The 3 Hottest Books for the Coldest Winter Days...

Welcome to The Sunday Salon and The Sunday Post! It is damn cold here in Connecticut! Right now as I write this it's 7 degrees. Tonight it's predicted to get to 20 below zero! It started this past Thursday when it started to snow furiously all day, the wind whipping it all about in tall and beautiful snowdrifts. The temperatures then started to drop. I don't ever remember it being this cold and the only thing I want to do is stay snuggled up inside the house. BUT, I do have some books to keep me company until the spring thaw...

My First Book of The Year for 2018 is Still Me by Jojo Moyes, and I am enjoying it so much! I have 60 pages to go and I'm trying to slow down because I don't want it to end! But I know it will and I'll have to find other pages to read. And I do have some great reads in my eReader (come by tomorrow and I'll share them with you!). But today let me share with you some books coming out next week that are lighting the publishing world on fire (and don't we need a little fire with all this cold!)...

The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani... She has the keys to their apartment. She knows everything. She has embedded herself so deeply in their lives that it now seems impossible to remove her.

When Myriam, a French-Moroccan lawyer, decides to return to work after having children, she and her husband look for the perfect nanny for their two young children. They never dreamed they would find Louise: a quiet, polite, devoted woman who sings to the children, cleans the family’s chic apartment in Paris’s upscale tenth arrondissement, stays late without complaint, and hosts enviable kiddie parties. But as the couple and the nanny become more dependent on one another, jealousy, resentment, and suspicions mount, shattering the idyllic tableau. Building tension with every page, The Perfect Nanny is a compulsive, riveting, bravely observed exploration of power, class, race, domesticity, and motherhood—and the American debut of an immensely talented writer.

This is the first "Hot" book of 2018! This book won The Prix Goncourt (The Goncourt Prize) in 2016, which is a prize in French literature given by the académie Goncourt to the author of "the best and most imaginative prose work of the year". Originally published in France as Chanson Douce, or "lullaby" (Sweet Song),  It has sold over 600,000 copies since then. Available Jan. 9th and published by Penguin. On my TBR list!

The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn... 
Anna Fox lives alone—a recluse in her New York City home, unable to venture outside. She spends her day drinking wine (maybe too much), watching old movies, recalling happier times . . . and spying on her neighbors.

Then the Russells move into the house across the way: a father, a mother, their teenage son. The perfect family. But when Anna, gazing out her window one night, sees something she shouldn’t, her world begins to crumble—and its shocking secrets are laid bare.

Lots of buzz about this book. Even movie rights have been sold for it. It's suppose to be a taunt psychological thriller and I'm so hoping that it lives up to all the hype! Lots of positive reviews pre-publication! Coming out on January 2nd and published by Harper Collins! P.S. A.J. Finn is not the authors real name... On my TBR list!


The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen... 
When you read this book, you will make many assumptions.
You will assume you are reading about a jealous ex-wife.
You will assume she is obsessed with her replacement – a beautiful, younger woman who is about to marry the man they both love. 
You will assume you know the anatomy of this tangled love triangle.
Assume nothing.

Twisted and deliciously chilling, Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen's The Wife Between Us exposes the secret complexities of an enviable marriage - and the dangerous truths we ignore in the name of love.

Another twist and turn book that's gotten quite a bit of buzz. It's made the Indie Next List this month, as did all of these book I'm talking about today, and it has gotten a lot of great pre-publishing reviews. Coming out January 9th and published by St. Martin's Press. Definitely on my TBR list!

And one more honorable mention in the hot books of the month club... 

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin... 
If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life?

It's 1969 in New York City's Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die. The Gold children—four adolescents on the cusp of self-awareness—sneak out to hear their fortunes.

The prophecies inform their next five decades. Golden-boy Simon escapes to the West Coast, searching for love in '80s San Francisco; dreamy Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy; eldest son Daniel seeks security as an army doctor post-9/11; and bookish Varya throws herself into longevity research, where she tests the boundary between science and immortality.

This is the #1 Indie Next choice for January, but I've seen a mixed bag of pre-publication reviews. Not so much of a thriller as literary fiction, I don't think this is going to get your heart beating fast and your palm sweating, but sounds like an interesting read. I'm reserving my judgement for this one, but it is on my TBR list. Coming out on January 9th and published by Putnam.

Week in Review...

*Sunday was New Years Eve and my reveal for my First Book Of The Year... Still Me by Jojo Moyes!

*First Lines Friday revealed the beginning of Chalk Man by C.J. Tudor!

*Sadly on Dec. 28th, 2017 the reading world had to bid farewell to Sue Grafton, who passed away at the age of 77 from cancer. The Guardian.com posted her obituary January 3rd. Unfortunately for fans of Grafton's alphabet series, the alphabet will be ending with Y.

How Are You Keeping Warm on These Cold Winter Days?

That about does it for this week. Next week we'll have some more great books coming out. And tomorrow I reveal 3 great eGalley's I just received from publishers for some great books coming out in the near future! Stop back and see what they are! 

Happy reading... Suzanne

The Sunday Salon and Books with Buzz

Welcome to The Sunday Salon! It's the time of the week we talk about all things bookish. So, grab a cup of Java, pull up a chair and relax!

It's been a crazy week as I try to plan for our vacation- a road trip down South that will end up in Savannah, Ga! I have always wanted to visit Savannah ever since reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt, who described it as a "hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks", and whose book was absolutely wonderful. Because of our "road trip', I was thinking of making this Sunday Salon all about "road trip" books - friends hopping in a car and heading out to parts unknown, or books about travel. But then as I started to try and figure out what books I'm going to bring with me ( and we always bring something to read, don't we?!) I thought "let's just talk about some great books that have poked their spines up for me to find in my week of travels." So no themes this week, just books that sound great and are going in my wish list...

The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells by Andrew Sean Greer...

“They say there are many worlds,” she explains. “All around our own, packed tight as the cells of your heart. Each with its own logic, its own physics, moons, and stars. … And in those other worlds, the places you love are there, the people you love are there. . . . So what if you found the door? And what if you had the key? Because everyone knows this: That the impossible happens once to each of us.”   

From the publisher... 1985. After the death of her beloved twin brother, Felix, and the break up with her long-time lover, Nathan, Greta Wells embarks on a radical psychiatric treatment to alleviate her suffocating depression. But the treatment has unexpected effects, and Greta finds herself transported to the lives she might have had if she'd been born in a different era.

Have you ever thought to yourself, "what if I was born 100 years ago, what would my life be?"What if I could go back just a little bit and meet my true love in a different era?" I LOVE time travel novels! I loved The Time Travelers Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. It's always fascinating to see the "what if's". The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells has gotten a lot of great reviews, "Magically atmospheric, achingly romantic", and it looks to have the potential to sweep you off your feet in that romantic time travel kind of way. In the book, Greta is transported back in time, but with her same family and surrounding people. She's aware of the shift, but can she really enjoy herself? Just published this week by Ecco, an imprint of Harper Collins, The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells is available right now from your local bookstore (and it's on my wish list!)!

The Thinking Woman's Guide to Readl Magic by Emily Croy Barker... Nora Fischer’s dissertation is stalled and her boyfriend is about to marry another woman.  During a miserable weekend at a friend’s wedding, Nora wanders off and walks through a portal into a different world where she’s transformed from a drab grad student into a stunning beauty.  Before long, she has a set of glamorous new friends and her romance with gorgeous, masterful Raclin is heating up. It’s almost too good to be true.

Then the elegant veneer shatters. Nora’s new fantasy world turns darker, a fairy tale gone incredibly wrong. Making it here will take skills Nora never learned in graduate school.

This book sounds like a fun romp! I like the elements of magic and the fairy tale gone wrong scenario. I also would like to see how the author merges the modern day with the fantasy world. This is coming to your local bookstore August 1st and is published by Penguin.

 We are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler... Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and our narrator, Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. “I spent the first eighteen years of my life defined by this one fact: that I was raised with a chimpanzee,” she tells us. “It’s never going to be the first thing I share with someone. I tell you Fern was a chimp and already you aren’t thinking of her as my sister. But until Fern’s expulsion, I’d scarcely known a moment alone. She was my twin, my funhouse mirror, my whirlwind other half, and I loved her as a sister.”

Just reading the description tugged at my heart. Don't you just want to know what happened to Fern?! Reading just a small sample of this book, the story slowly draws you in and I enjoyed the writing. Of course Karen Joy Fowler is the author of the wildly popular The Jane Austen Book Club, which swept through book clubs and put Jane Austen on the map with new readers.

What do you think of the title? I passed this by the first time I saw the title, because I thought it was a bit wordy and it didn't really compel me to open the book. I think that would be a great post one of these days - good books, not so good titles. Of course, I'm sure the title has to do with the loss of Fern, but on first sight... Anyway, We are Completely Besides Ourselves is available from your local bookstore and is published by Marian Wood Books/Putnam a division of Penguin.

So, now I'm going to stop looking at the books I am putting on my wish list and am going to start packing away the books I'm taking. I'm also packing away my Nook HD, which has a lot of books already loaded in my TBR pile. We'll have to talk about eReaders again too. It's been a while and there are even more choices including the advent of Tablets, which were not part of the discussion last time we talked digital reading. For Christmas, my hubby gave me a Nook HD, which I was pining for. I debated a long time on the Kindle Fire and the Nook HD. Finally deciding on the Nook HD because of it's size (it's definitely lighter and way thinner) and resolution. Although with Barnes & Noble hooking up with Google, there is an App that allows me to read my zillions of Kindle books now too! Best of both worlds... BUT if you are thinking of getting the Kindle Fire HD, it is on SALE on Amazon for $169 with adds for "a limited time'!

Now that I've shared what new books I found, what are you reading? What are you waiting for to be released?! I'd love to hear all about it! You can share it right here in your comment!!!

Have a great week... Suzanne

The Sunday Salon or How to Survive the Apocalypse...

Welcome to The Sunday Salon! What is The Sunday Salon? Imagine some university library's vast reading room. It's filled with people--students and faculty and strangers who've wandered in. They're seated at great oaken desks, books piled all around them, and they're all feverishly reading and jotting notes in their leather-bound journals as they go. Later they'll mill around the open dictionaries and compare their thoughts on the afternoon's literary intake...

Do you ever get up and gingerly make your way to the coffee maker? Eyes half closed, hair messed, legs a little stiff?... I'm not sure if I also have those dark circles under my eyes (big no no to look in the mirror so early!), but if I stay up a little too late, sometimes I kinda feel like a ZOMBIE in the morning! And these days as a reader, I'm in good company because Zombies and the Apocalypse are all the rage! 

My love of dystopian fiction should meld well with Zombies, but I have to confess, I haven't read too much Zombie fiction. Although what I have read I have enjoyed. I think it was right after the Vampire craze started that I read The Reapers are The Angels by Alden Bell, which I loved. Good versus evil, a great strong female protagonist, and even a sprinkling of Zombie humor. 

So, what's a girl to do? I can solve my Zombie problem with a little coffee. How do other people deal with zombies? I thought maybe I'd check out the literary side of Zombies today in The Sunday Salon... 

World War Z by Max Brooks... The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.

This a little different from a "normal" story with a plot, this is written as an oral history and thus the book is set up with interview questions from Max, who is making a record of the War, and the answers from the interviewee. Before the interview, and there are plenty, is the background of what the person is going to be talking about, so you can get a feel for what was happening and where, and this in turn is creating the story from just before the outbreak to the end. Just glancing at the preview of this book made me want to read more. I think it is such a great concept to write the story this way. Some may think that the way the book was written could have been a cop out, something a lesser writer may have done to cover up his poor writing, but from what I have sampled, this definitely is NOT the case! The story was pulling me in and I had only read the beginning. Max Brooks writing is gripping. I look forward to cracking the spine on this one. 

BTW, little did Max Brooks know in 2006, when he published World War Z, that it would become a major motion picture. There was actually a bidding war between Leonard DiCaprio's production company and Brad Pitt's. (Brad Pitt's won). Am I going to see the movie version? Possibly. I like to read the book first because there are no spoilers that way. Of course some movies change the endings, add characters, change characters... But that's another post altogether! Do you like reading the book for or doesn't matter to you?

Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion... R is a young man with an existential crisis--he is a zombie. He shuffles through an America destroyed by war, social collapse, and the mindless hunger of his undead comrades, but he craves something more than blood and brains. He can speak just a few grunted syllables, but his inner life is deep, full of wonder and longing. He has no memories, noidentity, and no pulse, but he has dreams. After experiencing a teenage boy's memories while consuming his brain, R makes an unexpected choice that begins a tense, awkward, and stragely sweet relationship with the victim's human girlfriend. Julie is a blast of color in the otherwise dreary and gray landscape that surrounds R. His decision to protect her will transform not only R, but his fellow Dead, and perhaps their whole lifeless world.

Warm Bodies proves that not all Zombies are bad! This sounds funny, heartbreaking, and touching. A doomed romance that you just may be rooting for anyway.  Just the first lines of the book made me feel empathy for "R", our Zombie with a heart (not a blood pumping one of course)...

"I AM DEAD, but it’s not so bad. I’ve learned to live with it. I’m sorry I can’t properly introduce myself, but I don’t have a name anymore. Hardly any of us do. We lose them like car keys, forget them like anniversaries. Mine might have started with an “R”, but that’s all I have now. It’s funny because back when I was alive, I was always forgetting other people’s names. My friend “M” says the irony of being a zombie is that everything is funny, but you can’t smile, because your lips have rotted off."

Warm Bodies has gotten a lot of great reviews! (It's also coming out on the big screen). This is currently in my eReader, so you can expect a review coming. I'm crossing my fingers that it's going to be as good as my first impressions have me believe. Part of those first impressions were Isaac Marion's writing, which I found refreshing. This past year, Isaac also published the prequel to Warm Bodies called The New Hunger. Seems that this is a short novella and only available digitally. I'll be trying Warm Bodies first though.

The 5th Wave by Rich Yancey... After the 1st wave, only darkness remains. After the 2nd, only the lucky escape. And after the 3rd, only the unlucky survive. After the 4th wave, only one rule applies: trust no one. Now, it's the dawn of the 5th wave, and on a lonely stretch of highway, Cassie runs from Them. The beings who only look human, who roam the countryside killing anyone they see. Who have scattered Earth's last survivors. To stay alone is to stay alive, Cassie believes, until she meets Evan Walker. Beguiling and mysterious, Evan Walker may be Cassie's only hope for rescuing her brother--or even saving herself. But Cassie must choose: between trust and despair, between defiance and surrender, between life and death. To give up or to get up.

This book has gotten so much hype prior to its publication and is making the rounds with lots of great reviews. It's a YA novel that's been called a cross between The Passage and Ender's Game. It's aliens and Zombies and looks to be the start of a great series! This has dystopian written all over it, and some of the words used to describe it are exhilarating, gripping, and breathtaking. This is on my nightstand waiting for its turn and I just hope that it's all that it's said to be. 


 As I was researching "Zombie Fiction", I came across another series called The Zombie Chronicles (Apocalypse Infection Unleashed Series) by Chrissy Peebles. Here's the description from Amazon... Val was bitten by a zombie and now she’s scheduled for lethal injection. Breaking all the rules, eighteen year old, Dean Walters snags an experimental serum. But it can’t be tested until Val turns into a zombie: something authorities won’t allow. Her execution is scheduled to happen before transformation is complete, giving Dean only hours to break her out. When their helicopter crashes straight into the heart of Zombie Land, his rescue mission becomes a fight for survival…and giving up on Val is NOT an option.

I read the first few sample pages and thought the writing was good. AND you can download this for Kindle for FREE right now! So what do you have to lose?! It's always nice when the author releases the first book in a series for free. I think it's a win win situation for both the author and the reader. I get to discover a new author and see if I enjoy her writing, and the author possibly gets a new reader who'll be buying more of his/her books.  Looks like there are 5 books in the series right now, and the books seems to have gotten really good reviews. 

P.S. If you would like to try a great zombie graphic novel series, The Waking Dead by Robert Kirkman is a great choice. A great story and wonderful graphics. I love a good graphic novel, but I need one that has great artwork and this fits the bill. You may be familiar with the television series which is based on these books. The Walking Dead, Book 1 encompasses the first 12 issues of the series and would be a great place to start. 

So, are you going to try a bit of Zombie fiction? Have you read any that you'd like to share? And what do you think of all these books to movies? Good thing or bad?

Thanks for stopping by! I love to hear what you're reading (Zombie or no zombie!), so share what you're reading week has been like!

Happy reading... Suzanne

P.S. Tomorrow is Monday, and I have a great Memoir monday ready to post! It's out of this world... 

Do you Prey?...

The first machines on the site were the wreckers, like steel dinosaurs, plucking and pulling at the houses with jaws that ripped off chimneys, shingles, dormers, and eaves, clapboard and brick and stone and masonry, beams and stairs and balconies and joists, headers and doorjambs. Old dreams, dead ambitions, and lost lives, remembrance roses and spring lilacs, went in the dump trucks all together.

Buries Prey by John Sandford (release date: May 10th, 2011!)

Exciting news for John Sandford Fans with the release of the 21st mystery in the PREY series! Last May, I traveled back in time to 1992 and reviewed Silent Prey as part of the Days of Prey Tour, in which 21 Bloggers each reviewed one of the 20 books in the PREY series. Courtesy of G.P. Putmam Sons I am getting a sneak peak at the new book! Don't worry, I won't make you wait until May to hear all about it! I'll be cracking the spine on this very soon and reviewing it! But just from glancing through it, I think it's going to be nothing less that terrific! Do you Prey? What's your favorite Prey book?