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May 7, 2024

In this newsletter, you will find books releasing the weeks of May 6th and May 13th 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 Favorite Monthly Lists & Picks feature for May, which includes Indie Next, LibraryReads, the Barnes & Noble Book Club, the "Good Morning America" Book Club, Oprah's Book Club, the "Read with Jenna" Today Show Book Club, Reese's Book Club, and the Target Book Club.

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May 7, 2024

This Bookreporter.com Special Newsletter spotlights a book that we think is a great summer reading selection. Read more about it, and enter our Summer Reading Contest by Wednesday, May 8th at noon ET for a chance to win one of five copies of SUMMERS AT THE SAINT by Mary Kay Andrews, which is now available and will be a Bookreporter.com Bets On pick. Please note that each contest is only open for 24 hours, so you will need to act quickly!

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May 7, 2024

A Book Club for Two

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By Eve J. Chung
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Inspired by her own family story, DAUGHTERS OF SHANDONG is Eve J. Chung’s propulsive debut novel about a mother and her daughters’ harrowing escape to Taiwan as the Communist revolution sweeps through China. For the longest time, Eve was under the impression that her mom didn’t like to read, even though she made sure that Eve made frequent trips to the library. It wasn’t until later in life that Eve, a voracious reader, realized she had so much more in common with her mom than she ever thought, which has made their relationship even stronger.

Eve J. Chung

Eve J. Chung is a Taiwanese American human rights lawyer focusing on gender equality and women’s rights. She lives in New York with her husband, two children and two dogs.

Photo Credit: Eve J. Chung

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May 6, 2024

The Story My Mum Tells

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By Holly Gramazio
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Holly Gramazio’s recently released novel, THE HUSBANDS, is an instant New York Times bestseller and a “Read with Jenna” Today Show Book Club pick. This exuberant debut delights in asking: How do we navigate life, love and choice in a world of never-ending options? As a child, Holly had plenty of options when it came to books. And for a few years, her mum would read to her almost every night. It was only when Holly was 9 or 10, and she began reading to her brothers, that she gained a greater appreciation for everything her mum did to foster her love of reading at a young age.

Holly Gramazio

Holly Gramazio is a writer, game designer and curator from Adelaide, currently based in London. She founded the experimental games festival Now Play This and wrote the script for the award-winning indie video game Dicey Dungeons. Her recent projects include New Rules, a zine collecting essays about play during the pandemic, and a collaboration with artist Lawrence Lek on a game for his exhibition NOX.

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Susan Page, author of The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters

Barbara Walters was a force from the time TV was exploding on the American scene in the 1960s to its waning dominance in a new world of competition from streaming services and social media half a century later. In THE RULEBREAKER, Susan Page conducts 150 interviews and extensive archival research to discover that Walters was driven to keep herself and her family afloat after her mercurial and famous impresario father attempted suicide. But she never lost the fear of an impending catastrophe, which is what led her to ask for things no woman had ever asked for before, to ignore the rules of misogynistic culture, to outcompete her most ferocious competitors, and to protect her complicated marriages and love life from scrutiny.

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Janet Skeslien Charles, author of Miss Morgan's Book Brigade

1918: As the Great War rages, Jessie Carson takes a leave of absence from the New York Public Library to work for the American Committee for Devastated France. This group of international women help rebuild destroyed French communities just miles from the front. Upon arrival, Jessie strives to establish something that the French have never seen --- children’s libraries. She turns ambulances into bookmobiles and trains the first French female librarians. Then she disappears. 1987: When NYPL librarian and aspiring writer Wendy Peterson stumbles across a passing reference to Jessie Carson in the archives, she becomes consumed with learning her fate. Eventually she discovers that they have more in common than their work at New York’s famed library, but she has no idea their paths will converge in surprising ways across time.

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Emily Henry, author of Funny Story

Daphne always loved the way her fiancé, Peter, told their story. How they met, fell in love and moved back to his lakeside hometown to begin their life together. He really was good at telling it…right up until the moment he realized he actually was in love with his childhood best friend, Petra. Daphne is now stranded in beautiful Waning Bay, Michigan, with a dream job as a children’s librarian and proposes to be roommates with Petra’s ex, Miles Nowak. The roommates mainly avoid one another until one day they form a tenuous friendship and a plan. If said plan also involves posting deliberately misleading photos of their summer adventures together, well, who could blame them? But it’s all just for show, because there’s no way Daphne would actually start her new chapter by falling in love with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex. Right?

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Erik Larson, author of The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston Harbor: Fort Sumter. Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter --- a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, inflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”

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