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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.

Ashley Audrain, author of The Push

Blythe Connor is determined that she will be the warm, comforting mother to her new baby, Violet, that she herself never had. But in the thick of motherhood’s exhausting early days, Blythe becomes convinced that something is wrong with her daughter --- she doesn’t behave like most children do. Or is it all in Blythe’s head? Her husband, Fox, says she’s imagining things. The more Fox dismisses her fears, the more Blythe begins to question her own sanity, and the more we begin to question what Blythe is telling us about her life as well. Then their son, Sam, is born --- and with him, Blythe has the blissful connection she’d always imagined with her child. Even Violet seems to love her little brother. But when life as they know it is changed in an instant, the devastating fallout forces Blythe to face the truth.

The Push by Ashley Audrain

January 2021

THE PUSH by Ashley Audrain is a debut novel that is both sharp and thought-provoking. In it, Blythe is a new mother. She and her husband, Fox, were happy newlyweds, and she was so excited about becoming a mother. However, once her daughter is born, she sees this as a lot less wonderful than what she had hoped for. Her own mother and grandmother were not role models; each harbored different strains of mental illness, and the ramifications from their issues made life difficult for her as she was growing up.

Week of January 3, 2022

Paperback releases for the week of January 3rd include THE COAST-TO-COAST MURDERS, an intense thriller from James Patterson and J.D. Barker about a detective and FBI agent who join forces on what seems like an open-and-shut case --- but a new rash of killings sends them on a pulse-pounding race against time; THE PUSH by first-time novelist Ashley Audrain, a tense, page-turning psychological drama about the making and breaking of a family, and a woman whose experience of motherhood is nothing at all what she hoped for --- and everything she feared; Gabriela Garcia's OF WOMEN AND SALT, a sweeping, masterful debut about a daughter's fateful choice, a mother motivated by her own past, and a family legacy that begins in Cuba before either of them were born; and THE NATURE OF FRAGILE THINGS, a gripping novel about the bonds of friendship and mother love, from the acclaimed author of THE LAST YEAR OF THE WAR and AS BRIGHT AS HEAVEN.