Friday Freebie: Triburbia by Karl Taro Greenfeld and The Bird Saviors by William J. Cobb

Congratulations to Michele Cofield, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter.

This week's book giveaway is another excellent two-fer deal with novels generously provided by publishers HarperCollins and Unbridled Books.  Up for grabs: Triburbia by Karl Taro Greenfeld and The Bird Saviors by William J. Cobb.

“Striking chords that range from haunting and heartbreaking to darkly funny and deeply poignant,” Greenfeld's novel is about a neighborhood in transition and a group of male friends who form unlikely friendships.  Here's how the publisher describes the plot of Triburbia:

Thrown together by circumstance, a group of fathers—a sound engineer, a sculptor, a film producer, a chef, a memoirist, a gangster—meets each morning at a local Tribeca coffee shop after walking their children to their exclusive school. The sound engineer looks uncomfortably like the guy on the sex offender posters strewn around the neighborhood; the memoirist is on the verge of being outed for fabricating his experiences; and the narcissistic chef puts his quest for the perfect quail-egg frittata before his children's well-being. Over the course of a single school year, we are privy to their secrets, passions, and hopes, and learn of their dreams deferred as they confront harsh realities about ambition, wealth, and sex. And we meet their wives and children, who together with these men are discovering the hard truths and welcome surprises that accompany family, marriage, and real estate at midlife.

Blurbaliciousness: “Triburbia is darkly humorous, occasionally lascivious, unsparing in its condemnations of the main characters and intrepid in its honest descriptions of the human conscience.... But it’s not a sad book.  It’s a candid one.  And a good one.  It is reassuring, cathartic even.”  (Downtown Magazine )

Cobb's novel is “a visionary story of defiance, anger, and compassion” which is set in “a time of economic turmoil, virus fears, climate change, fundamentalist cults and illegal immigrant hardship.”  Here's the publisher's jacket copy for The Bird Saviors to whet your appetite:

When a dust storm engulfs her Colorado town and pink snow blankets the streets, a heartbreaking decision faces Ruby Cole, a girl who counts birds. She must either abandon her baby or give in to her father, whom she nicknames Lord God, and marry a man more than twice her age who already has two wives. She chooses to run, which sets in motion an interlocking series of actions and reactions, upending the lives of an equestrian police officer, pawnshop riffraff, a disabled war vet, Nuisance Animal destroyers, and a grieving ornithologist who is studying the decline of bird populations.  All the while, a growing criminal enterprise moves from cattle rustling to kidnapping to hijacking fuel tankers and murder as events spin out of control in a world in which the social fabric and economic structures seem on the verge of falling apart.

Kent Haruf, author of Plainsong, had this to say about the book: “Bill Cobb's The Bird Saviors is a stark modern-day Old Testament story in which the evil that men do is barely balanced by the good that a few manage to achieve.  It's a gritty harrowing story set in a dust-blown Colorado town that seems filled with vivid characters.  Cobb's expert story-telling compels us forward scene by scene to a final satisfying redemption.”

If you'd like a chance at winning beautiful hardback copies of both Triburbia and The Bird Saviors, all you have to do is email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Aug. 23—at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on Aug. 24.  If you'd like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week Quivering Pen newsletter, simply add the words "Sign me up for the newsletter" in the body of your email.  Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning?  Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter.  Once you've done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying "I've shared" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.