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DAUGHTERS OF THE SUN AND MOON is Lisa See's Latest Outstanding Historical Novel

The unexpected friendship of three Chinese women helps them survive and, despite the odds, thrive in the turmoil of post-Civil War Los Angeles.

Beautiful in Its Simplicity, WHISTLER is Ann Patchett's Moving and Luminous New Novel

The book is ultimately about how love endures, and how the feeling of being known by one other person can change everything.

Two Friends Believe They Can Change the Art World and Bring New Meaning to It

CONTRAPPOSTO is Dave Eggers' moving and very funny new novel about friendship, love and the lifelong pursuit of art.

Douglas Stuart's New Novel, JOHN OF JOHN, is an Oprah's Book Club Selection

A young man returns to his Hebridean island home in this vivid and moving portrait of a father’s expectations and a son’s desires.

In August 1914, a Tragedy Shook the Very Foundation of Frank Lloyd Wright's Life

Casey Sherman delves beyond the myth of Wright's genius to reveal a man of relentless ambition, consuming passion and devastating loss.

We're Giving Away a Different Summer Reading Title on Select Days Through August

Our next contest will be up on Tuesday, June 23rd at noon ET. The prize book will be MIDNIGHT PATRIOTS by Paul Levine.

Latest Features and Contests


Bookreporter.com's Word of Mouth Contest: Tell Us What You've Read --- and You Can Win Two Books!

Let us know by Friday, June 26th at noon ET what books you’ve read, and you’ll have a chance to win IT COULD HAVE BEEN HER by Lisa Jewell and WHEN YOU LOVED ME by Beatriz Williams in our Word of Mouth contest.

IT COULD HAVE BEEN HER finds two women's lives converging in a house containing devastating secrets that refuse to stay buried. In WHEN YOU LOVED ME, which will be a Bookreporter.com Bets On pick, a young widow returns to her late father’s New England estate, only to be drawn into the hunt for the rumored pirate treasure that consumed his life.

» Click here to enter the contest.


Bookreporter.com's 22nd Annual Summer Reading Contests and Feature

Summer will be here before you know it! At Bookreporter.com, this means it's time for us to share some great summer book picks with our Summer Reading Contests and Feature.

We are hosting a series of 24-hour contests for these titles on select days through mid-August, so you will have to check the site each day to see the featured prize book and enter to win.

We also are sending a special newsletter to announce the day's title, which you can sign up for here.

Our next contest will be up on Tuesday, June 23rd at noon ET. The prize book will be MIDNIGHT PATRIOTS, which is the second novel in Paul Levine's Einstein-Chaplin series, following last year's MIDNIGHT BURNING. It revolves around real-life friends Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin as they confront powerful enemies threatening America.

» Click here to read all the contest details and learn more about our featured titles.

Bookreporter Talks To...

As part of our mission to expand The Book Report Network, we have been shooting video interviews with authors and posting them on our YouTube channel. We also have been making them available as podcasts. Carol loves interviewing authors, so this feels like a natural.

Lisa See's new novel, DAUGHTERS OF THE SUN AND MOON, will be a Bets On pick. This time, Lisa turns her attention to the idea of female friendship as told by three different Chinese women who were inspired by real people. The book is rooted in the 1871 Chinese Massacre in Los Angeles, which has been largely erased from public memory and not taught in history classes. Lisa first explored the massacre over 30 years ago while researching ON GOLD MOUNTAIN, where it appeared in a single paragraph. She was later invited by the mayor to serve on an advisory board for a memorial commemorating what became known as the “Night of Horrors.” The novel grew from both deep personal family history and a sense of compulsion to recover a deliberately suppressed historical event. Watch the video or listen to the podcast.

Carol had a wonderful conversation with Ruta Sepetys about her new book, A FORTUNE OF SAND, which is her first adult novel. Set in 1920s Detroit during the Prohibition era, the story is centered on the wealthy Lennox automotive dynasty behaving badly and accumulating power. The youngest daughter, Marjorie, uncovers a web of family secrets. The book is rooted in deep historical research, and explores themes of power, impermanence, control, and the fragility of constructed legacies in Detroit during this time period. Ruta discusses the control exerted over women during the era, often framed as “safeguarding” but functioning as suppression of creative and personal autonomy. She also notes that the cover design --- Honolulu Blue and silver --- is a nod to Detroit. Watch the video or listen to the podcast.

THE CALAMITY CLUB is Kathryn Stockett's first book since THE HELP, which was published in 2009, and is a Bets On selection. The story is set in Mississippi during the Great Depression and follows a group of scrappy, strong-willed women who work together to conquer challenges they face, knowing that there are no men to save them. The novel also addresses the societal expectations and hypocrisies of the 1920s and ’30s. Kathryn balances the book’s serious historical themes with humor. Initially she tried to write a cautious, bland tale that was different from THE HELP to avoid similar criticism, but she realized after a number of years that it lacked heart. Kathryn drew a lot of inspiration from her own mother, to whom THE CALAMITY CLUB is dedicated. Watch the video or listen to the podcast.

» Click here for a complete list of our "Bookreporter Talks To" videos and podcasts, along with upcoming interviews.

Latest Reviews

In a darkly brilliant thriller set in Maine’s rural Kennebec River Valley, the body of a young runaway from a “troubled teens” school has been found in the water, seemingly drowned, while a teenage girl has gone missing, believed dead. Now it is up to one man, private investigator Charlie Parker, to find the connection, and bring two evils --- one new and one ancient --- to an end.

Red Sheet by James Ellroy - Historical Thriller

It’s late October 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis has just concluded. The Russkies blinked and pulled their ICBMs out of Cuba. Attorney General Robert Kennedy fears reprisals from seething commies. He orders a red probe and puts the LAPD on the job. Freddy Otash is injudiciously named the lead investigating officer. He’s a stone-cold criminal with police sanction and a harrowing dope habit. He homes in on a red-front trade union. There’s a murder on Halloween night. It may link to ex-VP and current gubernatorial candidate Richard Nixon and two commie snuffs from eight years back. Freddy is overworked and overamped. He’s running the probe, and Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman --- Tricky Dick Nixon’s head goons --- have hired him to keep Nixon away from the smear-minded press.

Based on a True Story by Sarah Vaughan - Psychological Thriller

Famed children’s author Dame Eleanor Kingman has summoned her family and friends to her exquisite manor house on the cliffs. They're celebrating her birthday --- and her latest #1 bestseller in her series of books based on a mother fox and her cubs. But the night before the party, Eleanor receives an email that threatens to expose the lie she’s kept up for over half a century. Someone knows her secret. Is it her estranged literary agent? Is it her ex-husband? Is it the nanny she fired all those years ago? Or is it one of her three daughters, all of whom have a stake in the publishing empire she has built...With a television crew arriving to film a documentary of her life, Eleanor needs to find out who sent the email --- and preserve her legacy and multimillion-pound career. But when push comes to shove, and it's time to tell the truth will anyone actually believe her?

Abandoning college plans to work a dead-end job, Stevie can’t wait to move away from L.A., and her mother’s orbit, to start over. Reeling in the aftermath of her lover and TV husband’s death, out-of-work actress Moon struggles to process her grief. And the last thing she expects is for Stevie to leave her too. Now, neither Stevie nor Moon can afford to quit each other. And their cost of living forces them into a glass-walled pool house in the backyard, while their home is rented out to pay the bills. But when Adam, Moon’s former TV son and Stevie’s forever crush, arrives for the funeral, the three are pulled into a messy orbit, moving back into the “Big House” and play-acting a picture-perfect family even as tensions rise and relationships unravel.

In 1942, as head of the newly formed OSS, Wild Bill Donovan deployed spies across Europe and around the world to try to thwart the Nazis. In Greece, Nazis weren’t just taking over territory; they were seizing and threatening to destroy some of the world’s most important and valuable historical monuments and artifacts. Donovan tapped a young Ivy League-trained archaeologist named Rodney Young to assemble and lead a team of spies to collect intel. Young set about recruiting the most unlikely of spies --- academics, classicists, epigraphers, and other specialists and scholars --- who would come to be known as “the Greek Desk.” These men and women, along with their Greek allies, went undercover and tried desperately to protect some of the world’s most significant treasures.

Held at Fairmount Park, in Philadelphia, the Great Centennial Exhibition of 1876 attracted 10 million Americans and visitors from around the world. On display were inventions that signaled the changing landscape of American life, from the typewriter to the telephone to Heinz Tomato Ketchup. This celebration of America’s first century came at a moment when its future seemed more precarious than ever. Looming over the fair was the presidential race of 1876 --- a highly contested election that would determine the fate of Reconstruction and permanently shape the Republican party as we know it today. Fergus Bordewich animates these converging crises through the lives of four protagonists: Rutherford B. Hayes, Alexander Graham Bell, railroad magnate Tom Scott, and sculptor Edmonia Lewis.

Facing the global threat of a rising Communist world power in the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. employed hundreds of Black Americans to speed read Russian communications and gather essential information on their most dangerous nuclear rival. The result was the creation of a segregated civilian codebreaking unit known as the Traffic Processing Division --- The Plantation. Its 100 college-educated Black women made invaluable breakthroughs in the country’s Soviet intelligence, even as the Red Scare and the backlash against civil rights eroded their democratic freedoms at home. Their underappreciated top-secret work led directly to victory over the USSR and the end of the Cold War 30 years later. In DECODING THE DEVIL, Sarah Valentine tells their remarkable story in full for the first time. 

The Last Lady B by Eloisa James - Gothic Historical Romance

Lady Genevieve Burnsby, her pet piglet and her septuagenarian husband travel to a haunted abbey in the Scottish Highlands. Evie is excited to meet a ghost, but she didn’t expect the funny, quirky guests to become the friends she’s never had. And she certainly didn’t imagine meeting Sir Godric Everly, a sardonic, witty solicitor who loathes her husband. Yet as secrets and lies turn Evie’s world upside down, Sir Godric becomes the one person she can trust. When ghosts, multiple wills and a shocking marriage certificate bring Lord Burnsby’s past crashing into his present, Burnsby promptly dies, leaving Evie free to remarry. More importantly, she has to figure out whose identity is false, whose vows are dishonorable, whose truths could destroy her reputation --- and where her heart belongs.

Headlights by CJ Leede - Supernatural Thriller/Horror

Special Agent Daniel Stansfield is ready for a change. Burnt out and defeated by the job, it’s his last day with the FBI. But before he can turn in his badge, he’s summoned back to Denver, the city he ran from four years ago, with a chilling message: it's happening again. Seemingly innocent people are waking up on the side of the highway, with no memory of how they got there, wearing the skin of victims they've allegedly never met. And they each share one haunting detail: a strand of a stranger’s hair is tied around their tongue. Now Daniel will have to confront the ghosts of his traumatic childhood and face what’s been hunting him all along --- before he and the people he loves become the next victims.