Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Highlights from Random House's spring list, and more randomness

The blogosphere is the fastest means of information transmission around, I swear. My review of Sara Donati's Queen of Swords is posted on her blog, though it's not out yet in Booklist. It'll probably be out in the Sept. 15 or October 1 issue.

One of the nice ladies from Acquisitions brought a huge box from Random House to my office yesterday afternoon. Okay, so I'm weird, but I always look forward to this box arriving, because it has a couple dozen catalogs from all the RH imprints and other publishers for which they act as distributors. However, since I spent the afternoon figuring out whether a new e-journal package deal would save our library money, rather than drooling over forthcoming novels, I took the box home. Here are some highlights.

- Sheridan Hay's The Secret of Lost Things (Doubleday, March) - "a young Australian woman takes a job at a vast, chaotic emporium of used and rare books in NYC and finds herself caught up in the search for a lost Melville manuscript." Not historical, but could be fun.

- Michael Wallner's April in Paris (Doubleday/Talese, April) - written up as a suspenseful love story about a German soldier and a French Resistance fighter in occupied Paris. Part of the publisher's new series of international fiction, something I applaud. This one's from Germany.

- Alison Weir's Innocent Traitor, about Lady Jane Grey, will be out from Ballantine in February but everyone seems to know this already.

- Judith Merkle Riley's long-awaited The Water-Devil (Three Rivers, Jan) is the 3rd volume in her Margaret of Ashbury trilogy.

I haven't posted about most of these on the HNS forthcoming books page. I may do that this coming weekend.

This has nothing to do with historical fiction, but I want a copy of linguistics guru David Crystal's The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left, and not just because I enjoy the title.

Meanwhile, I'm about halfway done with Beatrice May's Sister to Jane, a very short Robert Hale novel about Lady Katherine Grey that I'd hoped to review here, but it's not very good and I probably won't finish it. It's a quick read, though. (Does that count as saying something nice?)

3 comments:

  1. LOL! I suppose that counts as nice. {g}

    It's a good thing you're the reviewer and not me. I never did stick to the "if you don't have anything nice to say" directive very well.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Heh. Me neither, really. More like, I'm not going to go to the trouble of reviewing a novel for the blog if it's that bad. I could finish it, but I've got plenty of other books to read instead!

    ReplyDelete
  3. And I just this moment read your last post on being nice in reviews too! Perhaps I should have read that before I blogged today...{sigh} Ah well. I do believe in being honest if I'm clear it's just my opinion!

    ReplyDelete