There are so many enticing books releasing over the next few months and I literally can’t wait to get my hands on ALL of them. Debut novels and returning favorites are topping the lists of my BOOKS TO PINE FOR. I also threw in a bibliophile journal to keep track of all my reading. Make sure to put these on your lists.
BOOKS I’VE READ: A Bibliophile’s Journal
For avid readers who see books as a vital part of their lives and homes, this beautifully illustrated reading journal is a decorative object in itself. Conceived by Deborah Needleman and illustrated by Virginia Johnson, the author/illustrator team behind The Perfectly Imperfect Home, this journal reflects the same aesthetic and spirit that made the book so successful.
Whether you read print books, ebooks, or a bit of both, Books I’ve Read will serve as a tangible keepsake of your reading experiences. The journal features an elegant three-piece case and is filled with full-color illustrations of impressive home libraries and cozy reading corners from Deborah Needleman’s home décor guide The Perfectly Imperfect Home. It also contains recommended reading lists from a variety of reputable sources (Pulitzer Prize, Man Booker, and National Book Award winners, Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels, BBC’s Best Novels, etc.), as well as prompts for making your own lists (Most Beautiful Books, Books I’ve Given as Gifts, Books I Loved as a Child).
{Adorable illustrations in a journal for keeping track of the books you read…yes, please!}
Release Date: June 25, 2013
The Engagements by J. Courtney Sullivan
From the New York Times best-selling author of Maine and Commencement comes a big, sprawling novel about marriage-about those who marry in a white heat of passion, those who marry for partnership and comfort, and those who live together, love each other, and have absolutely no intention of ruining it all with a wedding.
Evelyn has been married to her husband for forty years-forty years since he slipped off her first wedding ring and put his own in its place. Delphine knows both sides of love-the ecstatic, glorious highs of seduction and the bitter, spiteful fury that descends when it’s over. James, a paramedic who works the night shift, knows his wife’s family thinks she could have done better. Kate, partnered with Dan for ten years, has seen every kind of wedding-from the Nantucket beach wedding to the Irish castle wedding-and has vowed never, ever, to have one of her own. And Mary Frances Gerety, a young advertising copywriter, knows exactly what marriage is: it’s a diamond ring on a girl’s finger-and it’s her job to make sure everyone believes that. Weaving these lives together, Sullivan gives us a sharply observed, witty, irresistible portrait of the thorny, joyful, and complicated union that is marriage.
{Loved, loved, loved Maine. This one is topping my list of Books to Pine For!}
Release Date: June 4, 2013
Someday, Someday, Maybe by Lauren Graham
A charming and laugh-out-loud novel by Lauren Graham, beloved star of Parenthood and Gilmore Girls, about an aspiring actress trying to make it in mid-nineties New York City.
Franny Banks is a struggling actress in New York City, with just six months left of the three year deadline she gave herself to succeed. But so far, all she has to show for her efforts is a single line in an ad for ugly Christmas sweaters and a degrading waitressing job. She lives in Brooklyn with two roommates-Jane, her best friend from college, and Dan, a sci-fi writer, who is very definitely not boyfriend material-and is struggling with her feelings for a suspiciously charming guy in her acting class, all while trying to find a hair-product cocktail that actually works. Meanwhile, she dreams of doing “important” work, but only ever seems to get auditions for dishwashing liquid and peanut butter commercials. It’s hard to tell if she’ll run out of time or money first, but either way, failure would mean facing the fact that she has absolutely no skills to make it in the real world. Her father wants her to come home and teach, her agent won’t call her back, and her classmate Penelope, who seems supportive, might just turn out to be her toughest competition yet. Someday, Someday, Maybe is a funny and charming debut about finding yourself, finding love, and, most difficult of all, finding an acting job.
{I always have to check out a celebrity’s novel…and Lauren Graham is always funny so this might be a hit!}
Release Date: April 30, 2013
SISTERLAND by Curtis Sittenfeld
From nationally bestselling author of Prep and American Wife, an expressive novel centered on a natural disaster that shakes a family to its core and forces a woman to confront the identity she’s been fleeing since adolescence.
St. Louis, 2009-Kate and Jeremy are caught unawares after being woken by a series of tremors just hours south of the strongest earthquake in U.S. history. The quake has taken a toll on Kate’s nerves, but it’s nothing compared with her identical twin sister, Vi-a self-proclaimed psychic medium-having broadcast a prediction that a more powerful earthquake would strike. While her sister’s performance is embarrassing to say the least, Kate can’t dismiss the hunch as wholly ungrounded, for to do so would be to deny a part of herself that exists no matter how hard she’s tried to suppress it. Faced with the question of whether she hopes her sister’s prophecy will ring false, though it would put her in the line of public scrutiny, or true, though it could mean widespread destruction and even death, Kate must decide whether or not to hone in on her long-ignored faculties to predict what will happen, and admit to her friends, family and community that she has this unusual ability.
{I loved Prep and American Wife so I can’t wait to see what else she has in store for us.}
Release Date: June 25, 2013
THE LIFE LIST by Lori Nelson
Perfect for readers of Allison Winn Scotch, Jill Smolinski, and Cecilia Ahern’s PS, I Love You, this debut novel is the emotionally resonant, utterly charming story of a woman who must reevaluate her life when her mother passes away, leaving her the task of completing a list of life goals she wrote as a teenager.
When her mother dies, Brett is grief stricken, but it comforts her to know that her future is mapped out before her. She will step into her mother’s role as the CEO of Bohlinger Cosmetics, and will continue dating her boyfriend, the detached but deliciously handsome Andrew. But her mother had a different plan for her. When the will is read, Brett gets the shock of her life. Not only will she NOT be the CEO of Bohlinger Cosmetics, but she also will only get her inheritance if she fulfills a set of life goals she wrote-and then threw out-twenty years ago. At first Brett is outraged-she long ago stopped wanting the things she desired as a teen, and she likes her life just fine. But as she begins to follow “the life list,” she realizes that her mother might just have known her better than she knows herself.
{Sounds like women’s fiction at its best!}
Release Date: July 30, 2013
THE GIRL IN THE BLUE DRESS by Emma McLaughlin & Nicola Kraus
Following college, Jamie McAllister wins a prestigious internship at the White House that she has no idea will irrevocably alter her life. An unexpected flirtation with the handsome and charismatic Gregory Rutland quickly leads to an emotional relationship she is ill equipped to handle at twenty-two. Each time she tries to extricate herself Greg is unable to find the strength to let her go. Meanwhile, the opposing party mobilizes to annihilate his presidency by any means necessary.
As Greg’s conflicting desires drive her to the breaking point, Jamie can’t help but reveal intimate details to those closest to her. But she must have unburdened herself to the wrong person—because within a matter of weeks Jamie finds herself, and everyone she loves, facing highly calculated destruction at the hands of Greg’s political enemies.
With her every mistake dragged out for the world to judge, Jamie has to endure an unprecedented trial in the court of public opinion—with the fate of the President, his party, and the country at stake.
Now, years later, can the woman infamously known as the “girl in the blue dress” make sense of this affair, and the trauma it wrought, for the world—and for herself?
{I wonder who the character is based on?}
Release Date: August 27, 2013
Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan
MAINE by J. Courtney Sullivan
In her bestselling debut, COMMENCEMENT, J. Courtney Sullivan explored the complicated and contradictory landscape of female friendship. Now, in her highly anticipated second novel, Sullivan takes us into even richer territory, introducing four unforgettable women who have nothing in common but the fact that, like it or not, they’re family.
For the Kellehers, Maine is a place where children run in packs, showers are taken outdoors, and old Irish songs are sung around a piano. Their beachfront property, won on a barroom bet after the war, sits on three acres of sand and pine nestled between stretches of rocky coast, with one tree bearing the initials “A.H.” At the cottage, built by Kelleher hands, cocktail hour follows morning mass, nosy grandchildren snoop in drawers, and decades-old grudges simmer beneath the surface.
As three generations of Kelleher women descend on the property one summer, each brings her own hopes and fears. Maggie is thirty-two and pregnant, waiting for the perfect moment to tell her imperfect boyfriend the news; Ann Marie, a Kelleher by marriage, is channeling her domestic frustration into a dollhouse obsession and an ill-advised crush; Kathleen, the black sheep, never wanted to set foot in the cottage again; and Alice, the matriarch at the center of it all, would trade every floorboard for a chance to undo the events of one night, long ago.
By turns wickedly funny and achingly sad, MAINE unveils the sibling rivalry, alcoholism, social climbing and Catholic guilt at the center of one family, along with the abiding, often irrational love that keeps them coming back, every summer, to Maine and to each other.
Summer in Maine with a little family drama…sounds delightful!
Summer Rental by Mary Kay Andrews
SUMMER RENTAL by Mary Kay Andrews
Ellis, Julia, and Dorie. Best friends since Catholic grade school, they now find themselves, in their mid-thirties, at the crossroads of life and love. Ellis, recently fired from a job she gave everything to, is rudderless and now beginning to question the choices she’s made over the past decade of her life. Julia — whose caustic wit covers up her wounds — has a man who loves her and is offering her the world, but she can’t hide from how deeply insecure she feels about her looks, her brains, her life. And Dorie has just been shockingly betrayed by the man she loved and trusted the most in the world…though this is just the tip of the iceberg of her problems and secrets. A month in North Carolina’s Outer Banks is just what they each of them needs.
Ty Bazemore is their landlord, though he’s hanging on to the rambling old beach house by a thin thread. After an inauspicious first meeting with Ellis, the two find themselves disturbingly attracted to one another, even as Ty is about to lose everything he’s ever cared about.
Maryn Shackleford is a stranger, and a woman on the run. Maryn needs jus
Reese Witherspoon will produce an adaptation of J. Courtney Sullivan‘s The Engagements, a novel that won’t be published until June 11. Deadline Hollywood had the scoop:
