March 2016

Got money on the mind?  That's no surprise, considering we're still in the midst of tax season.  But author Anna Newell Jones may just have the information you need to go from anxious to worry-free.

In her forthcoming book The Spender's Guide to Debt-Free Living, Anna Newell Jones tells the story of how she eliminated her nearly $24,000 in debt in 15 months by going on a spending fast and compiles numerous tips on how you, too, can achieve a debt-free life, steps like

• Creating a personalized Debt-Free Life Pledge.
• Understanding where your money is going when you’re in debt, and where it will come from to pay it off.
• Finding additional income sources and generating side gigs.
• Re-integrating spending into your life once you’re out of debt, so that you stay out of debt.

No matter the level of debt, these tips can help set things moving in the right direction.  Definitely make sure to check out The Spender's Guide to Debt-Free Living when it hits shelves April 26.

-Amanda

We’ve been talking about The Nest for over a year and now it’s here.

This LibraryReads pick is just wonderful, and the critics agree. Here is a mere sampling of the raves that have been pouring in:

“[A] generous, absorbing novel…Sweeney’s endearing characters are quirky New Yorkers all… [a] lively novel. A fetching debut from an author who knows her city, its people, and their heart.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“In her debut, Sweeney spins a fast-moving, often-humorous narrative, and her portrait of each sibling is compassionate even as she reveals their foibles with emotional clarity…assured, energetic, and adroitly plotted…an engrossing narrative that endears readers to the Plumb family for their essential humanity.” — Publishers Weekly

“[S]cenes both witty and tragic… that glow with the confidence of an experienced comic writer… [Sweeney] maintains a refreshing balance of tenderness. Rather than skewering the Plumbs to death, she pokes them, as though probing to find the humanity beneath their cynical crust.” — Washington Post

Want a copy?  Let us know! First 20 folks to write to us at librarylovefest@harpercollins.com will receive a book that will stay with you for quite some time.

-Virginia

Stephanie Evanovich is the bestselling author of Big Girl Panties and The Sweet Spot.  If you attended this past ALA Midwinter in Boston or ALA Annual 2014 in Las Vegas, hopefully you had the chance to swing by our booth and meet her.  And if you did, you know she is absolutely hilarious.  Stephanie's third book, The Total Package, goes on sale today, and to celebrate, she's stopped by LLF to share her love for libraries with us.

***

I loved the library even before I learned to read when I used to feed the night deposit box with whatever books my mother was returning.  The library was where we went when it was either too cold or too hot to play outside.  I wasn’t aware of the public “shhhhhh” section of the library because in the children’s room, unless you were creating a real ruckus, you had a lot of freedom. 

I remember my school librarian more clearly.  The library was a cozy spot in the basement of my old elementary school—which really was a century-old building.   I proudly checked out my first book on Helen Keller for my first book report. 

…

LLF Guest Blogger: Stephanie EvanovichRead More »

Hear ye, hear ye!  The third episode of Under the Radar, Over the Moon has arrived!  Check out our new video for the wacky antics of your favorite LLF team and, of course, great new books!  This month we talk about:

Night of the Animals by Bill Broun: “Night of The Animals is the most beautiful, strange new novel I have read in years, and its obese, mentally ill, elderly protagonist is among the most engaging of heroes. The existence of this book in the present moment is a wonderment.” — Mary Gaitskill.  Click here for the egalley.

The Maximum Security Book Club by Mikita Brottman: “Take nine convicted felons confined for the long haul at a maximum security men’s prison. Add a well-meaning literary scholar armed only with cheap reprints of challenging books by writers from Conrad to Kafka. The resulting dynamic is the subject of Mikita Brottman’s fascinating and unvarnished book about criminals as rough-hewn literary critics. I tore through The Maximum Security Book Club." — Wally Lamb, New York Times bestselling author of We Are Water.  Click here to download an egalley!

Brighton by Michael Harvey: “Harvey has taken the elements of a classic crime novel and heightened them with race and class tensions, as well as the story of a remarkable friendship and an unforgettable family drama. The result is a novel that crackles with energy and makes you hold on until the final page.” — Ivy Pochoda, author of Visitation Street.  Get started reading the egalley here.

So much love for these books!  And definitely make sure you check out past episodes on the Under the Radar, Over the Moon website here.  We hope you enjoy!

-Amanda

March is Maisie Month, and bestselling author Jacqueline Winspear is celebrating by answering all your burning questions about fan favorite sleuth Maisie Dobbs!  Click here to check out the questions and submit some of your own, and definitely make sure to check back today at 4pm EST for the answers!

If you find your Maisie appetite has only been whetted by this Q&A, worry not!  Maisie's next adventure, Journey to Munich, hits shelves March 29.

-Amanda

We're all familiar with the ancient Mayan civilization whose traces can be found across the Yucatan Peninsula in Central America, but do you know how those amazing ruins were discovered?  In Jungle of Stone, William Carlsen takes us on a journey with the team that originally fought through the jungle to uncover the lost civilization, a tale which Kirkus calls in a starred review “Thrilling. …A captivating history of two men who dramatically changed their contemporaries’ view of the past.”  You can uncover this untold story when Jungle of Stone hits shelves April 26, but today the author has stopped by LLF to "uncover" his love for libraries!

***

Just out of the army in the late 1960s, I entered the University of California, Berkeley, on the G.I. Bill.  I knew I would still have to work myself through school (I majored in of all things Rhetoric—very practical).  My first choice in the university’s “work-study” program was a job in one of the university’s many libraries.  While in the army I had spent most of my free time in post libraries, always with my head in a book.  Now, I found myself working as a library page in the university’s Bancroft Library, a research repository for western history collections.  While there I was asked to retrieve handwritten correspondence from Ernest Hemingway and Mark Twain, two authors I revered, and to my disbelief I held in my hands many of their letters as I brought them up from the stacks to researchers.

I was hooked.  My dream was to write, and here early on I had discovered one of the great treasures of libraries, not only as cherished places of books but also the often hidden resources behind those books.  I went on to a career in journalism at the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times; and the need for libraries (oddly newspaper libraries are called “morgues”) and the power of research was never lost on me, particularly during my many years as an investigative reporter.

Decades after my first encounter with the Bancroft Library, I found myself there once again.  My wife and I lived for many years part time in Guatemala, where I had fallen in love with a nineteenth-century writer named John L. Stephens. I had traveled to several of the astonishing stone ruins of the ancient Maya scattered in the jungles of Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico.  But I became ever more enthralled with that civilization through the eyes of Stephens, who in the 1840s published riveting books about his adventures with an artist named Frederick Catherwood and their discovery of the lost civilization of the Maya.  I decided to follow their 2,500-mile journey through the jungle in my beat-up 1985 Toyota Corolla, a car without air conditioning or radio and the closest thing I could find to the mules the two men had used during their expeditions.  On returning to my home in San Francisco, I discovered to my surprise that Stephens’s letters and personal papers were located across the Bay at the Bancroft Library.  There, spellbound by his personal writings and letters that revealed his deep friendship with Catherwood, who had so brilliantly illustrated their travels of exploration and adventure together, I began my own journey that resulted in Jungle of Stone, a work aimed at telling not only the story of their extraordinary lives but the discoveries they made that changed the world’s understanding of the history of the Americas before Columbus.

All the best,

Bill

***

Thanks Bill!  Look for Jungle of Stone on shelves April 26 to discover the unknown story of explorers who changed history.

-Amanda

Historical fiction is a perennial favorite among library readers and book clubs alike, and we have some great ones coming out this year.  Luckily you can get a head start by downloading the egalleys from Edelweiss, so I hope you enjoy these excellent forthcoming gems!

The Girl from The Savoy by Hazel Gaynor, the bestselling author of A Memory of Violets and The Girl Who Came Home:  A young woman finds employment as a chambermaid at London’s grandest hotel after WWI and becomes torn between two men, two classes, and everything she knows and everything she dreams of.  Download the egalley here.

News of the World by Paulette Jiles:  In the aftermath of the Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this exquisitely rendered, morally complex, multilayered novel of historical fiction from the author of Enemy Women.  Download the egalley here.

Lazaretto by Diane McKinney-Whetstone:  A provocative, moving story that follows several unforgettable citizens through the struggle of 19th century Philadelphia’s early integration, from the author of the critically acclaimed novels Tumbling, Tempest Rising, Blues Dancing, Leaving Cecil Street, and Trading Dreams at Midnight.  Download the egalley here.

You can check out our catalogs on Edelweiss for even more downloadable egalleys here.  Enjoy!

-Amanda

The Hating Game by Sally Thorne is a delightfully hilarious, touching, and steamy debut romantic comedy that I absolutely loved.  Start with two completely opposite publishing assistants forced to share an office after a company merger, add a little competition, several misunderstandings, and a steamy kiss in the elevator, and you get the beginnings of funny romantic adventure where two people discover they may not hate each other after all.

But you don't have to just take my word for it.  In addition to all the in-house praise it's received, Booklist loved it, too!  They gave it a starred review and have made that review their Review of the Day!  You can read the whole review here.

And you can get a jump start reading the book itself by downloading the egalley from Edelweiss!  But I warn you, once you start reading, you won't be able to stop until you've experienced every laugh, sigh, and tender moment it has to offer.

-Amanda

New York Times bestselling author Beatriz Williams attended ALA Midwinter as one of our guests this year, signing copies of A Certain Age ARE (on sale June 28, 2016) and generally charming everyone she met. Some passages of her new novel, A Certain Age, are excerpts from a 1920’s gossip column, recounting a scandalous murder trial. We asked Ms. Williams to channel that gossip columnist when she sat down to write her report of this year’s Midwinter ALA. We think Ms. Williams is the Bees Knees, so without further ado, we cede the blog to her.

***

Ladies and gentlemen, your faithful correspondent has sometimes heard it said—now, don’t be amazed—that librarians are a conservative lot on the whole, and not much given to games of hazard. To those ignorant observers I submit the following counter-evidence: the American Library Association recently held its Midwinter conference in Boston, Massachusetts.

Let me repeat myself, for those of you reading this column before breakfast. The great librarian pooh-bahs decided it would be a splendid idea to schedule a wintertime gathering of thousands within the limits of a city that received a hundred and eight inches of snow during the course of the previous winter, and in consequence, thousands of librarians duly reserved non-refundable tickets on their airlines of choice—to Beantown, mind you, not South Florida—and packed their trunks with woolly sweaters and optimism.

This, my friends, represents a gamble of the highest degree.

And yet—proving, perhaps, that the old saw that Our Lord watches over drunks, children, and librarians—the entire affair went off without a hitch. Imagine! Precipitation arrived in the form of rain, instead of what a certain Southern acquaintance of mine is pleased to call the Devil’s Dandruff. Cheerful smiles greeted your correspondent at every corner. When I arrived at the HarperCollins booth, dampened and breathless from navigating a veritable maze of exhibits, I found a crowd of improbably lively conference-goers who, having already run the gauntlet of presentations and seminars and author signings, were yet eager to discover what lay waiting in the pages of my latest novel. In the evening, at a dinner hosted by my publisher, a well-chosen cadre of thoughtful, vibrant, and terribly amusing authors and librarians kept the bookish conversation flowing without end.

And while the queue for an evening taxi stretched almost as long as the queue for a morning caramel macchiato, nobody seemed to mind, for we all had Books To Read, ladies and gentlemen, piles and piles of glorious books! Suitcases packed with them, arms made weary by them, noses twitching at the new-book scent of them—and all of these volumes ready to be opened and embraced as the friends one hasn’t yet met.

Which, I suppose, explains the apparent contradiction laid open at the beginning of this column: When the reward is sufficient, any amount of risk will seem perfectly reasonable.

***

Get an egalley of A Certain Age by Beatriz Williams here!