Bookshelf, November 2018

It’s been a while since I did a bookshelf survey, but with the ton of interviews I have scheduled between now and next May, you can bet those shelves are groaning. Here’s a sample of the late 2018/early 2019 books, more or less in order of publication, with more to come in a month or two.
 

Samantha Silva, Mr. Dickens and His Carol (Flatiron Books, 2017)
Perfect for Christmas, this lovely reimagining of how Charles Dickens came to write his beloved classic doesn’t just get into Dickens’ head but draws on elements of his novel to tell the tale. Depressed by the failure of Martin Chuzzlewit to attract an audience, Dickens starts the novel in a thoroughly grinch-like mood, resisting demands from his publisher to produce a seasonal story while doing his best to rein in his family’s desire to celebrate the holidays in style. Things get so bad that his wife heads north with the kids to escape. But the arrival of a beautiful lady takes Dickens on a three-day journey that neither he nor his loyal fans will ever forget. If this book doesn’t get you into the holiday spirit, you are indeed a Scrooge!

 

P. K. Adams, The Greenest Branch (Iron Knight Press, 2018)
This first of two novels about the twelfth-century mystic, healer, and abbess Hildegard of Bingen, Germany’s first female physician, tells a story that will conclude in January 2019 with The Column of Burning Spices. Adams is a gifted writer, and she brings Hildegard, her medieval world, and especially a range of fascinating, well-rounded monastic companions vividly to life. And—a bonus for me—the author’s next project is a mystery series set in early sixteenth-century Poland, at the court of Sigismund I “the Old” where my own next novel, Song of the Siren (due in February 2019), opens in 1541.

 

Terry Gamble, The Eulogist (William Morrow, 2019)
Whether as a result of the 150th anniversary of the end of the US Civil War a few years back or just the re-emergence of a topic whose time has come, there seems to be a revival of interest in the Underground Railroad. In this novel a group of Irish immigrants gives up everything to settle in the Ohio River Valley, only to endure one crisis after another. The daughter of the family, Olivia, after being forced to confront the reality of slavery, begins to work with her brother, an itinerant preacher, to rescue people from bondage and then to end the institution altogether. I’m always drawn to books with powerful heroines, so this one looks like a natural fit.

 



As I’ve complained a few times this year, I’ve been offered so many novels set during World War II since I interviewed Gwen Katz about Among the Red Stars in January 2018 that I’ve more or less sworn to lay off the topic altogether. So much for New Year’s resolutions, because these two books from separate imprints at HarperCollins both find new angles from which to approach not only the immediate effects of the war but its long-term consequences.

Pam Jenoff, The Lost Girls of Paris (Park Row Books, 2019)
Pam Jenoff’s heroine, Grace Healey, is minding her own business when she sees an abandoned suitcase sitting underneath a bench. These days, she’d call it in as a potential bomb threat, but this is 1946, so Grace opens the suitcase and finds a dozen photographs of women that lead her on a hunt to find out who they were and what happened to them—a journey that leads her into the history of the resistance, espionage, wartime journalism, and much else.

Kate Quinn, The Huntress (William Morrow, 2019)
Kate Quinn’s novel returns us to the world depicted in Among the Red Stars, but from a different perspective. Nina Markova, one of the Soviet women pilots known as the Night Witches, ends up behind enemy lines. Her experiences there cause her eventually to join forces with a British journalist who’s determined to track down an exceptionally vicious ex-Nazi known as the Huntress. Through the perspective of the Nazi hunters and the contrasting viewpoint of a teenage girl suspicious of her new stepmother, Quinn raises important questions about secrets and the power of the past to influence the presence.


 

Karen Harper, American Duchess (William Morrow, 2019)
And after all that darkness and angst, what could be more fun than a fictionalized true story about a Gilded Age millionaire’s daughter fulfilling her mother’s deepest fantasies by marrying an English duke? Based on the life of Cornelia Vanderbilt before, during, and after her wedding to the duke of Marlborough, this smart and self-aware story about an America ruled by robber barons and a Britain governed by stiff-upper-lip aristocrats looks like the perfect ending to this half of my list: high tea and crumpets, with a large dollop of family life and a dash of politics—Downton Abbey, but for real. Well, as real as a novel can be.

Last but not least, I have The Night Tiger, by Yangsze Choo (Flatiron Books, 2019). I loved Choo’s first novel, The Ghost Bride, and interviewed her back in 2013. So when I heard she had a new book coming out, I wrote to her right away. Like most of the novels on this list, this one is scheduled for release in February, and since its exploration of colonial Malaya in the 1930s does contain elements of fantasy in its tale of mysterious corpses that can turn into tigers, Gabrielle Mathieu will conduct the podcast interview for New Books in Fantasy and Adventure. But stay tuned to this blog, where I will be hosting a written interview with Yangsze Choo around the time of the release/interview.

Additional kudos to all the designers who produced these gorgeous covers. Whether I’ve already read the books or not, their work makes me want to!