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End-of-the-Year Contest 2022

Congratulations to the winners of our 2022 End-of-the-Year Contest! One Grand Prize winner received all 40 of Carol Fitzgerald's Bookreporter.com Bets On picks from 2022, while eight others won a selection of five of these titles. You can see all the winners below, along with 2022's Bets On books.

Dani Shapiro, author of Signal Fires

On a summer night in 1985, three teenagers have been drinking. One of them gets behind the wheel of a car, and, in an instant, everything on Division Street changes. Each of their lives, and that of Ben Wilf, a young doctor who arrives on the scene, is shattered. For the Wilf family, the circumstances of that fatal accident will become the deepest kind of secret, one so dangerous it can never be spoken. On Division Street, time has moved on. When the Shenkmans arrive --- a young couple expecting a baby boy --- it is as if the accident never happened. But when Waldo, the Shenkmans’ brilliant, lonely son who marvels at the beauty of the world and has a native ability to find connections in everything, befriends Dr. Wilf, past events come hurtling back in ways no one ever could have foreseen.

Signal Fires by Dani Shapiro

December 2022

Is it possible that SIGNAL FIRES is the first Dani Shapiro book that I have read? It definitely has me scrambling to see what else I have missed. But before I do, let me tell you why I am betting on this book, which completely grabbed me from the start and held me through 200 pages of characters and plot.

The book is set on Division Street, a quiet suburban block in Westchester County, New York. As it opens in 1985, there is an accident that will forever change the brother and sister who were in the car when it happened --- a terrible tragedy where a young woman died. And the first secret is laid out. From there, we delve deeply into the lives of two families who are neighbors. The accident happens on a night when Sarah Wilf has had too much to drink, and she tosses her car keys to her younger brother, Theo, so he can drive. Their passenger in the front seat is Misty Zimmerman, who dies when Theo loses control and hits an oak tree on the front lawn of their house. The family pledges to keep secret that Theo was driving. But the guilt that the teens feel will be something that they carry with them.

Week of October 23, 2023

Paperback releases for the week of October 23rd include THE SHARDS, a novel of sensational literary and psychological suspense from Bret Easton Ellis that tracks a group of privileged high school friends in a vibrantly fictionalized 1980s Los Angeles as a serial killer strikes across the city; SIGNAL FIRES, Dani Shapiro’s first work of fiction in 15 years, a novel that examines the ties that bind families together --- and the secrets that can break them apart; THE REVOLUTIONARY, a revelatory biography from Stacy Schiff about the most essential Founding Father, Samuel Adams, who stood behind the change in thinking that produced the American Revolution; PEOPLE PERSON by Candice Carty-Williams, a witty and insightful novel about the power of family --- even when they seem like strangers; LADYPARTS by Deborah Copaken, a frank, witty and dazzlingly written memoir of one woman trying to keep it together while her body falls apart; and the paperback original LAWS OF ANNIHILATION, the third entry in Eriq La Salle's highly acclaimed Martyr Maker series, which is full of grit, relentless action and twists you'll never see coming.

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