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End-of-the-Year Contest 2024

Congratulations to the winners of our 2024 End-of-the-Year contest! One reader received all 40 of Carol Fitzgerald's Bookreporter.com Bets On picks from 2024, while 10 others won four of these titles. You can see all the winners below, along with 2024'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 40 picks.

Husbands & Lovers by Beatriz Williams

July 2024

I smiled a lot while reading HUSBANDS & LOVERS, loving what Beatriz Williams captures in a book that is genre-bending. It’s both historical fiction and women’s fiction, and it features a great love story…or two. Beatriz once again tackles two time frames --- actually, there are three --- but for the first time, one of them is in present day…or at least in this decade (2022 New England). Mallory is a single mom whose 10-year-old son, Sam, is at camp and has eaten poisonous mushrooms, which have destroyed his kidneys. He is in weekly dialysis and needs to be watched carefully as too much water or too many salty foods can throw his body off. He desperately needs a transplant.

Beatriz Williams, author of Husbands & Lovers

New England, 2022. Three years ago, single mother Mallory Dunne’s 10-year-old son, Sam, suffered acute poisoning from a toxic death cap mushroom. Now, searching for a donor kidney, Mallory is forced to confront two harrowing secrets from her past: her mother’s adoption and her romance with her childhood best friend, Monk Adams, which was cut short by a devastating betrayal. Cairo, 1951. Hungarian refugee Hannah Ainsworth has married a wealthy British diplomat with a coveted posting in glamorous Cairo. But a fateful encounter with the enigmatic manager of a hotel bristling with spies leads to a passionate affair that will reawaken Hannah’s longing for everything she once lost. As revolution simmers in the Egyptian streets, a pregnant Hannah finds herself snared in a game of intrigue between two men --- and an act of sacrifice that will echo down the generations.