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News & Book Club Picks

The 10th-anniversary edition of The Nightingale by patron favorite Kristin Hannah (St. Martin’s) releases next week. Hannah joined MSNBC this morning to talk about the new edition.

The attempted-murder trial of the man accused of stabbing Salman Rushdie onstage in 2022 begins, NPR reports. CBC also has coverage.

BookRiot suggests 11 book club picks for February 2025.

Confessions by Catherine Airey (Mariner) is the new Good Housekeeping book club pick.

BookBrowse shares top 10 book club recommendations of the week.

Shelf Awareness rounds up the top-selling self-published titles for last week.

AAP, IPA, and other groups release a joint statement calling for AI to respect copyright, Publishers Weekly reports.

Scotland’s national poet Peter Mackay expresses concerns about AI and new writing. BBC has the story.

Macmillan Publishers CEO Jon Yaged warns on the dangers of banning books, Publishing Perspectives reports.

Simon & Schuster will distribute University of New Mexico Press books, beginning in July, Shelf Awareness reports.

Reviews

NYT reviews Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War by Lyndal Roper (Basic): “One of the many merits of Summer of Fire and Blood is how Roper—despite being the author of a luminous biography of Luther—shifts the focus away from the face-off between Luther and Müntzer and back onto the peasants themselves, dealing resourcefully with the fact that few of them left any written record of their time in the sun”; Casualties of Truth by Lauren Francis-Sharma (Atlantic Monthly): “Despite the pain chronicled in its pages, and despite having no easy answer to the complex question of what real accountability looks like, the book does contain a shred of hope: Though the truth alone is not justice, there is still freedom in it”; Talk to Me: Lessons from a Family Forged by History by Rich Benjamin (Pantheon): “Despite the errors of history and geography, the goofy novelizations, the off-key lyric arias, Talk to Me is, ultimately, a moving and valuable book”; and Beartooth by Callan Wink (Spiegel & Grau): “Wink offers instead a rawer, much less melodramatic version of the contemporary West in which the main challenge is not to conserve power and perpetuate a dynasty but to put new tires on the old truck, fill the propane tank for winter and fix the leaking roof.” Plus, NYT reviews the reissue of 1961 novel The Pilgrimage by John Broderick (McNally Editions): “A sour and lasting portrait of what boils beneath kept-up appearances, Broderick’s once-banned novel inhabits the moral middle ground of the apparently righteous, displaying the desires and confusions of his characters’ inner lives without much mercy, but without judgment, either.”

Autostraddle reviews The Last Bookstore on Earth by Lily Braun-Arnold (Delacorte): “Bookstores represent a lot to different people—Braun-Arnold captures the magic of your local indie bookstore so well. It’s a place of comfort, of joy…well, it’s a place you feel protected.”

The Guardian reviews Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary by Victoria Amelina (St. Martin’s): “The reader’s confusion, experienced by me as a terrible slow-wittedness, is one of the book’s most powerful effects. It slows you down. It transmits a powerful sense of chaos. It compels attentiveness, as the TV news does not.”

Briefly Noted

LitHub highlights 27 new books for the week.

PEN America releases a Black History Month reading list.

The Bookseller canvases popular romance books on BookTok.

People suggests 11 new romance books to pair with classic movies for Valentine’s Day.

Reactor shares “Five Horror Novels That Feature the Perfect Dash of Romance.”

PopSugar highlights 23 enemies-to-lovers books.

ElectricLit has “8 Contemporary Novels with Omniscient Narrators.”

CrimeReads examines “the power of humor in horror and thrillers.”

Authors on Air

Alejandro Heredia discusses his new book, Loca (S. & S.), with B&N’s Poured Over podcast.

Thomas Ray’s novella Silencer (NeoText) will be adapted for the big screen, Deadline reports.

Mercedes Ron’s Culpables novels will get an English-language treatment at Netflix after the success of the Spanish-language adaptations. Deadline has the story.

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