Thursday, January 14, 2016

Coming Soon to a Book Store Near You


I get so excited overwhelmed really, reading about all the new releases coming out the first few months of 2016. Here are (3) that sound like ones I'd enjoy. What do you think?

Forty Rooms; Olga Grushin
Marion Wood Books - Putnam - February 2016

(Description from Amazon)

The internationally acclaimed author of The Dream Life of Sukhanov now returns to gift us with Forty Rooms, which outshines even that prizewinning novel.

Totally original in conception and magnificently executed, Forty Rooms is mysterious, withholding, and ultimately emotionally devastating. Olga Grushin is dealing with issues of women’s identity, of women’s choices, that no modern novel has explored so deeply. 

“Forty rooms” is a conceit: it proposes that a modern woman will inhabit forty rooms in her lifetime. They form her biography, from childhood to death. For our protagonist, the much-loved child of a late marriage, the first rooms she is aware of as she nears the age of five are those that make up her family’s Moscow apartment. We follow this child as she reaches adolescence, leaves home to study in America, and slowly discovers sexual happiness and love. But her hunger for adventure and her longing to be a great poet conspire to kill the affair. She seems to have made her choice. But one day she runs into a college classmate. He is sure of his path through life, and he is protective of her. (He is also a great cook.) They drift into an affair and marriage. What follows are the decades of births and deaths, the celebrations, material accumulations, and home comforts—until one day, her children grown and gone, her husband absent, she finds herself alone except for the ghosts of her youth, who have come back to haunt and even taunt her. 

Compelling and complex, Forty Rooms is also profoundly affecting, its ending shattering but true. We know that Mrs. Caldwell (for that is the only name by which we know her) has died. Was it a life well lived? Quite likely. Was it a life complete? Does such a life ever really exist? Life is, after all, full of trade-offs and choices. Who is to say her path was not well taken? It is this ambiguity that is at the heart of this provocative novel.


 Black Rabbit Hall; Eve Chase
G.P. Putnam - February - 2016
(Description from Amazon)

For fans of Kate Morton and Sarah Waters, here’s a magnetic debut novel of wrenching family secrets, forbidden love, and heartbreaking loss housed within the grand gothic manor of Black Rabbit Hall.

Ghosts are everywhere, not just the ghost of Momma in the woods, but ghosts of us too, what we used to be like in those long summers . . .
Amber Alton knows that the hours pass differently at Black Rabbit Hall, her London family’s country estate, where no two clocks read the same. Summers there are perfect, timeless. Not much ever happens. Until, of course, it does. 

More than three decades later, Lorna is determined to be married within the grand, ivy-covered walls of Pencraw Hall, known as Black Rabbit Hall among the locals. But as she’s drawn deeper into the overgrown grounds, half-buried memories of her mother begin to surface and Lorna soon finds herself ensnared within the manor’s labyrinthine history, overcome with an insatiable need for answers about her own past and that of the once-happy family whose memory still haunts the estate.

Stunning and atmospheric, this debut novel is a thrilling spiral into the hearts of two women separated by decades but inescapably linked by the dark and tangled secrets of Black Rabbit Hall.

The Blue Hour; Douglas Kennedy
Atria - February 2016

(Description from Amazon)

From the #1 internationally bestselling author of The Momentand Five Days comes “the best book about Morocco since The Sheltering Sky. Completely absorbing and atmospheric” (Philip Kerr).

Robin knew Paul wasn’t perfect. But he said they were so lucky to have found each other, and she believed it was true.

She is a meticulous accountant, almost forty. He is an artist and university professor, twenty years older. When Paul suggests a month in Morocco, where he once lived and worked, a place where the modern meets the medieval, Robin reluctantly agrees.

Once immersed into the swirling, white hot exotica of a walled city on the North African Atlantic coast, Robin finds herself acclimatizing to its wonderful strangeness. Paul is everything she wants him to be—passionate, talented, knowledgeable. She is convinced that it is here she will finally become pregnant.

But then Paul suddenly disappears, and Robin finds herself the prime suspect in the police inquiry. As her understanding of the truth starts to unravel, Robin lurches from the crumbling art deco of Casablanca to the daunting Sahara, caught in an increasingly terrifying spiral from which there is no easy escape.

With his acclaimed ability to write thought-provoking page-turners, Douglas Kennedy takes readers into a world where only Patricia Highsmith has ever dared. The Blue Hour is a roller-coaster journey into a heart of darkness that asks the question: What would you do if your life depended on it?

22 comments:

  1. My pick here would be Black Rabbit Hall. In fact, I was so taken with it a few months ago that I ordered it from the UK and so already have a copy. And then did I read it immediately? No, of course not. So, I do have a copy and intend to read it sometime soon. And, yes, a bunch of good books coming out this spring. Aren't there always? LOL

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    1. Why do we do that Kay - buy a book we must have and, then let it stay on the shelf unread LOL - that's me too.

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    1. I've heard good things about him but have not read any of his books yet.

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  3. I just added Blue Hour to my TBR list, and requested the book. I love the setting and intrigue.

    Thanks for mentioning it in your post!

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    1. Hi Mari - yes, I love the setting and description on this one.

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  4. Oooh - The Blue Hour sounds really good - thanks for putting that on my radar!

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  5. The cover for Forty Rooms is amazing

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  6. The Blue Hour looks really interesting, so I'm definitely going to add that one to my wish list. I'm almost finished with Black Rabbit Hall and really am enjoying it. Forty Rooms looks pretty interesting, too. Ugh! You're killing my TBR list. ;)

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  7. Okay, Forty Rooms has my attention! Sounds amazing, and a book I'll be looking for....

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  8. This sounds like a very thoughtful book.

    I love the allegory of the rooms in comparison to life.

    I found it interesting that you mentioned that this book was atmospheric. I have thinking a lot about atmosphere in novels and what creates it.

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    1. Brian, I can't comment personally, as I haven't read the (3) listed above. What I posted was the book description itself. (I do like when I feel a sense of place when I read -- cabins in the woods, deserted beach house (off season) etc.

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  9. Forty Rooms sounds intriguing! Love that cover art.

    The Blue Hour might be a good thriller to listen to on audio. Off to reserve it at my library's website. Thanks, Diane!

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    1. The Blue Hour has been getting buzz but, I am in love with the cover of Forty Rooms.

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  10. Forty Rooms sounds great!

    If you haven't checked out her book, The Line you should pick that one up as well. :)

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