Book Giveaway Newsletter

June 15, 2007

Dear Member,

*Important*

Starting July 1, you will only be able to enter to win books through this newsletter and not the homepage. So click on those enter to win links now so you don't forget to do it later!

And tell you club that order to win books, they need to subscribe this newsletter--so pass it on!

The Bestiary by Nicholas Christopher
Article by Nicholas Christopher Enter to win this book for your club Two myths lie at the heart of The Bestiary. I encountered them thirty years apart, and they were like a chemical reaction waiting to happen. The first is a Native American myth that altered the way I looked at life, and which I incorporated whole into the body of the novel. We hear it early on from the grandmother of the hero, Xeno Atlas, a woman with a gift for communicating with animals: "Before men started their killing ways," she tells Xeno, "they spoke the same language as all the other animals. Then the worm of cruelty burrowed into man's heart. The animals needed to protect themselves, so they made up their own languages that only their own kind could understand." The second myth was central to the cosmogony of the Gnostics, those early Christian heretics. It stipulated that the Holy Ghost authored two books: the Bible and the lost Book of Life, which was the first bestiary. The man who read both books in their entirety would achieve universal gnosis, ensuring the salvation and immortality of the soul. More about Nicholas... Nicholas is available to meet wioth book clubs in New York City and to call-in to clubs by speakerphone. Email Nicholas

Tilt a Whirl by Chris Grabenstein

Winner "Best First Mystery" Anthony Award 2006

Article by Chris Grabenstein

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TILT A WHIRL, like all "new" ideas, started when two old ideas bumped into and got tangled up with each other.

Thought #1: September 11, 2001.

I, like so many others, marveled at the bravery of the New York City firefighters and cops who ran up the staircases of the World Trade Center when everybody else was running down. What makes some men ignore their survival instincts to help others?

Why, as Bruce Springsteen (The Boss gets quoted quite often by the characters in TILT A WHIRL) puts it, do "love and duty call" them "someplace higher?"

That thinking led me to my protagonist, John Ceepak - a former MP just back from Iraq who joins the police force in a quiet seaside resort town. Ceepak is a good man. A truly honorable hero. A modern day knight guided by a code of chivalry. Ceepak will not lie, cheat or steal nor tolerate those who do.

Thought #2: Tacky Tourist Towns.

Chris Grabenstein

Tilt A Whirl takes place down the Jersey Shore in a tourist town called Sea Haven - the kind of seaside resort best pictured on a map filled with squiggly cartoon drawings of shops and attractions with names like King Putt Golf, The Pancake Palace, and Cap'n Scrubby's Car Wash.

I love going down to the Jersey Shore, any place that has a restaurant called "The Rusty Scupper" where they serve cold bottles of beer in an aluminum bucket and mountains of peel-and-eat shrimp in red plastic baskets.

And I loved putting my hero John Ceepak into this world - a place where absolutely nothing is as it seems, where everything is fake or packaged into a snow globe so you can take it home when your vacation ends. It's a world of false fronts hiding seamier underbellies.

A world built on lies that can send a truly good man's soul spinning.?

It makes for a wild ride.

And that's what I hope readers will take away from TILT A WHIRL: what happens when a truly good man is misled by his less noble counterparts?

More about Chris...

Chris is available to meet with book clubs in the NY, NJ, CT area, is available to call in to clubs and will be on tour this summer. Email Chris

Woman in Red by Eileen Goudge
New York Times Bestselling Author

Article by Eileen Goudge

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The idea for WOMAN IN RED began with an image. I saw a dog waiting on the dock as a ferry pulled into the landing---a Border Collie. There was a story there, I knew, so I let it slowly unfold in my imagination. The loyal animal is waiting in vain for his dead master. On the same ferry is the dead man's grandson, newly returned after a long absence to the island where he summered as a child. Also on the ferry is a woman just out of prison, who is coming home to the child she left behind nine years ago.

I chose the setting because my husband and I are building a home on a very similar island in the Pacific Northwest. It has an almost mystical appeal, and I think that plays into the storyline of the World War II lovers whose love transcends time. There's also a lot of history there, going back to the early Native Americans who settled the area.

What I would like readers to take away from this book is that there are, indeed, second chapters in life. Second chances at love, too. Most of all, I hope readers will find in WOMAN IN RED a book to curl up with on a rainy day (or in any kind of weather!), which not only entertains but affirms this author's basically positive view of the world and the people in it.

More about Eileen...

Once Upon a Day by Lisa Tucker

Article by Lisa Tucker

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The idea for Once Upon a Day came from something that happened to me when I was in New York to tape the CBS Early Show. I was on the way back to my hotel when the cab driver and I struck up a conversation. He was curious why I'd been at CBS, and I told him about my first novel, The Song Reader, which had just been released. He also told me about himself: that he was from Romania and had immigrated a decade before, that he loved New York, that he had two children, a wife, and a house in Queens. But then his voice became quiet as he told me that he was having some problems since 9/11. The World Trade Center attack had changed him, he said, and he didn't know what to do or how to change back. Then he looked in the rearview mirror and said flatly, "I've lost my hope."

Lisa Tucker I didn't have a chance to say anything to him before we arrived at my hotel, where he picked up another fare and disappeared down the block. But I kept thinking about this man, wondering what I could have done. Wishing there was something I could have said. Wondering if there were any words powerful enough to help a person who'd lost his hope.

All of this was still haunting me as I sat down and started writing about Stephen Spaulding, the character who opens my novel. Like his real counterpart, Stephen is a cab driver who has been changed by the events of a single day. In Stephen's case though, it's a car accident that killed his wife and young daughter and made him give up his career as a doctor. And Stephen has no intention of telling anyone about his loss, even if they could help. But then Dorothea O'Brien climbs into his cab, and meeting her changes his life profoundly.

My characters always lead me to places I could never have predicted-this is one of the things I love about writing. What began as my cab driver novel turned out to be so much bigger than anything I'd ever written, with a larger cast of characters, three locations (St. Louis, New Mexico, Los Angeles), and two distinct time-periods: the late seventies and the present. Of course the central themes of my first two books, the things I always care about, found their way into this one, too: the struggle to come to terms with the past and find forgiveness; the loneliness of people who have grownup in poverty and are trying to make it out; the complex relationships within a family, especially a troubled one; the importance of music and the inextricable connection between music and memory.

The title comes from a passage in Don Quixote: "Dame Fortune once upon a day/ To me was bountiful and kind/ But all things change; she changed her mind/ And what she gave she took away." One of the themes of the novel is the role of chance, coincidence and fate in our lives, especially the way everything can change so suddenly: our hearts can be broken by the events of a single day, yet a day can also bring a new chance at love and redemption. Nearly all of us have experienced the truth of this; most of us can narrate our personal histories as a series of important days: births and marriages and deaths but also first dates and a winter afternoon holding our baby that was just like every other, except that one is burned into our memory.

Of course the title Once Upon a Day also has a fairy tale quality, and this, too, relates to the novel's meaning. One of the main characters has created an isolated world for his family: a "utopia" that is protected from danger, but also protected from the messy struggles and joys of ordinary life. And all of the characters will be forced to deal with the limitations of the dreams/fairy tales they thought they were living. They'll lose their innocence, but they'll each find new reasons for hope.

Now that I've written this novel, I've had dozens and dozens of people tell me the story of their own most important day. Some of the days are happy; many of them are heartbreaking, but what they all have common is the people who lived through them feel that they have been forever changed. I have days like that myself, of course. I know the day I met the cab driver will always be one of them.