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End-of-the-Year Contest 2014

Congratulations to the winners of our 2014 End-of-the-Year Contest! One Grand Prize winner received all 32 of Carol Fitzgerald's Bookreporter.com Bets On picks from 2014, while 32 others won a copy of one of these titles. You can see all the winners below, along with 2014's Bets On selections.

Matthew Thomas, author of We Are Not Ourselves

When Eileen Tumulty meets Ed Leary, a scientist whose bearing is nothing like those of the men she grew up with in Woolside, Queens, she thinks she’s found the perfect partner to deliver her to the cosmopolitan world she longs to inhabit. They marry, and Eileen quickly discovers that Ed doesn’t aspire to the same, ever bigger, stakes in the American Dream. She encourages him to want more, but as years pass, it becomes clear that his growing reluctance is part of a deeper psychological shift.

We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas

September 2014

People start their lives with dreams. When we are young, we create a road map and typically see it without speed bumps. But then real life happens, and often it’s not what we planned. Challenges arise; it gets messy. It’s all not the holiday card newsletter or the perfect Facebook photos. Dreams fade or get reshaped.

WE ARE NOT OURSELVES by debut novelist Matthew Thomas looks at life like that. It starts with a dream and then heads off the rails. At the beginning, Eileen Tumulty has a plan. She is going to leave the Queens neighborhood where she lives with her hard-drinking Irish immigrant parents and not look back. She meets Ed Leary, who is her ticket to a better life. He has a great job as a scientist and is kind to her. She feels the tumult of her childhood being left behind and sees a bright future ahead: Success. A great house. A bigger world.

Week of June 1, 2015

Releases for the week of June 1st include WRITTEN IN MY OWN HEART’S BLOOD, the highly anticipated continuation of Diana Gabaldon’s classic Outlander series; A DEADLY WANDERING by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Matt Richtel, an exploration of technology’s vast influence on the human mind and society, told through the lens of a tragic “texting-while-driving” car crash that claimed the lives of two rocket scientists in 2006; and THE VACATIONERS, Emma Straub’s novel about the secrets, joys and jealousies that rise to the surface over the course of an American family’s Mediterranean holiday.

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