Release Week: 11 October 2022
← Release Week: 4 October 2022Release Week: 18 October 2022 →
Release Week: 11 October 2022
Posted on 2022-10-11 at 12:00 by Samuel Montgomery-Blinn
PICKS:
Dinosaurs By: Lydia Millet, read by Paul Heitsch for Dreamscape -- "The story of an Arizona man’s relationship with the family next door, whose house has one wall made entirely out of glass. The story delivers attraction and love, friendship and grief. But Millet also evokes the uncanny. Through close observation of human and animal life in the desert, she captures the daunting scale of human society without losing sight of the real difference one person can make in the world."
Will Do Magic for Small Change By: Andrea Hairston, read by Tamika Katon-Donegal, Andre Santana for Recorded Books -- "Cinnamon Jones dreams of stepping on stage and acting her heart out like her famous grandparents, Redwood and Wildfire. But she’s always been theatrically challenged. That won’t necessarily stop her! But her family life is a tangle of mysteries and secrets, and nobody is telling her the whole truth. Before her brother died, he gave Cinnamon The Chronicles of the Great Wanderer—a tale of a Dahomean warrior woman and an alien from another dimension who perform at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. They are a story of magic or alien science, but the connection to Cinnamon's past is unmistakable. When an act of violence wounds her family, Cinnamon and her theatre squad determine to solve the mysteries and bring her worlds crashing together."
Illuminations: Stories By: Alan Moore, read by Laura Haddock, Rory Kinnear, Emilia Fox, Nina Sosanya, Samuel Barnett, Sian Clifford, Toby Jones, Matt Reeves, Clarke Peters, and the author for Bloomsbury -- "In his first-ever short story collection, which spans forty years of work, Alan Moore presents a series of wildly different and equally unforgettable characters who discover—and in some cases even make and unmake—the various uncharted parts of existence."
The Spare Man By: Mary Robinette Kowal, read by the author for Audible -- "Tesla Crane, one of the richest women in the world, is on her honeymoon on an interplanetary space liner, cruising between Earth and Mars. She’s traveling incognito and is reveling in her anonymity. Then someone is murdered and her husband is named as the prime suspect. To save him from the frame-up, Tesla will risk exposure and face demons from her past. Even though doing so might make her the next victim."
Random By: Penn Jillette, read by the author for Blackstone -- "Two weeks before his twenty-first birthday, Las Vegas native Bobby Ingersoll finds out he’s inherited a crushing gambling debt from his scumbag father. The debt is owed to an even scummier bag named Fraser Ruphart who oversees his bottom-rung criminal empire from the classy-adjacent Trump International Hotel. Bobby’s prospects of paying off the note, which comes due the day he turns twenty-one, are about as dim as the sign on the tower’s façade."
Beasts of the Earth: A Novel By: James Wade, read by Roger Clark for Blackstone -- "A chilling parable about the impossible demands of hate and love, trauma and goodness, vividly set in the landscapes of Texas and Louisiana."
Obsidian By: Sarah J. Daley, read by Tegan Ashton Cohan for Tantor -- "Shade Nox is the only witch in a land of wizards—a fiend, a rogue, a wanted criminal. Defying those who think her an abomination, Shade wears her tattoos openly and carries obsidian blades at her hips. For years, she has protected the outcast clans who wander the blighted Wastes, but the land is growing more unstable and her blades are no longer enough."
The Blue Book of Nebo By: Manon Steffan Ros, read by the author for Blackstone -- "Prize-winner in three categories of the 2019 Wales Book of the Year Award, The Blue Book of Nebo paints a spellbinding and eerie picture of society’s collapse, and the relationships that persist after everything as we know it disappears. After nuclear disaster, Rowenna and her young son are among the rare survivors in rural north-west Wales. Left alone in their isolated hillside cottage, after others have died or abandoned the towns and villages, they must learn new skills in order to remain alive. With no electricity or modern technology they must return to the old ways of living off the land, developing new personal resources."
Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn edited by Claire L. Evans and Brian Merchant, read by a full cast for Blackstone -- "Section by section—Watch/Worlds/Burn—the book takes on surveillance, artificial intelligence, and climate collapse. With a potent roster of established names and rising talents—from Bruce Sterling, Ellen Ullman, Cory Doctorow, Jeff VanderMeer, and Omar El Akkad, to E. Lily Yu, Elvia Wilk, Fernando Flores, Tochi Onyebuchi, and Gus Moreno—it confronts the issues that orbit our everyday existence, and takes them to unsettling dimensions."
Daughters of the New Year: A Novel By: E.M. Tran, read by Lulu Lam for Harlequin -- "Combining the powerful scope of Homegoing with the mystical touch of The Immortalists, Daughters of the New Year is a captivating debut novel about five generations of Vietnamese mothers and daughters, drawing on Vietnamese zodiac astrology to chart the fateful events of their lives."
Short: Marigold and Rose: A Fiction By: Louise Glück, read by the author for Macmillan -- "A magical and incandescent fiction from the Nobel laureate. [An] astonishing chronicle of the first year in the life of twin girls. Imagine a fairy tale that is also a multigenerational saga; a piece for two hands that is also a symphony; a poem that is also, in the spirit of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, an incandescent act of autobiography. Here are the elements you’d expect to find in a story of infant twins—Father and Mother; Grandmother and Other Grandmother; bath time and naptime—but more than that, Marigold and Rose is an investigation of the great mystery of language and of time itself, of what is and what has been and what will be."
BACKLIST WATCH:
Little Eve By: Catriona Ward (2018), read by Carolyn Bonnyman for Macmillan -- "Winner of the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel. On the wind-battered isle of Altnaharra, off the wildest coast of Scotland, a clan prepares to bring about the end of the world and its imminent rebirth. The Adder is coming and one of their number will inherit its powers. They all want the honor, but young Eve is willing to do anything for the distinction. A reckoning beyond Eve’s imagination begins when Chief Inspector Black arrives to investigate a brutal murder and their sacred ceremony goes terribly wrong. And soon all the secrets of Altnaharra will be uncovered."
The Uninhabited House By: Mrs. J. H. Charlotte Riddell (19th c.), read by Stefan Rudnicki for Blackstone -- "River Hall, the uninhabited house in question, is a place of ghosts and secrets, and it simply cannot keep a tenant. Inherited by the too-young Miss Helena Elmsdale after her father’s death, it falls to her aunt, Miss Susannah Blake, to attend to the house. In order to see that it remains rented out, Miss Blake brings the property to Messrs. Craven and Son for management. The lawyers do their best, but there is something sinister at River Hall, and the tenants cannot seem to leave fast enough, threatening to leave Miss Blake and her orphaned niece in dire financial straits. Miss Blake demands that something be done to rectify the situation, and one of the younger lawyers at the firm decides to stay in the house himself to uncover the mystery of the uninhabited house."
SERIES WATCH:
The Oracle of Maracoor: Another Day, Book 2 By: Gregory Maguire, read by Debra Wise for Harper -- "The enchanting second novel in the series Another Day, returning to the world he first created in Wicked ... continues the story of Elphaba’s green-skinned granddaughter, Rain."
Dark City: Tales of the Shadow City, Book 2 By: Anna Mocikat, read by David Reimer, Jessica Weyman for Crossroad Press -- "The battle is won, but the war has just begun."
The Raven Song: A Conspiracy of Magic, Book 2 By: Luanne G. Smith, read by Susannah Jones for Brilliance -- "Fleeing Victorian London, a witch finds her newfound independence comes with all-new perils—both mortal and immortal."
1636: The Atlantic Encounter: Ring of Fire, Book 25 By: Eric Flint, Walter H. Hunt, read by George Guidall
MORE SCI-FI, FANTASY and HORROR:
Dead Man's Hand: The Unorthodox Chronicles, Book 1 By: James J. Butcher, read by James Patrick Cronin for Penguin -- "In the tradition of his renowned father, James J. Butcher’s debut novel is a brilliant urban fantasy about a young man who must throw out the magical rule book to solve the murder of his former mentor. On the streets of Boston, the world is divided into the ordinary Usuals, and the paranormal Unorthodox. And in the Department of Unorthodox Affairs, the Auditors are the magical elite, government-sanctioned witches with spells at their command and all the power and prestige that comes with it. Grimshaw Griswald Grimsby is…not one of those witches."
The Dark Between the Trees By: Fiona Barnett, read by Vicky Hall and Tayla Kovacevic-Ebong for Penguin -- "1647: A small group of Parliamentarian soldiers are ambushed in an isolated part of Northern England. Their only hope for survival is to flee into the nearby Moresby Wood...unwise though that may seem. For Moresby Wood is known to be an unnatural place, the realm of witchcraft and shadows, where the devil is said to go walking by moonlight... Seventeen men enter the wood. Only two are ever seen again, and the stories they tell of what happened make no sense. Stories of shifting landscapes, of trees that appear and disappear at will...and of something else. Something dark. Something hungry. Today, five women are headed into Moresby Wood to discover, once and for all, what happened to that unfortunate group of soldiers."
The Hollow Kind: A Novel By: Andy Davidson, read by Susie James for Macmillan -- "Nellie Gardner is looking for a way out of an abusive marriage when she learns that her long-lost grandfather, August Redfern, has willed her his turpentine estate. She throws everything she can think of in a bag and flees to Georgia with her eleven-year-old son, Max, in tow. It turns out that the "estate" is a decrepit farmhouse on a thousand acres of old pine forest, but Nellie is thrilled about the chance for a fresh start for her and Max, and a chance for the happy home she never had. So it takes her a while to notice the strange scratching in the walls, the faint whispering at night, how the forest is eerily quiet. But Max sees what his mother can't: They're no safer here than they had been in South Carolina. In fact, things might even be worse. There's something wrong with Redfern Hill. Something lurks beneath the soil, ancient and hungry, with the power to corrupt hearts and destroy souls."
Wrath By: Sharon Moalem and Daniel Kraus, read by T. Ryder Smith for Sterling Ethos -- "In a future much nearer than you think, where scientific experimentation is exploited for commercial profit, unwisely under-supervised cutting-edge technology creates a menace that threatens the very fabric of human existence."
When the Night Bells Ring By: Jo Kaplan, read by Rachel Fulginiti and Nicol Zanzarella for CamCat -- "In a future ravaged by fire and drought, two climate refugees ride their motorcycles across the wasteland of the western US, and stumble upon an old silver mine. Descending into the cool darkness of the caved-in tunnels in desperate search of water, the two women find Lavinia Cain’s diary, a settler in search of prosperity who brought her family to Nevada in the late 1860s. But Lavinia and the settlers of the Western town discovered something monstrous that dwells in the depths of the mine, something that does not want greedy prospectors disturbing the earth."
The Immortality Thief By: Taran Hunt, read by Rory Alexander for Penguin -- "When linguist and smuggler Sean Wren is blackmailed into a job to get some data off an ancient ship, he's not expecting it to be the Philosopher's Stone: a literal recipe for immortality. Unfortunately, he's not the only one looking. The undying Ministers, mysterious aliens that have ruled over humanity for thousands of years, want the data too. So does the Republic, the last free human government. To add to the fun, the map to the treasure is in a long-lost language, the ship's filled with dangerous traps and genetically engineered monsters, and the nearby star's going supernova in a few days. Easy job, right?"
Morgan Is My Name By: Sophie Keetch, read by Vanessa Kirby for Audible Originals -- "The first volume in a stunning trilogy set in the world of Arthurian legend and told from the perspective of its traditional antagonist, Morgan Le Fay."
No Gods, Only Monsters By: Steve McHugh, read by Moira Quirk for Podium -- "Diana, the Roman Goddess of the hunt, lives alone on the far edge of the Roman Empire. When an old friend arrives looking for help, Diana finds herself thrust back into her old life, and her old problems. With innocent lives caught in the crossfire, Diana realizes that the only way to ensure the safety of her friends and loved ones is to do what she does best: hunt her enemies down."
MOST MISSING:
- FOUND: An anthology of found footage horror stories edited by Andrew Cull and Gabino Iglesias (Vermillion 2 One) -- "Eighteen stories of found footage horror. Featuring stories by: Bev Vincent, Ali Seay, Holly Rae Garcia, Clay McLeod Chapman, Nick Kolakowski, Ally Wilkes, Alan Baxter, Tim McGregor, Jeremy Hepler, Angela Sylvaine, Josh Rountree, Donna Lynch, Kurt Fawver, Robert Levy, Joe Butler, Fred Fischer, Georgia Cook, and Aristo Couvaras. Reader caution is advised."