LIBRARYJOURNAL PrepubAlert 2014 ALA LAS VEGAS Galley & Signing Guide BY BARBARA HOFFERT The American Library Digital Galleys Association conference is in the Via NetGalley offi ng (June 26-July 1 in Las (www.netgalley.com), professional readers Vegas), and a little guidance while can access digital strolling around the convention galleys, and publishers can choose how to provide access. We’ve noted fl oor could go a long way. To that here if a title is available for request end, here’s LJ’s annual galley and or if the title is private. signing guide, which should lead The galley is available you to the books and authors for request. you want. With many more titles Readers can ask publicists for a NetGalley widget, which available for distribution than at can be emailed to grant approved last month’s BookExpo America, this is one of the biggest access for that particular title. guides ever. Few publishers have giveaways schedules, so be NOTE If you’re an ALA member, add prepared to circle back for your favorites. A special thanks to your member number to your NetGalley Profi le to make it easier for publishers Sourcebooks for sponsoring this guide; check out its titles at to approve your requests! Questions? booth 662. Email [email protected]. 302–303 Simon & Schuster Fiction essentials: Garth Stein’s A Sudden Light with the author of the phenomenal The Art of Racing in the Rain working his usual magic for a teenage boy in the Pacifi c Northwest; Lalita Tademy’s Citizen’s Creek, an eye-opener from the Oprah Pick author about a slave whose gift as a translator during the American Indian Wars helps him buy his freedom; and Colm Tóibín’s Nora Webster , the IMPAC award winner’s portrait of a widow reclaiming her life. 1 Fiction tears and laughter: Matthew Thomas’s We Are Not Ourselves , a big fall debut (and BookExpo America Buzz Book) featuring an Irish American couple in the mid-20th-century coping with the husband’s worsening illness; Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove , an international best seller from Sweden about a curmudgeon whose life is upended by the new family next door; Randy Susan Meyers’s Accidents of Marriage , about a marital clash of temperaments that results in a serious accident; Colleen Oakley’s Before I Go , a debut heartbreaker featuring a dying wife’s determined search for her replacement; Emma Hooper’s Etta and Otto and Russell and James, a charming literary debut wherein 82-year-old Etta leaves husband Otto to trek 3,232 kilometers across Canada to the see the sea (Russell is a devoted friend, and James is a coyote); Santa Montefi ore’s Secrets of the Lighthouse , whose heroine abandons stuffy London for Ireland’s Connemara coast, where she fi nds a haunted lighthouse; Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera’s The Awakening of Miss Prim (fi nished books), an international best seller about what educated young Prudencia Prim learns working as a librarian in an isolated French village; and mystery-writer-changing-direction Peggy Webb’s The Language of Silence , whose heroine is inspired by her tiger-taming grandmother to abandon her heavy-fi sted husband for the circus. Fiction chills: Brad Thor’s Act of War , with covert counterterrorism operative Scot Harvath on not one but two missions to save America; Tawni O’Dell’s One of Us , featuring a forensic psychologist shocked when he returns to his blue-collar mining-town roots; Benjamin Whitmer’s Cry Father , the story of a bereaved father who must also counter a violent friend (comparisons to Cormac McCarthy seem apt); Faceoff (fi nished books), a big thriller anthology edited by David Baldacci; David Cronenberg’s Consumed, the famed fi lmmaker’s debut with a truly creepy-sounding horror story (surprised?); Douglas Brunt’s The Means , a political thriller from the New York Times best-selling author; Dwayne Alexander Smith’s Forty Acres , an ambitious debut thriller about a young black lawyer who discovers a conspiracy to reintroduce slavery, with black men as the masters; Caroline Kepnes’s You , about two lovers whose obsession will soon get the better of them; and Glenn Meade’s The Last Witness , sobering news-that-stays-news about a woman tracking down the killers who left her, as a child, “the last witness” of atrocities at a Bosnian prison camp. Historical fi ction: Donald McCaig’s Ruth’s Journey: The Authorized Novel of Mammy from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind , the retelling of a classic by an old hand at Southern fi ction; Tosca Lee’s The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen , the retelling of a biblical story by an author who always delivers heart-pumping Christian fi ction; Elizabeth Fremantle’s Sisters of Treason , a tale of the two sisters of Lady Jane Grey, from the author of the triumphant debut Queen’s Gambit; and Lois Leveen’s Juliet’s Nurse , a servant’s-eye view of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Great nonfi ction: Brando Skyhorse’s Take This Man: A Memoir, the PEN/Hemingway Award winner’s memoir about coming of age with a mother who systematically reinvented his childhood; S.C. Gwynne’s Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson , highlighting Jackson’s accomplishments during the Civil War; Baptist de Pape’s The Power of the Heart: Finding Your True Purpose in Life , packed with spiritual self-help; Kate Mayfi eld’s The Undertaker’s Daughter , a real-life Six Feet Under from the daughter of a small-town undertaker; Carter Paysinger & Steven Fenton’s Where a Man Stands: Two Different Worlds, an Impossible Situation, and the Unexpected Friendship That Changed Everything , Paysinger’s memoir of being a disadvantaged kid who became an inspiring teacher and coach—and then the fi rst black principal (not without upheaval) of rich, progressive Beverly Hills High School; and Harold Holzer’s Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion , from the chair of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation. In-booth signings: On Saturday, 6/28, at 12:00 p.m., Dorothy Hearst, Secrets of the Wolves and Spirit of the Wolves, wrapping up her trilogy on Kaala, the wolf responsible for keeping peace between her kind and humankind; and at 3:00 p.m., Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, much picked as a Best Book last year and soon to be in paperback. Buzzzz: Don’t miss the Simon & Schuster Book Buzz at the Book Buzz Theater, Monday, 6/30, at 9:30–10:00 a.m. 2 3 322 Grove Atlantic Seven fi ction gems: Lily King’s Euphoria (100 books), sexual and intellectual tensions among three anthropologists in the Territory of New Guinea in the 1930s, recently reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review; Malcolm Brooks’s Painted Horses (200 galleys), a gorgeous, Montana-set debut of the changing West, circa 1950, that’s both an Indie Next and a Discover Great New Writers pick; Audrey Magee’s The Undertaking (50 galleys), a debut about World War II told, remarkably, from the German perspective and shortlisted for the Baileys Woman’s Prize for Fiction(formerly the Orange Prize); Paula Daly’s Keep Your Friends Close (100 galleys), which hits home as effectively as her smash debut, Just What Kind of Mother Are You?; Patrick Hoffman’s TheThhe WhiteWhite VanVVan (75 galleys), a San Francisco–set crime debut featuring unsettlingly cross-the-line characters and already attracting a following; Deon Meyer’s Cobra (150 galleys), putting you on the edge of your seat in South Africa; and Conjunctions founding editor Bradford Morrow’s The Forgers (75 galleys), appealing to the cognoscenti with a rare-books backdrop. History at its best: Elizabeth Mitchell’s Liberty’s Torch: The Great Adventure To Build the Statue of Liberty (100 galleys), history you probably don’t know regarding an ambitious French sculptor’s bid (helped by fund-raising smarts) to create a distinctive monument; and Brian Moynahan’s Leningrad: Siege and Symphony; The Story of the Great City Terrorized by Stalin, Starved by Hitler, Immortalized by Shostakovich (75 galleys), an acute and absorbingly told study of horrifi c history through culture. 334 Perseus Books Group Fiction giveaways: Ben Mezrich’s Seven Wonders , from the author of New York Times best-selling nonfi ction, a thriller about hunting for a secret linking the Seven Wonders of the World (200 galleys); and Cecilia Ekbäck’s gothic debut, Wolf Winter (100 galleys), set in the remote reaches of 1717 Swedish Lapland, where a newly arrived family confronts dark secrets and suspicious death (100 galleys). Top nonfi ction giveaways: Chris Taylor’s How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise and National Review senior editor Richard Brookhiser’s Founders’ Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln were the publisher’s biggest hits at BookExpo America. With only about 20 to 50 galleys apiece for distribution, better run fast. Also look for Irvin Yalom’s Creatures of a Day: And Other Tales of Psychotherapy (35 galleys), the much- anticipated follow-up to 1989’s Love’s Executioner; and Jonathan Beckman’s intriguing true-crime How To Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (75 galleys). The contemporary scene: British-Iranian journalist Ramita Navai’s City of Lies: Sex, Death, and the Search for Truth in Tehran (60 galleys), featuring some unexpected characters, like the religious militiaman who undergoes a sex change; Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (60 galleys), an on-the-street look from a contributor to Newsweek and the London Review of Books; G.