January 1, 2022
International award winner Cercas expands to literary suspense inEven the Darkest Night, featuring a young ex-con who read Les Mis�rables in jail and after the murder of his sex-worker mother joins the Barcelona police and is sent to investigate a particularly brutal double murder outside the city. In another genre blender, the New York Times best-selling Crosley purveys humor, psychological twistiness, and strong writing to create what could be a Cult Classic featuring a woman who leaves a work dinner to buy cigarettes and encounters a string of ghostly ex-boyfriends (100,000-copy first printing). From Dermansky (e.g., the multi-best-booked The Red Car), Hurricane Girl sends 32-year-old Allison Brody from the West Coast to the East Coast, where she buys a small house on the beach and is promptly hit by a Category 3 hurricane that leaves her with a bleeding head and some very confused thoughts. Following Delicious Foods, which boast PEN/Faulkner and Hurston/Wright Legacy honors, Hannaham's Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta features a woman who transitioned in prison and is finally released after more than two decades, returning apprehensively to a New York she barely knows and a family that doesn't understand her (40,000-copy first printing). Winner of the Publishing Triangle's Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, Holleran returns after 13 years with The Kingdom of Sand, whose nameless narrator has survived the death of friends from AIDS and his parents from old age and tragedy and is surviving his own end time by enjoying classic films and near-anonymous sexual encounters (50,000-copy first printing). In Laskey's So Happy for You, following Center for Fiction First Novel finalist Under the Rainbow, Robin and Ellie have always been best friends, but queer academic Robin has her doubts about being maid of honor in Ellie's forthcoming wedding. In the medieval-set Lapnova, from ever-edgy, New York Times best-selling Moshfegh, hapless shepherd's son Marek--close only to a midwife feared for her ungodly way with nature--is caught up in the violence surrounding a cruel and corrupt lord. In this follow-up to Newman's multi-starred The Heavens, all The Men in the world mysteriously vanish at once, leaving women both to grieve and to rebuild. Prix Marguerite Yourcenar winner Nganang follows up hisLJ best-booked When the Plums Are Ripe with A Trail of Crab Tracks, whose protagonist slowly reveals his story--and the story of Cameroon's independence--on a prolonged stay with his son in the United States. The dedicated assistant principal at a New Jersey public high school thinks she has a lock on the principal's job when the current principal retires, but alas for the durable protagonist of Perrotta's Election, Tracy Flick [still] Can't Win (300,000-copy first printing). In Thrust, a motherless child from the late 21st century learns that she can connect with people over the last two centuries, from a French sculptor to a dictator's daughter; from Yuknavitch, a Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize finalist.
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April 11, 2022
Laskey (Under the Rainbow) sends up the wedding industrial complex in this enjoyable and darkly comic outing. Robin Hawkins, a lesbian and self-described “rabid feminist,” loathes weddings, pumpkin spice lattes, and everything suburban and heteronormative. She is comfortably ensconced in her “liberal-queer bubble” when her estranged high school best friend Ellie announces her engagement and asks Robin to be her maid of honor. The novel is set in a slightly different version of reality in which the American government aggressively incentivizes young people to wed, and where single women are labeled “leftovers” at 27 and “rotten” at 35 on social media. Also, the high divorce rate has created a cottage industry of “wedding charm” rituals meant to ensure the success rate of each union; some are as benign as carrying bouquets of garlic and sage to “ward off evil marriage-ruining spirits,” while others, like at Ellie’s wedding, involve blood sacrifice. Robin continues to ignore her better judgment as ominous events befall the bridal party, among them a near drowning, and Ellie’s behavior grows increasingly unhinged. Though a few outlandish events stretch the bounds of believability, the story has plenty of verve, and the social satire is accurate if not especially profound. There’s nothing exceptional about this, but it nails what it sets out to do. Agent: Alexa Stark, Trident Media Group.
April 15, 2022
Society's obsession with unwed women leads to destruction. From the first line of Laskey's novel, readers may wonder if they're dealing with hyperbole or horror: "If you want to know the story of how my best friend and I ended up trying to kill each other, I should probably start with the night she asked me to be her maid of honor." Robin Hawkins, a queer Brooklyn woman in her early 30s, is writing her Ph.D. dissertation on society's pervasive focus on marriage. It's a time when only 21% of people get married and 76% of marriages end in divorce, meaning "fewer people were buying houses and having kids, which meant suburbs became ghost towns and cities became wildly over-crowded...even though Americans were happier than ever....Happiness was not good for capitalism or the patriarchy or white supremacy." Urged by her adviser to make her dissertation sexier by adding real-life case studies, Robin hesitantly agrees to be the maid of honor at her best friend Ellie's wedding. From there, a series of increasingly sinister events unfolds, spurred on by Ellie's desperation to bring good luck to her wedding and Robin's growing unrest. The bridezilla trope is pretty well played out by now, and Laskey winks a little too much at The Handmaid's Tale. Nevertheless, Laskey successfully creates an eerie tone for the novel and a discomforting closeness between Ellie and Robin, two women who share a deep bond forged in adolescence. Ultimately, the novel settles into the sweet spot of dystopia: just unrealistic enough to feel fantastical but grounded in sufficient reality for the reader to pose the question, could this really happen? An exploration of a friendship brought to the brink.
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May 15, 2022
In a marriage-crazed world, Robin refuses to swoon for tripled tax breaks and rom-coms. Instead, she loathes what the revered institution symbolizes: the patriarchy's disregard for women and LGBTQ people--a disdain that drives her dissertation. Then her childhood best friend gets engaged. Ellie has followed Robin from part-time jobs to college and accepted her coming-out even when her own sister did not. Fights may have bruised their relationship, but Robin ultimately agrees to be the maid of honor. During the wedding weekend, the bride-to-be embraces disturbing superstitions for a successful union, such as killing rabbits. Meanwhile, Robin clashes with the rest of the bridal party and finds herself in strange, sometimes life-threatening situations, setting off alarm bells. To survive this wedding, she must swallow her objections in order to understand Ellie's desperation for marriage, including the societal pressures that come with it. Laskey's second novel (after Under the Rainbow, 2020) is a force of dark humor, captivating in its boldness and its portrayal of a friendship torn apart by tradition. For readers of satire and thrillers with an added dose of dystopia.
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