THOUGHTS ON THIS 'n THAT

Bestselling author Lisa Genova's latest novel, MORE OR LESS, MADDY (Gallery/ScoutPress) is about a woman diagnosed with bipolar disease who rejects the stability and approval found in a traditionally "normal" life for a career in the unstable world of stand-up comedy. Maddy Banks is just like any other stressed-out freshman at NYU. Between schoolwork, exams, navigating life in the city, and a recent breakup, it’s normal to be feeling overwhelmed. It doesn’t help that she’s always felt like the odd one out in her picture-perfect Connecticut family. But Maddy’s latest low is devastatingly low, and she goes on an antidepressant. She begins to feel good, dazzling in fact, and she soon spirals high into a wild and terrifying mania that culminates in a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. As she struggles to find her way in this new reality, navigating the complex effects bipolar has on her identity, her relationships, and her life dreams ,  Maddy will have to figure out how to manag...

  Painter, Piet Mondrian's avant-garde paintings are instantly recognizable and some of the most important work of the 20th century. In 2022, one of his pieces sold for $51 million dollars,  but in the beginning - the early1920s -  it was a different story. Cultural historian, Nicholas Fox Weber has written a five-hundred and fifty-six page tome, of this reclusive artist's work: MONDRIAN: His Life, His Art, His Quest for the Absolute (Knopf).  Mondrian was born in the Netherlands in 1872. Early in his career he sold popular paintings to survive, while honing in on his own simplified style. In 1917 he started a magazine that began a movement of straight lines and primary colors, evolving into his geometric, bold-colored abstractions. Today, his work influences architecture and fashion. When I've had the opportunity to view his paintings in museums, I've found myself overwhelmed by the complex simplicity and use of white and primary colors. MONDRIAN: His Life, His Art,...

  A witty, warmhearted novel about coming to terms with grief, taking a chance on unexpected connections, and finding family in time for the holidays For wedding singer Mel Hart, the holidays have always retained a certain magic. Her mother, Connie, always managed to pull off spectacular Santa hijinx that convinced Mel to keep believing in Santa way longer than other kids. Those moments meant everything to Mel because the rest of the year, life was unpredictable because of her mother’s alcohol use. But two weeks before Christmas, Mel gets a call from the hospital: her mother has died. Then a woman shows up on Mel's doorstep, claiming to be Connie's estranged best friend, promising to tell Mel a different narrative—one in which Connie was almost a famous country music star, if only a man hadn't gotten in the way. Instead of spending Christmas alone in her dead mother's house, Mel agrees to stay with Barb for the holidays, finding herself in the middle of Barb's compl...

  Special Agent Alex Martel is thrown back into a deadly world of deception when a series of attacks threaten to incite World War III in this action-packed thriller. While sailing across the Mediterranean, the megayacht  Aurora  is rocked with explosions, taken under siege by unknown assailants. On board are some of Europe’s wealthiest and most powerful political players, including the secretary general of Interpol, a high-ranking Finnish diplomat, and Special Agent Alex Martel—whose lethal sniper skills kick in to bring them safely to shore. Someone is waging a ruthless campaign of attacks against Finland, one of NATO’s newest members, in an attempt to throw the Alliance into turmoil. Teaming back up with CIA agent Caleb, Alex is thrust into the middle of the fray, pursuing the villains from the waters off of Monaco to the Baltic Sea and home to American soil. As the US is pulled deeper into the conflict, a global catastrophe seems inevitable. But who is really responsib...

  END OF AUGUST (AlovePress) is a captivating, multigenerational debut novel of a young woman navigating the personal trauma that ties herself, her nomadic mother, and her alcoholic grandmother together. 1979. Fifteen-year-old Aurora Taylor’s single mother prefers to leave when things get hard. She’s spent years abandoning bad boyfriends and dead-end jobs, without so much as a glance in the rearview mirror. After fifteen years in the passenger seat, Aurora needs more than two hands to count the towns she’s lived in. She’s learned to live small—it’s easier to leave when you don’t need to say goodbye. So when her mother Laine shows up at school with the car loaded, Aurora assumes her latest fling has run its course. Instead, it’s her grandpa Jay’s death calling them back to the town Laine has spent fifteen years running from. Every visit to Monroe, Indiana ends in an explosive fight. Her mother and her Gran are oil and water, and it doesn’t take Aurora long to realize Gran has fallen...

  18-year-old Janie has the world and her bright future ahead of her. She's about to leave behind the small, seaside town she's known all her life to embark on a career in London in book publishing and couldn't be more excited. She'll miss home—especially her dad. They've only had each other since her mother died years earlier. But she's about to start her life and she can't wait.      She's on her way home after her last early dawn swim in the bay when the peaceful stillness of the quiet Tuesday morning is suddenly shattered. A white van careens around the corner and onto the quiet street Janie is riding her bike along, and in one swift moment, her life is forever changed, and her dreams of a new life destroyed. She's brutally run-down by the van and left for dead on the street.        Twenty years later… Robbie Manning, international pop superstar and all-around good guy, answers the front door of his palatial home to a pair ...

  In this darkly funny and surprisingly sweet novel, I MADE IT OUT OF CLAY (MIRA)  a woman creates a golem in a desperate attempt to pretend her life is a rom-com rather than a disaster. Nothing’s going well for Eve: she’s single, turning forty, stressed at work and anxious about a recent series of increasingly creepy incidents. Most devastatingly, her beloved father died last year, and her family still won’t acknowledge their sorrow. With her younger sister’s wedding rapidly approaching, Eve is on the verge of panic. She can’t bear to attend the event alone. That’s when she recalls a strange story her Yiddish grandmother once told her, about a protector forged of desperation…and Eve, to her own shock, manages to create a golem. At first, everything seems great. The golem is indeed protective—and also attractive. But when they head out to a rural summer camp for the family wedding, Eve’s lighthearted rom-com fantasy swiftly mudslides into something much darker. With moments of...

  A gripping new novel inspired by a real place and events from the author’s family,  Trouble Island  (Minotaur) is the standalone suspense debut from historical mystery writer, Sharon Short. Many miles from anywhere in the middle of Lake Erie, Trouble Island serves as a stop-off for gangsters as they run between America and Canada. The remote isle is also the permanent home to two women: Aurelia Escalante, who serves as a maid to Rosita, lady of the mansion and wife to the notorious prohibition gangster, Eddie McGee. In the freezing winter of 1932, the women anticipate the arrival of Eddie and his strange coterie: his right-hand man, a doctor, a cousin, a famous actor, and a rival gangster who Rosita believes murdered their only son. Aurelia wants nothing more than to escape Trouble Island, but she is hiding a secret of her own. She is in fact not a maid, but a gangster’s wife in hiding, as she runs from the murder she committed five years ago. Her friend Rosita took her...

  To protect their lavish allowances, four charismatic sisters in their thirties try to seduce, cajole, and mislead their less well-off neighbor Benjamin, who their father has hired to investigate an attempt to smother him while he was in the hospital recovering from a car crash.  Their feckless brother responds by threatening Benjamin with a shotgun, while their socialite mother falsely confesses to the crime. Trying to dominate everyone is their father, a wheeling, dealing, helicopter-flying entrepreneur who is afraid he might have hallucinated the smothering, even more afraid that it might have been real, and terrified that he might be losing control of his family and fortune. Desperate, he implements a devious and dastardly scheme . . . Played out on the fashionable Connecticut shore and Manhattan's Upper East Side, the shenanigans of the entitled rich don't prevent Benjamin from finding the truth, and maybe even love. EXCERPT             ...