"Her Turn"

New from Harper Perennial: Her Turn: A Novel by Katherine Ashenburg.

About the book, from the publisher:

A delightful novel in the vein of Younger and The Unbreakables, with a hint of Nora Ephron, about a journalist who stumbles into an unusual relationship with the woman married to her former husband.

A journalist in Washington, DC, Liz has turned lemons into lemonade after her husband walked out on her a decade ago. She likes her life—she’s the editor of My Turn, a weekly column in which readers write about their lives, has a few romantic nibbles—some better than others—a good relationship with her teen-aged son, and has come to terms with the shock and heartbreak of her divorce.

Or so she thinks.

One day at work, she receives a letter for the column she can’t ignore, because it’s written by her ex-husband’s current wife—AKA the other woman. It is the beginning of an unexpected correspondence between the two women—but only Liz knows the truth about their connection. Could it be she still cares? How far will she take this unusual relationship? And what happens if the truth comes out?

Her Turn is an immensely readable, joyful novel about fidelity and forgiveness that explores one woman’s second act in life, and the ties that still bind her to the first.

Visit Katherine Ashenburg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Just Get on the Pill"

New from the University of California Press: Just Get on the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics by Krystale E. Littlejohn.

About the book, from the publisher:

Understanding the social history and urgent social implications of gendered compulsory birth control, an unbalanced and unjust approach to pregnancy prevention.

The average person concerned about becoming pregnant spends approximately thirty years trying to prevent conception. People largely do so alone using prescription birth control, a situation often taken for granted in the United States as natural and beneficial. In Just Get On the Pill, a keenly researched and incisive examination, Krystale Littlejohn investigates how birth control becomes a fundamentally unbalanced and gendered responsibility. She uncovers how parents, peers, partners, and providers draw on narratives of male and female birth control methods to socialize cisgender women into sex and ultimately into shouldering the burden for preventing pregnancy.

Littlejohn draws on extensive interviews to document this gendered compulsory birth control—a phenomenon in which people who give birth are held accountable for preventing and resolving pregnancies in gender-constrained ways. She shows how this gendered approach encroaches on reproductive autonomy and poses obstacles for preventing disease. While diverse cisgender women are the focus, Littlejohn shows that they are not the only ones harmed by this dynamic. Indeed, gendered approaches to birth control also negatively impact trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming people in overlooked ways. In tracing the divisive politics of pregnancy prevention, Littlejohn demonstrates that the gendered division of labor in birth control is not natural. It is unjust.

Visit Krystale E. Littlejohn's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Her Last Hope"

New from Lake Union: Her Last Hope by Louise Guy.

About the book, from the publisher:

Will new friends almost ruined by their husbands find the strength to fight for each other?

Abi’s life has been turned upside down by her husband’s death―in more ways than she could ever have imagined. With his dodgy business dealings now exposed, gone is her glamorous lifestyle and the trust of her family and friends. How could the man who said he loved her have betrayed her so spectacularly?

Abi’s new neighbour Lucinda and her four-year-old son Max are struggling to overcome their own betrayal by Max’s violent, vengeful father. The pieces of Lucinda’s life seem finally to be coming together when she is given a new identity and finds an ally in Abi. But an unexpected twist throws both women’s lives into fresh turmoil.

Faced with a tougher time than they ever thought possible, Abi and Lucinda turn to each other. It’s an unlikely friendship built on common ground―but is it strong enough to help them rebuild their lives from rock bottom?

Visit Louise Guy's website.

The Page 69 Test: A Life Worth Living.

My Book, The Movie: A Life Worth Living.

Q&A with Louise Guy (November 2020).

My Book, The Movie: A Winning Betrayal.

The Page 69 Test: A Winning Betrayal.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Intimate Inequalities"

New from Rutgers University Press: Intimate Inequalities: Millennials' Romantic Relationships in Contemporary Times by Cristen Dalessandro.

About the book, from the publisher:

When it comes to the topic of romantic and sexual intimacy, social observers are often quick to throw criticisms at millennials. However, we know little about millennials’ own hopes, fears, struggles, and triumphs in their relationships from the perspectives of millennials themselves. Intimate Inequalities uses millennials’ own stories to explore how they navigate gender, race, social class, sexuality, and age identities and expectations in their relationships. Situating millennials’ lives within contemporary social and cultural conditions in the United States, Intimate Inequalities takes an intersectional approach to examining how millennials challenge—or rather, uphold—social inequalities in their lives as they come into their own as full adults. Intimate Inequalities provides an in-depth look into the intimate lives of one group of millennials living in the United States, demystifying what actually goes on behind closed doors, and arguing that millennials’ private lives can reveal much about their ability to navigate inequalities in their lives more broadly.

Visit Cristen Dalessandro's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"No Gods, No Monsters"

New from Blackstone Publishing: No Gods, No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull.

About the book, from the publisher:

One October morning, Laina gets the news that her brother has been shot and killed by Boston cops. But what looks like a case of police brutality soon reveals something much stranger. Monsters are real. And they want everyone to know it.

As creatures from myth and legend come out of the shadows, seeking safety through visibility, their emergence sets off a chain of seemingly unrelated events. Members of a local werewolf pack are threatened into silence. A professor follows a missing friend’s trail of bread crumbs to a mysterious secret society. And a young boy with unique abilities seeks refuge in a pro-monster organization with secrets of its own. Meanwhile, more people start disappearing, suicides and hate crimes increase, and protests erupt globally, both for and against the monsters.

At the center is a mystery no one thinks to ask: Why now? What has frightened the monsters out of the dark?

The world will soon find out.

Visit Cadwell Turnbull's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant"

New from Oxford University Press: Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant (Spiritual Lives series) by D. G. Hart.

About the book, from the publisher:

Benjamin Franklin grew up in a devout Protestant family with limited prospects for wealth and fame. By hard work, limitless curiosity, native intelligence, and luck (what he called "providence"), Franklin became one of Philadelphia's most prominent leaders, a world recognized scientist, and the United States' leading diplomat during the War for Independence. Along the way, Franklin embodied the Protestant ethics and cultural habits he learned and observed as a youth in Puritan Boston. Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant follows Franklin's remarkable career through the lens of the trends and innovations that the Protestant Reformation started (both directly and indirectly) almost two centuries earlier. His work as a printer, civic reformer, institution builder, scientist, inventer, writer, self-help dispenser, politician, and statesmen was deeply rooted in the culture and outlook that Protestantism nurtured. Through its alternatives to medieval church and society, Protestants built societies and instilled habits of character and mind that allowed figures such as Franklin to build the life that he did. Through it all, Franklin could not assent to all of Protestantism's doctrines or observe its worship, but for most of his life he acknowledged his debt to his creator, revelled in the natural world guided by providence, and conducted himself in a way (imperfectly) to merit divine approval. In this biography, D. G. Hart recognizes Franklin as a cultural or non-observant Protestant, someone who thought of himself as a Presbyterian, ordered his life as other Protestants did, sometimes went to worship services, read his Bible, and prayed, but could not go all the way and join a church.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Hiding Place"

New from Polis Books: Hiding Place by Meghan Holloway.

About the book, from the publisher:

Hector Lewis is obsessed with uncovering the truth of what happened to his wife and daughter fifteen years ago. The man he believed responsible for their disappearance is dead, and the trail has once again grown cold. Until he finds a long-hidden message from the past. Unraveling the clues his wife left behind leads Hector deep into the wild borderlands of Yellowstone National Park and into the dark labyrinth of his own obsession with finding his missing girls.

Faye Anders is in hiding. The remote town of Raven’s Gap, Montana, has been the perfect refuge. Until her young son goes missing on a school field trip. Desperation forces her to make a choice that will shatter the illusion of safety she has carefully built and bring the powerful man she fled five years ago straight to her doorstep.

Hector is a man chasing answers. Faye is a woman willing to do whatever it takes to keep her son safe. Caught in the crosshairs of a man who is determined to silence them both, they discover some men will kill to keep their secrets buried. But when the past comes knocking, there is no place to hide.

Visit Meghan Holloway's website, and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

My Book, The Movie: Once More Unto the Breach.

The Page 69 Test: Once More Unto the Breach.

Writers Read: Meghan Holloway (May 2019).

Q&A with Meghan Holloway.

The Page 69 Test: Hunting Ground.

My Book, The Movie: Hunting Ground.

--Marshal Zeringue

"All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days"

New from Little, Brown and Company: All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner.

About the book, from the publisher:

Born and raised in Milwaukee, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six when she enrolled in a PhD program in Germany and witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. In 1932, she began holding secret meetings in her apartment—a small band of political activists that by 1940 had grown into the largest underground resistance group in Berlin. She recruited working-class Germans into the resistance, helped Jews escape, plotted acts of sabotage, and collaborated in writing leaflets that denounced Hitler and called for revolution. Her coconspirators circulated through Berlin under the cover of night, slipping the leaflets into mailboxes, public restrooms, phone booths. When the first shots of the Second World War were fired, she became a spy, couriering top-secret intelligence to the Allies. On the eve of her escape to Sweden, she was ambushed by the Gestapo. At a Nazi military court, a panel of five judges sentenced her to six years at a prison camp, but Hitler overruled the decision and ordered her execution. On February 16, 1943, she was strapped to a guillotine and beheaded.

Historians identify Mildred Harnack as the only American in the leadership of the German resistance, yet her remarkable story has remained almost unknown until now.

Harnack’s great-great-niece Rebecca Donner draws on her extensive archival research in Germany, Russia, England, and the U.S. as well as newly uncovered documents in her family archive to produce this astonishing work of narrative nonfiction. Fusing elements of biography, real-life political thriller, and scholarly detective story, Donner brilliantly interweaves letters, diary entries, notes smuggled out of a Berlin prison, survivors’ testimony, and a trove of declassified intelligence documents into a powerful, epic story, reconstructing the moral courage of an enigmatic woman nearly erased by history.

Visit Rebecca Donner's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"One Year Gone"

New from Lake Union Publishing: One Year Gone: A Novel by Avery Bishop.

About the book, from the publisher:

A mother will risk everything to find her missing daughter in this twisty thriller from the author of Girl Gone Mad.

“Sometimes teenagers run away…Give her a few days. She’ll be back.”

That’s what the police tell Jessica Moore when her seventeen-year-old daughter, Wyn, vanishes. All signs point to this being true. But days become weeks. Weeks become months. And Jessica begins to fear the terrible truth―that she may never see her daughter again.

Then, one year later, when all hope seems lost, Jessica gets a flurry of text messages from Wyn that freeze her blood: mom. please help. i think he’s going to kill me. But Wyn’s terrified plea comes with a warning not to call the police. Her kidnapper wears a badge.

As Jessica’s fears are raised again, so are the stakes. Delving into the months leading up to Wyn’s disappearance, Jessica stumbles upon information that could put her own life in danger. With each revelation, the nightmare deepens. Now she must decide just how far she’ll go to bring her daughter home.

Visit Avery Bishop's website.

The Page 69 Test: Girl Gone Mad.

Q&A with Avery Bishop.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bright Star, Green Light"

New from Yale University Press: Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful Works and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald by Jonathan Bate.

About the book, from the publisher:

An immensely pleasurable biography of two interwoven, tragic figures: John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald

In this radiant dual biography, Jonathan Bate explores the fascinating parallel lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald, writers who worked separately—on different continents, a century apart, in distinct genres—but whose lives uncannily echoed.

Not only was Fitzgerald profoundly influenced by Keats, titling Tender is the Night and other works from the poet’s lines, but the two shared similar fates: both died young, loved to drink, were plagued by tuberculosis, were haunted by their first love, and wrote into a new decade of release, experimentation, and decadence. Both were outsiders and Romantics, longing for the past as they sped blazingly into the future.

Using Plutarch’s ancient model of “parallel lives,” Jonathan Bate recasts the inspired lives of two of the greatest and best-known Romantic writers. Commemorating both the bicentenary of Keats’ death and the centenary of the Roaring Twenties, this is a moving exploration of literary influence.

Visit Jonathan Bate's website.

--Marshal Zeringue