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January 18, 2023

This Bookreporter.com Special Newsletter spotlights a book that we know people will be talking about this winter. Read more about it, and enter our Winter Reading Contest by Thursday, January 19th at noon ET for a chance to win one of five copies of CLYTEMNESTRA by Costanza Casati, which releases on March 7th. Please note that each contest is only open for 24 hours, so you will need to act quickly!

January 17, 2023

In this newsletter, you will find books releasing the weeks of January 16th and January 23rd that we think will be of interest to Bookreporter.com readers, along with Bonus News, where we call out a contest, feature or review that we want to let you know about so you have it on your radar.

This week, we are calling attention to our Winter Reading Contests and Feature, which we have brought back for an eighth year. On select days in January and February, we are hosting a series of 24-hour contests spotlighting a book releasing this winter and giving five lucky readers the chance to win it. Our first contest kicks off TOMORROW, Wednesday, January 18th at noon ET.

Special Preview: Bookreporter.com's Winter Reading 2023

This Bookreporter.com SPECIAL PREVIEW Newsletter brings you a sneak peek at the titles that are included in our Winter Reading feature.

Each title below will be featured in a contest where you will have a 24-hour window of opportunity to enter for your chance to win a copy of the book being featured that day. You will need to act quickly! Learn more about the feature here.

We encourage you to scroll down and click on each image to read more about that book on our site.

If you have friends who you think may be interested in these 24-hour contests, please forward this newsletter to them so they can sign up for it.

Our first feature and contest kicks off TOMORROW, Wednesday, January 18th at noon ET. Best of luck to you, and Happy Winter Reading!

Laura Zigman, author of Small World

A year after her divorce, Joyce is settling into being single again and has developed a secret comforting hobby: trolling the neighborhood social networking site Small World for posts that help solve life’s easiest problems. When her older sister, Lydia, calls to tell her she’s moving back east after almost 30 years away, Joyce invites Lydia to temporarily move into her Cambridge apartment. But instead of forging the bond she always dreamed of having with Lydia, their relationship frays. And they rarely discuss the loss of their sister, Eleanor, who was significantly disabled and died when she was only 10 years old. When new revelations from their family’s history come to light, will those secrets further split them apart, or course-correct their connection for the future?

Stephen Markley, author of The Deluge

In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters --- a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.

Paul Levine, author of Early Grave: A Jake Lassiter Thriller

When his godson suffers a catastrophic injury in a high school football game, lawyer Jake Lassiter sues to abolish the sport and becomes Public Enemy Number One. The former NFL linebacker also battles CTE, the fatal brain disease. With his personal life in tatters, he's in couple's therapy with fiancée Dr. Melissa Gold and vows to live long enough to fix his relationship and achieve justice for his godson. EARLY GRAVE is the final novel of the series that began with the international bestseller TO SPEAK FOR THE DEAD in 1990.

Mary Kubica, author of Just the Nicest Couple

Jake Hayes is missing. This much is certain. At first, his wife, Nina, thinks he is blowing off steam at a friend’s house after their heated fight the night before. But then a day goes by. Two days. Five. And Jake is still nowhere to be found. Lily Scott, Nina’s friend and coworker, thinks she may have been the last to see Jake before he went missing. After Lily confesses everything to her husband, Christian, the two decide that nobody can find out what happened leading up to Jake’s disappearance, especially not Nina. But Nina is out there looking for her husband, and she won’t stop until the truth is discovered.

Brad Meltzer, author of The Nazi Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill

In 1943, as the war against Nazi Germany raged abroad, President Franklin Roosevelt had a critical goal: a face-to-face sit-down with his allies Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill. This first-ever meeting of the Big Three in Tehran, Iran, would decide some of the most crucial strategic details of the war. Yet when the Nazis found out about the meeting, their own secret plan took shape --- an assassination plot that would’ve changed history. A true story filled with daring rescues, body doubles and political intrigue, THE NAZI CONSPIRACY details FDR’s pivotal meeting in Tehran and the deadly Nazi plot against the heads of state of the three major Allied powers who attended it.

Editorial Content for The Blackhouse

Contributors

Reviewer (text)

Kate Ayers

On an island in the Outer Hebrides off the coast of mainland Scotland, visitors, rare though they may be, are greeted with a sign reading “Welcome to the Isle of Kilmeray.” But when Maggie MacKay returns in her mid-20s, there is little about the island that is welcoming --- from the weather to the inhabitants to the Blackhouse that she has rented. She had last been to Kilmeray when she was five years old, and she caused quite a stir with her claim of being Andrew MacNeil, a man who lived and died on the island. Read More

Teaser

Maggie Mackay has been haunted her entire life. No matter what she does, she can’t shake the sense that something is wrong with her. And maybe something is. When she was five years old, Maggie announced that a man on the remote island of Kilmeray in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides --- a place she’d never visited --- was murdered. Her unfounded claim drew media attention and turned the locals against each other, creating rifts that never mended. Now, nearly 20 years later, Maggie is determined to discover what really happened and what the villagers are hiding. But everyone has secrets, and some are deadly. As she gets closer to the horrifying truth, the island’s legendary and violent storms begin to rage again, and Maggie’s own life is in danger.

Promo

Maggie Mackay has been haunted her entire life. No matter what she does, she can’t shake the sense that something is wrong with her. And maybe something is. When she was five years old, Maggie announced that a man on the remote island of Kilmeray in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides --- a place she’d never visited --- was murdered. Her unfounded claim drew media attention and turned the locals against each other, creating rifts that never mended. Now, nearly 20 years later, Maggie is determined to discover what really happened and what the villagers are hiding. But everyone has secrets, and some are deadly. As she gets closer to the horrifying truth, the island’s legendary and violent storms begin to rage again, and Maggie’s own life is in danger.

About the Book

From the author of the “dark and devious...beautifully written” (Stephen King) MIRRORLAND comes an “atmospheric, thrilling, and utterly captivating” (Booklist) gothic tale set on a remote Scottish island where the locals are hiding a deadly secret.

Maggie Mackay has been haunted her entire life. No matter what she does, she can’t shake the sense that something is wrong with her. And maybe something is.

When she was five years old, Maggie announced that a man on the remote island of Kilmeray in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides --- a place she’d never visited --- was murdered. Her unfounded claim drew media attention and turned the locals against each other, creating rifts that never mended.

Now, nearly 20 years later, Maggie is determined to discover what really happened and what the villagers are hiding. But everyone has secrets, and some are deadly. As she gets closer to the horrifying truth, the island’s legendary and violent storms begin to rage again, and Maggie’s own life is in danger.

Unnerving, enthralling and filled with gothic suspense, THE BLACKHOUSE is a spectacularly sinister tale readers won’t soon forget.

Audiobook available; read by Joe McFadden, Eilidh Beaton, Joe McFadden and Eilidh Beaton

Editorial Content for Moonrise Over New Jessup

Contributors

Reviewer (text)

Susan Miura

Alice Young leaves her tiny, segregated Alabama town in 1957 with an evil landlord hot on her heels and just one goal: find her sister, Rosie, in Chicago. But her meager funds won’t stretch that far, so she heads for Birmingham, never imagining that her bus ride will end sooner than expected. At a rest stop in New Jessup, Alice discovers her own wonderland. No “whites only” signs on the store fronts and restaurants. No white people with condescending words or expressions. In fact, no white people at all. Read More

Teaser

In 1957, Alice Young steps off the bus into the all-Black town of New Jessup, Alabama, where residents have largely rejected integration as the means for Black social advancement. Instead, they seek to maintain, and fortify, the community they cherish on their “side of the woods.” In this place, Alice falls in love with Raymond Campbell, whose clandestine organizing activities challenge New Jessup’s longstanding status quo and could lead to the young couple’s expulsion --- or worse --- from the home they both hold dear. But as Raymond continues to push alternatives for enhancing New Jessup’s political power, Alice must find a way to balance her undying support for his underground work with her desire to protect New Jessup from the rising pressure of upheaval from inside, and outside, their side of town.

Promo

In 1957, Alice Young steps off the bus into the all-Black town of New Jessup, Alabama, where residents have largely rejected integration as the means for Black social advancement. Instead, they seek to maintain, and fortify, the community they cherish on their “side of the woods.” In this place, Alice falls in love with Raymond Campbell, whose clandestine organizing activities challenge New Jessup’s longstanding status quo and could lead to the young couple’s expulsion --- or worse --- from the home they both hold dear. But as Raymond continues to push alternatives for enhancing New Jessup’s political power, Alice must find a way to balance her undying support for his underground work with her desire to protect New Jessup from the rising pressure of upheaval from inside, and outside, their side of town.

About the Book

Winner of the 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, a thought-provoking and enchanting debut about a Black woman doing whatever it takes to protect all she loves at the beginning of the civil rights movement in Alabama.
 
It’s 1957, and after leaving the only home she has ever known, Alice Young steps off the bus into the all-Black town of New Jessup, Alabama, where residents have largely rejected integration as the means for Black social advancement. Instead, they seek to maintain, and fortify, the community they cherish on their “side of the woods.” In this place, Alice falls in love with Raymond Campbell, whose clandestine organizing activities challenge New Jessup’s longstanding status quo and could lead to the young couple’s expulsion --- or worse --- from the home they both hold dear.

But as Raymond continues to push alternatives for enhancing New Jessup’s political power, Alice must find a way to balance her undying support for his underground work with her desire to protect New Jessup from the rising pressure of upheaval from inside, and outside, their side of town.

Jamila Minnicks’ debut novel is both a celebration of Black joy and a timely examination of the opposing viewpoints that attended desegregation in America. Readers of Brit Bennett’s THE VANISHING HALF and Robert Jones, Jr.’s THE PROPHETS will love MOONRISE OVER JESSUP.

Audiobook available, read by Karen Chilton