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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.

J. Courtney Sullivan, author of The Cliffs

On a secluded bluff overlooking the ocean sits a Victorian house that contains a century’s worth of secrets. By the time Jane Flanagan discovers the house as a teenager, it has long been abandoned. There are still clothes in the closets, marbles rolling across the floors and dishes in the cupboards, even though no one has set foot there in decades. The house becomes a hideaway for Jane, a place to escape her volatile mother. Twenty years later, Jane returns home to Maine following a terrible mistake that threatens both her career as an archivist and her marriage. Jane is horrified to find the Victorian is now barely recognizable. The new owner, Genevieve, has gutted it and is convinced that it’s haunted. She hires Jane to research the history of the place and the women who lived there. The story Jane uncovers is even older than Maine itself.

The Cliffs by J. Courtney Sullivan

July 2024

I enjoy J. Courtney Sullivan's writing, so I was looking forward to reading THE CLIFFS. Here, she returns to Maine in a book that is full of character, history and stories woven together.

First, there is an abandoned house, one that Jane Flanagan, a teen with a less-than-happy home life, explores in her free time. Her imagination is in gear about who may have lived there and what their story was. Things seem hurriedly abandoned as if a family fled. There are clothes in closets and dishes in cabinets. But life moves on. And so does Jane.