Beautiful Music
Ashley Poston made her adult debut with 2022’s The Dead Romantics and has published another well-received novel each year since. Her latest, Sounds Like Love, takes the #4 spot on our trade paperback list. It’s “a winning magical realist romance,” per our starred review, “that explores artistic creation, grief, and new beginnings—all through the medium of a sweet, slow-burning love story between a burned-out songwriter and a former boy band ‘bad boy’ who’s eager to make a comeback.”
Type Setting
Journalist E. Jean Carroll’s Not My Type recounts her five-year legal battle with President Donald Trump. Over the course of two trials, juries found Trump liable for sexual abuse, battery, and defamation, and Carroll has been awarded a total of $88.3 million in damages by the courts. (At press time, Trump’s appeals continue.) “My job is, and was, to write the facts. So that’s what I did,” she told PW. “And I have extensive documentation; I used the trial transcripts, which are like a Shakespearean play.”
The seriousness of the context notwithstanding, Carroll describes her memoir, which lands at #4 on our hardcover nonfiction list, as “a funny book, a good beach read. Two of my lawyers fell in love during the trial and got married, so we have a love story too. Not My Type is also a call to arms—it’s about sparking women’s fire to once again stand up and not let men keep running this country. It’s not good, and I think we have the power. I am an old woman, but I am the only person to have beaten Trump twice.”
Style and Substance
Elyce Arons and the late fashion designer Kate Spade met the day they moved into their dorm rooms at the University of Kansas in 1981, and remained friends and business partners until Spade died by suicide in 2018. In We Might Just Make It After All, #7 on our hardcover nonfiction list, Arons recalls their personal and professional relationship. “Lengthy chapters about building the Kate Spade brand, which catalog Arons’s late nights working alongside Spade; Spade’s husband, Andy; and entrepreneur Pamela Bell in 1990s New York City, will satisfy fashion aficionados,” according to our starred review. “It’s the evolution of Arons and Spade’s sisterlike relationship, however, that lends the book its beating heart.”
Continuing Education
Two new, heavily illustrated books, both from Thunder Bay Press, encourage readers to consider the personalities and premises that have shaped civilization from ancient times to the present.
#9 Hardcover Nonfiction: A History of the World in 500 People
Key figures: Itzcoatl, founder of the Aztec Empire; Louis Pasteur, pioneering microbiologist; and Greta Thunberg, contemporary climate change activist
#15 Hardcover Nonfiction: A History of the World in 500 Buildings
Essential structures: the Great Pyramid of Giza; Yasnaya Polyana, the Russian country estate of Leo Tolstoy; and the Brooklyn Bridge
