Book Spotlights: The She Reads’ Books of Winter Selections

Last week, the gals at She Reads announced the three ‘Books of Winter’
selections. I’ll be reading these, so be sure to keep an eye out here for my reviews.

So without further ado…here are the Books of Winter:

Title: The Gates of Evangeline 

Author: Hester Young

Published: September 2015, G.P. Putnam’s Sons

From a unique new talent comes a fast-paced debut,
introducing a heroine whose dark visions bring to light secrets that
will heal or destroy those around her . . .

When New York journalist and recently bereaved mother
Charlotte “Charlie” Cates begins to experience vivid dreams about
children she’s sure that she’s lost her mind. Yet these are not the
nightmares of a grieving parent, she soon realizes. They are messages
and warnings that will help Charlie and the children she sees, if only
she can make sense of them.

After a little boy in a boat appears
in Charlie’s dreams asking for her help, Charlie finds herself entangled
in a thirty-year-old missing-child case that has never ceased to haunt
Louisiana’s prestigious Deveau family. Armed with an invitation to
Evangeline, the family’s sprawling estate, Charlie heads south, where
new friendships and an unlikely romance bring healing. But as she
uncovers long-buried secrets of love, money, betrayal, and murder, the
facts begin to implicate those she most wants to trust—and her visions
reveal an evil closer than she could’ve imagined. A Southern Gothic
mystery debut that combines literary suspense and romance with a
mystical twist, The Gates of Evangeline is a story that readers of Gillian Flynn, Kate Atkinson, and Alice Sebold won’t be able to put down.

Title: The Edge of Lost

Author: Kristina McMorris

Published: November 2015, Kensington

From New York Times bestselling author Kristina McMorris comes an ambitious and heartrending story of immigrants, deception, and second chances.

On
a cold night in October 1937, searchlights cut through the darkness
around Alcatraz. A prison guard’s only daughter—one of the youngest
civilians who lives on the island—has gone missing. Tending the warden’s
greenhouse, convicted bank robber Tommy Capello waits anxiously. Only
he knows the truth about the little girl’s whereabouts, and that both of
their lives depend on the search’s outcome.

Almost two decades
earlier and thousands of miles away, a young boy named Shanley Keagan
ekes out a living as an aspiring vaudevillian in Dublin pubs. Talented
and shrewd, Shan dreams of shedding his dingy existence and finding his
real father in America. The chance finally comes to cross the Atlantic,
but when tragedy strikes, Shan must summon all his ingenuity to forge a
new life in a volatile and foreign world.

Skillfully weaving
these two stories, Kristina McMorris delivers a compelling novel that
moves from Ireland to New York to San Francisco Bay. As her finely
crafted characters discover the true nature of loyalty, sacrifice, and
betrayal, they are forced to confront the lies we tell—and believe—in
order to survive.

Title: What Was Mine

Author: Helen Klein Ross

Published: January 2016, Gallery Books

Simply told but deeply
affecting, in the bestselling tradition of Alice McDermott and Tom
Perrotta, this urgent novel unravels the heartrending yet unsentimental
tale of a woman who kidnaps a baby in a superstore—and gets away with it
for twenty-one years.

Lucy Wakefield is a seemingly ordinary
woman who does something extraordinary in a desperate moment: she takes a
baby girl from a shopping cart and raises her as her own. It’s a secret
she manages to keep for over two decades—from her daughter, the
babysitter who helped raise her, family, coworkers, and friends.

When
Lucy’s now-grown daughter Mia discovers the devastating truth of her
origins, she is overwhelmed by confusion and anger and determines not to
speak again to the mother who raised her. She reaches out to her birth
mother for a tearful reunion, and Lucy is forced to flee to China to
avoid prosecution. What follows is a ripple effect that alters the lives
of many and challenges our understanding of the very meaning of
motherhood.

Author Helen Klein Ross, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker,
weaves a powerful story of upheaval and resilience told from the
alternating perspectives of Lucy, Mia, Mia’s birth mother, and others
intimately involved in the kidnapping. What Was Mine is a
compelling tale of motherhood and loss, of grief and hope, and the
life-shattering effects of a single, irrevocable moment.

Be sure to check out the She Reads website
for reviews, guest posts, author interviews and more. And if
you’re on Twitter, be sure to follow @SheReadsBookCLB  and the hashtag
#srblog for author twitter chats.