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Author Holiday Blogs

Author Talk: Michael Connelly, author of The Drop

Dec 1, 2011

In Michael Connelly’s new Harry Bosch novel, THE DROP, the LAPD homicide detective simultaneously takes on two cases. Both deal with shocking deaths, and both go back years --- even decades --- into the past. In this interview, Connelly sheds light on the triple meaning of the title. He also discusses the extensive research he conducts through real crime cases, how he balances Harry Bosch with the protagonist of the Lincoln Lawyer series, Mickey Haller, and the evolution of Bosch’s character over the past 20 years.

Editorial Content for Gabby

Contributors

Reviewer (text)

Carole Turner
To many who knew Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly, they were thought of as a “power couple.” Two highly successful people with high-profile public service careers: Gabby, the dedicated young Congresswoman, and Mark, the Navy captain and space shuttle commander. Mark and his twin brother Scott, sons of police officers, were raised in an Irish Catholic family in New Jersey. Gabby and her sister were brought up by their artist mother and tire company owner father (who was Jewish) in the southwest.
 

Teaser

 

From one of the most admired and beloved couples in recent American history, GABBY is an extraordinarily moving story of public service, risk-taking, romance --- and the journey toward recovery.

Promo

From one of the most admired and beloved couples in recent American history, GABBY is an extraordinarily moving story of public service, risk-taking, romance --- and the journey toward recovery.

About the Book

As individuals, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, showed Americans how optimism, an adventurous spirit, and a call to service can help change the world. As a couple, they became a national example of the healing power to be found in deeply shared love and courage. Their arrival in the world spotlight came under the worst of circumstances. On January 8, 2011, while meeting with her constituents in Tucson, Arizona, Gabby was the victim of an assassination attempt that left six people dead and 13 wounded. Gabby was shot in the head; doctors called her survival “miraculous.”

As the nation grieved and sought to understand the attack, Gabby remained in private, focused on her against-all-odds recovery. Mark spent every possible moment by her side, as he also prepared for his final mission as commander of space shuttle Endeavour.

Now, as Gabby’s health continues to improve, the couple is sharing their remarkable untold story. Intimate, inspiring and unforgettably moving, GABBY: A Story of Courage and Hope, provides an unflinching look at the overwhelming challenges of brain injury, the painstaking process of learning to communicate again, and the responsibilities that fall to a loving spouse who wants the best possible treatment for his wife. Told in Mark’s voice and from Gabby’s heart, the book also chronicles the lives that brought these two extraordinary people together --- their humor, their ambitions, their sense of duty, their long-distance marriage, and their desire for family.

Gabby and Mark made a pledge to tell their account as honestly as possible, and they have done so in riveting detail. Both Gabby and Mark have lived large public lives, but this book takes readers behind many closed doors --- from the flight deck of the space shuttle to the cloakrooms of Congress to the hospital wards where Gabby struggled to reclaim herself with the help of formidable medical teams and devoted family and friends.

Questions are answered with unvarnished candor. How do Gabby and Mark feel about the angry political discourse that was swirling in America at the time of the shooting, and that remains prevalent today? How do they see government living up to the highest possible ideals? And how do they understand and mourn the loss of the people who did not survive that day? GABBY is a reminder of the power of true grit, the patience needed to overcome unimaginable obstacles, and the transcendence of love. In the story of Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly, we all can see the best in ourselves. As Mark and Gabby’s friends have said: “The two of them are America as we dream it can be.”

Editorial Content for Hotel Vendome

Contributors

Reviewer (text)

Amie Taylor

Heloise Martin had the immense good fortune to grow up in the upscale Hotel Vendome on East 69th Street in New York City with her doting father, Hugues, a staff of workers who took the charming little girl under their wing, and all of the advantages that money could buy.

"Steel has created a fairy tale world where happy endings are requisite, and warm and tender emotions prevail."
 

Teaser

 

Danielle Steel’s new novel invites readers into the ultra-glamorous world of a five-star New York hotel, and brings to vivid life the man who builds it as his dream, the girl who grows up in its loving embrace, and the colorful guests and staff who make its magic complete.

Promo

Danielle Steel’s new novel invites readers into the ultra-glamorous world of a five-star New York hotel, and brings to vivid life the man who builds it as his dream, the girl who grows up in its loving embrace, and the colorful guests and staff who make its magic complete.

About the Book

The hotel was old, run-down. But to Swiss-born Hugues Martin, a young, ambitious hotelier trained in the most illustrious European traditions, it is a rough diamond, tucked away on a quiet, perfectly situated Manhattan street. After begging and borrowing every penny he can scrape together, Hugues purchases the building --- and transforms it into one of the world’s finest luxury hotels.

Under Hugues’s tireless, exacting supervision, the Hotel Vendôme is soon renowned for its elegance, its efficiency, its unparalleled service and discretion --- the ideal New York refuge for the rich and famous, as well as a perfect home for Hugues’s beautiful young wife and their daughter. But when his wife runs off with a notorious rock star, Hugues is suddenly a single parent to four-year-old Heloise --- who will grow up happily regardless, amid a fascinating milieu of celebrities, socialites, politicians, world travelers, and the countless hotel employees who all adore her.

As the years pass, Hugues and the hotel are the center of Heloise’s life, a universe of unexpected mysteries and pleasures, crises and celebrations that make every day magical. She longs to follow in her father’s footsteps and one day run the Vendôme with him. New challenges mark her way: an unexpected romance for Hugues and her own journey to hotel school in Switzerland. The lessons she has learned at her father’s side, in their exciting upstairs/downstairs world, will carry her through it all, as they illuminate a story no reader will forget.

Welcome to the Hotel Vendôme.

Editorial Content for A Christmas Homecoming

Contributors

Reviewer (text)

Ray Palen
Anne Perry brings us her annual Christmas mystery with the release of A CHRISTMAS HOMECOMING. For nine straight seasons, she has issued holiday-inspired mysteries featuring both stand-alone stories and tales involving some of her recurring characters.
 
"A CHRISTMAS HOMECOMING...will chill you as you sit by a warm fireside and prepare for another holiday season."

Teaser

 

A familiar face from the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels --- Charlotte’s mother, Caroline --- travels with her young husband, Joshua Fielding, and his theatrical troupe to Whitby, the Yorkshire fishing village where Dracula the vampire first touched English soil in the sensational novel named after him.

Promo

A familiar face from the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels --- Charlotte’s mother, Caroline --- travels with her young husband, Joshua Fielding, and his theatrical troupe to Whitby, the Yorkshire fishing village where Dracula the vampire first touched English soil in the sensational novel named after him.

About the Book

A familiar face from the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels --- Charlotte’s mother, Caroline --- travels with her young husband, Joshua Fielding, and his theatrical troupe to Whitby, the Yorkshire fishing village where Dracula the vampire first touched English soil in the sensational novel named after him. Joshua has arranged to produce a stage adaptation of Dracula by the daughter of Whitby millionaire Charles Netheridge during the Christmas holiday, but after the disastrous first read-through of her amateurish script, only the fact that the company is depending on Netheridge’s financial backing for their spring tour keeps them at work. 

As tempers flare and wind and snow swirl around Netheridge’s lonely hilltop mansion, a black-cloaked stranger emerges from the storm --- an eerily opportune arrival, for this enigmatic figure, one Anton Ballin, turns out to be a theatrical genius. At the same time, a brooding evil makes itself felt. Instead of the theatrical triumph that Netheridge desired for his daughter, there is murder --- shocking and terrifying.

Anne Perry’s ninth Christmas novel keeps us poised on a razor’s edge of suspense, hypnotized by a story in which the heartwarming power of goodness is challenged by the seductive power of inner darkness. In the end, A CHRISTMAS HOMECOMING lifts the spirit and rejoices the heart.

Editorial Content for In Other Worlds

Contributors

Reviewer (text)

Pauline Finch
With every book that she births into her already magnificent and diverse family of works, fans of Canadian literary icon Margaret Atwood are as eager and hungry for it as gaping baby birds in the nest. It doesn’t matter in which genre she chooses to speak, which causes she passionately takes up, or which forgotten corner of culture she illuminates with her unique and astute perceptions. Fans such as hers span every time of life, every social and political stripe, and every aesthetic taste, as well as numerous professional and vocational realms.  

Teaser

 

In this collection of essays and lectures, Margaret Atwood illuminates her lifelong relationship with the literary genre of science-fiction.

Promo

In this collection of essays and lectures, Margaret Atwood illuminates her lifelong relationship with the literary genre of science fiction.

About the Book

At a time when speculative fiction seems less and less far-fetched, Margaret Atwood lends her distinctive voice and singular point of view to the genre in a series of essays that brilliantly illuminates the essential truths about the modern world. This is an exploration of her relationship with the literary form we have come to know as "science fiction,” a relationship that has been lifelong, stretching from her days as a child reader in the 1940s, through her time as a graduate student at Harvard, where she worked on the Victorian ancestor of the form, and continuing as a writer and reviewer.

This book brings together her three heretofore unpublished Ellmann Lectures from 2010: "Flying Rabbits," which begins with Atwood's early  rabbit superhero creations, and goes on to speculate about masks, capes, weakling alter egos, and Things with Wings; "Burning Bushes," which follows her into Victorian otherlands and beyond; and "Dire Cartographies," which investigates Utopias and Dystopias. IN OTHER WORLDS also includes some of Atwood's key reviews and thoughts about the form.

Among those writers discussed are Marge Piercy, Rider Haggard, Ursula Le Guin, Ishiguro, Bryher, Huxley, and Jonathan Swift. She elucidates the differences (as she sees them) between "science fiction" proper, and "speculative fiction," as well as between "sword and sorcery/fantasy" and "slipstream fiction."

For all readers who have loved THE HANDMAID'S TALE, ORYX AND CRAKE and THE YEAR OF THE FLOOD, IN OTHER WORLDS is a must.