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Awards & Book News

The shortlist for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction is revealed.

Winners of the Association of American Publishers PROSE Awards are announced, Publishers Weekly reports.

Winners are announced for the Christopher Awards, for work that “affirms the highest values of the human spirit.”

Shortlists for the UK’s Charles Tyrwhitt Sports Book Awards are announced.

Publishers ask Congress to defend libraries as federal library grant funding ends, Publishers Weekly reports. PW also has coverage on the furloughing of IMLS staff.

Page to Screen

April 4

William Tell, based on the 1804 play by Friedrich Schiller. Samuel Goldwyn Films. Reviews | Trailer

Reviews

Washington Post reviews Audition by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead): “Tonally and in certain surface ways, Kitamura’s new novel, Audition, is of a piece with her previous works. But the questions it provokes and the form it takes are both stark departures, which makes for a bracing, unlikely, almost auto-deconstructive conclusion to this loose trilogy of taut novels”; Rabbit Moon by Jennifer Haigh (Little, Brown; LJ starred review): “Haigh’s narrative resembles a police procedural—one that prowls widely to disclose backstories and contexts. Its foremost strength, and Haigh’s steadiest skill, is to fully inhabit disparate minds, hopscotching among genders, ages, economic classes and cultures”; Saving Five: A Memoir of Hope by Amanda Nguyen (AUWA): “The narrative loops again and again around events and memories like an orbiting planet, veering closer and farther away but never quite touching the book’s precipitating event”; Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer’s Families and the Seach for a Cure by Jennie Erin Smith (Riverhead): “Avoiding dry jargon, Smith masterfully infuses details from medical records to offer intimate glimpses into the heartbreaking paths taken by the disease as it robs people of all the little things that make them who they are”; and Bitterfrost by Bryan Gruley (Severn House): “This is a tried-and-true setup for a crime mystery. But Gruley’s story ventures beyond the mere mechanics of a murder investigation and trial. His love for small towns is heartfelt, and his writing often reflects that.”

NYT reviews John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie (Celadon): “This book is about soul, about grief and most of all about love—the love that two boys who lost their mothers far too soon have for each other, the courageous way they merge and the unfathomable power of that merger”; and Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance by Joe Dunthorne (Scribner): “In Dunthorne’s hands, these disparate moments of bearing witness—sometimes in the most literal way—add up to a remarkable, strange and complicated story, full of the shame and humor a lesser memoir might have avoided.”

LA Times reviews Make Sure You Die Screaming by Zee Carlstrom (Flatiron): “Carlstrom has written a book that feels incredibly of the moment, twining together anger and glee, hope and despair, alienation and community”

The Guardian reviews The Possibility of Tenderness: A Jamaican Memoir of Plants and Dreams by Jason Allen-Paisant (Milkweed): “Allen-Paisant’s heart is in the right place, and there are passages that prickle and sing, but The Possibility of Tenderness is too self-conscious, groomed and full of box-ticking invocations of grace/embodiment/connection to fully realise that possibility.”

Briefly Noted

Picador will reissue more than 100 novels by Georges Simenon, including his 75 Inspector Maigret mysteries, starting in spring 2025, Publishers Weekly reports.

Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy will tell the story of his life and career in a new memoir, Life, Law, & Liberty: The Early Years, due out from S. & S. on Oct. 14, Kirkus reports.

Penguin Random House has acquired an as-yet-untitled true crime book cowritten by actor and professional wrestler Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and journalist Nick Bilton, Publishers Weekly reports.

E.A. Hanks, daughter of Tom Hanks, is publishing a memoir, The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, due out from Gallery on Apr. 8; People has an excerpt. USA Today also has coverage.

CrimeReads shares an excerpt from Why I Love Horror: Essays on Horror Literature, edited by LJ horror columnist Becky Siegel Spratford, to be published by S. & S./Saga on Sept. 23.

Time publishes an excerpt from The Perfect Game: Tetris; From Russia with Love by Henk Rogers (Di Angelo).

Anthony Horowitz, author of Marble Hall Murders (Harper; LJ starred review), shares “The Books of My Life” with The Guardian.

The two most popular books in March at Reading Group Choices were A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl by Nanda Reddy (Zibby; LJ starred review) and When We Grow Up by Angelica Baker (Flatiron), Shelf Awareness reports.

NYT has “Seven New Books We Recommend This Week.”

In CrimeReads, Queer Crime Writers offers a spring roundup of new titles in the genre.

Reactor shares five underrated dystopian books from the backlist.

CrimeReads lists “Five Thrillers Where Mothers Fight for Their Children.”

NYT revisits Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, published 30 years ago.

Authors on Air

Apple TV+ has greenlighted The Husbands, based on Holly Gramazio’s bestselling 2024 debut novel, Deadline reports.

There’s a new episode of The LitHub Podcast, featuring “weird” books coming in April, poetry, and The Brothers Karamazov.

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