Winter Reading 2024

At Bookreporter.com, we kicked off 2024 with our ninth annual Winter Reading Contests and Feature. We hosted a series of 24-hour contests spotlighting a book releasing this winter and gave five lucky readers a chance to win it.

Even though our contests have wrapped up, we encourage you to take a look at this year's featured titles, as these are books you will want to read during the winter months --- and into the warmer ones!

Read more »

Stephen McCauley, author of You Only Call When You're in Trouble

After a lifetime of taking care of his impossible but irresistible sister and his cherished niece, Tom is ready to put himself first. An architect specializing in tiny houses, he finally has an opportunity to build his masterpiece. Assuming, that is, he can stick to his resolution to keep the demands of his needy family at bay. Naturally, that’s when his phone rings. His niece, Cecily --- the real love of Tom’s life, as his boyfriend reminded him when moving out --- is embroiled in a Title IX investigation at the college where she teaches that threatens her career and relationship. And after decades of lying, his sister wants him to help her tell Cecily the real identity of her father. Tom does what he’s always done --- answers the call. Thus begins a journey that will change everyone’s life.

Read more »

Amy Jo Burns, author of Mercury

It’s 1990, and 17-year-old Marley West is blazing into the river valley town of Mercury, Pennsylvania. A perpetual loner, she seeks a place at someone’s table and a family of her own. The first thing she sees when she arrives in town is three men standing on a rooftop. The Joseph brothers become Marley’s whole world before she can blink. Soon, she is young wife to one, The One Who Got Away to another, and adopted mother to them all. As their own mother fades away and their roofing business crumbles under the weight of their unwieldy father’s inflated ego, Marley steps in to shepherd these unruly men. Years later, an eerie discovery in the church attic causes old wounds to resurface, and suddenly the family’s survival hangs in the balance.

Read more »

Jonathan Santlofer, author of The Lost Van Gogh

For years, there have been whispers that, before his death, Van Gogh completed a final self-portrait. Curators and art historians have savored this rumor, hoping it could illuminate some of the troubled artist's many secrets, but even they have to concede that the missing painting is likely lost forever. But when Luke Perrone, artist and great-grandson of the man who stole the Mona Lisa, and Alexis Verde, daughter of a notorious art thief, discover what may be the missing portrait, they are drawn into a most epic art puzzle. When only days later the painting disappears again, they are reunited with INTERPOL agent John Washington Smith in a dangerous and deadly search that will not only expose secrets of the artist's last days but draw them into one of history's darkest eras.

Read more »

Christy Lefteri, author of The Book of Fire

In present-day Greece, deep in an ancient forest, lives a family: Irini, a musician, who teaches children to read and play music; her husband, Tasso, who paints pictures of the forest, his greatest muse; and Chara, their young daughter, whose name means joy. On the fateful day that will forever alter the trajectory of their lives, flames chase fleeing birds across the sky. The wildfire that will consume their home, and their lives as they know it, races toward them. Months later, as the village tries to rebuild, Irini stumbles upon the man who started the fire, a land speculator who had intended only a small, controlled burn to clear forestland to build on but instead ignited a catastrophe. He is dying, although the cause is unclear, and in her anger at all he took from them, Irini makes a split-second decision that will haunt her.

Read more »

Rachel Hawkins, author of The Heiress

When Ruby McTavish Callahan Woodward Miller Kenmore dies, she’s not only North Carolina’s richest woman, she’s also its most notorious. The victim of a famous kidnapping as a child and a widow four times over, Ruby ruled the tiny town of Tavistock from Ashby House, her family’s estate high in the Blue Ridge Mountains. But in the aftermath of Ruby’s death, her adopted son, Camden, wants little to do with the house or the money --- and even less to do with the surviving McTavishes. Ten years later, his uncle’s death pulls Camden and his wife, Jules, back into the family fold at Ashby House. Its views are just as stunning as ever, its rooms just as elegant, but the legacy of Ruby is inescapable. And as Ashby House tightens its grip on Camden and Jules, questions about the infamous heiress come to light.

Read more »