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End-of-the-Year Contest 2020

Congratulations to the winners of our 2020 End-of-the-Year Contest! One Grand Prize winner received all 42 of Carol Fitzgerald's Bookreporter.com Bets On picks from 2020, while 14 others won a selection of three of these titles. You can see all the winners below, along with 2020's Bets On books.

Stephanie Scott, author of What's Left of Me Is Yours

In Japan, a covert industry has grown up around the "wakaresaseya" (literally "breaker-upper"), a person hired by one spouse to seduce the other in order to gain the advantage in divorce proceedings. When Satō hires Kaitarō, a wakaresaseya agent, to have an affair with his wife, Rina, he assumes it will be an easy case. But Satō has never truly understood Rina or her desires, and Kaitarō's job is to do exactly that --- until he does it too well. While Rina remains ignorant of the circumstances that brought them together, she and Kaitarō fall in a desperate, singular love, setting in motion a series of violent acts that will forever haunt her daughter's life.

What's Left of Me Is Yours by Stephanie Scott

June 2020

WHAT'S LEFT OF ME IS YOURS by Stephanie Scott is a brilliant debut novel set in modern-day Japan. It revolves around the tradition of “wakaresaseya,” where one person is hired by another to seduce a spouse and break up a marriage, with a goal that this will bring a better settlement in a divorce.

Week of June 21, 2021

Paperback releases for the week of June 21st include A PRIVATE CATHEDRAL, James Lee Burke's 40th book and his 23rd featuring Detective Dave Robicheaux, who must battle the most terrifying adversary he has ever encountered --- a time-traveling superhuman assassin; LOVE YOUR LIFE by Sophie Kinsella, an utterly delightful novel about a woman who ditches her dating app for a writer’s retreat in Italy, only to find that real love comes with its own filters; GHOSTS OF HARVARD, Francesca Serritella's much-talked-about first novel about a Harvard freshman who becomes obsessed with her schizophrenic brother’s suicide --- then she starts hearing voices; WHAT’S LEFT OF ME IS YOURS, Stephanie Scott's gripping debut set in modern-day Tokyo that charts a young woman's search for the truth about her mother's life...and her murder; and BRONTË’S MISTRESS, newcomer Finola Austin's dazzling work of fiction that revolves around the scandalous love affair between Lydia Robinson and Branwell Brontë, brother to novelists Charlotte, Emily and Anne.