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End-of-the-Year Contest 2023

Congratulations to the winners of our 2023 End-of-the-Year Contest! One reader received all 44 of Carol Fitzgerald's Bookreporter.com Bets On picks from 2023, while 11 others won four of these titles. You can see all the winners below, along with 2023's Bets On selections.

If you would like to know more about these books, be sure to check out this video and podcast where Carol talks about each of her 44 picks.

Absolution by Alice McDermott

December 2023

When we think about Vietnam, what comes to mind are soldiers, battles, napalm and a war that no one wants to talk about. With ABSOLUTION, Alice McDermott delivers a book with beautiful prose that I just inhaled, and it gave me a different perspective on the place before it really erupted.

But first, the setup. The story takes place before we formally entered the war in 1965. Trouble is brewing, but the US is not deeply involved. We are there more as advisors to the South Vietnamese. Alice explores these days through the story of the wives of those who accompanied their husbands to Vietnam in 1963.

Alice McDermott, author of Absolution

Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form a wary alliance as they balance the era’s mandate to be “helpmeets” to their ambitious husbands with their own inchoate impulse to “do good” for the people of Vietnam. Sixty years later, Charlene’s daughter, spurred by an encounter with an aging Vietnam vet, reaches out to Tricia. Together, they look back at their time in Saigon, taking wry account of that pivotal year and of Charlene’s altruistic machinations. They discover how their own lives as women on the periphery have been shaped and burdened by the same sort of unintended consequences that followed America’s tragic interference in Southeast Asia.

Week of October 28, 2024

Paperback releases for the week of October 28th include BROKEN TRUST, the latest installment of Robert B. Parker’s beloved Spenser series and the first penned by celebrated writer Mike Lupica; ABSOLUTION by Alice McDermott, a riveting account of women’s lives on the margins of the Vietnam War; THE BERRY PICKERS, a rich and layered debut novel from Amanda Peters, in which a four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a mystery that will haunt the survivors, unravel a family and remain unsolved for nearly 50 years; Lauren Grodstein's WE MUST NOT THINK OF OURSELVES, a piercing story of love, determination and sacrifice, inspired by a little-known piece of the history of the Jewish occupants of the Warsaw Ghetto in World War II; and THE WATERS by Bonnie Jo Campbell, a fierce, mesmerizing novel about exceptional women and the soul of a small town.

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