Book Radar: Nancy Pearl, J. P. Monninger, William Jensen, Tara Ison, S. M. Stirling and Sarah Weinman

Book Radar rounds up some of the latest publishing deals which have caught my eye, gathered from reports at Publishers Marketplace, Galley Cat, office water-coolers and other places where hands are shaken and promises are made. As with anything in the fickle publishing industry, dates and titles are subject to change.

From Publishers Lunch, news of the following book deals...

Librarian Nancy Pearl’s GEORGE AND LIZZIE, a married couple have radically different understandings of what love and marriage should be. He grew up in a warm and loving family in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his father an orthodontist, his mother a stay-at-home mom; while she grew up as the only child of two famous psychologists who related to her more as an in-house experiment, than a child to love; it extends from their first meeting to more than a decade into their unlikely marriage. (Touchstone, publication in June 2017)

J. P. Monninger’s THE MAP THAT LEADS TO YOU, in which a recent college graduate traveling around Europe with her two best friends meets and falls in love with an enigmatic Vermonter a few years older than she is, who is following his grandfather’s journal to various cities around Europe. (St. Martin’s, publication in Summer 2017)

William Jensen’s CITIES OF MEN, pitched as Richard Russo’s The Risk Pool, Tobias Wolf’s This Boy’s Life and Richard Ford’s Canada. It’s billed as a Bildungsroman wherein a mother goes missing without explanation and her son sets out to find her. Along the way, the boy experiments with alcohol, violence, and vandalism, and he begins to truly know his father, a Vietnam veteran struggling with PTSD. Together, father and son drive around the hills of Southwest America in hopes of finding the most important woman in their lives.

Author of Rockaway and Ball, Tara Ison’s AT THE HOUR BETWEEN DOG AND WOLF, a coming-of-age novel of identity and the devastating consequences of war and prejudice, about a Parisian-Jewish girl who must hide out with French Christian villagers during World War Two, pitched in the vein of Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See. (Counterpoint, for publication in Spring 2017)

S. M. Stirling’s THE BLACK CHAMBER TRILOGY, set in an alternate history where Teddy Roosevelt regains the Presidency in 1912, kicking off a 20th century of even greater technological and social change than in our real timeline. (Ace, for publication in 2017 and 2018)

Editor of the anthologies Women Crime Writers and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives Sarah Weinman’s AMONG THE WHOLESOME CHILDREN, on the abduction and tragic life of Sally Horner, the real-life inspiration for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. (Ecco)