Release Week: 25 March 2025
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Release Week: 25 March 2025
Posted on 2025-03-25 at 12:00 by Samuel Montgomery-Blinn
FICTION PICKS:
When the Moon Hits Your Eye By: John Scalzi, read by Wil Wheaton for Audible -- "The moon has turned into cheese. Now humanity has to deal with it. For some it’s an opportunity. For others it’s a moment to question their faith: In God, in science, in everything. Still others try to keep the world running in the face of absurdity and uncertainty. And then there are the billions looking to the sky and wondering how a thing that was always just there is now... something absolutely impossible."
Tilt: A Novel by Emma Pattee, read by Ariel Blake for Simon and Schuster -- "Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, there’s nothing to do but walk. Making her way across the wreckage of Portland, Annie experiences human desperation and kindness: strangers offering help, a riot at a grocery store, and an unlikely friendship with a young mother. As she walks, Annie reflects on her struggling marriage, her disappointing career, and her anxiety about having a baby. If she can just make it home, she’s determined to change her life."
Dissolution: A Novel By: Nicholas Binge, read by Charlotte Strevens, David Thorpe, and Joe Eyre for Penguin -- "A woman dives into her husband's memories to uncover a decades-old feud threatening reality itself in this staggering technothriller from the bestselling author of Ascension."
Sons and Daughters: A Novel By: Chaim Grade, translated by Rose Waldman, read by Rob Shapiro for Random House -- "Originally serialized in the 1960s and 1970s in New York-based Yiddish newspapers, the long-awaited English translation of a work, Tolstoyan in scope, that chronicles the last, tumultuous decade of a world succumbing to the march of modernity."
Theory & Practice By: Michelle de Kretser, read by Melissa Madden Gray for Highbridge -- "A writer looks back on her young adulthood and grapples with what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art."
Gothictown By: Emily Carpenter, read by Cassandra Campbell for Recorded Books -- "In an immersive Southern Gothic, a restauranteur lured by pandemic-era incentives moves her family to a seemingly idyllic small town in Georgia, only to discover a darkness lurking beneath the Southern hospitality and sun-dappled streets."
Nowhere: A Novel By: Allison Gunn, read by Leanne Woodward for Simon and Schuster -- "A spine-tingling and twisty debut about a series of disappearances in a small fundamentalist town and what one broken family must do to remain together as dark forces close in."
Twist: A Novel By: Colum McCann, read by the author for Random House -- "A propulsive novel of rupture and repair in the digital age, delving into a hidden world deep under the ocean—from the New York Times bestselling author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin."
Rekt By: Alex Gonzalez, read by Robb Moreira for Recorded Books -- "A disturbing examination of toxic masculinity and the darkest pits of the Internet, about a young man’s algorithmic descent into depravity in a future that’s nearly here."
Nobody's Fool By: Harlan Coben, read by Vikas Adam for Grand Central -- "Sami Kierce, a young college grad backpacking in Spain with friends, wakes up one morning, covered in blood. There’s a knife in his hand. Beside him, the body of his girlfriend. Anna. Dead. He doesn’t know what happened. His screams drown out his thoughts—and then he runs. Twenty-two years later, Kierce, now a private investigator, is a new father who’s working off his debts by doing low level surveillance jobs and teaching wannabe sleuths at a night school in New York City. One evening, he recognizes a familiar face at the back of the classroom. Anna. It’s unmistakably her. As soon as Kierce makes eye contact with her, she bolts. For Kierce there is no choice. He knows he must find this woman and solve the impossible mystery that has haunted his every waking moment since that terrible day."
Elphie: A Wicked Childhood By: Gregory Maguire, read by Edoardo Ballerini for Harper -- "What happened to young Elphaba before her witchy powers took hold in Wicked? Almost 30 years after the publication of the original novel, for the first time Gregory Maguire reveals the story of prickly young Elphie, the future Wicked Witch of the West."
The Keeper of Lonely Spirits By: E.M. Anderson, read by David Sweeney-Bear for Harlequin -- " In this mesmerizing, wonderfully moving queer cozy fantasy, an immortal ghost hunter must confront his tragic past in order to embrace his found family."
Trap Line: A Short Story By: Timothy Zahn, read by Greg D. Barnett for Audible Originals -- "En route to far-off stars, Toby’s consciousness has a crucial mission: inhabit his clone long enough to repair a spaceship, then zip back to Earth. He’s done it a million times, more or less. OK, twelve times. It should only take a few hours. Until he wakes up in jail. And he’s not alone. His fellow prisoners: a cadre of alien soldiers. His prison: an ethereal boundary that will imprison their spirits until their bodies die. His jailers can’t even see him. But their pet cat (er, iguana cat?) can—and it’s got a serious case of the zoomies. With humanity’s place in the odd and ever-widening universe riding on Toby’s choices, it’s time to saddle up for a ghostly game of cat and mouse."
NON-FICTION WATCH:
Yoko: The Biography By: David Sheff, read by Max Meyers for Simon and Schuster
Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax of the Century, Its Enduring Impact, and What It Reveals About America Today by Phil Tinline, read by the author for Simon and Schuster -- "Delve into the labyrinth of America’s conspiracy culture with this investigative masterpiece that unearths the roots of our era’s most potent myths."
Code Name: Pale Horse: How I Went Undercover to Expose America's Nazis by Scott Payne with Michelle Shepherd, read by Payne for Simon and Schuster
Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand by Jeff Chu, read by the author for Random House -- "A profound meditation on nature, heritage, and belonging, from an accomplished journalist who left New York City for life on a working farm."
SERIES WATCH:
- Tideborn: The Drowned World Duology, Book 2 By: Eliza Chan, read by Emily Woo Zeller for Little, Brown Audio -- "A dragon queen, a vengeful sea witch, and a mythical titan converge on the underwater city of Tiankawi in this sequel to the no. 1 Sunday Times bestselling epic fantasy, Fathomfolk."
BACKLIST WATCH:
Exemplar: The Autonomous Sequence, Book 1 By: Alastair Wells (2024), read by Cody Roberts for Tantor -- "After damaging climate change, humanity is divided, torn into the technophobic nature-worshippers on Earth and the banished children of science on the new worlds. Jaruss awakens, drifting 300 light-years from Earth, trapped, memoryless, and alone. Who is he, where does he come from, and what are these recurring nightmares that trouble his sleep? To find out, he must outwit an efficiency-obsessed AI and join the dangerous crew of the stealth ship, Pangolin."
Love, Death + Robots: The Official Anthology: Volume One, edited by Amanda J. Spedding and Geoff Brown (2021), stories by Tim Miller, Alastair Reynolds, Claudine Griggs, John Scalzi, Ken Liu, Marko Kloos, Peter F. Hamilton, various, Alberto Mielgo, David W. Amendola, Michael Swanwick, Vitaliy Shushko, and Joe R. Lansdale, read by a full cast for Blackstone -- "The sixteen stories and two screenplays that make up Volume One of the Emmy® Award–winning Netflix Original series Love, Death & Robots."
To Turn the Tide: Make the Darkness Light, Book 1 By: S. M. Stirling (2024), read by Dean Gallagher for Tantor -- "Everyone could see it coming. But one man could do something about it. Oh, he couldn’t avert the nuclear holocaust, but a scientist in Austria, ruthlessly using billions of research dollars for his own purposes, set himself up an out: he created a time machine, and filled a warehouse with low-tech survival gear. Too bad he didn’t get to use it himself. Instead, a team of American grad students, led by their professor, is sent back to the late Roman Empire. Even though they are experts in this time and place, they are about to realize that books and actual experience are very different things."
Taiwan Travelogue: A Novel By: Yang Shuang-Zi (2021), translated by Lin King (2024), read by Sarah Skaer for Tantor -- "May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She's been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste its authentic cuisine. Soon a Taiwanese woman—who is younger than she is, and who shares the characters of her name—is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true."
INDIE WATCH:
- Space Brooms! By: A.G. Rodriguez, read by Tim Andres Pabon for Podium -- "A fun, sci-fi romp where custodian—or space broom—Johnny Gomez teams up with smugglers and is thrust into an unforgettable adventure."
MOST MISSING:
Southern Cross: Ballad of the Blackthornes, Book 1 by Vaughn A. Jackson (Falstaff) -- "Ten years ago, Ezekiel escaped one evil, only to watch helplessly as an even more ancient evil in the form of a vampire ripped his wife from his grasp. Ezekiel’s hunt began in the ashes of his former life. Now, the Civil War burns through the American South, and Ezekiel cuts his own swath of destruction, battling man and monster alike. Two unlikely allies join him in his quest: Will, a member of the Union's Ambulance Corp, and Kate, a young Confederate sympathizer."
Before Baker Street: Adventures of Young Sherlock Holmes by A.L. Sirois (Hawthorne House)