thrilling adventure in the #1 New York Times bestselling series created by Clive Cussler. In this interview conducted by former publicity executive Michael Barson, who was Cussler’s primary publicist at G.P. Putnam’s Sons from 1999 to 2015, Du Brul talks about incorporating iconic figures into his stories, the importance of research to ensure that every detail is accurate, and why he loves writing historical fiction so much.

Arundhati Roy, author of Mother Mary Comes to Me

MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME is a soaring account of how Arundhati Roy became the person and the writer she is. “Heart-smashed” by her mother Mary’s death in September 2022 yet puzzled and “more than a little ashamed” by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age 18, “not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her.” And so begins this astonishing, sometimes disturbing and surprisingly funny memoir of the author’s journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, to the writing of her prize-winning novels and essays, through today.

Hank Phillippi Ryan, author of All This Could Be Yours

Debut sensation Tessa Calloway is on a whirlwind book tour for her instant bestseller, All This Could Be Yours. She receives standing ovations from adoring fans while her husband, Henry, and their two children cheer her on from their brand-new dream house. But there's a chilling problem with Tessa's triumphant book tour. She soon discovers she is being stalked by someone who's obsessed not only with sabotaging her career, but also with destroying her perfect family back home. Tessa fears that the fallout from an impossible decision she once made appears to be coming due. And she’s realizing that every high-stakes bargain comes with a high-stakes price. If Tessa can't untangle who's threatening to expose her darkest secrets, she'll lose her career, her family --- and possibly her life.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation

In 2000, Elizabeth Gilbert met Rayya. They became friends, then best friends, then inseparable. When tragedy entered their lives, the truth was finally laid bare: The two were in love. They were also a pair of addicts, on a collision course toward catastrophe. What if your most beautiful love story turned into your biggest nightmare? What if the dear friend who taught you so much about your self-destructive tendencies became the unstable partner with whom you disastrously reenacted every one of them? And what if your most devastating heartbreak opened a pathway to your greatest awakening?

Editorial Content for Bridge of Sighs

Teaser

From the beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning author of EMPIRE FALLS comes a novel about small-town America that follows Louis Charles Lynch (“Lucy”) and his wife of 40 years as they prepare to embark on a vacation to Italy.

Promo

From the beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning author of EMPIRE FALLS comes a novel about small-town America that follows Louis Charles Lynch (“Lucy”) and his wife of 40 years as they prepare to embark on a vacation to Italy.

About the Book

From the beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning author of EMPIRE FALLS comes “a magnificent, bighearted” novel (The Boston Globe) about small-town America that follows Louis Charles Lynch (“Lucy”) and his wife of 40 years as they prepare to embark on a vacation to Italy.

Louis Charles Lynch is 60 years old and has spent his entire life in Thomaston, New York, married to the same woman, Sarah, for 40 of them, their son now a grown man. Like his late, beloved father, “Lucy” is an optimist, though he’s had plenty of reasons not to be --- chief among them his mother, still indomitably alive. Yet it was her shrewdness, combined with that Lynch optimism, that had propelled them years ago to the right side of the tracks and created an “empire” of convenience stores about to be passed on to the next generation.

Lucy and Sarah are also preparing for a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Italy, where his oldest friend, a renowned painter, has exiled himself. Once a rival for Sarah’s affection, Noonan leads a life in Venice far removed from Thomaston. In fact, the exact nature of their friendship is one of the many mysteries Lucy hopes to untangle in the “history” he’s writing of his hometown and family. And with his story interspersed with that of Noonan, the native son who’d fled so long ago, the destinies building up around both of them (and Sarah, too) are relentless, constantly surprising and utterly revealing.

Editorial Content for Full Bloom

Book

Teaser

A woman's life is forever changed by a mysterious perfume in this stunning novel about ambition and untapped desire from the New York Times bestselling author of GHOSTS OF HARVARD.

Promo

A woman's life is forever changed by a mysterious perfume in this stunning novel about ambition and untapped desire from the New York Times bestselling author of GHOSTS OF HARVARD.

About the Book

The power to be seen. The power to be heard. The power to be adored.

A woman's life is forever changed by a mysterious perfume in this stunning novel about ambition and untapped desire from the New York Times bestselling author of GHOSTS OF HARVARD.

Reeling from a breakup and overlooked at her job as a lighting designer, Iris Sunnegren finds herself stuck, disconnected and lonely in crowded New York City. Her wealthy friends are married and having babies, while she’s trying to pay for freezing her eggs. And the future she longs for feels out of reach.

Then a mysterious neighbor, an older Frenchwoman, makes her a gift: a bespoke perfume.

One spritz, a dab behind the ears, and Iris feels like a different woman. Suddenly, she is the object of every man’s desire, and she can satisfy her own hungers for sex, love and ambition. She can cast off her inhibitions and use her newfound allure to dazzle the high-profile client, attract a man who excites her like no other, and access all the rarefied spaces that once excluded her. Invigorated by the perfume, Iris embodies her maximum power --- a flower fully bloomed.

But there is danger in connecting to our primal emotions. Scent awakens buried memories, and nightmares of the childhood house fire she barely survived return to haunt her. As Iris ventures deeper into the glamorous and male-dominated worlds of New York real estate, dimly lit steakhouses, and beachfront mansions in the Hamptons, she finds herself getting closer to unspeakable truths --- about the people she trusted, about the people she loved, and about the new circle of power-players that invited her in.

A sensual and seductive novel set among the upper echelons of New York City, FULL BLOOM is at once a poignant story of becoming and a riveting mystery that asks: Who are you without your inhibitions? Does being wanted get what you want, or will you be devoured by desire?

Editorial Content for The Harvey Girls

Teaser

Juliette Fay transports us to 1920s America with a big-hearted tale of two very different women who must learn to trust each other as one tries to save her family and the other to save herself.

Promo

Juliette Fay transports us to 1920s America with a big-hearted tale of two very different women who must learn to trust each other as one tries to save her family and the other to save herself.

About the Book

Juliette Fay --- known for her “well-drawn characters and vibrant historical backdrops” (Library Journal) --- transports us to 1920s America with this big-hearted tale of two very different women who must learn to trust each other as one tries to save her family and the other to save herself. Perfect for fans of Kristin Hannah and Kristina McMorris.

1926: Charlotte Crowninshield was born into one of the finest Boston society families. Now she’s on the run from a brutal husband, desperate to disappear into the wilds of the Southwest. Billie MacTavish is the oldest of nine children born to Scottish immigrants in Nebraska. She quit school in the sixth grade to help with her mother’s washing and mending business, but even that isn’t enough to keep the family afloat.

Desperate, both women join the ranks of the Harvey Girls, waitresses who serve in America’s first hospitality chain on the Santa Fe railroad. Hired on the same day, they share three things: a room, a heartfelt dislike of each other…and each has a secret that certainly will get them fired.

Through 12-hour days of training in Topeka, Kansas, they learn the fine art of service, perfecting their skills despite bouts of homesickness, fear of being discovered and a run-in with the KKK. When they’re sent to work at the luxurious El Tovar hotel at the Grand Canyon, the challenges only grow, as Billie struggles to hide her young age from would-be suitors and Charlotte discovers the little-known dark side of the national park’s history.

“Juliette Fay’s gift for creating complex, exquisitely human characters” (Marisa de los Santos, New York Times bestselling author) is on full display in this deeply moving and joyous celebration of female empowerment, loyalty and friendship.

Editorial Content for In Berlin

Book

Teaser

IN BERLIN is an entangled story about two women whose lives are upended, one by an achingly rare spinal stroke and the other by political violence.

Promo

IN BERLIN is an entangled story about two women whose lives are upended, one by an achingly rare spinal stroke and the other by political violence.

About the Book

"An utterly spellbinding journey...reflects a triumph of the human spirit in the face of unexpected catastrophe." —Vivek Murthy, MD, MBA, 19th and 21st Surgeon General of the United States

His novel is for the universe, and all readers will find bits of themselves in places they might not have realized." —Heather Krill, TRUE NORTH

Software engineer Anna Werner lives at a rapid clip, relishing her work and adopted city as much as her early morning runs. All comes undone on a sweaty August evening when, in the course of a 20-minute commute, Anna goes from worrying vaguely about a sore shoulder to staggering her way into an ambulance. She has suffered a spinal stroke. Over the coming months, her parents join the insurance man in telling her to get ready for life in a group home.

The only person who recognizes what Anna is still capable of is Batul al-Jaberi, a recent Syrian immigrant who meets Anna while doing her rounds as a janitor at the hospital. Batul is applying to medical school, where she hopes to regain control of a life hijacked by her family's flight from persecution in the early days of the Arab Spring.

At first the friendship is what Anna and Batul each need to regain mobility. But as their relationship deepens, Batul finds that she must choose between her family and Anna --- a choice that will force both women to rewrite their notions of loyalty.

IN BERLIN is a work of empathetic precision, exploring both the unpredictable nature by which geopolitics and scientific breakthroughs touch our lives, and the brave, bold and sometimes quiet ways in which people reassert agency in the face of loss. Most of all, it taps a throughline of emotion that binds characters and readers alike across geographies, cultures and ambitions.