Live from BEA: Big Books for the Fall

By Louisa Ermelino -- Publishers Weekly, 5/31/2008 6:09:00 PM

The line to get a hardcover copy of Andre Dubus III’s The Garden of Last Days (Norton, June) started forming an hour before he was scheduled to arrive. It snaked along a main aisle and continued around the corner. Anticipated by booksellers—from Richard Howorth of Square One bookstore in Oxford, Miss., to Jane Moser from Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Tex.—it’s been one of the most talked-about bookseller favorites.

But big fiction books were everywhere, with or without their authors: Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy, coming from Knopf in November, looks at racism in the 17th century. Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day (Morrow, Sept.), set in post-WWI Boston, got snapped up and lugged around despite its door-stopper size. Anita Shreve and Julia Glass both have new books that look at family dynamics: Glass’s third novel, I See You Everywhere (Pantheon, Oct.), follows the relationship of two sisters over the course of 25 years, and Shreve’s Testimony (Little, Brown, Oct.) explores the aftermath of a sex tape scandal that ruins marriages and the lives of several boarding school students. And, of course, there’s Philip Roth’s coming-of-age story set in the Korean war era, Indignation (Houghton, Sept.), Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence (Random, June) and Marilynne Robinson’s follow-up to Gilead, Home (FSG, Sept.) 

Nonfiction: Animals, Politics, Celebrities

Moving on from Marley is the moving We Bought a Zoo by Benjamin Mee (Weinstein Books, Sept.), a memoir in which a family buys a dilapidated zoo in the English countryside and copes with tigers, fighting emus and family tragedy.

The Book of Animal Ignorance by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson (Harmony, Sept.) is a collection of entertaining bits about creatures big and small that could very well match the bestselling success of the author’s The Book of General Ignorance. And Bliss to You (Hyperion September) is golden retriever Dean Trixie Koontz’s gems of wisdom “as told to her owner Dean Koontz.”

For politics, the pre-BEA talk was all about former Bush press secretary’s Scott McClellan’s stunner from Public Affairs. The embargoed book pubbed Monday; at the Knopf dinner Friday we heard Barbara Walters say that she’d been planning to buy the book, but upon reading the extensive L.A. Times review, she didn’t have to.

Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America (FSG, Sept.) looks to be big, along with The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank (Metropolitan Books, Aug.), an examination of corruption in Washington, D.C.

On the memoir front, Kathleen Norris’s Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life (Riverhead, Sept.) should do well, given the author’s popularity and the book’s pitch as “part meditation/part memoir.” In The Night of the Gun (Simon & Schuster, Sept.) David Carr writes a terrifying memoir of addiction, illness and, of course, recovery.

Celebrities were much in evidence, at the show and beyond. The party at Prince’s house off Mulholland Drive was the hottest ticket at BEA—directions to his manse were not revealed until the RSVP was approved. His royal purpleness performed somewhere around 2 a.m. in honor of his collection of poetry/music/lyrics, 21 Nights—a $50 hardcover coming from Atria in September.

Lewis Black follows his popular memoir, Nothing’s Sacred, with a book about religion, Me of Little Faith (Riverhead, June); and Alec Baldwin offers A Promise to Ourselves, written with Mark Tabb (St. Martin’s, Sept.). At Saturday’s breakfast, Baldwin described his memoir is a serious critique of the plight of fathers in the family court system, rather than a tell-all—but booksellers expect it to be a huge success nonetheless. At the show, Diahann Carroll was furiously signing copies of her memoir The Legs Are the Last to Go (Amistad, Oct.). And coming up are George Hamilton’s Don’t Mind if I Do (Touchstone, Dec.) and Ted Turner’s Call Me Ted,coming in November from Grand Central. 

Fiction Prospects

Booksellers were raving about The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Dial, July). Lynn Wilbur, a University of Western Ontario bookseller, told Show Daily it was selling big in Canada, and Debra Linn from Books & Books in Coral Gables, Fla., picked it as the hit of the summer: “Who knew the Nazis occupied the Channel Islands? It’s a whole new look at WWII.” She’s also excited about Phillipa Gregory’s The Other Queen (Simon & Schuster, Sept.): “My customers can’t get enough of her. In this book, she makes Mary, Queen of Scots, come to life.”

Karl Pohrt, of Shaman Drum in Ann Arbor, Mich., is high on Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh (FSG, Oct.), describing it as “an example of what I call the new cosmopolitan novel. It’s about people from a number of different cultures coming together—in this case, on a ship.”

Flying high in fiction debuts are witches, and fortune tellers. The Heretic’s Daughter by Kathleen Kent (Little, Brown, Sept.), about the women accused of witchcraft in Salem, “sounds perfect for reading book groups,” according to Kelly Estep from Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville, Ky. The Lace Reader (Morrow, July) by Brunonia Barry, about women in Salem who can read the future in lace has people talking.

Bob Wietrak, v-p of merchandising for Barnes & Noble is really excited about two European thrillers: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Knopf, Sept.) by Stieg Larsson and The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson (Doubleday, Aug.).

Paul Yamazaki of City Lights bookstore in San Francisco thinks Roberto Bolano’s 2666 (FSG, Nov.) is going to be huge; FSG is releasing the 900-page hardcover—along with a three-volume paperback edition for readers who have injured themselves falling asleep with a huge hardcover on their face.

And on the small press front, there’s The Flying Troutmans (Counterpoint, Oct.), a debut novel by Miriam Toews, about two young girls and their aunt on a cross-country van trip to find the girls’ father. Jamie Siocco, a bookseller at McIntyre’s Bookshop in Pittsboro, N.C., sang the praises of In Hovering Flight by Joyce Hinnefeld (Unbridled, Sept.); she was surprised at how moved she was by this story of the relationships between the characters and with the natural world. “We live our lives too quickly,” she said. “In Hovering Flight made me realize we have to sit and observe the world about us a lot more.”

“When she moved into the White House, Jackie was a size 12. When she left she was a size 8.” Thus begins Adam Braver’s Nov. 22, 1963, coming from Tin House in November: a chilling blend of fact and fiction that chronicles Jacqueline Kennedy’s fateful day.

For our roundup of big BEA children's books, click here.