Books in the Wild: Recent releases

I’ve been in a lot of bookshops recently, so this Saturday I’ve got a quick round up of some of the new releases that I’ve spotted in the shops.

I’m starting with the new book from Maria Semple, because it’s been a long, long time since her last book came out and I’d almost forgotten about her. Which is a terrible thing to say, but it’s a decade since Today Will Be Different and 14 years since Where’d You Go Bernadette, so I don’t think that’s unfair. Accordig to the blurb, Go Gentle is about a midlife transformation of a divorcée complete with romance and globe trotting. I have a mixed record with Semple – I loved …Bernadette, hated This One is Mine and quite liked Today Will Be Different, so I’m sure I’ll read this at some point even if just to see if my assessment back in 2016 of when I like Semple’s books is right or not!

There’s another author back from a long hiatus in this shot of the bestsellers (in Waterstones Gower Street) too. Kathryn Stockett’s The Help was a huge hit when it came out in 2009 – it won a bunch of awards and was turned into a hit movie starring Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis (among many) in 2011. But it was also polarising and Stockett faced criticism for writing the story of black maids through the eyes of a white woman and the controversy over it has only increased over time. In fact in the run up to the publication of The Calamity Club, Stockett told The New York Times that her publishers cancelled her contract in 2020. So after such a big gap and so much controversy The Calamity Club – which is more than 600 pages long and once again set in Mississippi but this time in the 1930s – has had a relatively low key release. I’m fascinated to see how it does. Apart from that, you can also see the new Matt Haig, The Midnight Train, which is set in the same world as his mega hit The Midnight Library, the new Elizabeth Strout and also that Murder at Worlds End is now out in paperback.

On to some murder mysteries in hardback (some of which came out la little longer ago) and we’ve got the Sophie Hannah Poirot continuation that came out in the autumn, the latest Judy Murray cozy crime, and the Jennie Godfrey that I’ve seen everywhere. The House of Fallen Sisters was one I hadn’t come across before – set in Covent Garden and the underbelly of 18th century London and I’ve now seen various of Andrey Kurkov’s Kyiv Mysteries around so much that I think it might be a message for me to try one! Amin Ahmad’s A Killer in the Family sounds interesting – the blurb calls it “A caper, social satire, and propulsive thriller rolled into one” the first two of which are totally my thing – but as we know thrillers can go either way for me! And strangely this also has Elizabeth and Marilyn about the meeting between Elizabeth II and Marilyn Monroe in the summer of 1956 and which I didn’t have down as being a mystery but am even more interested in now that I’ve seen it in this selection!

I mentioned Emma Straub’s American Fantasy when it was released the other week, so it seems only fair to mention that I was right that I would spot it in the shops a lot (this wasn’t the only time I could have taken a picture of it in a store) and also that it’s blurbed by Taylor Jenkins Reid.

Also in the now out in paperback is Andrew Lownie‘s Entitled – which as you can see from the cover has had more material added since the hardback edition. This makes me wonder whether if I had bought it on Kindle I would have got the new material added automatically, or whether I would have had to buy it again. As it is, I bought a physical copy at the airport (partly to escape any redactions that might later happen!) and so now I have to figure out how much I want to read Lownie’s take on everything that has happened to Andrew Mountbatten Windsor since Entitled first came out last summer when he was still known as Prince Andrew.

And finally for today we have Katja Hoyer’s Weimar, which is one of the anticipated history books of the year – examining the town that gave its name to the government of Germany from the end of World War one until the Nazi regime took power. It was also a key location in the rise of the Nazi party as well as the home of the Bauhaus movement. Hoyer is looking at the town and it’s people from 1919 until 1939 charting how it all happened. I’ve got a stack of books about German twentieth century history waiting on the various to-read piles but I’m still really tempted by this – as depressing as I suspect it may be.

And sorry to end on that miserable note, but there we are, that’s the way it goes sometimes. Enjoy your weekend everyone – I hope the weather is good where you are.