Books Around the Bend
Featuring Keynote Closer, TJ Klune
Tuesday, October 1 12:45 - 2:00 pm Washington/Clark Room
Sponsored by Harper/Collins (Tickets required)
To celebrate ten authors with books to look forward to, due to publish in the later winter and spring.
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Tamara Berry | Murder Runs in the Family| Poisoned Pen Press
Murder Runs in the Family (Poisoned Pen Press/Sourcebooks, due 4/25), Edgar Award winner Tamara Berry’s newest book, is a light-hearted, soft-boiled, stand-alone mystery featuring an amateur sleuth and a retirement community brimming with busybody podcasters. After Amber Winslow’s life takes a turn for the worse, she heads for sunny Arizona and her grandmother’s retirement community. But she’s only just arrived when she finds out her beloved Grandma Jade is about to be arrested for murder. Amber, with the help of an army of retirees, has to find the real killer before it’s too late. Tamara Berry is the author of the By the Book Mystery series, and under the pen name Lucy Gilmore, The Lonely Hearts Book Club and The Library of Borrowed Hearts.
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Holly Brickley | Deep Cuts| Crown
Holly Brickley’s debut novel, Deep Cuts (Crown/PRH, due 2/25), is already earning lots of buzz, with rights selling at auction in the U.S. and abroad. Funny, insightful, timely, and with a great romance, Deep Cuts is the story of two people drawn together by music--the same force that will also pull them apart. Percy, who has no talent for music but plenty of opinions about it, and Joe, a budding songwriter, form an unlikely partnership that will span years, sometimes resulting in success, sometimes in hurt and resentment. Moving from Brooklyn bars to San Francisco dancefloors, Deep Cuts examines the nature of talent, obsession, belonging, and above all, our need to be heard. Originally from British Columbia, Holly Brickley now lives in Portland.
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Amanda DuBois | Unshackled | Flashpoint
Attorney Camille Delaney returns for a new case in Seattle writer Amanda DuBois’s Unshackled (Flashpoint Books, due 2/25), a case of a woman whose newborn child was taken from her while she was incarcerated for a crime she did not commit. Camille’s quest for the lost child and the man who framed her mother takes her from Seattle to the San Juan Islands to the mountains of Olympic National Park, all while bucking the system that routinely dismisses the rights of convicted mothers. Amanda DuBois, who practices law in Seattle, serves on several boards that support social justice and women’s issues, and is actively engaged in the Civil Survival Project, which teaches advocacy skills to previously incarcerated individuals. Unshackled is her third Camille Delaney mystery.
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TJ Klune | Bones Beneath My Skin | Tor Books
Bestselling author TJ Klune returns with another truly original story in The Bones Beneath My Skin (Tor Books/Macmillan, due 2/25), a supernatural road-trip thriller featuring an extraordinary young girl and her two unlikely protectors on the run from both cultists and the government. With nothing left to lose, Nate Cartwright returns to his family's summer cabin in the Oregon woods to try and find some sense of direction. The cabin should be empty. It's not. Inside is a man named Alex and a young girl who is not exactly as she appears. And there are forces coming who seek to control her. TJ Klune is the Lambda Literary Award-winning author of The House in the Cerulean Sea, Under the Whispering Door, In the Lives of Puppets, and more.
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Thomas Kohnstamm | Supersonic | Counterpoint Press
Thomas Kohnstamm’s new novel, Supersonic (Counterpoint/PRH, due 2/25), paints a vivid portrait of the city of Seattle, its booms and busts, its cultural clashes and bigger than life personalities by tracing generations of interrelated families who built the place we know today. Through a kaleidoscope of characters, Supersonic illuminates themes and patterns of identity, displacement, destruction, and reinvention that gave rise to not just Seattle, but to most great American cities. Thomas Kohnstamm, born and raised in Seattle, still lives in the house where he grew up--now with his wife and family. A professional freelance writer, he is also the author of the novel Lake City and the memoir Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?
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Caroline Kurtz | Hope for the Wrong Things | Catalyst Press
In Hope for the Wrong Thing (Catalyst Press/Consortium, due 6/25), Portland writer Caroline Kurtz relates her solo hiking trip down the rugged Oregon coast; an expedition of isolation, adventure, joy, and grief inside an emotional wilderness following the death of her husband. Intertwined with her adventures along the trail are memories of her past and reflections on her spiritual life. Caroline Kurtz is the author of two previous memoirs, A Road Called Down on Both Sides, chronicling her experiences growing up in Ethiopia, and Today is Tomorrow, about her return to Africa to work with South Sudanese refugees. She is the Executive Director of The Develop Maji Coalition which brings solar energy and women’s development to the corner of Ethiopia where she grew up.
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Buddy Levy | Realm of Ice and Sky | St. Martin's Press
Realm of Ice and Sky (St. Martin’s Press/Macmillan, due 1/25) by award-winning Idaho writer Buddy Levy is a thrilling narrative of polar exploration via airship—and the men who sacrificed everything to make history. Arctic explorer and American visionary Walter Wellman pioneered both polar and trans-Atlantic airship aviation, making history’s first attempts at each. Wellman has been cast as a self-promoting egomaniac known mostly for his failures. Instead, he was a courageous innovator who pushed the boundaries of polar exploration and paved the way for the ultimate conquest of the North Pole by airship. Buddy Levy is the author of more than ten books, including Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition and Empire of Ice and Stone: The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk.
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David Shannon | That's Not Funny, David! | Scholastic
Everyone’s favorite David (well, everyone’s two favorite Davids) is back in David Shannon’s new picture book That’s Not Funny, David! (Orchard Books/Scholastic, due 3/25). Picture book David is determined to get laughs out of everyone--even from those who might not find his antics all that amusing. From cannonballs into the pool to slurping his spaghetti to telling funny jokes during class, David is a natural comedian. But even David realizes that some of his jokes are just not that funny--like sticking things up his nose. David Shannon is the beloved creator of more than 40 picture books, including five previous David books, the first of which, No, David! was a Caldecott Honor Book and has remained a perennial bestseller for nearly 25 years.
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Matthew Sullivan | Midnight by Soap Lake | HQN / Hanover Square Press
Mystery, history, a sense of menace, and quirky characters abound in Mathew Sullivan’s new novel, Midnight in Soap Lake (Hanover Square Press/HarperCollins, due 4/25). When newcomer to Soap Lake Abigail meets a young boy and becomes entwined in questions surrounding his mother’s death, her search for answers leads her to a cast of town characters worthy of Twin Peaks or Stephen King’s Castle Rock. Matthew Sullivan is the author of the beloved Indie Next Pick and indie bookstore bestseller Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Spokesman-Review, Sou’wester, and elsewhere, and his stories have been awarded the Florida Review Editor’s Prize and the Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize. A one-time bookseller, he now lives in Anacortes.
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Karen Thompson Walker | The Strange Case of Jane O. | Random House
Karen Thompson Walker’s spellbinding new novel, The Strange Case of Jane O. (Random House/PRH, due 2/25), is a speculative mystery about memory, identity, and fate; a mesmerizing story about the bonds of love between a mother and child, a man and a woman, and those who we’ve lost but may still be alive among us. The strange episodes a new mother is experiencing--premonitions, hallucinations, amnesia, and dread--are disturbing enough. But then she goes missing, only to turn up a day later with no memory of what has happened to her. Karen Thompson Walker is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Age of Miracles. Thompson Walker, an associate professor of creative writing lives in Portland with her husband, the novelist, Casey Walker.
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