Book Radar: Eleanor Catton, Richard Flanagan, Salman Rushdie, Rebecca Schaeffer, Maurice Isserman, Lee Child

Booker-winning author of The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton’s third novel, BIRNAM WOOD, sold to Farrar, Straus and Giroux. A psychological thriller, Birnam Wood is set in rural New Zealand where super-rich foreigners have stored caches of weapons in fortress-like homes in preparation for disaster. The novel follows the guerrilla gardening outfit Birnam Wood, a group of quarreling leftists who move about the country cultivating other people’s land. Their chance encounter with an American billionaire sparks a tragic sequence of events which questions, ultimately, how far each of us would go to ensure our own survival–and at what cost.

Winner of the Booker Prize in 2014 for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan’s next novel, FIRST PERSON, about the producer of a TV reality show who recalls his years as a young, struggling writer and his decision to serve as the ghost writer for a notorious con man–and how he and grew increasingly uncertain if he was helping the con man write his memoir, or if the tables had turned and he was instead re-writing his own life–to Knopf for publication in April 2018.

Salman Rushdie’s THE GOLDEN HOUSE, a modern-day bildungsroman set against the panorama of American culture and politics since the inauguration of Barack Obama, it presents a host of memorable characters, including a young American film-maker whose involvement with a secretive, tragedy-haunted family teaches him how to become a man, weaving together a story of life over the last eight years: the rise of the Tea Party, Gamergate and identity politics; the backlash against political correctness; and the insurgence of a ruthlessly ambitious, narcissistic, media-savvy villain sporting make-up and colored hair, to Random House for publication in September 2017.

Rebecca Schaeffer’s debut NOT EVEN BONES, featuring a teenage girl who dissects monsters, packaging their parts for sale on the black market, but when her mother brings home a live specimen, she follows her conscience and helps him escape—and ends up sold on the black market in his place, pitched as Dexter meets This Savage Song, to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children’s for publication in Fall 2018.

Author of Continental Divide and winner of the National Outdoor Book Award for history Maurice Isserman’s CLIMB TO GLORY, the definitive WWII history of the 10th Mountain Division, the force of elite mountain and ski troops who led the Allied advance through northern Italy, and whose members (including Ivy leaguers, two Von Trapp children, future presidential contender Bob Dole, and the eventual founders of Aspen and Vail) would go on to reshape both America’s environmental movement and help launch its favorite winter pastime, to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

NYT bestselling author Lee Child’s NO MIDDLE NAME: The Complete Jack Reacher Short Stories, a volume of all Lee Child’s short fiction featuring Jack Reacher; a new novella, TOO MUCH TIME, along with SECOND SON, DEEP DOWN, HIGH HEAT, NOT A DRILL and SMALL WARS, five Reacher novellas which were first published in eBook-only form, and all the other Reacher short stories that Child has written, to Ballantine Bantam Dell for publication on May 30, 2017.

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.