I promised more content from my experience a couple of weeks ago at BookExpo America. Well here it comes. One of the sessions I attended (moderated by our very own Carol Fitzgerald) was called Hot Book Club Titles: Fall 2010. Sounds right up our alley, no? It was 6 industry big wigs talking about their companies upcoming great reads for book groups. So, welcome to Part 1 of a 6 part series! The first speaker at the session was Michael Croy, Field Sales Director at Simon & Schuster, and these are the books he presented:
HALF BROKE HORSES by Jeanette Walls
Trade Paperback on Sale: September 2010
The author of The New York Times bestselling memoir THE GLASS CASTLE is back with a "true life novel" that brings us the story of her grandmother. By age six, Lily Casey Smith was helping her father break horses. At fifteen, she left home to teach in a frontier town -- riding five hundred miles on her pony, alone, to get to her job. She learned to drive a car ("I loved cars even more than I loved horses. They didn't need to be fed if they weren't working, and they didn't leave big piles of manure all over the place") and fly a plane. And, with her husband Jim, she ran a vast ranch in Arizona. She raised two children, one of whom is Jeannette's memorable mother, Rosemary Smith Walls, unforgettably portrayed in THE GLASS CASTLE.
A HAPPY MARRIAGE by Rafael Yglesias
Trade Paperback on Sale August 2010
Another "true life novel", A HAPPY MARRIAGE is both intimate and expansive: It is the story of Enrique Sabas and his wife, Margaret, a novel that alternates between the romantic misadventures of the first weeks of their courtship and the final months of Margaret's life as she says good-bye to her family, friends, and children -- and to Enrique. Spanning thirty years, this achingly honest story is about what it means for two people to spend a lifetime together -- and what makes a happy marriage.
DAY AFTER NIGHT by Anita Diamant
Trade Paperback on Sale August 2010
Just as she gave voice to the silent women of the Old Testament in THE RED TENT, Anita Diamant creates a cast of breathtakingly vivid characters who escaped to Israel from Nazi Europe. DAY AFTER NIGHT is based on the extraordinary true story of the October 1945 rescue of more than two hundred prisoners from the Atlit internment camp, a prison for "illegal" immigrants run by the British military near the Mediterranean coast south of Haifa. The story is told through the eyes of four young women at the camp with profoundly different stories. All of them survived the Holocaust: Shayndel, a Polish Zionist; Leonie, a Parisian beauty; Tedi, a hidden Dutch Jew; and Zorah, a concentration camp survivor. Haunted by unspeakable memories and losses, afraid to begin to hope, Shayndel, Leonie, Tedi, and Zorah find salvation in the bonds of friendship and shared experience even as they confront the challenge of re-creating themselves in a strange new country.
Other titles highlighted by Michael:
LEARNING TO DIE IN MIAMI by Carlos Eire
Hardcover on Sale November 2010
BLUE NUDE by Elizabeth Rosner
Trade Paperback on Sale September 2010
