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Editorial Content forThe Island of Missing Trees

Teaser

From the Booker-shortlisted author of 10 MINUTES 38 SECONDS IN THIS STRANGE WORLD comes a rich, magical new novel on belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal.

Promo

From the Booker-shortlisted author of 10 MINUTES 38 SECONDS IN THIS STRANGE WORLD comes a rich, magical new novel on belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal.

About the Book

A rich, magical new novel on belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal, from the Booker-shortlisted author of 10 MINUTES 38 SECONDS IN THIS STRANGE WORLD.

Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. In the taverna, hidden beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers and creeping honeysuckle, Kostas and Defne grow in their forbidden love for each other. A fig tree stretches through a cavity in the roof that bears witness to their hushed, happy meetings, and eventually to their silent, surreptitious departures. The tree is there when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, and when the teenagers vanish. Decades later, Kostas returns. He is a botanist looking for native species, but really, he's searching for lost love.

Years later, a Ficus carica grows in the back garden of a house in London where Ada Kazantzakis lives. This tree is her only connection to an island she has never visited --- her only connection to her family’s troubled history and her complex identity as she seeks to untangle years of secrets to find her place in the world.

A moving, beautifully written and delicately constructed story of love, division, transcendence, history and eco-consciousness, THE ISLAND OF MISSING TREES is Elif Shafak’s best work yet.

Editorial Content for Oh William!

Teaser

Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout explores the mysteries of marriage and the secrets we keep, as a former couple reckons with where they’ve come from --- and what they’ve left behind.

Promo

Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout explores the mysteries of marriage and the secrets we keep, as a former couple reckons with where they’ve come from --- and what they’ve left behind.

About the Book

Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout explores the mysteries of marriage and the secrets we keep, as a former couple reckons with where they’ve come from --- and what they’ve left behind.

I would like to say a few things about my first husband, William.

Lucy Barton is a writer, but her ex-husband, William, remains a hard man to read. William, she confesses, has always been a mystery to me. Another mystery is why the two have remained connected after all these years. They just are.

So Lucy is both surprised and not surprised when William asks her to join him on a trip to investigate a recently uncovered family secret --- one of those secrets that rearrange everything we think we know about the people closest to us. What happens next is nothing less than another example of what Hilary Mantel has called Elizabeth Strout’s “perfect attunement to the human condition.” There are fears and insecurities, simple joys and acts of tenderness, and revelations about affairs and other spouses, parents and their children. On every page of this exquisite novel, we learn more about the quiet forces that hold us together --- even after we’ve grown apart.

At the heart of this story is the indomitable voice of Lucy Barton, who offers a profound, lasting reflection on the very nature of existence. “This is the way of life,” Lucy says: “the many things we do not know until it is too late.”

Editorial Content for Once Upon a Wardrobe

Teaser

From Patti Callahan, the bestselling author of BECOMING MRS. LEWIS, comes another enchanting story that pulls back the curtain on the early life of C. S. Lewis.

Promo

From Patti Callahan, the bestselling author of BECOMING MRS. LEWIS, comes another enchanting story that pulls back the curtain on the early life of C. S. Lewis.

About the Book

From Patti Callahan, the bestselling author of BECOMING MRS. LEWIS, comes another enchanting story that pulls back the curtain on the early life of C. S. Lewis.

“Where did Narnia come from?”

The answer will change everything.

Megs Devonshire is brilliant with numbers and equations, on a scholarship at Oxford, and dreams of solving the greatest mysteries of physics.

She prefers the dependability of facts --- except for one: the younger brother she loves with all her heart doesn’t have long to live. When George becomes captivated by a brand-new book called THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE and begs her to find out where Narnia came from, there’s no way she can refuse.

Despite her timidity about approaching the famous author, Megs soon finds herself taking tea with the Oxford don and his own brother, imploring them for answers. What she receives instead are more stories...stories of Jack Lewis’ life, which she takes home to George.

Why won’t Mr. Lewis just tell her plainly what George wants to know? The answer will reveal to Meg many truths that science and math cannot, and the gift she thought she was giving to her brother --- the story behind Narnia --- turns out to be his gift to her, instead: hope.

Editorial Content for Our Country Friends

Teaser

Eight friends, one country house, four romances and six months in isolation. OUR COUNTRY FRIENDS is a novel about love, friendship, family and betrayal, a book that reads like a great Russian novel, or Chekhov on the Hudson.

Promo

Eight friends, one country house, four romances and six months in isolation. OUR COUNTRY FRIENDS is a novel about love, friendship, family and betrayal, a book that reads like a great Russian novel, or Chekhov on the Hudson.

About the Book

Eight friends, one country house, four romances and six months in isolation --- a novel about love, friendship, family and betrayal, a book that reads like a great Russian novel, or Chekhov on the Hudson, by a novelist The New York Times calls “one of his generation’s most original writers.”

It’s March 2020, and a calamity is unfolding. A group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next six months, new friendships and romances will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge, forcing each character to reevaluate whom they love and what matters most. The unlikely cast of characters includes a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American writer; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; a global dandy with three passports; a Southern flamethrower of an essayist; and a movie star, the Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family.

Both elegiac and very, very funny, OUR COUNTRY FRIENDS is the most ambitious book yet by the author of the beloved bestseller SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY.

Editorial Content for The Secret of Snow

Teaser

The forecast is calling for a reluctant homecoming and regrettable decisions with a strong chance of romance in Viola Shipman's latest novel, THE SECRET OF SNOW.

Promo

The forecast is calling for a reluctant homecoming and regrettable decisions with a strong chance of romance in Viola Shipman's latest novel, THE SECRET OF SNOW.

About the Book

The forecast is calling for a reluctant homecoming and regrettable decisions with a strong chance of romance.

When Sonny Dunes, a SoCal meteorologist whose job is all sunshine and 72-degree days, is replaced by a virtual meteorologist that will never age, gain weight or renegotiate its contract, the only station willing to give the 50-year-old another shot is the very place she has been avoiding since the day she left for college --- her northern Michigan hometown.

Sonny grudgingly returns to the long, cold, snowy winters of her childhood…with the added humiliation of moving back in with her mother. Not quite an outsider but no longer a local, Sonny finds her past blindsiding her everywhere: from the high school friends she ghosted, to the former journalism classmate and mortal frenemy who’s now her boss, to, most keenly, the death years ago of her younger sister, who loved the snow.

To distract herself from the memories she's spent her life trying to outrun, Sonny throws herself headfirst into covering every small-town winter event to woo a new audience, made more bearable by a handsome widower with optimism to spare. But with someone trying to undermine her efforts to rebuild her career, Sonny must make peace with who she used to be and allow her heart to thaw if she’s ever going to find a place she can truly call home.

Editorial Content for The Wicked Widow: A Wicked City Novel

Teaser

Audacious Appalachian flapper Geneva “Gin” Kelly, the wicked redhead, is back! Readers will delight in the next installment of the Wicked City series by New York Times bestselling author Beatriz Williams.

Promo

Audacious Appalachian flapper Geneva “Gin” Kelly, the wicked redhead, is back! Readers will delight in the next installment of the Wicked City series by New York Times bestselling author Beatriz Williams.

About the Book

Gin Kelly, the wicked redhead, is back! Readers will delight in the next installment of the Wicked City series by New York Times bestselling author Beatriz Williams. 

June 1925. Audacious Appalachian flapper Geneva “Gin” Kelly prepares to trade her high-flying ways for respectable marriage to Oliver Anson Marshall, a steadfast Prohibition agent who happens to hail from one of New York’s most distinguished families. But just as wedding bells chime, the head of the notorious East Coast rum-running racket --- and Anson’s mortal enemy --- turns up murdered at a society funeral, and their short-lived honeymoon bliss goes up in a spectacular blaze that sends Anson back undercover...and into the jaws of a trap from which not even Gin can rescue him. As violence explodes around her, Gin must summon all her considerable moxie to trace the tentacles of this sinister organization back to their shocking source, and face down a legendary American family at a rigged game it has no intention of losing.

June 1998. When Ella Dommerich’s ninetysomething society queen aunt Julie ropes her into digging up dirt on Senator (and Presidential candidate) Franklin Hardcastle in order to settle old family scores, she couldn’t be less enthusiastic. Pregnant Ella has recently ditched her unfaithful husband and settled into cozy --- if complicated --- domesticity with her almost-too-good-to-be-true musician boyfriend, Hector. But then the Hardcastle secrets lead to a web of shady dealings Ella has uncovered in her job as a financial analyst, and the bodies start to tumble out of the venerable woodwork. With the help of her ex-husband and her mysterious connection to a certain redheaded flapper, Ella digs up more than mere dirt…only to discover herself standing alone between a legendarily ruthless family and the prize it’s sought for generations.

What ugly secrets lurk in the opulent enclaves --- and bank accounts --- of America’s richest families? And can two determined women from two different generations thwart the murderous legacy of the demon liquor?

January 2022 Bookaccino Live Event

Reviewer Event on December 8th

Win Up to 12 Copies of SUNFLOWER SISTERS by Martha Hall Kelly for Your Group

Each month, we ask book groups to share the titles they are reading that month and rate them. From all entries, three winners will be selected, and each will win up to 12 copies of that month’s prize book for their group. Note: To be eligible to win, let us know the title of the book that YOUR book group is CURRENTLY reading, NOT the title we are giving away.

Our latest prize book is SUNFLOWER SISTERS, the final installment in Martha Hall Kelly’s trilogy of novels about Caroline Ferriday’s family, following LILAC GIRLS and LOST ROSES. This concluding volume, which releases in paperback on December 28th, tells the story of Ferriday’s ancestor Georgeanna Woolsey, a Union nurse during the Civil War whose calling leads her to cross paths with Jemma, a young enslaved girl who is sold off and conscripted into the army, and Anne-May Wilson, a Southern plantation mistress whose husband enlists. To enter, please fill out the form below by Wednesday, January 12th at noon ET.

 

October 29, 2021

Thanks to all of you who answered our recent poll about how your group is meeting these days. For many years, book groups took place in homes, restaurants and libraries. There were a smattering of online discussions. But then the pandemic hit, and intrepid book group readers really got inventive as they tried to meet “safely.” Here’s a snapshot of what we learned about what you are up to these days.