Literairyland: April 16-22, 2024

This week's hot 🔥 new books, writer birthdays, and more.

Author

Nicholas Barron
April 16, 2024

Welcome to Literairyland, your list of this week's hottest new books and writer birthdays. Subscribe today and get Literairyland in your inbox every Tuesday!

This week’s email includes 16 🔥 hot new books.

Table of Contents

Note: Your email app might cut off this email in your inbox, but you can view the entire email by clicking a link at the bottom that says something like, “View entire message.”

Affiliate Disclosure: This email contains affiliate links. That means I may receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after visiting one of these links at no additional cost to you.

This Week’s Hot 🔥 New Fiction

Mystery & Thriller

One of Us Knows by Alyssa Cole

Logline: From the critically acclaimed and New York Times bestselling author of When No One Is Watching comes a riveting thriller about the new caretaker of a historic estate who finds herself trapped on an island with a murderer--and the ghosts of her past.

Publisher: William Morrow & Company

Reviews:
Kirkus

What Cannot Be Said by C.S. Harris

Logline: A seemingly idyllic summer picnic ends in a macabre murder that echoes a pair of slayings fourteen years earlier in this riveting new historical mystery from the USA Today bestselling author of Who Cries for the Lost.

Publisher: Berkley Books

Horror

Indian Burial Ground by Nick Medina

Logline: A man lunges in front of a car. An elderly woman silently drowns herself. A corpse sits up in its coffin and speaks. On this reservation, not all is what it seems, in this new spine-chilling mythological horror from the author of Sisters of the Lost Nation.

Publisher: Berkley Books

Science Fiction

The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar

Logline: Celebrated author Sofia Samatar presents a mystical, revolutionary space adventure for the exhausted dreamer in this brilliant science fiction novella tackling the carceral state and violence embedded in the ivory tower while embodying the legacy of Ursula K. Le Guin.

Publisher: Tor.com

Historical Fiction

The Beautiful People by Michelle Gable

Amazon | Bookshop

Logline: Set against the glamorous 1960s Jet Set, a novel about a failed debutante whose new job as assistant to society photographer Slim Aarons takes her into Palm Beach's inner circle, and into a beguiling friendship with the star at its center, fashion designer Lilly Pulitzer.

Publisher: Graydon House

The Forgetters by Greg Sarris

Amazon | Bookshop

Logline: A tender, astonishing, and richly beautiful story cycle about remembering our shared histories and repairing the world.

Publisher: Heyday Books

Literary

Thorn Tree by Max Ludington

Logline: A beautifully wrought novel on the aftershocks of the heady but dangerous late 1960s and the relationship between trauma and the creative impulse

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Honey by Victor Lotado

Logline: Meet a woman as tenacious as Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge and as irresistible as Andrew Sean Greer's Arthur Less: Honey Fasinga, the glamorous daughter of a notorious New Jersey mobster, is returning home at last, ready to reckon with her violent past.

Publisher: Harper

This Week’s Hot 🔥 New Nonfiction

Memoir

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie

Logline: From internationally renowned writer and Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, a searing, deeply personal account of enduring--and surviving--an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him.

Publisher: Random House

Chipped: Writing from a Skateboarder's Lens by José Vadi

Logline: A memoir-in-essays about how skateboarding re-defines space, curates culture, confronts mortality, and affords new perspectives on and off the board.

Publisher: Soft Skull

Biography

The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim: The Woman Who Invented Freud's Talking Cure by Gabriel Brownstein

Logline: The story of a patient who changed the world, and the mystery of her illness.

Publisher: PublicAffairs

The Fixer: Moguls, Mobsters, Movie Stars, and Marilyn by Josh Young and Manfred Westphal

Logline: A riveting tell-all biography that delves into the extraordinary life of Hollywood's most infamous private detective and "fixer" to the stars, revealing newly discovered shocking revelations from his never-before-seen investigative files.

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

History

Chamber Divers: The Untold Story of the D-Day Scientists Who Changed Special Operations Forever by Rachel Lance

Logline: For readers of The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Code Girls, who want stories about the tech behind military successes and the maverick groups that generate historic innovations.

Publisher: Dutton

An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Logline: An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of America's most beloved historians, artfully weaves together biography, memoir, and history. She takes you along on the emotional journey she and her husband, Richard (Dick) Goodwin embarked upon in the last years of his life.

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Science

Unrooted: Botany, Motherhood, and the Fight to Save an Old Science by Erin Zimmerman

Logline: An exploration of science, motherhood, and academia, and a stirring account of a woman at a personal and professional crossroads . . .

Publisher: Melville House Publishing

Grief

Other People's Words: Friendship, Loss, and the Conversations That Never End by Lissa Soep

Logline: What if the great love of your life is friendship?

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Reviews:
Kirkus

Bookish Trivia 🤔

This Week’s Literary Birthdays & Events

April 16

  • Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook published (1962)

  • Margot Adler

  • Polly Adler

  • Kingsley Amis

  • John Davies

  • Sarah Kirsch

  • Dorothy P. Lathrop

  • John Christopher

  • Tracy K. Smith

April 17

  • George Adamski

  • Hervé Bazin

  • Clare Francis

  • Robert Dean Frisbie

  • Nick Hornby

  • Cynthia Ozick

  • Henry Vaughan

  • Thornton Wilder

April 18

  • Kathy Acker

  • Richard Bausch

  • Robert Bausch

  • Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić

  • Joy Davidman

  • Richard Harding Davis

  • Keith DeCandido

  • Niall Ferguson

  • C. Dale Young

April 19

  • Louis Amédée Achard

  • Richard Hughes

  • Steven H. Silver

April 20

  • Edgar Allan Poe publishes "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," the first detective story (1841)

  • Peter S. Beagle

  • Dinah Craik

  • Sebastian Faulks

  • Henry de Montherlant

  • Arto Paasilinna

  • Daniel Varoujan

  • Vladimir Vidrić

April 21

  • Charlotte Brontë

  • Gerald Early

  • Hilda Hilst

  • Alistair MacLean

  • John Muir

  • Murathan Mungan

  • Jeannette Walls

April 22

  • Janet Evanovich

  • Louise Glück

  • Vladimir Nabokov

See you next week!

Animated gif of a book's pages fluttering in the wind.