"The Witching Hour"

New from Mobius: The Witching Hour by Catriona McPherson.

About the book, from the publisher:

War is hovering on the horizon, and Dandy Gilver wants nothing more than to keep her friends and family close. But then a call in the night places her oldest friend Daisy at the centre of a murder investigation. With her friend's future on the line, Dandy and her fellow sleuth Alec Osbourne must race to prove her innocence.

But when they reach the idyllic Scottish village of Dirleton, residents confirm a woman was seen at the crime scene - an ancient stone called the louping stane, still spattered with the victim's blood. And the longer the detectives spend in the village the more they question Daisy's involvement. They're not getting the answers they need, but are they asking the right questions?...

Visit Catriona McPherson's website.

The Page 69 Test: Go to My Grave.

Writers Read: Catriona McPherson (November 2018).

My Book, The Movie: The Turning Tide.

The Page 69 Test: The Turning Tide.

My Book, The Movie: A Gingerbread House.

The Page 69 Test: Hop Scot.

The Page 69 Test: Deep Beneath Us.

Q&A with Catriona McPherson.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Ambivalent Pleasures"

New from Cornell University Press: Ambivalent Pleasures: Soft Drugs and Embodied Anxiety in Early Modern Europe by Scott K. Taylor.

About the book, from the publisher:

Ambivalent Pleasures explores how Europeans wrestled with the novel experience of consuming substances that could alter moods and become addictive. During the early modern period, psychotropic drugs like sugar, chocolate, tobacco, tea, coffee, distilled spirits like gin and rum, and opium either arrived in western Europe for the first time or were newly available as everyday commodities.

Drawing from primary sources in English, Dutch, French, Italian, and Spanish, Scott K. Taylor shows that these substances embodied Europeans' anxieties about race and empire, religious strife, shifting notions of class and gender roles, and the moral implications of urbanization and global trade.

Through the writings of physicians, theologians, political pamphleteers, satirists, and others, Ambivalent Pleasures tracks the emerging understanding of addiction; fears about the racial, class, and gendered implications of using these soft drugs (including that consuming them would make users more foreign); and the new forms of sociability that coalesced around their use.

Even as Europeans' moral concerns about the consumption of these drugs fluctuated, the physical and sensory experiences of using them remained a critical concern, anticipating present-day rhetoric and policy about addiction to drugs and alcohol.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Change of Place"

Coming September 17 from DAW Books: A Change of Place by Julie E. Czerneda.

About the book, from the publisher:

Return to the Aurora Award-winning, cozy romantic fantasy Night's Edge series and the rich and atmospheric world of Marrowdell

Spring in Marrowdell is a time to celebrate. Life stirs, the air warms, and Jenn Nalynn and Bannan Larmensu couldn't be happier. But spring is also fraught with change, and nowhere is this truer than the edge, where the Verge, the magical realm of dragons and sei, touches that of snow and roads. The spring equinox marks the final turn before Marrowdell’s sun starts to dominate the sky and Jenn, turn-born and sei, feels the pull to cross to the Verge.

Marrowdell’s river floods, and Jenn knows she is needed at home, but deep within the Verge a perilous force is calling her away from all she loves. For the house toad’s mighty queen has waited for the first equinox with the powers of a turn-born in the edge, and now she is ready to make her move against it.

Caught up in plots they cannot understand, Jenn and Bannan find themselves separated, and to reunite they will have to outsmart the queen herself. But even if they can foil her plan, will Marrowdell still be there when they return?

Visit Julie E. Czerneda's website.

The Page 69 Test: To Guard Against the Dark.

The Page 69 Test: The Gossamer Mage.

The Page 69 Test: Mirage.

Q&A with Julie E. Czerneda.

The Page 69 Test: To Each This World.

My Book, The Movie: To Each This World.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Making Mao's Steelworks"

New from Cambridge University Press: Making Mao's Steelworks: Industrial Manchuria and the Transnational Origins of Chinese Socialism by Koji Hirata.

About the book, from the publisher:

Located in Manchuria, the geopolitical borderland between China, the Soviet Union, and Imperial Japan, Anshan Iron and Steel Works (Angang) was Mao-era China's most important industrial enterprise. The history of Angang from 1915 to 2000 reveals the hybrid nature of China's accelerated industrialization, shaped by transnational interactions, domestic factors, and local dynamics. Utilizing archives in Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and English, Koji Hirata provides the first comprehensive history of this enterprise before, during, and after the Mao era. Through this unique lens, he explores the complex interplay of transnational influences in Mao-era China. By illustrating the symbiotic relationship between socialism and capitalism during the twentieth century, this major new study situates China within the complex global history of late industrialization.

--Marshal Zeringue

"All They Ask Is Everything"

New from Lake Union: All They Ask Is Everything: A Novel by Hadley Leggett.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this hopeful debut about the silent struggles of motherhood, three very different women want custody of the same two little girls―and learn they have more in common than the children they’re fighting for.

Determined to be a better mother than her own, Hannah has devoted her life to her daughters. She ignores her increasing exhaustion and isolation as a widowed mom―until a disastrous mistake lands the girls in foster care.

Julie is single and lonely and dreams of being a mother. After infertility issues lead her to foster parenting, she falls head over heels for Hannah’s daughters. The more she bonds with these sweet, precocious girls, the more she worries about their previous home life and becomes intent on finding a way to keep them.

Recently forced into retirement, Elaine is devastated by the way her daughter, Hannah, has shut her out. When she discovers her granddaughters are in foster care, she resolves to rescue them from the system: her one chance at a parenting do-over.

Each woman thinks she’s the best possible mother, but none understands the full truth. Old hurts, long-held secrets, and budding new relationships collide as they fight for the girls who could make them a family.

Visit Hadley Leggett's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Memes, Monsters, and the Digital Grotesque"

New from Oxford University Press: Memes, Monsters, and the Digital Grotesque by Cristina Moreno-Almeida.

About the book, from the publisher:

Memes, Monsters, and the Digital Grotesque looks at the emerging and thriving new genre of digital horror from an innovative perspective. Examining digital cultural production during the period that has been referred to as the 'Arab Winter', Moreno-Almeida delves into the memes, animated cartoons, music videos, and expressive cultures — like fashion and urban subcultures — that emerged between 2016 and 2020. In revealing concealed narratives underlying the digital lives of artists, as well as ordinary people, Moreno-Almeida explores how memes, horror, and the grotesque capture a moment infused with political and affective significance, characterized by despair, alienation, and anomie, alongside opportunities for creative experimentation made possible in the postdigital era.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Dreamers"

New from Rare Bird: The Dreamers by Ryan Elizabeth Penske.

About the book, from the publisher:

An epic tale of survival, magic, and romance...

Teenage Stella Grey has always felt an intense recurring sense of déjà vu...often plagued by strong dreams that feel more real than her waking moments. One ill-fated morning, her dream from the night before actually comes to life, as she awakens and finds her house ransacked and her mother unconscious near their broken-in front door. Her next moments are scary, shocking, and earth-shattering as she is kidnapped and delivered to a Gothic mansion, The Manor de Rêves.

Over the next few days Stella grapples with where she is and why she was taken. She is trapped by a cast of chilling characters forcing Stella and the other captured, unwilling "recruits", the "Dreamers," to endlessly sleep while The Manor staff forcibly extract their dreams. Dreams that amazingly foretell the future.

Along the way Stella befriends two other Dreamers: Nina, a fiery girl who often refuses orders and her smart yet sheepish companion, Caleb. Stella even comes face to face with one of her own recurring dreams in Charlie, a boy whose blue eyes she has seen before and cannot help but be drawn to.

These four must navigate the eerie experiments the Manor forces upon them while concocting an escape. Their morality and grit are challenged as each of the foursome comes face to face with bizarre dreams that are painting terrifying pictures of the future.

Visit Ryan Elizabeth Penske's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Required Reading"

New from Princeton University Press: Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire by Priyasha Mukhopadhyay.

About the book, from the publisher:

How ordinary forms of writing—including manuals, petitions, almanacs, and magazines—shaped the way colonial subjects understood their place in empire

In Required Reading, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay offers a new and provocative history of reading that centers archives of everyday writing from the British empire. Mukhopadhyay rummages in the drawers of bureaucratic offices and the cupboards of publishers in search of how historical readers in colonial South Asia responded to texts ranging from licenses to manuals, how they made sense of them, and what this can tell us about their experiences living in the shadow of a vast imperial power. Taking these engagements seriously, she argues, is the first step to challenging conventional notions of what it means to read.

Mukhopadhyay’s account is populated by a cast of characters that spans the ranks of colonial society, from bored soldiers to frustrated bureaucrats. These readers formed close, even intimate relationships with everyday texts. She presents four case studies: a soldier’s manual, a cache of bureaucratic documents, a collection of astrological almanacs, and a women’s literary magazine. Tracking moments in which readers refused to read, were unable to read, and read in part, she uncovers the dizzying array of material, textual, and aural practices these texts elicited. Even selectively read almanacs and impenetrable account books, she finds, were springboards for personal, world-shaping readerly relationships.

Untethered from the constraints of conventional literacy, Required Reading reimagines how texts work in the world and how we understand the very idea of reading.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Many Lies of Veronica Hawkins"

New from Pegasus Books: The Many Lies of Veronica Hawkins: A Novel by Kristina Pérez.

About the book, from the publisher:

A cursed woman. A beautiful socialite. A tragic heiress. Just who was Veronica Hawkins?

When Martina Torres arrives in the glamorous and vibrant metropolis of Hong Kong, newly married to her high school sweetheart, the world seems to be her oyster. But looks can be deceiving. Adrift in a foreign city, with no job and no friends, Martina chafes in her new role as Expat Wife.

But her luck changes when she meets Veronica Hawkins. Beautiful, sophisticated, and very, very rich, Veronica is the epitome of Old Hong Kong—the last surviving member of a British mercantile dynasty that built the city during its colonial heyday. Martina can hardly believe her fortune when she's taken under Veronica's wing and into her confidence, with Veronica helping her to find a new apartment, a new career, and most importantly, a new self.

Veronica transforms Martina's life and then, shockingly, she dies. She disappears over the side of a yacht during a party attended by Hong Kong's most influential people—yet somehow there are no witnesses.

Was it murder? Suicide? A terrible accident? What really happened to Veronica Hawkins?

Somebody knows but nobody's telling.

Visit Kristina Pérez's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Victorians and English Dialect"

New from Oxford University Press: The Victorians and English Dialect: Philology, Fiction, and Folklore by Matthew Townend.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Victorians and English Dialect tells the story of the Victorians' discovery of English dialect, and of the revaluation of local language that was brought about by the new, historical philology of the nineteenth century. Regional dialects came to be seen not as corrupt or pernicious, but rather as venerable and precious.

The book examines the work of the ground-breaking collectors of the 1840s and 1850s, who first alerted their contemporaries to the importance of local dialect - and also to the perils that threatened it with extinction. It traces the connection between dialect and literature, in the flourishing of dialect poetry and the foregrounding of regional voices in Victorian fiction. It explains how the antiquity of regional dialects cast light on the national past - the Celts, Anglo-Saxons, and Vikings - and how dialect study was also at the heart of the discovery of local folklore and oral culture: old words, old customs, old beliefs. And it tells the story of the three great monuments of Victorian dialect study that marked the apogee of regional philology: the 80 publications of the English Dialect Society (1873-96), an organization run by a committee of journalists and local historians in Manchester; the nationwide survey of The Existing Phonology of English Dialects (1889), which listened in on local speech in market squares and third-class railway carriages; and the multi-volume English Dialect Dictionary (1898-1905), which collected all the previous labours together, and made an enduring record of Victorian dialect.

--Marshal Zeringue