This is the high point of summer, and many great books have come out and will be released this August. There are a few notable titles, such as the upcoming unauthorized biography of Bill Gates, but of America’s obsession with tech geniuses. There is also a highly anticipated release from Abi Daré and Jodi Picoult.
Under the Surface by Diana Urban
An epic survival thriller about four teens who get lost in the Paris catacombs for days—a gripping and propulsive story of love, danger, betrayal, and hope… even when all seems lost.
“Tense and fast-moving, with a unique setting and compelling characters, Under the Surface is Diana Urban’s best yet.”—Karen M. McManus, #1 New York Times bestselling author of One of Us Is Lying
Ruby fears confessing her feelings for Sean and risking him crushing her heart.
Sean is excited to spend a week with Ruby in Paris on their senior class trip, and he’ll wait until she’s ready to take things further.
But when Ruby’s best friend sneaks out the first night to meet a mysterious French boy, Ruby goes after her with two classmates but caves to another temptation: attending the mystery boy’s exclusive party in the Paris catacombs, the intricate web of tunnels beneath the city, home to six million long-dead Parisians. Only they never reach the party.
Underground, as something sinister chases them, they get lost in the endless maze of bones, uncovering dark secrets about the catacombs…..and each other. And if they can’t find a way out, they’ll die in the dark beneath the City of Light.
Aboveground, Sean races to find the girl he loves as a media frenzy over the four missing teens begins.
From award-winning author and rising YA star Diana Urban comes a twisty tale of four teens lost in the dark beneath the City of Light and the race to find them.
Tiger, Tiger: His Life, As It’s Never Been Told Before by James Patterson
On April 13, 1986, ten-year-old Tiger Woods watched his idol, Jack Nicklaus, win his record sixth Masters.
Just over a decade later, chants of “Ti-ger, Ti-ger!” ring out as the twenty-one-year-old wins his first Green Jacket.
He blazes an incredible path, winning fourteen major titles (second only to Nicklaus himself) by the time he’s thirty- three, smashing records and raising standards.
Then come multiple public scandals and potentially career-ending injuries.
The once-assured champion becomes an all-American underdog. “YouTube golfer” is how his two children know their father—winless since 2013—until he wins the 2019 Masters, his fifteenth major, before their eyes.
But the story doesn’t end there.
Tiger, Tiger is the first full-scale Woods biography of the decade. In James Patterson’s hands, this story is a hole-in-one thriller.
The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
Early morning, August 1975, a camp counsellor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.
As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.
The Wedding People by Alison Espach
It is a propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help her start anew.
It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn alone, wearing a green dress and gold heels, with no bag in sight. Everyone in the lobby immediately mistakes her for one of the wedding people, but she’s the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and possible disaster the weekend might yield except for Phoebe and Phoebe’s plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other.
In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.
There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, erudite but ruthless King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives.
In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur’s only chance of escaping poverty is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a leading publisher, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, and one book in particular catches his interest: Nineveh and Its Remains.
In 2014, in Turkey, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl, was diagnosed with a rare disorder that would soon cause her to go deaf. Before that happens, her grandmother is determined to baptize her in a sacred Iraqi temple. But with the rising presence of ISIS and the destruction of the family’s ancestral lands along the Tigris, Narin is running out of time.
In 2018 London, the newly divorced Zaleekah, a hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband. Orphaned and raised by her wealthy uncle, Zaleekah had decided to take her own life in one month until a curious book about her homeland changed everything.
A dazzling feat of storytelling, There Are Rivers in the Sky entwines these outsiders with a single drop of water, a drop which manifests across the centuries. Both a source of life and harbinger of death, rivers—the Tigris and the Thames—transcend history, transcend fate: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”
House of Glass by Sarah Pekkanen
House of Glass is the next thrilling novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Sarah Pekkanen.
On the outside, they were part of the golden family with the perfect life. On the inside, they built the perfect lie.
A young nanny who plunged to her death, or was she pushed? A nine-year-old girl who collects sharp objects and refuses to speak. A lawyer whose job it is to uncover who in the family is a victim and who is a murderer. But how can you find out the truth when everyone here is lying?
Rose Barclay is a nine-year-old girl who witnessed the possible murder of her nanny – amid her parent’s bitter divorce – and immediately stopped speaking. Stella Hudson is a best interest attorney who was appointed to serve as counsel for children in custody cases. She never accepts clients under thirteen due to her traumatic childhood, but Stella’s mentor, a revered judge, believes Stella is the only one who can help.
When Stella passes through the iron security gate and steps into the gilded, historic DC home of the Barclays, she realizes the case is even more twisted and the Barclay family far more troubled than she feared. And there’s something eerie about the house itself: It’s a plastic house with little glass to be found.
As Stella comes closer to uncovering the secrets the Barclays are desperate to hide, danger wraps around her like a shroud, and her past and present are set on a collision course in ways she never expected. Everyone is a suspect in the nanny’s murder. The mother, the father, the grandmother, the nanny’s boyfriend. Even Rose. Is the person Stella’s supposed to protect the one she may need protection from?
By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult
Young playwright Melina Green has just written a new work inspired by the life of her Elizabethan ancestor, Emilia Bassano. But seeing it performed is unlikely in a theatre world where women’s playing field isn’t level. As Melina wonders, if she dares risk failure again, her best friend takes the decision out of her hands and submits the play to a festival under a male pseudonym.
In 1581, young Emilia Bassano was a ward of English aristocrats. Her lessons on languages, history, and writing have endowed her with a sharp wit and a gift for storytelling, but like most women of her day, she is allowed no voice of her own. Forced to become a mistress to the Lord Chamberlain, who oversees all theatre productions in England, Emilia sees firsthand how playwrights’ words can move an audience. She begins to form a plan to secretly bring a play of her own to the stage—by paying an actor named William Shakespeare to front her work.
Told in intertwining timelines, By Any Other Name, a sweeping tale of ambition, courage, and desire, centers on two women who are determined to create something beautiful despite the prejudices they face. Should a writer do whatever it takes to see her story live on . . . no matter the cost? This remarkable novel, rooted in primary historical sources, ensures the name Emilia Bassano will no longer be forgotten.
Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World by Anupreeta Das
Few billionaires have been in the public eye for as long and in as many guises as Bill Gates. At first, heralded as a tech visionary, the Microsoft cofounder next morphed into a ruthless capitalist, only to change yet again when he fashioned himself into a global do-gooder. Along the way, Gates forever influenced how we think about tech founders, as the products they make and the ideas they sell continue to dominate our lives. Through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he set a new standard for high-profile, billionaire philanthropy. But there is more to Gates’s story, and here, Das’s revelatory reporting shows us that billionaires have secrets and philanthropy can have a dark side.
Drawing upon hundreds of interviews with current and former employees of the Gates Foundation, Microsoft, academics, nonprofits, and those with insight into the Gates universe, Das delves into Gates’s relationships with Warren Buffett, Jeffrey Epstein, Melinda French Gates, and others, to uncover the truths behind the public persona. In telling Gates’s story, Das also provides a new way to think about how billionaires wield their power, manipulate their image, pursue philanthropy to become heroes, repair damaged reputations, and direct policy to achieve their preferred outcomes.
Insightful, illuminating, and timely, Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King is an essential story of money and government, wealth and power, media and image, and how the world’s wealthiest people hold us in their thrall.
The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer
As boys, best friends Jeremy Cox and Rafe Howell went missing in a vast West Virginia state forest, only to mysteriously reappear six months later with no explanation for where they’d gone or how they’d survived.
Fifteen years after their miraculous homecoming, Rafe is a reclusive artist who still bears scars inside and out but has no memory of what happened during those months. Meanwhile, Jeremy has become a famed investigator for missing persons. With his uncanny abilities, he is the one person who can help vet tech Emilie Wendell find her sister, who vanished in the very same forest as Rafe and Jeremy.
Jeremy alone knows the unbelievable truth about the disappearances, for while the rest of the world was searching for them, the two missing boys were in a magical realm filled with impossible beauty and terrible danger. He believes it is there that they will find Emilie’s sister. However, since their return, Jeremy has kept Rafe in the dark for his inscrutable reasons. But the time for burying secrets ends as the quest for Emilie’s sister begins. The former lost boys must confront their shared past, no matter how traumatic the memories.
Alongside the headstrong Emilie, Rafe and Jeremy must return to the enchanted world they called home for six months—for only then can they get back everything and everyone they’ve lost.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
