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Win 12 Copies of LADY CLEMENTINE by Marie Benedict 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 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 LADY CLEMENTINE by Marie Benedict, which is now available in paperback. This Bookreporter.com Bets On pick is an incredible novel that focuses on one of the people who had the most influence during World War I and World War II: Clementine Churchill. To enter, please fill out the form below by Wednesday, September 9th at noon ET.

» Click here to watch our "Bookreporter Talks To" interview with Marie Benedict.
» Click here to listen to a podcast of the interview.
 

July 1, 2020

Last Monday night, I had the pleasure of attending a virtual "Writers at Home" event that was a perk for frequent attendees of BOOKTHEWRITER's Pop-Up Book Groups. Jeanine Cummins was the author guest, and she and Jean Hanff Korelitz, who hosted the program, had a wonderful discussion about AMERICAN DIRT, with questions from the attendees. Jeanine shared how she wrote two complete versions of a novel with similar themes, and abandoned them before she penned the bestselling book that we all now know. The sudden death of her father in late 2016 devastated her, and for a while she just could not get out of bed. She started writing as a way to get her bearings again. She went to the desert to volunteer in a migrant camp, and by the time she left, she had the full arc of the story.

Editorial Content for The Beauty of Broken Things

Teaser

United by tragedy, can two broken souls make each other whole? That is the question Victoria Connelly poses to the readers of her latest novel, THE BEAUTY OF BROKEN THINGS.

Promo

United by tragedy, can two broken souls make each other whole? That is the question Victoria Connelly poses to the readers of her latest novel, THE BEAUTY OF BROKEN THINGS.

About the Book

United by tragedy, can two broken souls make each other whole?

After the tragic loss of his wife, Helen, Luke Hansard is desperate to keep her memory alive. In an effort to stay close to her, he reaches out to an online friend Helen often mentioned: a reclusive photographer with a curious interest in beautiful but broken objects. But first he must find her --- and she doesn’t want to be found.

Orla Kendrick lives alone in the ruins of a remote Suffolk castle, hiding from the haunting past that has left her physically and emotionally scarred. In her fortress, she can keep a safe distance from prying eyes, surrounded by her broken treasures and insulated from the world outside.

When Luke tracks Orla down, he is determined to help her in the way Helen wanted to: by encouraging her out of her isolation and back into the world. But Orla has never seen her refuge as a prison, and when painful secrets and dangerous threats begin to resurface, Luke’s good deed is turned on its head.

As they work through their grief for Helen in very different ways, will these two broken souls be able to heal?

Editorial Content for A Burning

Book

Teaser

For readers of Tommy Orange, Yaa Gyasi and Jhumpa Lahiri, A BURNING is an electrifying debut novel about three unforgettable characters who seek to rise --- to the middle class, to political power, to fame in the movies --- and find their lives entangled in the wake of a catastrophe in contemporary India.

Promo

For readers of Tommy Orange, Yaa Gyasi and Jhumpa Lahiri, A BURNING is an electrifying debut novel about three unforgettable characters who seek to rise --- to the middle class, to political power, to fame in the movies --- and find their lives entangled in the wake of a catastrophe in contemporary India.

About the Book

For readers of Tommy Orange, Yaa Gyasi and Jhumpa Lahiri, A BURNING is an electrifying debut novel about three unforgettable characters who seek to rise --- to the middle class, to political power, to fame in the movies --- and find their lives entangled in the wake of a catastrophe in contemporary India.

Jivan is a Muslim girl from the slums, determined to move up in life, who is accused of executing a terrorist attack on a train because of a careless comment on Facebook. PT Sir is an opportunistic gym teacher who hitches his aspirations to a right-wing political party, and finds that his own ascent becomes linked to Jivan's fall. Lovely --- an irresistible outcast whose exuberant voice and dreams of glory fill the novel with warmth, hope and humor --- has the alibi that can set Jivan free, but it will cost her everything she holds dear.

Taut, symphonic, propulsive and riveting from its opening lines, A BURNING has the force of an epic while being so masterfully compressed it can be read in a single sitting. Majumdar writes with dazzling assurance at a breakneck pace on complex themes that read here as the components of a thriller: class, fate, corruption, justice, and what it feels like to face profound obstacles and yet nurture big dreams in a country spinning toward extremism. An extraordinary debut.

Editorial Content for Evvie Drake Starts Over

Teaser

This heartfelt debut is about the unlikely relationship between a young woman who has lost her husband and a major league pitcher who has lost his game.

Promo

This heartfelt debut is about the unlikely relationship between a young woman who has lost her husband and a major league pitcher who has lost his game.

About the Book

A heartfelt debut about the unlikely relationship between a young woman who's lost her husband and a major league pitcher who’s lost his game.

In a sleepy seaside town in Maine, recently widowed Eveleth “Evvie” Drake rarely leaves her large, painfully empty house nearly a year after her husband’s death in a car crash. Everyone in town, even her best friend, Andy, thinks grief keeps her locked inside, and Evvie doesn’t correct them.

Meanwhile, in New York City, Dean Tenney, former Major League pitcher and Andy’s childhood best friend, is wrestling with what miserable athletes living out their worst nightmares call the “yips”: he can’t throw straight anymore, and, even worse, he can’t figure out why. As the media storm heats up, an invitation from Andy to stay in Maine seems like the perfect chance to hit the reset button on Dean’s future.

When he moves into an apartment at the back of Evvie’s house, the two make a deal: Dean won’t ask about Evvie’s late husband, and Evvie won’t ask about Dean’s baseball career. Rules, though, have a funny way of being broken --- and what starts as an unexpected friendship soon turns into something more. To move forward, Evvie and Dean will have to reckon with their pasts --- the friendships they’ve damaged, the secrets they’ve kept. But in life, as in baseball, there’s always a chance --- up until the last out.

A joyful, hilarious and hope-filled debut, EVVIE DRAKE STARTS OVER will have you cheering for the two most unlikely comebacks of the year --- and will leave you wanting more from Linda Holmes.

Editorial Content for Hannah's War

Teaser

A "mesmerizing" reimagination of the final months of World War II (Kate Quinn, author of THE ALICE NETWORK), HANNAH'S WAR is an unforgettable love story about an exceptional woman and the dangerous power of her greatest discovery.

Promo

A "mesmerizing" reimagination of the final months of World War II (Kate Quinn, author of THE ALICE NETWORK), HANNAH'S WAR is an unforgettable love story about an exceptional woman and the dangerous power of her greatest discovery.

About the Book

A "mesmerizing" reimagination of the final months of World War II (Kate Quinn, author of THE ALICE NETWORK), HANNAH'S WAR is an unforgettable love story about an exceptional woman and the dangerous power of her greatest discovery.

Berlin, 1938. Groundbreaking physicist Dr. Hannah Weiss is on the verge of the greatest discovery of the 20th century: splitting the atom. She understands that the energy released by her discovery can power entire cities or destroy them. Hannah believes the weapon's creation will secure an end to future wars, but as a Jewish woman living under the harsh rule of the Third Reich, her research is belittled, overlooked and eventually stolen by her German colleagues. Faced with an impossible choice, Hannah must decide what she is willing to sacrifice in pursuit of science's greatest achievement.

New Mexico, 1945. Returning wounded and battered from the liberation of Paris, Major Jack Delaney arrives in the New Mexican desert with a mission: to catch a spy. Someone in the top-secret nuclear lab at Los Alamos has been leaking encoded equations to Hitler's scientists. Chief among Jack's suspects is the brilliant and mysterious Hannah Weiss, an exiled physicist lending her talent to J. Robert Oppenheimer's mission. All signs point to Hannah as the traitor, but over three days of interrogation that separate her lies from the truth, Jack will realize they have more in common than either one bargained for.

HANNAH'S WAR is a thrilling wartime story of loyalty, truth and the unforeseeable fallout of a single choice.

Editorial Content for Montauk

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Teaser

An epic and cinematic novel by debut author Nicola Harrison, MONTAUK captures the glamour and extravagance of a summer by the sea with the story of a woman torn between the life she chose and the life she desires.

Promo

An epic and cinematic novel by debut author Nicola Harrison, MONTAUK captures the glamour and extravagance of a summer by the sea with the story of a woman torn between the life she chose and the life she desires.

About the Book

An epic and cinematic novel by debut author Nicola Harrison, MONTAUK captures the glamour and extravagance of a summer by the sea with the story of a woman torn between the life she chose and the life she desires.

Montauk, Long Island, 1938.

For three months, this humble fishing village will serve as the playground for New York City’s wealthy elite. Beatrice Bordeaux was looking forward to a summer of reigniting the passion between her and her husband, Harry. Instead, tasked with furthering his investment interest in Montauk as a resort destination, she learns she’ll be spending 12 weeks sequestered with the high society wives at The Montauk Manor --- a 200-room seaside hotel --- while Harry pursues other interests in the city.

College educated, but raised a modest country girl in Pennsylvania, Bea has never felt fully comfortable among these privileged women, whose days are devoted not to their children but to leisure activities and charities that seemingly benefit no one but themselves. She longs to be a mother herself, as well as a loving wife, but after five years of marriage she remains childless while Harry is increasingly remote and distracted. Despite lavish parties at the Manor and the Yacht Club, Bea is lost and lonely and befriends the manor’s laundress whose work ethic and family life stir memories of who she once was.

As she drifts further from the society women and their preoccupations and closer toward Montauk’s natural beauty and community spirit, Bea finds herself drawn to a man nothing like her husband --- stoic, plain spoken and enigmatic. Inspiring a strength and courage she had almost forgotten, his presence forces her to face a haunting tragedy of her past and question her future.

Desperate to embrace moments of happiness, no matter how fleeting, she soon discovers that such moments may be all she has, when fates conspire to tear her world apart.

Editorial Content for The Summer Country

Teaser

A brilliant, multigenerational saga in the tradition of THE THORN BIRDS and NORTH AND SOUTH, New York Times bestselling historical novelist Lauren Willig delivers her biggest, boldest and most ambitious novel yet --- a sweeping Victorian epic of lost love, lies, jealousy and rebellion set in colonial Barbados.

Promo

A brilliant, multigenerational saga in the tradition of THE THORN BIRDS and NORTH AND SOUTH, New York Times bestselling historical novelist Lauren Willig delivers her biggest, boldest and most ambitious novel yet --- a sweeping Victorian epic of lost love, lies, jealousy and rebellion set in colonial Barbados.

About the Book

A brilliant, multigenerational saga in the tradition of THE THORN BIRDS and NORTH AND SOUTH, New York Times bestselling historical novelist Lauren Willig delivers her biggest, boldest and most ambitious novel yet --- a sweeping Victorian epic of lost love, lies, jealousy and rebellion set in colonial Barbados.

Barbados, 1854: Emily Dawson has always been the poor cousin in a prosperous English merchant clan --- merely a vicar’s daughter, and a reform-minded vicar’s daughter, at that. Everyone knows that the family’s lucrative shipping business will go to her cousin, Adam, one day. But when her grandfather dies, Emily receives an unexpected inheritance: Peverills, a sugar plantation in Barbados --- a plantation her grandfather never told anyone he owned.

When Emily accompanies her cousin and his new wife to Barbados, she finds Peverills a burnt-out shell, reduced to ruins in 1816, when a rising of enslaved people sent the island up in flames. Rumors swirl around the derelict plantation; people whisper of ghosts.

Why would her practical-minded grandfather leave her a property in ruins? Why are the neighboring plantation owners, the Davenants, so eager to acquire Peverills? The answer lies in the past --- a tangled history of lies, greed, clandestine love, heartbreaking betrayal and a bold bid for freedom.

THE SUMMER COUNTRY will beguile readers with its rendering of families, heartbreak and the endurance of hope against all odds.

Editorial Content for The Vanishing Half

Teaser

From the New York Times bestselling author of THE MOTHERS comes a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds --- one black and one white.

Promo

From the New York Times bestselling author of THE MOTHERS comes a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds --- one black and one white.

About the Book

From the New York Times bestselling author of THE MOTHERS comes a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds --- one black and one white.

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age 16, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect?

Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, THE VANISHING HALF considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

As with her New York Times bestselling debut THE MOTHERS, Brit Bennett offers an engrossing page-turner about family and relationships that is immersive and provocative, compassionate and wise.

Editorial Content for The Wife Stalker

Teaser

The bestselling author of THE LAST MRS. PARRISH returns with a psychological thriller, filled with chilling serpentine twists, about a woman fighting to hold onto the only family she’s ever loved --- and how far she’ll go to preserve it.

Promo

The bestselling author of THE LAST MRS. PARRISH returns with a psychological thriller, filled with chilling serpentine twists, about a woman fighting to hold onto the only family she’s ever loved --- and how far she’ll go to preserve it.

About the Book

The bestselling author of THE LAST MRS. PARRISH returns with a psychological thriller, filled with chilling serpentine twists, about a woman fighting to hold onto the only family she’s ever loved --- and how far she’ll go to preserve it.

Breezing into the tony seaside paradise of Westport, Connecticut, gorgeous thirtysomething Piper Reynard sets down roots, opening a rehab and wellness space and joining a local yacht club. When she meets Leo Drakos, a handsome, successful lawyer, the wedding ring on his finger is the only thing she doesn’t like about him. Yet as Piper well knows, no marriage is permanent.

Meanwhile, Joanna has been waiting patiently for Leo, the charismatic man she fell in love with all those years ago, to re-emerge from the severe depression that has engulfed him. Though she’s thankful when Leo returns to his charming, energetic self, paying attention again to Evie and Stelli, the children they both love beyond measure, Joanna is shocked to discover that it’s not her loving support that’s sparked his renewed happiness --- it’s something else.

Piper. Leo has fallen head over heels for the flaky, New Age-y newcomer, and unrepentant and resolute, he’s more than willing to leave Joanna behind, along with everything they’ve built. Of course, he assures her, she can still see the children.

Joanna is devastated --- and determined to find something, anything, to use against this woman who has stolen her life and her true love. As she digs deeper into Piper’s past, Joanna begins to unearth disturbing secrets...but when she confides to her therapist that she fears for the lives of her ex-husband and children, her concerns are dismissed as paranoia. Can she find the proof she needs in time to save them?