Sunday Musings: Wish List Books
Upcoming Books Wish List
Hi there, book readers! Happy Sunday to you.
Like most avid book readers over the weekend, I found myself in envy of all the lucky devils who were able to attend Bookexpo America and Book Con over the weekend. I saw so many great book posts on Twitter and YouTube that I made myself a huge list of upcoming books. And since I did make a book list, I thought it might be fun to share details about a few of the books I’m most excited for and anticipating. These books are in no particular order, but they all caught my eye and my interest.
The Blind Astronomer’s Daughter by John Pipkin
Historical Fiction | 464 pages | Bloomsbury USA
Release Date: October 11th, 2016
From Goodreads:
A transporting new historical novel from the acclaimed author of Woodsburner.
In late-eighteenth-century Ireland, accidental stargazer Caroline Ainsworth learns that her life is not what it seems when her father, Arthur, throws himself from his rooftop observatory. He has chosen death over a darkened life, gone blind from staring at the sun in his obsessive hunt for an unknown planet near Mercury. Caroline had often assisted her father with his observations; when astronomer William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781, she watched helplessly as unremitting jealousy drove Arthur to madness.
Grief-stricken, Caroline at first abandons the vain search, leaves Ireland for London, and tries to forget her love for Finnegan O’Siodha, the tinkering blacksmith who was helping her father build a massive telescope larger than Herschel’s own. But she later discovers that her father has left her more than the wreck of an unfinished telescope: his cryptic atlas holds the secret to finding a new world at the edge of the sky. As Caroline reluctantly resumes the search and confronts her longing for Finnegan, Ireland is swept into rebellion, and the lovers are plunged into its violence.
This is a novel of the obsessions of the age—scientific inquiry, geographic discovery, political reformation—but above all astronomy, the mapping of the solar system, and beyond. It is a novel of the quest for knowledge and also—just as importantly—for human connection. The Blind Astronomer’s Daughter is rich, far-reaching, and unforgettable.
By Gaslight by Steven Price
Historical Thriller | 752 Pages | Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
Release Date: October 4th, 2016
From Goodreads:
A literary tour de force of a detective’s ceaseless hunt for an elusive criminal
London, 1885. Three years before the Whitechapel killings, London is a city of fog and darkness. A severed head is dredged from the Thames; ten miles away, a woman’s body is discovered on Edgeware Road. The famed American detective William Pinkerton is summoned by Scotland Yard to investigate. The dead woman fits the description of a grifter Pinkerton had been pursuing for a long time–someone he believed would lead him to a man he has been hunting since his father’s death.
Edward Shade is an industrialist without a past, a fabled con, a thief of other men’s futures–he seems a ghost, a man of smoke. The obsessive hunt for him that began in the last days of the Civil War becomes Pinkerton’s inheritance. What follows is an epic journey of secrets, deceit, and betrayals. Above all, it is the story of the most unlikely of bonds: between Pinkerton, the greatest detective of his age, and Shade, the one criminal he cannot outwit.
Steven Price’s By Gaslight is a riveting, atmospheric portrait of a man on the brink. Moving from the diamond mines of South Africa to the fog-enshrouded streets of Victorian London, the novel is a journey into a cityscape of grief, trust, and its breaking, where what we share can bind us even against our better selves.
Stalking Jack the Ripper by Kerri Maniscalco
YA Historical | YA Horror | 320 Pages | James Patterson Presents
Release Date: September 20th 2016
Presented by James Patterson’s new children’s imprint, this deliciously creepy horror novel has a storyline inspired by the Ripper murders and an unexpected, blood-chilling conclusion…
Seventeen-year-old Audrey Rose Wadsworth was born a lord’s daughter, with a life of wealth and privilege stretched out before her. But between the social teas and silk dress fittings, she leads a forbidden secret life.
Against her stern father’s wishes and society’s expectations, Audrey often slips away to her uncle’s laboratory to study the gruesome practice of forensic medicine. When her work on a string of savagely killed corpses drags Audrey into the investigation of a serial murderer, her search for answers brings her close to her own sheltered world.
The story’s shocking twists and turns, augmented with real, sinister period photos, will make this dazzling debut from author Kerri Maniscalco impossible to forget.
There were a lot more books on my list, but these are three that appealed to me right off.