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End-of-the-Year Contest 2018

Congratulations to the winners of our 2018 End-of-the-Year Contest! One Grand Prize winner received all 45 of Carol Fitzgerald's Bookreporter.com Bets On picks from 2018, while nine others won a selection of five of these titles. You can see all the winners below, along with 2018's Bets On books.

Winter Reading 2018

At Bookreporter.com, we kicked off 2018 with our fourth annual Winter Reading Contests and Feature. We hosted a series of 24-hour contests spotlighting a book releasing this winter (or a book publishing in the spring that we wanted to get on your radar now) and gave five lucky readers a chance to win it.

Even though our contests have wrapped up, we encourage you to take a look at this year's featured titles, as these are the books you'll want to read during the winter months --- and into the warmer ones!

Allison Pataki, author of Beauty in the Broken Places: A Memoir of Love, Faith, and Resilience

When Allison Pataki's husband suffers a stroke, he wakes up with a complete loss of memory. At five months pregnant, Allison has lost the Dave she knew and loved. Within a few months, she found herself caring for both a newborn and a sick husband, struggling with the fear of what was to come. As a way to make sense of the pain and chaos of their new reality, Allison started to write daily letters to Dave. Not only would she work to make sense of the unfathomable experiences unfolding around her, but her letters would provide Dave with the memories he could not make on his own.

Beauty in the Broken Places: A Memoir of Love, Faith, and Resilience by Allison Pataki

May 2018

A couple of years ago, I was at a party for Allison Pataki’s historical novel, SISI. Though we had not met before, she was so warm and gracious, spending time with every person in the room. I thought to myself, She really has it all.

Someone mentioned that her life had had a twist the year before. When she was five months pregnant, she and her husband, Dave, had gone on a babymoon to Hawaii. They left from Chicago, planning a stop in Seattle on the way to see her brother-in-law. Shortly after they took off, Dave, who was just 30 years old at the time, asked her to look at his eye, as he could not see out of it. She looked and realized something was dreadfully wrong as his pupil had widened so much that she could not see the iris of his eye. Moments later, he was unconscious, she was seeking help from the flight crew, and not long afterwards they made an emergency landing in Fargo, ND, where he was diagnosed with a stroke.

Week of May 6, 2019

Paperback releases for the week of May 6th include LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE by Celeste Ng, a riveting novel that traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives; THERE THERE, Tommy Orange’s shattering novel that follows 12 characters from Native communities --- all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to each other in ways they may not yet realize; THE MARS ROOM by Rachel Kushner, a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America; and Simon Winchester's THE PERFECTIONISTS, a superb history that traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age to explore the single component crucial to advancement --- precision.

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