Edgar Award Nominees Are Announced | Book Pulse

The Edgar Award nominees and Audie Awards finalists are revealed. USA Today launches its Winter Book Challenge, a bingo card full of book categories, to help readers stretch and track their reading goals. Christian rom-coms are flourishing. Plus, new title bestsellers.

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Awards & Book News

The Edgar Award nominees are revealed.

Finalists for the Audie Awards are announced, Publishing Perspectives reports.

USA Today launches its Winter Book Challenge, a bingo card full of book categories, to help readers stretch and track their reading goals.

New Title Bestsellers

Links for the week: NYT Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers | NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers | USA Today Bestselling Books

Fiction

Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix (Berkley; LJ starred review) enchants at No. 2 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers list and No. 5 on the USA Today Bestselling Books list.

Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney (Flatiron) gets No. 6 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers list and No. 14 on the USA Today Bestselling Books list.

The Big Empty by Robert Crais (Putnam) fills spot No. 8 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers list.

Presumed Guilty by Scott Turow (Grand Central) holds No. 13 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers list.

Nonfiction

The JFK Conspiracy: The Secret Plot To Kill Kennedy—and Why It Failed by Brad Meltzer & Josh Mensch (Flatiron) reaches No. 3 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers list.

Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed To Get Old: Thoughts on Aging as a Woman by Brooke Shields with Rachel Bertsche (Flatiron) climbs to No. 4 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers list.

Hope: The Autobiography by Pope Francis with Carlo Musso (Random) ascends to No. 6 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers list.

All the President’s Money: Investigating the Secret Foreign Schemes That Made the Biden Family Rich by James Comer (Broadside) has No. 7 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers list, though some booksellers report receiving bulk orders.

Reviews

LA Times reviews Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People by Imani Perry (Ecco): “Her work walks a line between ethnography and history, although that’s too simple to describe what she is doing; let’s just call it inquiry instead. In that spirit, she ranges widely, beginning with indigo—the plant and the color—before sharing the story of Eliza Lucas, a white woman who in the 1730s began to cultivate the crop ‘at her father’s low-country Wappoo plantation just three miles outside of Charleston,’ and in the process created an industry.”

The Guardian reviews The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir by Edmund White (Bloomsbury): “The memoir’s unashamed opening sets the tone, and serves as an inoculation of sorts, preparing any potentially scandalised reader for what’s to come…. But The Loves of My Life is far more textured and variegated than its enticing subtitle (‘A Sex Memoir’) has us believe. It is also a writer’s memoir and a rumination on craft—something that complements rather than contradicts the amatory theme.”

Vulture reviews We Do Not Part by Han Kang, tr. by e. yaewon & Paige Aniyah Morris (Hogarth; LJ starred review): “By locating the military’s crimes on both physical and spiritual levels, Han refuses to consign them to the safe distance of history, lending her novel, and the very real story she is telling, the visceral immediacy of a blow and the lingering agony of a wound.”

NYT reviews Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism by Randall Fuller (Oxford Univ.): “The conversations—which one participant called ‘a vindication of woman’s right to think’—became the basis of Fuller’s groundbreaking book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century; they were, Bright Circle suggests, the foundations of the American women’s rights movement.”

LitHub selects “5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week.”

Briefly Noted

Publishers Weekly talks to theologist Pamela Ayo Yetunde, author of Dearly Beloved: Prince, Spirituality, and This Thing Called Life (Broadleaf).

In LitHub, Betty Shamieh, author of Too Soon (Avid Reader), considers the work of other Palestinian American novelists.

Robert Harris, author of Conclave, answers NYT’s “By the Book” questionnaire.

Publishers Weekly reports that Christian rom-com titles are flourishing and releases its preview of spring 2025 adult religion and spirituality books.

CrimeReads rediscovers the Golden Age detective novels of Dostoevsky translator David Magarshack, whose Big Ben Strikes Eleven: A London Mystery was recently reissued by Poisoned Pen.

Washington Post dives into The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free (Broadside), the 2024 book by secretary of defense nominee Pete Hegseth.

Publishers Weekly reports on how booksellers are reaching readers without using TikTok.

Reactor gathers “five post-apocalyptic novels set on a nearly empty Earth.”

Authors on Air

Kirkus’s Fully Booked podcast speaks with Catherine Coleman Flowers, author of Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope (Spiegel & Grau).

NPR’s Code Switch talks to Hajar Yazdiha, author of The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement (Princeton Univ.).

CBC’s Bookends with Mattea Roach interviews Amy Lin, author of the memoir Here After (Zibby; LJ starred review).

Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference podcast releases a 2024 talk by John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World (Knopf).

Tomorrow, Good Morning America will host Rebecca Yarros, author of Onyx Storm (Entangled: Red Tower), and Anthony O’Neal, author of Take Your Seat at the Table: Live an Authentic Life of Abundance, Wellness, and Freedom (Thomas Nelson).

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novel The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (Del Rey; LJ starred review) is being developed for TV at Universal; Deadline has the news.

A screen adaptation of Julie C. Dao’s “Rise of the Empress” series is in the works at Amazon, Reactor reports.

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