"Etna"

New from Scribner: Etna: A Novel by Paul Yoon.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Beloved author and winner of The Story Prize, Paul Yoon, is back with the unforgettable story of a working dog, Etna, who, after a devastating war, embarks on an odyssey in the hopes of returning home.

Set in a fictional country in the present day, this is a story told through the eyes of an ex-military dog, Etna. After surviving years of a devastating war, Etna decides one night to leave the men he has fought alongside for years and return home—to the place where he was taken from when he was young, in the thin but persistent hope that if a home exists for him, it might be there.

Thus begins an exhilarating odyssey told through the eyes of a dog as he traverses across ruined landscapes and fights to survive in a world that, even in peacetime, proves to be just as precarious. Along the way, he encounters other animals and humans who are attempting to figure out how to start again. What makes a life when there is no home to go back to? How do we begin to trust each other again after such profound loss?

This is a novel about the power of an idea, about never giving up, and ultimately a novel about finding hope in the most dire of times.

Visit Paul Yoon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Animal Minds, Other Minds"

New from University of Virginia Press: Animal Minds, Other Minds: Nonhuman Intelligence and Narrative Form in American Fiction by Victoria Googasian.

About the book, from the publisher:

How a fascination with animal consciousness, perception, and intelligence shaped American fiction in the twentieth century

Animal Minds, Other Minds upends a common assumption: that the minds encountered in fiction are always in some sense fundamentally human. Readers, writers, critics, and narrative theorists have surmised that when fiction turns its attention to the inner lives of its characters, it does so with the aim of revealing their recognizable humanity. This book tells a different story. The narrative styles of American fiction show a growing awareness that human subjectivity exists within a multispecies ecology of minds. The science of animal minds, argues Victoria Googasian, has played a central role in building fiction’s capacity to imagine cognitive diversity, both within our own species and in the wider world of sentience.

The multispecies world of twentieth-century American literature exhibits a clear recognition that intelligence can take more than one form. From the fragmented personhood of Jack London’s canine heroes, to the associative intelligence of William Faulkner’s Compson family, to the rabid opacity of Zora Neale Hurston’s Tea Cake, to the sociobiological play of Octavia Butler’s shapeshifters, American fiction abounds with characters whose animalized minds structure the narrative techniques that unfold their behaviors.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Five Things I See"

New from Severn House: Five Things I See (A Detective Grace Hartwell Thriller) by Wendy Church.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A city-wide conspiracy. A serial killer on the loose. A detective battling her own demons. Everything comes together in Five Things I See, the first installment in a brand-new thrilling police procedural series by Wendy Church.

If pain is the price of strength, Grace is one of the strongest people you will ever meet.

Five crime scenes connected by a visible pattern.

A serial killer terrorizes the citizens of Jacksonville, and the entire police force is focused on cracking the case―but will they be able to stop the murderer before more bodies are found?

Three suspects who all tell a different story.

Homicide detective Grace Hartwell’s knack for reading people has never let her down―until now. Is the killer playing a clever game or is she losing touch with herself?

One determined detective with a taste for justice.

Grace's life is dedicated to her work. But she has a dark secret―a secret that could jeopardize not only her job but her life...

For fans of MICHAEL CONNELLY, LISA REGAN, RUTH WARE, and VAL McDERMID, and the Netflix miniseries Unbelievable―Five Things I See is a fast-paced and twisty thriller with a complex female detective lead.

Visit Wendy Church's website.

The Page 69 Test: Murder on the Spanish Seas.

Q&A with Wendy Church.

My Book, The Movie: Murder on the Spanish Seas.

The Page 69 Test: Murder Beyond the Pale.

Writers Read: Wendy Church.

The Page 69 Test: Knife Skills.

My Book, The Movie: Knife Skills.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Play to Survive"

New from Stanford University Press: Play to Survive: Disaster Preparedness Along the Ring of Fire by Chika Watanabe.

About the book, from the publisher:

We live in a fragile world. This much is evident as stories abound of natural disasters that wipe out communities in an instant. How can we survive the future on such a planet, amid intensifying climate change? This question is particularly poignant along the Ring of Fire, a tectonic belt in the Pacific region that routinely faces some of the most devastating disasters in the world. Based on ethnographic research spanning seven years, Play to Survive examines the work of preparedness training in Japan and Chile, two primary nations along the Ring of Fire that experience frequent and intense disasters. Experts from these countries have often collaborated to create some of the most advanced disaster preparedness systems in the world. Chika Watanabe traces how local city officials, NGOs, and members of neighborhood and grassroots organizations are, counterintuitively, using fun, playful methods to teach preparation for our darkest hours. While there are many important studies of post-disaster response, much less is written about the future-orientation of disaster preparedness. This book shows how a transnational group of preparedness experts orient people toward potential disasters in gentle and hopeful ways, focusing on improvisation and repair. In a time of political and environmental destabilization globally, this book offers a unique look at how playful preparedness can reset relationships to environments, to the future, and to each other.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Seeing Red"

New from Thomas & Mercer: Seeing Red (DI Nick Dixon Crime) by Damien Boyd.

About the novel, from the publisher:

From the bestselling DI Nick Dixon crime series, secrets, lies, and a truth buried in a borrowed grave.

A body is found in a newly dug grave in a rural Somerset churchyard. The murder matches a series of brutal attacks blamed on a serial killer in Devon, and a DNA profile neatly points to the same suspect.

Fresh from another bruising encounter with the Professional Standards Department, Acting Detective Superintendent Nick Dixon knows the scene is wrong and the evidence staged―someone else has engineered this killing to silence the victim.

Ordered not to overcomplicate the investigation, and with his judgement under scrutiny, Dixon must choose between the convenient solution or digging deeper to uncover a truth someone is desperate to hide.

Visit Damien Boyd's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Rebellious Citizens"

New from University of Nebraska Press: Rebellious Citizens: Social Upheaval and Democracy in Revolutionary Mexico by Ulices Piña.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Rebellious Citizens Ulices Piña shows that democracy in Mexico has never been the exclusive domain of elites, nor confined to the ballot box. Focusing on the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20, Piña explores how citizens forged a substantive democratic culture in the crucible of three successive social upheavals that shook the established social order in the central western state of Jalisco during the 1920s and 1930s―a formative period in the nation’s political history.

Piña examines how ordinary Mexicans actively shaped the political process, made their own history, and fought for equality in the country’s long fight for democracy. The long-term effects of the recurring uprisings in Jalisco were central to the new political system produced by the postrevolutionary state: After each rebellion, authorities consolidated institutional power, elected officials debated the strictures of government, and ordinary people grappled with the promise and limits of political emancipation. Because of the contradictions that arose from the creation of this modern political system, especially those that emerged at the nexus of democratic inclusion and authoritarian rule, seemingly powerless populations claimed equality, exercised participation rights, and demanded respect, even amid the violence and surveillance the state deployed against marginal groups to achieve its goals. Rebellious Citizens brings into focus the struggles of ordinary people to experiment with new ways of doing politics to remake the nation.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Meet Me in the Garden"

New from Flatiron Books: Meet Me in the Garden: A Novel by Nina LaCour.

About the novel, from the publisher:

From BESTSELLING, AWARD-WINNING author Nina LaCour comes a GORGEOUS FAMILY STORY about self-discovery and love in all forms, inspired by the author's Creole roots

New Orleans, 1944. Odette has always been one of the Honore sisters, glamorous and admired in their Creole community. But while Odette’s older sisters are content to be wives and mothers, Odette has always wanted something else. It is only with her beloved cousin, Delphine, that Odette can tell her secret: she is in love with a woman, and she longs to be an artist. Delphine has a secret lover, too, a white man. In the hidden garden they’ve discovered, Odette and Delphine can dream of futures full of passion and freedom.

But five years later, Odette's life is nothing like what she'd planned. She's a widowed mother, living in Los Angeles, and she and Delphine, who is passing as white, have spiraled away from each other. When Delphine reaches a breaking point, Odette must make a shattering choice to try to hold her family together.

Profound and expansive, a story of love and longing, art and motherhood, friendship and desire, Meet Me in the Garden is a decades-spanning tour de force, inspired by the author’s family and tracing the history of the Great Migration.

Visit Nina LaCour's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Beholden to Beauty"

New from Oxford University Press: Beholden to Beauty: Aesthetic Value and the Authority of Pleasure by Keren Gorodeisky.

About the book, from the publisher:

Beauty surrounds us―in art that captivates, in landscapes that move us, and in countless aspects of life. Yet beauty remains philosophically puzzling. How can something so deeply tied to feeling also demand rational responsiveness? How can aesthetic value be at once personal, social, and universal?

In Beholden to Beauty, Keren Gorodeisky confronts these questions with rigor and insight. She argues that our sense of being beholden to beauty―and its inseparable connection to feeling―is not a paradox but a key to understanding the nature of aesthetic value. Beauty, like admirability or suffering, calls for emotional responsiveness. To be true to beauty is not merely to recognize its worth but to feel a distinctive kind of pleasure―one that belongs to a rational capacity for feeling, a core dimension of human agency. Rejecting views that reduce aesthetic value to the goodness of pleasure or the goodness of the capacity for feeling it, Gorodeisky shows that the pleasure that is responsive to beauty is not opaque to the world but rather revelatory of it. In doing so, she resolves some of the deepest puzzles about beauty, revealing it as intelligible only in light of our shared human capacity for feeling.

Profound, original, and elegantly argued, Beholden to Beauty offers a transformative account of why beauty matters―and why our response to it is essential to who we are.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Just the Good Parts"

Coming September 29 from Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers: Just the Good Parts by Robbie Couch.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the New York Times bestselling author of If I See You Again Tomorrow comes a stunningly romantic, speculative novel about a teen looking for his missing dad, who keeps getting pulled into others’ memories and crossing paths with a handsome stranger who also doesn’t belong there.

Caspen Coolsby’s dad is missing. But even though it’s only been a few months, everyone has given up on finding him. Except for Caspen.

He finally gets a break in the case when he meets his new upstairs neighbors and discovers he can somehow transport himself into each of the college students’ memories using candle scents that remind them of important moments. No one loved candles more than his dad, so Caspen is sure there must be clues pointing toward where to find him hidden in the memories.

His thinking hits a snag, though, when a handsome boy named Lars keeps popping up in memories where he also doesn’t belong. As the lines between memory and reality begin to blur, Caspen can’t help but fall for the mysterious boy who keeps chipping away at the rose-colored lens he’s always seen life through. But will Caspen be able to find his dad and his crush outside of these stolen moments if it means reliving the hard truths of his past and not just the good parts?

Visit Robbie Couch's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Tempering Power"

New from Cambridge University Press: Tempering Power: Beyond the Rule of Law by Martin Krygier.

About the book, from the publisher:

What is the rule of law for? What does that take? Why does it matter? There is little clarity and less agreement about any of these questions. That is partly because they are hard, but it is also because we generally do not think especially well about them. Yet they are rarely more important than today, and there are better ways to think. In this seminal book, Martin Krygier combines an account of conventional assumptions, a fundamental critique of them, and an alternative way of thinking about the purpose, the value, and the significance of the rule of law, in light of the goal it should serve: tempering power. In this time of widespread intemperate abuse of power throughout the world, these concerns are not merely analytical, academic, or even legal. They are social, political, and moral, and everyone's business. And the stakes are high.

--Marshal Zeringue