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End-of-the-Year Contest 2021

Congratulations to the winners of our 2021 End-of-the-Year Contest! One Grand Prize winner received all 44 of Carol Fitzgerald's Bookreporter.com Bets On picks from 2021, while 11 others won a selection of four of these titles. You can see all the winners below, along with 2021's Bets On books.

Lisa Jewell, author of The Night She Disappeared

On a beautiful summer night in a charming English suburb, a young woman and her boyfriend disappear after partying at the massive country estate of a new college friend. One year later, a writer moves into a cottage on the edge of the woods that border the same estate. Known locally as the Dark Place, the dense forest is the writer’s favorite area for long walks, and it’s on one such walk that she stumbles upon a mysterious note that simply reads “DIG HERE.” Could this be a clue towards what has happened to the missing young couple? And what exactly is buried in this haunted ground?

The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell

October 2021

Lisa Jewell has told me that her books always start with some little idea that she expands upon. For THE NIGHT SHE DISAPPEARED, I guessed that it was a sign that read “Dig Here,” but alas I was wrong. She said that the impetus was thinking about a posh boarding school and the people who went there. What would happen to them as they moved together on this campus? And how about layering in a student who does not come from money? What happens then?

Week of May 2, 2022

Paperback releases for the week of May 2nd include THE NIGHT SHE DISAPPEARED, an edge-of-your seat thriller from Lisa Jewell about a young couple’s disappearance on a gorgeous summer night, and the mother who will never give up trying to find them; Jean Hanff Korelitz's THE PLOT, a propulsive read about a story too good not to steal, and the writer who steals it; THE FOREST OF VANISHING STARS by Kristin Harmel, an evocative coming-of-age World War II story about a young woman who uses her knowledge of the wilderness to help Jewish refugees escape the Nazis --- until a secret from her past threatens everything; Ash Davidson's DAMNATION SPRING, a stunning novel about love, work and marriage that asks how far one family and one community will go to protect their future; and THE CODE BREAKER, Walter Isaacson's gripping account of how Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues launched a revolution that will allow us to cure diseases, fend off viruses and have healthier babies.