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Editorial Content for How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder

Contributors

Reviewer (text)

Norah Piehl

COWBOYS AND EAST INDIANS, an award-winning short story collection, was Nina McConigley's first book. As the title suggests, many of the included stories explored the culture clash between Indian immigrants and their overwhelmingly white neighbors in the American West, specifically in Wyoming. With her debut novel, HOW TO COMMIT A POSTCOLONIAL MURDER, McConigley continues to explore some of these same themes while connecting them to India's own colonial history, the bonds of sisterhood, and the awkwardness of coming of age. Read More

Teaser

Summer, 1986. The Creel sisters, Georgie Ayyar and Agatha Krishna, welcome their aunt, uncle and young cousin --- newly arrived from India --- into their house in rural Wyoming where they’ll all live together. Because this is what families do. That is, until the sisters decide that it’s time for their uncle to die. According to Georgie, the British are to blame. And to understand why, you need to hear her story. She details the violence hiding in their house and history, her once-unshakeable bond with Agatha Krishna, and her understanding of herself as an Indian-American in the heart of the West. Her account is, at every turn, cheeky, unflinching and infectiously inflected with the trappings of teendom, including the magazine quizzes that help her make sense of her life.

Promo

Summer, 1986. The Creel sisters, Georgie Ayyar and Agatha Krishna, welcome their aunt, uncle and young cousin --- newly arrived from India --- into their house in rural Wyoming where they’ll all live together. Because this is what families do. That is, until the sisters decide that it’s time for their uncle to die. According to Georgie, the British are to blame. And to understand why, you need to hear her story. She details the violence hiding in their house and history, her once-unshakeable bond with Agatha Krishna, and her understanding of herself as an Indian-American in the heart of the West. Her account is, at every turn, cheeky, unflinching and infectiously inflected with the trappings of teendom, including the magazine quizzes that help her make sense of her life.

About the Book

A bold, inventive and fiercely original debut novel that begins with an uncle dead and his tween niece’s private confession to the reader --- she and her sister killed him, and they blame the British.

Summer, 1986.The Creel sisters, Georgie Ayyar and Agatha Krishna, welcome their aunt, uncle and young cousin --- newly arrived from India --- into their house in rural Wyoming where they’ll all live together. Because this is what families do. That is, until the sisters decide that it’s time for their uncle to die.

According to Georgie, the British are to blame. And to understand why, you need to hear her story. She details the violence hiding in their house and history, her once-unshakeable bond with Agatha Krishna, and her understanding of herself as an Indian-American in the heart of the West. Her account is, at every turn, cheeky, unflinching and infectiously inflected with the trappings of teendom, including the magazine quizzes that help her make sense of her life. At its heart, the tale she weaves is:

a) a vivid portrait of an extended family
b) a moving story of sisterhood
c) a playful ode to the '80s
d) a murder mystery (of sorts)
e) an unexpected and unwaveringly powerful meditation on history and language, trauma and healing, and the meaning of independence

Or maybe it’s really:

f) all of the above

Audiobook available, read by Reena Dutt 

Editorial Content for Advance Britannia: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1942-1945

Contributors

Reviewer (text)

Philip Zozzaro

The Second World War had been ongoing since 1939, and the British had been immersed in the conflict from its outset. British citizens had weathered the Blitz of 1940, where London was bombed for nearly two months straight by the German Luftwaffe. The government underwent a shift in leadership as Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was ousted in favor of Winston Churchill. Churchill was viewed as someone who could lead the government on a wartime footing. By December 1941, the United Kingdom was in a precarious situation. Read More

Teaser

By 1942, Winston Churchill found himself facing a vastly different war than the one he’d inherited from Neville Chamberlain back in 1940. In the East, the Soviets were now a co-belligerent (if not exactly a firm ally). And the aid he’d so longed for from across the Atlantic had finally arrived, when Pearl Harbor pushed America to end its “dithering and buggering about.” But with Parliament and the public losing faith in him, Churchill had to manage a war that now stretched into the Pacific and Indian Oceans, threatening Britain’s colonies, all the while negotiating a new relationship with Roosevelt and Stalin --- two jostling, unpredictable comrades-in-arms fully prepared to carve up the world to their own satisfaction. In this sequel to his prizewinning BRITAIN AT BAY, Alan Allport completes his superlative history of Britain’s role in World War II.

Promo

By 1942, Winston Churchill found himself facing a vastly different war than the one he’d inherited from Neville Chamberlain back in 1940. In the East, the Soviets were now a co-belligerent (if not exactly a firm ally). And the aid he’d so longed for from across the Atlantic had finally arrived, when Pearl Harbor pushed America to end its “dithering and buggering about.” But with Parliament and the public losing faith in him, Churchill had to manage a war that now stretched into the Pacific and Indian Oceans, threatening Britain’s colonies, all the while negotiating a new relationship with Roosevelt and Stalin --- two jostling, unpredictable comrades-in-arms fully prepared to carve up the world to their own satisfaction. In this sequel to his prizewinning BRITAIN AT BAY, Alan Allport completes his superlative history of Britain’s role in World War II.

About the Book

The author of BRITAIN AT BAY --- which The Wall Street Journal said may be “the single best examination of British politics, society and strategy [from 1938 to 1941] that has ever been written” --- picks up his sweeping social history in 1942, when what was once a regional war has become an intricate, globe-spanning conflict, with profound consequences for the British Empire and for a British people already exhausted after more than two years of fighting.

“The Japanese, gone berserk, have struck in the Pacific, joined up with the Axis, declared war on us,” one British soldier wrote in his diary. “So the Yanks are now our comrades in arms, and the whole world’s ablaze.”

By 1942, Winston Churchill found himself facing a vastly different war than the one he’d inherited from Neville Chamberlain back in 1940. In the East, the Soviets were now a co-belligerent (if not exactly a firm ally). And the aid he’d so longed for from across the Atlantic had finally arrived, when Pearl Harbor pushed America to end its “dithering and buggering about.” But with Parliament and the public losing faith in him, Churchill had to manage a war that now stretched into the Pacific and Indian Oceans, threatening Britain’s colonies, all the while negotiating a new relationship with Roosevelt and Stalin --- two jostling, unpredictable comrades-in-arms fully prepared to carve up the world to their own satisfaction.

In this sequel to his prizewinning BRITAIN AT BAY, Alan Allport completes his superlative history of Britain’s role in World War II, once again weaving together the political, military, social and cultural to tell a multifaceted story of a country forced to endure the profound stresses of total war. Now, Britain is no longer at bay. But any victory remains far off, and its costs will be great. Can the British win the war without sacrificing so much along the way that they then lose the peace?

Audiobook available, read by Ric Jerrom 

Editorial Content for Crucible

Book

Contributors

Reviewer (text)

Jana Siciliano

By anyone’s account, John Sayles has had a successful career. Whether he’s writing and directing films (Matewan, Eight Men Out, The Brother from Another Planet), rewriting schlock horror movies (Piranha), or publishing historical novels set in distant lands and comfortable shores, he always finds an audience. Sayles has been nominated twice for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and once for the National Book Award, so he has the aura of American literati shining around his head. Read More

Teaser

Already the gateway for illegal Canadian liquor during Prohibition, the Motor City becomes a crucible for American class conflict during the Great Depression, with an army of laid-off Ford workers drifting into the ranks of the burgeoning union movement. To keep the hundreds of thousands still employed by Henry Ford in thrall, he recruits black laborers migrating from the deep South to serve as “strike insurance.” The Model T mogul also has bought a sizable chunk of Brazil's Amazonian rainforest, vowing to grow his own rubber for tires, but stubbornly refusing to include a botanist in his troop of would-be jungle tamers. As a series of biological plagues descend on the Fordlandia plantation, the racial melting pot he has created in Detroit begins to boil over, and not even the Sage of Dearborn can control the forces that have been unleashed.

Promo

Already the gateway for illegal Canadian liquor during Prohibition, the Motor City becomes a crucible for American class conflict during the Great Depression, with an army of laid-off Ford workers drifting into the ranks of the burgeoning union movement. To keep the hundreds of thousands still employed by Henry Ford in thrall, he recruits black laborers migrating from the deep South to serve as “strike insurance.” The Model T mogul also has bought a sizable chunk of Brazil's Amazonian rainforest, vowing to grow his own rubber for tires, but stubbornly refusing to include a botanist in his troop of would-be jungle tamers. As a series of biological plagues descend on the Fordlandia plantation, the racial melting pot he has created in Detroit begins to boil over, and not even the Sage of Dearborn can control the forces that have been unleashed.

About the Book

From the Oscar-nominated filmmaker comes a complex and sweeping historical novel about Henry Ford --- the Elon Musk of his day --- and his attempt to rule not only an automotive empire but the rambunctious city of Detroit. It is an epic tale ranging from the 1920s through the second World War, featuring violent labor disputes, misbegotten jungle expeditions, a tragic race riot, and the gestapo tactics of Ford’s private army.

Already the gateway for illegal Canadian liquor during Prohibition, the Motor City becomes a crucible for American class conflict during the Great Depression, with an army of laid off Ford workers drifting into the ranks of the burgeoning union movement --- Henry Ford's worst nightmare. To keep the hundreds of thousands still employed by him in thrall, the man who was formerly "America's favorite tycoon" recruits black laborers migrating from the deep South to serve as "strike insurance," and gives Harry Bennett, pugnacious as he is diminutive, free reign over the legion of barroom brawlers and ex-cons who make up the company’s "Security Department."

The Model T mogul has also bought a sizable chunk of Brazil's Amazonian rainforest, vowing to grow his own rubber for tires, but stubbornly refusing to include a botanist in his troop of would-be jungle tamers. As a series of biological plagues descend on the Fordlandia plantation, the racial melting pot he has created in Detroit begins to boil over, and not even the Sage of Dearborn can control the forces that have been unleashed.

The novel's cast --- Ford workers black and white and their families, young radicals, cynical newsmen, gangsters, Brazilian rubber tappers, cameos from boxer Joe Louis and muralist Diego Rivera --- create the tapestry of differing points of view that John Sayles has become famous for, the events portrayed fundamental to the country we live in today.

Editorial Content for What Boys Learn

Contributors

Reviewer (text)

Pamela Kramer

Nature versus nurture. Genes versus upbringing. What forces form a child into the adult he or she becomes? In WHAT BOYS LEARN, Andromeda Romano-Lax forces us to consider that issue as we meet Abby Rosso, a high school counselor whose childhood was really rough. Her only sibling is a brother who is a psychopath, ended up in prison and regrets nothing. But Abby has done things that she's ashamed of. Read More

Teaser

Over one terrible weekend, two teenage girls are found dead in a wealthy Chicago suburb. As the community mourns, Abby Rosso, the girls’ high school counselor, begins to suspect that her son was secretly involved in their lives --- and, possibly, their deaths. Abby doesn’t want to believe Benjamin hurt anyone. But she’s seen the warning signs before. Two decades ago, her brother was imprisoned for a disturbing crime --- he was only a little older than Benjamin is now. And Abby has more troubling memories from her own adolescence that confirm what boys and men are capable of. As Abby searches for the truth about what happened to her students, she’s forced to face the question: Has she been making excuses for Benjamin for years?

Promo

Over one terrible weekend, two teenage girls are found dead in a wealthy Chicago suburb. As the community mourns, Abby Rosso, the girls’ high school counselor, begins to suspect that her son was secretly involved in their lives --- and possibly their deaths. Abby doesn’t want to believe Benjamin hurt anyone. But she’s seen the warning signs before. Two decades ago, her brother was imprisoned for a disturbing crime --- he was only a little older than Benjamin is now. And Abby has more troubling memories from her own adolescence that confirm what boys and men are capable of. As Abby searches for the truth about what happened to her students, she’s forced to face the question: Has she been making excuses for Benjamin for years?

About the Book

A twisty, jaw-dropping psychological thriller that unravels a mother's worst nightmare --- that her child is capable of terrible violence --- when her teenage son becomes a suspect in the murder of two classmates, from the author of THE DEEPEST LAKE.

Over one terrible weekend, two teenage girls are found dead in a wealthy Chicago suburb. As the community mourns, Abby Rosso, the girls’ high school counselor, begins to suspect that her son was secretly involved in their lives --- and possibly their deaths.

Abby doesn’t want to believe Benjamin hurt anyone. But she’s seen the warning signs before. Two decades ago, her brother was imprisoned for a disturbing crime --- he was only a little older than Benjamin is now. And Abby has more troubling memories from her own adolescence that confirm what boys and men are capable of. As Abby searches for the truth about what happened to her students, she’s forced to face the question: Has she been making excuses for Benjamin for years?

Swirling with sharp questions about family and masculinity, WHAT BOYS LEARN unravels a mother’s worst fears.

Audiobook available, read by Eva Kaminsky and Michael Crouch 

We have listed 12 of Carol’s Bookreporter.com Bets On picks that are now or soon to be in paperback. Which of these books have you read or do you plan to read? Please check all that apply.

January 23, 2026, 555 voters

January 23, 2026 - February 6, 2026

Here are reading recommendations with your comments and a rating of 1 to 5 stars for the contest period of January 23 - February 6.

January 23, 2026

Who has their books lined up for the snowstorm or whatever unusual weather pattern seems to be planned for across the country? The weather forecasters have been beyond excited about the pending storm. Even if you are not in the path of snow, there is talk about shockingly freezing temperatures. The images of the green iguanas falling off the trees in Florida said a lot this week!

On Thursday afternoon, there was an Outlook outage that was ill-timed as we were pulling together plans for this update. It took me a couple of hours to realize that no mail had come in for a while. I am sure that some messages went into the ether and never will make it my way!

January 20, 2026

In this newsletter, you will find books releasing the weeks of January 19th and January 26th that we think will be of interest to Bookreporter.com readers, along with Bonus News, where we call out a contest, feature or review that we want to let you know about so you have it on your radar.

This week, we are calling attention to the Most Requested Guides of 2025 on ReadingGroupGuides.com. We pulled together the 30 guides that were accessed the most by you last year. Your top five picks are THE FROZEN RIVER by Ariel Lawhon, THE WOMEN by Kristin Hannah, THE LION WOMEN OF TEHRAN by Marjan Kamali, THE WEDDING PEOPLE by Alison Espach, and MY FRIENDS by Fredrik Backman. We always love seeing which guides appealed to you the most!

January 20, 2026

This Bookreporter.com Special Newsletter spotlights a book that we know people will be talking about this winter. Read more about it, and enter our Winter Reading Contest by Wednesday, January 21st at noon ET for a chance to win one of five copies of ANATOMY OF AN ALIBI by Ashley Elston, which is now available and will be a Bookreporter.com Bets On pick. Please note that each contest is only open for 24 hours, so you will need to act quickly!

January 17, 2026

Happy New Year! We are excited to be kicking off another great year of bringing you books and authors. My group did not select a discussion book for January. We decided that we each will talk about what we read over the break.

Also, during our Christmas party, we chatted about Brisa Carleton’s debut novel, LAST CALL AT THE SAVOY. We all enjoyed it so much that we asked Brisa to join us via Zoom so we can discuss the book with her. While it is dry January, I can see myself mixing up both a mocktail and a cocktail for the occasion!