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
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.
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.
Adam Johnson's recently published novel The Orphan Master's Son is introducing many readers to the complex history and multi-layered culture of North Korea. If you'd like to learn more about the political and social climate of this country, here are some suggestions:
