This winter has been unseasonably warm and dry for many. Let's hope spring changes that - not just to keep everything green but because there's way too many great books publishing in March to want to be anywhere other than tucked up with a good read!

Below are half a dozen exceptional first novels, selected from the ninety or so notable books profiled in our March Preview issue.

Enjoy!

Davina, BookBrowse editor

This Burns My Heart by Samuel Park Novel, 336 pages Publishes: March 6 Simon & Schuster A transcendent love story that vibrantly captures 1960s South Korea and brings to life an unforgettable heroine... Full description & reviews

Birds of a Lesser Paradise by Megan Mayhew Bergman Stories, 240 pages Publishes: March 6 Scribner From a prizewinning young writer whose stories have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South comes a heartwarming and hugely appealing debut collection that explores the way our choices and relationships are shaped by the menace and beauty of the natural world. Full description & reviews

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Show me a voracious reader and I will show you someone who I daresay had a lonely, miserable and isolated childhood -- at least, I did.

As a child, I read to escape, to find friends, to travel to distant parts of the world, and to try to make sense of a world that I found pretty baffling. I was the type of girl who read cereal boxes, the tags on mattress covers, and the comics in Hubba Bubba gum.

I never enjoyed history in school - too many battles, boring old politicians and stuffy monarchs. But now, as an historical novelist, I find social history, the day to day gritty details of how people kept warm, cooked, had babies, went to the bathroom and had sex, riveting.

My reading has changed since I started writing full time. I used to be a 'drive by reader', pick up a book, read a chapter, finish it if I enjoyed it, and toss it aside if I didn't. I read everything - thrillers, mysteries, historicals and literary fiction.

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Flood water smells old. It smells like something decaying, like something that has been left out for too long, like a mix of oil and compost and mold. Flood silt is heavy. It sticks to everything it touches. A pair of blue jeans covered in it is almost too hard to carry. I know these things. I know what it feels like to walk down a block lined with more appliances than trees and more garbage than grass. Facing clean-up and recovery is lonely--deep in the bones lonely--and while part of that loss of control means surrendering to the awful thing that has happened, another part means accepting help--from friends but also from strangers. And that's why I also know what it feels like to have a stranger walk up my front porch steps, ask if she can take the pile of muddy, wet laundry from my front yard and wash it for me--and to not know what to say--and to finally say yes--and to have my life change forever because of that one word.

Early this fall, Tropical Storm Irene swept through my home state of Vermont, my town, my street and my home--and all of a sudden I was inside Marble Boys, my middle-grade novel about Hurricane Katrina, in a way I had never, ever, ever imagined.

I began to write Marble Boys in September 2005. The story was born out my son Luc's question, "Who exactly is going to get my blue jeans?" as we dropped off a bag of food and clothing for the Hurricane Katrina Relief Drive at the Vermont State Police Barracks. I didn't know how, exactly, to answer his question. I didn't know who would get his blue jeans. But it--or he--stayed with me. This mystery person. Who would he be? Would he be Luc's age? Would he love to skateboard too?  Play the trombone?  Be afraid of making telephone calls? And so I began to imagine: What if a boy in Vermont named Henry donated a pair of his blue jeans to the relief effort in New Orleans and a boy named Zavion got them? And what if Henry put his lucky marble--which he had just deemed unlucky because of his own terrible tragedy--into a pocket of those pants?  And what if Zavion found the marble and wondered who had given him this magical gift?

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