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2024/01/02

Publishing This Week: Wild and Distant Seas

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Publishing This Week
Happy New Year!

Here we are at the start of 2024 with another year of fantastic books to look forward to; and I am once again struck by how extraordinary it is that we readers get to pick and choose from so many amazing books, each one likely representing a year or more of the author's life. I am sure that there would be many things that a visitor from the pre-printing press world of the 15th century would find extraordinary in our world today, but I think possibly the most fundamental would be our easy access to knowledge and ideas; what a privilege it is, and not something to take for granted.

Seven of this week's nine new and notable books are debuts, including two much anticipated thrillers: Anna O by Matthew Blake and The Ascent by Adam Plantinga; and Wild and Distant Seas by Tara Karr Roberts set in mid-19th century Nantucket; BookBrowse members who reviewed it for our early reader program First Impressions, rated it a very high 4.5-stars overall. Also, Pure Wit, Francesca Peacock's biography of 17th century author Margaret Cavendish, who not only published under her own name at a time when women didn't, she is also credited with writing one of the earliest works of science fiction.

You'll find brief information on all the week's books below and more about all of them, including early reviews, in our New This Week section.

Enjoy!

The BookBrowse Team


This Week's New and Notable Books
There are too many books published each week for you to read about them all, let alone read them all. So we do the legwork for you, scouring the publishers' catalogs and the pre-publication reviews to pick out what we believe to be among the best and most interesting. You can see them all in our "What's New" section.

More about how we pick and rate books.
Wild and Distant Seas book jacket
Wild and Distant Seas: A Novel
by Tara Karr Roberts


On sale Jan 2 from W.W. Norton & Company
Genre: Literary Fiction. 304 pages
Critics' Opinion: 4/5
Members' Rating: 4.5/5

A gorgeous debut, laced through with magic, following four generations of women as they seek to chart their own futures.

Read More
Reader Reviews
Diary of a Confused Feminist book jacket
Diary of a Confused Feminist
by Kate Weston


Debut Author
On sale Jan 2 from Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Genre: Literary Fiction (Young Adult). 384 pages
Critics' Opinion: 4/5

The Field Guide to the North American Teenager meets Derry Girls in this hilarious and relatable young adult novel in diary entries about a British teen determined to be a good feminist and her charming, embarrassing, and inspiring journey to figuring out how.

Read More
Verdigris book jacket
Verdigris
by Michele Mari


On sale Jan 2 from And Other Stories
Genre: Literary Fiction. 240 pages
Critics' Opinion:

An unusual coming-of-age tale from one of Italy's most renowned contemporary writers.

Read More
The Storm We Made book jacket
The Storm We Made: A Novel
by Vanessa Chan


Debut Author
On sale Jan 2 from Marysue Rucci Books
Genre: Historical Fiction. 352 pages
Critics' Opinion: 4/5

A spellbinding, sweeping novel about a Malayan mother who becomes an unlikely spy for the invading Japanese forces during WWII—and the shocking consequences that rain upon her community and family.

Read More
Anna O book jacket
Anna O: A Novel
by Matthew Blake


Debut Author
On sale Jan 2 from Harper
Genre: Thrillers. 432 pages
Critics' Opinion: 5/5

Joining the ranks of Gillian Flynn, A. J. Finn, and Alex Michaelides, Matthew Blake delivers the thriller of the year: a dark, twisty, and shocking mystery about a young woman who commits a double murder while sleepwalking, and then never opens her eyes again.

Read More
The Ascent book jacket
The Ascent
by Adam Plantinga


Debut Author
On sale Jan 2 from Grand Central Publishing
Genre: Thrillers. 352 pages
Critics' Opinion: 5/5

When a high-security prison fails, a down-on-his luck cop and the governor's daughter are going to have to team up if they're going to escape in this "jaw-dropping, authentic, and absolutely gripping" (Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times bestselling author) debut thriller from Adam Plantinga, whose first nonfiction book Lee Child praised as "truly excellent."

Read More
Sky's End book jacket
Sky's End: Above the Black
by Marc J Gregson


On sale Jan 2 from Peachtree Publishers
Genre: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History (Young Adult). 416 pages
Critics' Opinion: 5/5

Plummet into a kill-or-be-killed competition where a scrappy underdog hell-bent on revenge must claw his way to the top in this thrilling YA fantasy debut

Read More
Pure Wit book jacket
Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish
by Francesca Peacock


Debut Author
On sale Jan 2 from Pegasus Books
Genre: Biography/Memoir. 384 pages
Critics' Opinion: 5/5

A biography of the remarkable - and in her time scandalous - seventeenth-century writer Margaret Cavendish, who pioneered the science fiction novel.

Read More
The Age of Deer book jacket
The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with our Wild Neighbors
by Erika Howsare


Debut Author
On sale Jan 2 from Catapult
Genre: Science, Health and the Environment. 368 pages
Critics' Opinion: 5/5

A masterful hybrid of nature writing and cultural studies that investigates our connection with deer—from mythology to biology, from forests to cities, from coexistence to control and extermination—and invites readers to contemplate the paradoxes of how humans interact with and shape the natural world

Read More
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