Did one of the book covers on our homepage catch your eye? They are all new titles being released in August 2021, and all are well-reviewed and anticipated. You can watch the video or read the description of each below, then click the linked title to request a copy or get your name on the wait list. And don't forget to watch for more featured releases next month!
Featured Fiction for August
The Turnout by Megan Abbott
With their long necks and matching buns and pink tights, sisters Dara and Marie have been dancers since they can remember. Growing up, they were homeschooled and trained by their mother, founder of the Durant School of Dance. After their parents' death in an accident nearly twelve years ago, the sisters began running the school together, along with Charlie, Dara's husband.
Marie teaches the younger students; Dara trains the older ones; and Charlie rules over the back office. When an accident occurs, just at the onset of the annual performance of The Nutcracker, an interloper threatens the sisters' delicate balance.
Billy Summers by Stephen King
When Billy was 12, he killed his mother's boyfriend after he kicked Billy's sister to death. At 17, he enlisted in the army. At 18, he was a sniper in Iraq and involved in the deadly battle to recapture Fallujah. For nearly twenty years, he's worked as a paid assassin. He's a good guy in a bad job, and he wants out. He takes on a very complicated, lucrative job he hopes will be his last. He's got a perfect new identity lined up and a flawless escape plan. And then something happens that changes everything. A stranger needs rescuing, and Billy sacrifices the safety of his own new life to offer her protection.
Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
1970s, Mexico City. Maite is a secretary who lives for one thing: the latest issue of Secret Romance. While student protests and political unrest consume the city, Maite escapes into stories of passion and danger.
Her next-door neighbor, Leonora, seems to live a life of intrigue and romance. When Leonora disappears, Maite searches for the missing woman—journeying deeper into Leonora’s secret life of radicals and dissidents.
Meanwhile, someone else is looking for Leonora at the behest of his boss, a shadowy figure who commands goon squads dedicated to squashing political activists.
Featured Nonfiction for August
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner
Born and raised in Milwaukee, Mildred was 26 when she enrolled in a PhD program in Germany and saw the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. In 1932, she began holding secret meetings in her apartment—a small band of political activists that by 1940 had grown into a large underground resistance group. She recruited working-class Germans into the resistance, helped Jews escape, plotted acts of sabotage, and collaborated in writing leaflets that denounced Hitler and called for revolution.
The Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World by Arthur Herman
Scandinavia has always been a world apart. For millennia Norwegians, Danes, Finns, and Swedes lived a remote existence among the fjords and peaks of the land of the midnight sun. But when they left their homeland in search of opportunity, these wanderers—including the Vikings—would reshape Europe and beyond. Their ingenuity, daring, resiliency, and loyalty to family and community would propel them to the gates of Rome, the steppes of Russia, the courts of Constantinople, and the castles of England and Ireland.
The Irish Assassins: Conspiracy, Revenge, and the Phoenix Park Murders That Stunned Victorian England by Julie Kavanagh
In 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke, Chief Secretary and Undersecretary for Ireland, were stabbed to death while strolling through Phoenix Park in Dublin. The murders were funded by American supporters of Irish independence, and so ended what should have been a turning point in Anglo-Irish relations. A spirit of goodwill had been burgeoning between British Prime Minister Gladstone and Ireland’s leader Charles Stewart Parnell, with both men forging a pact to achieve independence in Ireland—with Cavendish to play an instrumental role. The impact of the Phoenix Park murders set in motion repercussions that would last long into the 20th century.
