The books coming out in 2023/2024

[Macklunkey]

John Gwynne has The Fury of the Gods coming in October 24.

[Calibandar]

Oeh, The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman, his long awaited Arthurian novel, is finally done and coming out in July:

 

Quote

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Magicians trilogy returns with a triumphant reimagining of the King Arthur legend for the new millennium

A gifted young knight named Collum arrives at Camelot to compete for a spot on the Round Table, only to find that he’s too late. The king died two weeks ago at the Battle of Camlann, leaving no heir, and only a handful of the knights of the Round Table survive.

They aren’t the heroes of legend, like Lancelot or Gawain. They’re the oddballs of the Round Table, from the edges of the stories, like Sir Palomides, the Saracen Knight, and Sir Dagonet, Arthur’s fool, who was knighted as a joke. They’re joined by Nimue, who was Merlin’s apprentice until she turned on him and buried him under a hill. Together this ragtag fellowship will set out to rebuild Camelot in a world that has lost its balance.

But Arthur’s death has revealed Britain’s fault lines. God has abandoned it, and the fairies and monsters and old gods are returning, led by Arthur’s half-sister Morgan le Fay. Kingdoms are turning on each other, warlords lay siege to Camelot and rival factions are forming around the disgraced Lancelot and the fallen Queen Guinevere. It is up to Collum and his companions to reclaim Excalibur, solve the mysteries of this ruined world and make it whole again. But before they can restore Camelot they’ll have to learn the truth of why the lonely, brilliant King Arthur fell, and lay to rest the ghosts of his troubled family and of Britain’s dark past.

The first major Arthurian epic of the new millennium, The Bright Sword is steeped in tradition, full of duels and quests, battles and tournaments, magic swords and Fisher Kings. It also sheds a fresh light on Arthur’s Britain, a diverse, complex nation struggling to come to terms with its bloody history. The Bright Sword is a story about imperfect men and women, full of strength and pain, who are looking for a way to reforge a broken land in spite of being broken themselves.

 Read less

 

 

Edited February 11 by Calibandar

[AncalagonTheBlack]

Acquisition Announcement: BLOOD OF THE OLD KINGS by Sung-il Kim

https://www.orbitbooks.net/2024/02/12/acquisition-announcement-blood-of-the-old-kings-by-sung-il-kim/

[AncalagonTheBlack]

Some SFF March releases:

03-05     Ben H. Winters     Big Time
03-05     Gwendolyn Kiste     The Haunting of Velkwood
03-05     Peter V. Brett     The Hidden Queen • The Nightfall Saga #2
03-07     Katherine Arden     The Warm Hands of Ghosts (UK)
03-12     Hao Jingfang     Jumpnauts (Translated by Ken Liu)
03-12     Hannah Kaner     Sunbringer • Fallen Gods / Godkiller #2
03-12     Premee Mohamed     The Siege of Burning Grass
03-12     Micaiah Johnson     Those Beyond the Wall
03-12     Jane Hennigan     Toxxic • Moths #2
03-19     Catherine Lacey     Biography of X
03-19     L. M. Sagas     Cascade Failure • Ambit's Run #1
03-19     Grace Curtis     Floating Hotel
03-19     Michael R. Fletcher, Anna Smith Spark     In the Shadow of Their Dying
03-19     Lucy Holland     Song of the Huntress
03-19     Natasha Pulley     The Mars House
03-26     Stephen Graham Jones     The Angel of Indian Lake • The Indian Lake Trilogy #3
03-28     Adrian Tchaikovsky     Alien Clay
03-28     Stuart Turton     The Last Murder at the End of the World (UK)

[joanellis]

On 12/11/2023 at 9:01 AM, AncalagonTheBlack said:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Breaking-Hell-Age-Bronze-Book/dp/1473232570?ref_=ast_author_dp

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Deep-Black-Miles-Cameron-ebook/dp/B0CGY19QFH?ref_=ast_author_dp

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/150247395-the-tainted-cup

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/124941442-sunbringer

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195790571-the-daughters-war

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60028924-the-trials-of-empire

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/201930181-the-mercy-of-gods

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195790798-the-west-passage

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/114067124-outlaw-empire

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/144736989-the-silverblood-promise

There are so many books that are coming out soon, and I hope I will have time to read them all. Because I still have my studies and my literature course, I also have to read a lot, but not new books. Now, I am reading Macbeth, not for the first time, but because I need it for my course. I can't say that's my favourite genre, but it's classic. I also need to write a paper on it, and I've already found this page https://edubirdie.com/examples/macbeth/, which provides a lot of very useful samples. Because such tasks are not that hard for me, sometimes I can face some troubles, so having such examples is very beneficial.

The Daughters' War is something I really really wait. I think this book will be great. And I'm also waiting for Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xóchitl González.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

On 12/4/2023 at 12:59 AM, Calibandar said:

Does anybody have any 2024 releases they are looking forward to?

Locusmag has an overview as usual, but there is a ton of stuff on it ( as usual).

The Winds of Winter.

 

[Zorral]

Don't know where to put this, since opening a new thread seems to be silly, as there can't be that much discussion about the subject as none of us were there.

Welcome to the London Book Fair, Where Everyone Knows Their Place
If you want to understand the power map of the publishing industry, just look at this event’s floor plan.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/15/books/london-book-fair.html

Quote

 

....  Heady as they were, these moments of high glamour were counterbalanced by the frankly poignant spectacle of hundreds of people in business-wear sitting on the floor, tapping away on their phones, whispering urgently to one another and eating chicken Caesar wraps. On the first day of the fair, I spotted a well-dressed woman fully asleep on the floor, her blow-dried blonde hair spilling over the handbag she was using as a pillow. It was 3 p.m., but it looked like an airport in the middle of the night, or some kind of conference center Fyre Festival.

As an indicator of who mattered, or how much money they had, the floor plan was an excellent guide. As an indicator of why many thousands of people from all over the world had gathered in this strange space, with its terrible food and its weird acoustics, to conduct conversations that could plausibly have taken place over email, the floor plan was of no use.

What were they all doing? What were they all talking about, in meeting after meeting, sitting down and standing up and hugging each other as they cried “So good to see you!” in the air near each other’s ears?

The publishing industry may be enamored of hierarchy and ritual, but it is possibly even more enamored of gossip, of chatting and hanging out, and it seemed that this was what everyone had come to the London Book Fair to do.

Alex Bowler, the publisher at Faber, said “I first started coming here in 2004 as an assistant, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing. No one told me. It took me a few years to realize that you’re just here to talk to people.” Asked to elaborate, he rolled his eyes amiably. “Triangulating,” he said. “Gathering intelligence”

Coming together seemed to be almost an end in itself, whether the meeting took place at a wobbly white table in Kensington, or at the Canongate party, held this year in a tropical-themed pub.

“We’re all just here to see our friends, really,” said a young literary agent who asked not to be named, because she had just given the game away. Simon Prosser, the publisher at Hamish Hamilton, put it in terms that bordered on the life affirming. “The fact that we’re all together in this way convinces me that what we do has a meaning,” he said. “Why else would we do it?”

 

 

[Teng Ai Hui]

I just now noticed that Dennis E. Taylor made a recent update on his website.  Not Till We Are Lost (Bobiverse 5) will be published on Sept. 5th.

[Werthead]

Interesting.

Janny Wurts was apparently urged by her published to split the final volume of her Wars of Light & Shadow mega-series into two volumes. She refused, and when the published started arguing about it, Wurts noted that the book is 298,000 words in length (almost exactly the same as A Game of Thrones). She then listed the sheer number of epic fantasy novels published in one volume of comparable length or even much greater length, and her publisher backed down.

Wurts also noted that the first book in the series did have to be split in two (Ships of Merior and Warhost of Vastmark) way back in the 1990s, but that book was vastly bigger than this one.

 

[Zorral]

Not news. So many have known this for so long.

No one buys books
Everything we learned about the publishing industry from Penguin vs. DOJ.

https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books?

What I can't figure out is why we still get royalties. The only thing I can figure is we did our books before digital entirely ate everything.  However this is why we aren't writing new books.  This has happened with the music biz too.

Indeed, self publishing is the only way to go, but you gotta have something going already to make it possible for enough buyers to know or care.  Just like with music.

Edited Tuesday at 12:49 AM by Zorral

[IlyaP]

We now have a cover for Neal Stephenson's next novel, Polostan, which is the first book in the Bomb Light Trilogy: 

(Still hate the name of this book. Polostan? What is this, an independent country founded by the owners of Polo and Banana Republic?!)

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

On 3/14/2024 at 2:36 PM, A Horse Named Stranger said:

The Winds of Winter.

 

Going by GRRMs Stephen Colbert interview, it should be due in 2026.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Well, GRRM also thought he could deliver it before Season 5 (or was it 6?) of the TV adaption. We all know how that worked out. To be clear, he is entitled to work at his own pace and finish/deliver books as he sees fit, and better shelve it for a year than deliver a bad book. However, that doesn't mean this being the year the book gets published shouldn't be treated as a running gag.

Sidenote. Him finishing A Dream of Spring before his 90th birthday gets odds of greater or lower than 1/10.

[Calibandar]

On 3/3/2024 at 10:34 AM, AncalagonTheBlack said:

Some SFF March releases:

03-05     Ben H. Winters     Big Time
03-05     Gwendolyn Kiste     The Haunting of Velkwood
03-05     Peter V. Brett     The Hidden Queen • The Nightfall Saga #2
03-07     Katherine Arden     The Warm Hands of Ghosts (UK)
03-12     Hao Jingfang     Jumpnauts (Translated by Ken Liu)
03-12     Hannah Kaner     Sunbringer • Fallen Gods / Godkiller #2
03-12     Premee Mohamed     The Siege of Burning Grass
03-12     Micaiah Johnson     Those Beyond the Wall
03-12     Jane Hennigan     Toxxic • Moths #2
03-19     Catherine Lacey     Biography of X
03-19     L. M. Sagas     Cascade Failure • Ambit's Run #1
03-19     Grace Curtis     Floating Hotel
03-19     Michael R. Fletcher, Anna Smith Spark     In the Shadow of Their Dying
03-19     Lucy Holland     Song of the Huntress
03-19     Natasha Pulley     The Mars House
03-26     Stephen Graham Jones     The Angel of Indian Lake • The Indian Lake Trilogy #3
03-28     Adrian Tchaikovsky     Alien Clay
03-28     Stuart Turton     The Last Murder at the End of the World (UK)

Are we going to get one of these excellent summary posts for April and May too? 

[Zorral]

How often does one read a book review that provokes outright guffaws?  Here is one.

With ‘Only the Brave,’ Danielle Steel confronts the Holocaust
A courageous young nurse resists romance to save others from the Nazis
Review by Ron Charles

Shared/gift link:

https://wapo.st/3w1Gyfx

Quote

 

In 1949, when Danielle Steel was just a toddler, Theodor Adorno declared that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

It took her awhile, but Steel has proved Adorno’s point. Not that there’s anything poetic about her new Holocaust novel, “Only the Brave,” but using the Final Solution as the setting for a sentimental melodrama is profoundly unseemly. It’s not good for the Jews. It’s not good for anybody.

But the publicity machine grinds on.

Half a century ago, Steel published her first book, “Going Home,” and over the decades she’s become one of the best-selling novelists in the world, with more than a billion copies in print. Perhaps no other writer is so widely read and so rarely reviewed. It’s a confirmed blind spot in our critical landscape: Unlike music, movie and TV reviewers, book reviewers pride themselves on avoiding what most people are consuming. Sometimes, I feel guilty about this. At the moment, I feel grateful.

By my count, “Only the Brave” is Steel’s 152nd novel, but her publicist tells me, “It is closer to her 170th.” Apparently, the actual number can only be guessed at, in the same way the total mass of dark matter in the universe is estimated by how it bends light. With some certainty, though, we can determine that “Only the Brave” is one of seven titles Steel plans to release this year, which means she writes a book more often than most people clean their fridge.

In the months leading up to this week’s publication, Steel’s publicist reached out repeatedly to insist that I not mention that the author is a 76-year-old romance novelist. As always, we’re never ashamed of the right things.

“Only the Brave” opens in Berlin in 1937 with one of the book’s typically perplexing observations: “Even at eighteen,” Steel writes, “Sophia Alexander knew that things in Germany had changed in the past four years since the Nazis had come to power.” Yes, nothing gets by our Sophia. Somehow, after Adolf Hitler established himself as a dictator, passed the Nuremberg Laws and remilitarized the Rhineland, this savvy young woman has managed to pick up a change in the air. That weird consummation of obviousness and obliviousness quickly becomes the novel’s prevailing tone.

Sophia is a shy, “dark-haired beauty with huge green eyes, and always looked serious.” Her younger sister, Theresa, is a pretty flirt with “little awareness that her natural sexiness was an aphrodisiac to the men who wanted her.” These two schöne Mädchen live with their wealthy father, the most important surgeon in Berlin, who runs his own private hospital. Although Dr. Alexander treats high-ranking Nazis, he treats Jews, too. “Medicine was all that interested him,” Steel writes. “He lived in a rarefied, isolated world.”

Don’t worry if you initially miss these details — or others; they’ll be repeated again and again. I experienced déjà vu so often while reading “Only the Brave” that I worried I was losing my mind and then began to hope so. Typical example: On Page 110, Steel writes, “Hitler’s generals, led by Göring, were preparing the Final Solution, to eradicate all Jews from the face of the earth.” On the facing page, we’re told, “The Führer and his generals were obsessed with this plan, called ‘the Final Solution,’ to obliterate all Jews from the planet.” This is the kind of book you can read while watching TV. Or operating heavy equipment.

In fact, Steel seems determined never to leave anyone behind. We learn from this historical novel that Hitler was a bad man and that the Holocaust was a disaster. Families disappear, people are murdered, and prisoners are brutally beaten, but the selection of details about the Shoah sometimes feels constrained within a narrow range of genteel taste. In Ravensbrück, for instance, “bunks were in short supply, latrines and toilet facilities were inadequate” — so, like, two stars on Airbnb. Prisoners “were given boots of any random size, whether they fit or not, boots that had been worn by others who might have died in them,” which makes the camp sound worse than a bowling alley. And even the most well-known historical horrors must contend with Steel’s oddly banal tone. An early chapter begins by reporting that in Krakow and Warsaw, “it was the Nazis’ hope to wipe out over a million Jews.” That, Steel explains, is “an incredible number of men, women, and children to annihilate” — a helpful appraisal for readers new to morality or math.

But despite all this suffering, the real focus is brave Sophia, a selfless woman compelled by her Christian faith. While her flighty sister marries a wealthy man and pursues a life of pleasantries and parties, Sophia works as a nurse in her father’s hospital and aspires to become a nun — which was, reportedly, once Steel’s dream, too. When the Nazis insist that Dr. Alexander turn his hospital into a euthanasia center for undesirables, Sophia redoubles her efforts to save doomed patients and begins spiriting Jews out of Germany.

Obviously, there’s no end of dramatic possibilities with this material. The deadly predicament faced by Dr. Alexander recalls the shocking transformation in Cecil Philip Taylor’s indelible play “Good.” And the heroism of people who risked their lives to save Jews from the Holocaust has inspired deeply moving works of fiction and nonfiction. But Steel paints all of her protagonists in such bright primary colors that there can be no shades of moral anguish or suspense. These aren’t characters so much as Weebles: They wobble, but they don’t fall down. Dr. Alexander never considers acquiescing to the Nazis’ demands. His elder daughter, the nursing nun, is “devoted to the human race as a whole, and willing to sacrifice herself for what she believed. She was a strong, brave woman.”

Sophia never abandons her devotion to God, even when tempted by the adulation of adoring men. First, there’s Claus — “tall, blond, and handsome” — who recruits her to the work of smuggling Jews across the border. Then there’s Hans. “He was tall, blond, and would have been movie-star handsome if he hadn’t been a Nazi.” Steel spends a number of pages trying to spin this encounter into a cute Beatrice-and-Benedick romance, but in the end, “no matter how nice he seemed, he was a Nazi officer at a concentration camp. She hadn’t lost sight of that, no matter how handsome he was.” Sorry, Hans, but genocide is one of Sophia’s turnoffs!

And finally, there’s the American Army captain Theodore Blake, “a young, very handsome man” with “short blond hair.” Will he be able to tear Sophia away from the convent and give her the life every woman truly desires?

Only the brave readers will find out.

 

 

[Ormond]

On 4/26/2024 at 10:57 AM, Calibandar said:

Are we going to get one of these excellent summary posts for April and May too? 

I don't know if this will be as good as Ancalagon's posts for you, but the Locus site has a list of forthcoming books.  At the moment there is a typo at the top of their April list, but it is supposed to be 2024, not 2023.

https://locusmag.com/forthcomingbooks/

 

[KingAerys_II]

On 4/25/2024 at 6:55 AM, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Going by GRRMs Stephen Colbert interview, it should be due in 2026.

20never, that's the date of release, it's certain he wrote the manuscripts he released