January 14, 2023
This week, after our monthly “Bookaccino Live” preview event, readers who attended brought up the topic of online book groups. They shared the names of the groups in which they had participated both during this conversation and in email follow-up. We are planning to share a list of these groups once we have had time to give them a closer look. If you have participated in an online book group that you have enjoyed, let us know the name of the group, what you enjoy about it, and some of the books they have discussed. Send me an email with the subject line “Online Book Groups.”
February 2023 Bookaccino Live Event
Editorial Content for Dawnlands
Book
Teaser
Philippa Gregory's Fairmile series continues as the fiercely independent Alinor and her family find themselves entangled in palace intrigue and political upheaval in 17th-century England.
Promo
Philippa Gregory's Fairmile series continues as the fiercely independent Alinor and her family find themselves entangled in palace intrigue and political upheaval in 17th-century England.
About the Book
The “superb” (People) Fairmile series from #1 New York Times bestselling author Philippa Gregory continues as the fiercely independent Alinor and her family find themselves entangled in palace intrigue and political upheaval in 17th-century England.
It is 1685, and England is on the brink of a renewed civil war. King Charles II has died without an heir, and his brother, James, is to take the throne. But the people are bitterly divided, and many do not welcome the new king or his young queen. Ned Ferryman cannot persuade his sister, Alinor, that he is right to return from America with his Pokanoket servant, Rowan, to join the rebel army. Instead, Alinor and her daughter, Alys, have been coaxed by the manipulative Livia to save the queen from the coming siege. The rewards are life-changing: the family could return to their beloved Tidelands, and Alinor could rule where she was once lower than a servant.
Alinor’s son is determined to stay clear of the war, but in order to keep his own secrets in the past, Livia traps him in a plan to create an imposter Prince of Wales --- a surrogate baby to the queen.
From the last battle in the desolate Somerset Levels to the hidden caves on the slave island of Barbados, this third volume of an epic story follows a family from one end of the empire to another, to find a new dawn in a world that is opening up before them with greater rewards and dangers than ever before.
Editorial Content for Flight
Book
Teaser
With the urgency and artfulness that cemented her previous novel, WANT, as “a defining novel of our age” (Vulture), Lynn Steger Strong once again turns her attention to the structural and systemic failings that are haunting Americans, but also to the ways in which family, friends and strangers can support each other through the gaps.
Promo
With the urgency and artfulness that cemented her previous novel, WANT, as “a defining novel of our age” (Vulture), Lynn Steger Strong once again turns her attention to the structural and systemic failings that are haunting Americans, but also to the ways in which family, friends and strangers can support each other through the gaps.
About the Book
It’s December 22nd, and siblings Henry, Kate and Martin have converged with their spouses on Henry’s house in upstate New York. This is the first Christmas the siblings are without their mother, the first not at their mother’s Florida house. Over the course of the next three days, old resentments and instabilities arise as the siblings, with a gaggle of children afoot, attempt to perform familiar rituals, while also trying to decide what to do with their mother’s house, their sole inheritance. As tensions rise, the whole group is forced to come together unexpectedly when a local mother and daughter need help.
With the urgency and artfulness that cemented her previous novel, WANT, as “a defining novel of our age” (Vulture), Lynn Steger Strong once again turns her attention to the structural and systemic failings that are haunting Americans, but also to the ways in which family, friends and strangers can support each other through the gaps. FLIGHT is a novel of family, ambition, precarity, art and desire, one that forms a powerful next step from a brilliant chronicler of our time.
Editorial Content for The Last Party
Book
Teaser
THE LAST PARTY is a delicious blend of police procedural and psychological thriller about the homicide of a local celebrity in small-town Wales --- a man everyone in the village had good cause to murder.
Promo
THE LAST PARTY is a delicious blend of police procedural and psychological thriller about the homicide of a local celebrity in small-town Wales --- a man everyone in the village had good cause to murder.
About the Book
At midnight, one of them is dead. By morning, all of them are suspects.
It's the party to end all parties…but not everyone is here to celebrate.
On New Year's Eve, Rhys Lloyd has a house full of guests. His vacation homes on Mirror Lake are a success, and he's generously invited the village to drink champagne with their wealthy new neighbors.
But by midnight, Rhys will be floating dead in the freezing waters of the lake.
On New Year's Day, Ffion Morgan has a village full of suspects. The tiny community is her home, so the suspects are her neighbors, friends and family --- and Ffion has her own secrets to protect.
With a lie uncovered at every turn, soon the question isn't who wanted Rhys dead…but who finally killed him.
In a village with this many secrets, murder is just the beginning.
Editorial Content for The Light Pirate
Book
Teaser
THE LIGHT PIRATE is a hopeful, sweeping story of survival and resilience spanning one extraordinary woman’s lifetime as she navigates the uncertainty, brutality and arresting beauty of a rapidly changing world.
Promo
THE LIGHT PIRATE is a hopeful, sweeping story of survival and resilience spanning one extraordinary woman’s lifetime as she navigates the uncertainty, brutality and arresting beauty of a rapidly changing world.
About the Book
"A luminous and wrenching portrait of a frighteningly possible future," THE LIGHT PIRATE is a hopeful, sweeping story of survival and resilience spanning one extraordinary woman’s lifetime as she navigates the uncertainty, brutality and arresting beauty of a rapidly changing world (Booklist, starred review).
Florida is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels wreak gradual havoc on the state’s infrastructure, a powerful hurricane approaches a small town on the southeastern coast. Kirby Lowe, an electrical line worker; his pregnant wife, Frida; and their two sons, Flip and Lucas, prepare for the worst. When the boys go missing just before the hurricane hits, Kirby heads out into the high winds in search of his children. Left alone, Frida goes into premature labor and gives birth to an unusual child, Wanda, whom she names after the catastrophic storm that ushers her into a society closer to collapse than ever before.
As Florida continues to unravel, Wanda grows. Moving from childhood to adulthood, adapting not only to the changing landscape, but also to the people who stayed behind in a place abandoned by civilization, Wanda loses family, gains community and, ultimately, seeks adventure, love and purpose in a place remade by nature.
Told in four parts --- power, water, light and time --- THE LIGHT PIRATE mirrors the rhythms of the elements and the sometimes quick, sometimes slow dissolution of the world as we know it. It is a meditation on the changes we would rather not see, the future we would rather not greet, and a call back to the beauty and violence of an untamable wilderness.