Check out these highly anticipated new releases featuring fiction and nonfiction titles. Click on the title to request a copy or get your name on the waitlist. Don’t forget to watch for more featured releases next month!
FICTION
It may
be hard to imagine that one the great classics in world literature was penned
by a rebellious teenage girl. Mary Shelley was just eighteen years old, married
to poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and grieving the death of her first child, when
she and her husband spent the cold and dreary summer of 1816 on the shore of a
Swiss lake, sharing a home with a coterie of other writers and artists. One wine-soaked evening the infamous poet,
Lord Byron challenged each member of the group to write a ghost story. Mary was
reluctant until she began to draw on memories of time spent with an equally
imaginative girl, Isabella Burton, several years before. The two had formed an intense
friendship, sharing intimacies, confidences, and not least a penchant for the
uncanny. Past experience informed Mary’s
creative spirit and the result? Frankenstein’s immortal monster. In this work of fiction, Dutch writer
Ann Eekhout has re-imagined the life of what one reviewer called “the queen of all
goth girls.”
A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth
Hand
Hill House is
hungry again. For those of us who consider Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of
Hill House to be the greatest and scariest haunted house story of all time,
this is good news indeed. Holly Sherwin
is a struggling playwright in need of the perfect place to complete her latest
work, when she stumbles across the crumbling, cavernous old house in a small
town in upstate New York and invites three friends to join her in residence.
The rest is pure Shirley Jackson: slow burn, isolation paranoia, exterior threat,
interior vulnerabilities, and the sinister, almost sentient presence of the
house, looming over the background. For any who might be tempted to cry
plagiarism, it should be noted that the Jackson estate selected the talented
Elizabeth Hand, to create an updated interpretation of the author’s classic
work. Critics say “spot on.”
NONFICTION
Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon by Michael Lewis
Fourteen contestants compete to win
$50,000 by enduring one week in a creepy derelict carnival. The only rule? Don’t get caught. When
participants begin to disappear it occurs to those remaining that the stakes
may be higher than they had ever imagined. What’s not to love? Evidently, someone loved Hide well enough to
consider White’s novel, published in 2018, a good candidate for adaptation as a
graphic novel. Adapter Scott Peterson’s text is chilling and immersive, but the
real star is the stunning, moody, illustrations contributed by Worcester’s own
Veronica and Andy Fish.
In this upcoming work,
acclaimed author, Lewis, has added to the burgeoning collection of books
chronicling the lives of brilliant (and sometimes) well-intentioned innovators
who rise to meteoric heights and then crash and burn due to a combination of
hubris and criminality. Lewis’s subject, Sam Bankman-Fried founded FTX, a
crypto currency brokerage firm in 2019 and attracted a host of investors, due
to the company’s reputation for stability in the shaky, poorly regulated world
of crypto. Overnight, the outwardly unassuming iconoclast became a
billionaire. Too good to be true? Of
course. In 2022, Bankman-Fried went on trial for fraud and now jurors have to
decide. Did he merely make a series of
stupid mistakes or is he Bernie Madoff in disguise?
How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair
Growing up in Jamaica, Safiya and her
sisters were taught that the world outside their home was “Babylon” a place of
corruption and evil. In order to protect his daughters, Safiya’s father a militant
adherent of a strict branch of Rastafari, forbade them almost everything:
revealing clothing, makeup, friends, opinions. Obedience was presented as the highest virtue. However, Safiya’s mother,
while outwardly compliant gave her children the gift that would ultimately
liberate them—books. Now, in shimmering prose, Sinclair, an award-winning poet,
illuminates the Rastafari movement that first nourished, and later oppressed
her.
The Sisterhood: The Secret History of
Women in the CIA by Liza Mundy
They started as secretaries, clerks,
and spouses, but—perhaps due to their very invisibility—rose to become some
of the CIAs shrewdest and most
successful operatives, transforming spy craft, and playing a pivotal role in
the capture of Osama Bin Laden. Author
Steve Coll calls The Sisterhood a rip-roaring read, and Booklist says
that every page is electric with revelations.
