December 1, 2022
In award-winning debuter Bell's The Disenchantment, unhappily married Baroness Marie Catherine and self-confident Mademoiselle de Conti become lovers in a 17th-century Paris beset by scheming nobility and servants immured in witchcraft (35,000-copy first printing). In The Secret Book of Flora Lea, from New York Times best-selling, Christy Award-winning Henry, Hazel unwraps a package at the rare bookstore where she works to discover a book telling the story she made up for her little sister, who vanished after they were evacuated from World War II London two decades previously. Jackson follows up award-winning nonfiction with To Die Beautiful, based on the life of World War II Dutch Resistance fighter Hannie Schaft, who also figures in Noelle Salazar's recent Angels of the Resistance (50,000-copy first printing). In Morton's latest, Jess has an uncomfortable Homecoming when she returns from London to Australia after the grandmother who raised her is hospitalized; she learns that her family is linked to a horrific unsolved 1959 crime (250,000-copy first printing).New York Times best-selling author Noble tells the story of The Tiffany Girls, who did much of the design and construction of Tiffany's glorious glassworks without credit (75,000-copy first printing). Paul's Did You Hear About Kitty Karr? features Elise St. John, a young Black woman who is startled that she and her sisters have inherited the multimillion-dollar estate of star Kitty Karr Tate; then she learns that Kitty was actually her grandmother, passing for white (100,000-copy first printing). After the celebratedAriadne and Elektra, Saint brings us Atalanta, the story of a masterly huntress who was the only woman to sail with the Argonauts (125,000-copy first printing). A four-time winner of the American Library Association's William Boyd Young Award (for excellence in military fiction), New York Times best-selling author Shaara limns the life of Theodore Roosevelt in The Old Lion (100,000-copy first printing). Working at the Jeu de Paume during World War II after having fled Germany, Sophie executes a Paris Deception in Turnbull's latest; she rescues modernist paintings looted from Jewish families and set for destruction by smuggling them out of the museum and replacing them with forgeries created by her sister-in-law (75,000-copy paperback and 10,000-copy hardcover first printing). Famed novelist/historian Weir follows up her "Six Tudor Queens" series by reimagining Henry VIII in The King's Pleasure.
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April 1, 2023
Sophie Dix is an art restorer at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris--the job of her dreams, except for one thing: WWII is raging, and her museum is being used by a Nazi art commission called the ERR to store looted paintings, many previously owned by Jewish collectors. Sophie has an audacious plan for keeping as many paintings out of Nazi hands as possible, but she'll need the help of her estranged stepsister, Fabienne Brandt, a talent painter herself. The idea is for Fabienne to create forgeries of works coveted by the Germans and then hide the originals at her winemaker parents' crumbling chateau in the country, awaiting the end of the war. Sophie and Fabienne are particularly interested in saving what the Nazis call ""degenerated art""--pretty much anything modern--which is likely to be burned. Turnbull effectively combines fascinating background on winemaking and art restoration and forgery with plenty of wartime suspense and some appealing dollops of romance. This will be a page-turning delight for anyone who loves tale of women in the resistance, especially Kristin Hannah's The Nightingale (2015).
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