Hello friends, and welcome to the last week of the first month of fall, where the weather hasn't quite figured out what it wants to do and publishing has a lot more to give this season. Why don't we take a look at what this last week of September has to offer.
Well, after we take a moment and gather our wits about the fact that it's all holiday planning from here on out. Where did the year go?
We've got the standard end of the month paperback releases. Alex North's The Angel Maker, for one. Ken Follett's The Armor of Light, for another. They're still hefty (Follett's Armor of Light is only 752 pages, but it weighs nearly two pounds!), but with the paper covers you can cram them more readily into a duffel bag and not have those sharp edges banging into the base of your spine when you haul them around town.
James Patterson, of course, knows what you really want, and his 23 1/2 Lies is definitely mass market sized.
Meanwhile, Wright Thompson tackles a story very close to his childhood home. In The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, Thompson explores the confusion and conspiracy surrounding the terrible death of Emmett Till in 1955. One of the most horrific racial murders in recent history, the death of Emmett Till has never been fully documented, and The Barn is an incredible work of scholarship and reporting about what happened that night in the barn on the map of Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half. Less than 23 miles from where Wright's family's farm is located. There's some intense reporting in this one, dear readers. Plan accordingly.
And here is the next hardcover volume in Matt Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl series. This is Carl's Doomsday Scenario, wherein Carl, who has escaped the first dungeon, must travel across Over City, a sprawling metropolis filled with all sorts of horrific monsters. Carl is ill-equipped for all of this, as he still has no pants.
And we're fairly certain that every character in the new Nicholas Sparks book is wearing pants. This one is Counting Miracles, and it's the story of two people who find each other at a time when neither is looking for love, as well as the seemingly unconnected tale of a man chasing a deer. It's Nicholas Sparks, friends. There's a formula at work here. It does the thing it's supposed to do.
Did we mention that it's paperbackapalooza week? Sure is. We've got Cussler and Flynn too. Written by neither Cussler nor Flynn since, you know, they're dead and all.
It's kind of magical that mass market paperbacks are still being produced, isn't it?
And that old revenant William W. Johnstone has two (!) books out this week. The first is While the Town Slept, the latest Tim Colter Western, wherein Tim threatens a coal-smoking, steam-spewing train engine with a six-shooter.
[Note to cover designer: if you put Tim ON the tracks, it'd make for better dramatic tension. Just noting.]
Anyway, Tim and his trusty mountain man sidekick, Jed Reno, must thwart a deadly conspiracy to assassinate the President, Ulysses S. Grant. In order to do so, they must team up with a busty lady outlaw—no, wait, they have to "bust" her out of jail. Sorry. We regret that misread.
In Hard Winter, Johnstone really switches it up on us by telling two stories set 132 years apart. They both take place in Cutthroat County, Montana (which is totally a real place, right?), and both involve the Maddox and Drew families as they fight to survive the worst winter on record.
Hang on. Both winters can't be the worst. One is worserer than the other . . . ?
Cutthroat County, where the men are so rugged and the weather is so bad that storms last for generations.
Okay, fine. There's a new Percy Jackson book out this week. Percy still hasn't graduated high school. He's still getting into trouble. And Rick Riordan still has a few bits of Greek mythology that he hasn't mined. This time around, Percy and the gang have to do is watch Hecate's polecat for a weekend . . . ?
Also, someone gets turned into a goat, so, you know, the usual sort of hijinks that go on when you let high school seniors house sit for a weekend.
And we feel like we buried the lede a bit here, but Richard Powers has a new book out this week as well. This is Playground, and it's already been named the Best Book of the Year by a number of outlets, which is kinda annoying for the rest of us.
Hey, the ink is barely dry, and everyone has already decided this book is the tops? What about the new Jack Reacher book that comes out in a few weeks? Andrew Child might knock it out of the park, yo.
Anyway, Ron Charles of The Washington Post can't help but name-check "AI" in his review. Hamilton Caine at The Boston Globe reviews the cover ("Richly hued."), and Heller McAlpin at NPR uses the words "meaty, slowly, confusingly, and gradually" in her review. Which is a lot of words that end in "y," but we get the hint that this one takes a bit to open up. Playground is the story of four people who manage to find each other in the world largest's ocean (where all the landmarks are very clearly marked). Once they get together, they have an experience which, you know, changes their lives, and, ostensibly, ours as well, because this is the guy who won the Pulitzer Prize for a book about trees, after all.
Oh, and Olga Tokarczuk has a new book out this week as well. We're fairly confident that no one's review of this one says that it reads slowly or confusingly or opens itself up to the reader gradually. The Empusium is the story of a young man, suffering from tuberculosis, who arrives at Wilhelm Opitz's Guesthouse for Gentleman, a remote health resort in Silesian mountains. At this resort, the young man discovers a bunch of residents who drink hallucinogenic liqueur and ask probing philosophical questions. Naturally, this is all a front for a very sinister plot, which, in very Tokarczukian fashion, unfolds in a seriously WTF? way. Sign us up.
And that's the list this week, dear readers. Hopefully, there is something here that will fit in your satchel, so you can carry it with you as you stroll about during these autumnal evenings.
