For a while every month the Baker and Taylor magazine, Forecast, was crossing my desk at work, but I never seem to come across it anymore. I miss seeing all the new book blurbs. There are other places to look, however, if I am not too lazy to go and search them out. Booklist and Library Journal both list new books in various subjects that are due to be published in the near future. So I have managed to compile a list of new books that I will be requesting from the library.
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield seems to be popping up all over the place. I wonder if this will be the next big "talked about" book of the fall bookselling season? I have already seen other bloggers reviewing it (it might already be available in the UK?) and talking about it. It sounds like a modern day Gothic tale (I think it is set in contemporary times). Per Publishers Weekly: "Former academic Setterfield pays tribute in her debut to Brontë and du Maurier heroines: a plain girl gets wrapped up in a dark, haunted ruin of a house, which guards family secrets that are not hers and that she must discover at her peril." I am second on the library list, so I will be one of the first to get a copy when it is published next month. Along the same lines is The Meaning of the Night by Michael Cox. I did get a preview email from Barnes and Noble about this one (giving you the option to pre-order it, of course), but it almost sounded too good to be true. Another Victorian pastiche following in the footsteps of Charles Dickens, and Wilkie Collins. I am on the list for that one, too. I hope it is as good as it sounds like it might be.
Some authors I have read and enjoyed before are coming out with new books. Margaret George has just published Helen of Troy. I didn't expect it so quickly, but I picked it up yesterday from the library. I have read some of her previous books (the books about Henry VIII and Mary Queen of Scots--both very good), but I wasn't sure about this one. Actually I sort of have the Brad Pitt movie in my head still, and I hate to have those visuals when reading the book. If anything that will put me off reading it. I do like mythology, so I will have to at least give it a try. Sebastian Faulks has a new book coming out, called Human Traces. I didn't much care for On Green Dolphin Street but I have enjoyed his earlier novels. Perhaps this will be better than his last one! Also I see that Kate Atkinson is continuing her Jackson Brodie storyline. I liked him in Case Histories. I don't see Atkinson as a mystery writer, but I am willing to give One Good Turn a try. Sena Jeter Naslund (of Ahab's Wife fame--loved it!) has a fictional biography coming out of Marie Antoinette called Abundance. And Jody Shields (I read her The Fig Eater last year--unusual mystery set in Vienna) has a new one that sounds even better than her last called The Crimson Portrait. Yes, more books for the library queue (so much for trying to wean myself from having so many books on request).
There are a few new books that I don't know anything about, but the blurbs sound intriguing, so added to my list are: American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Filler, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work by Susan Cheever, Another Green World by Richard Grant, and Sound Like Thunder by Sonny Brewer. The list never seems to get shorter (meaning I have read them and can cross them off)--it only seems to get longer and longer!