The 14 Best New Book Releases This Week: Oct. 15-21, 2024
By Michael Giltz,
1 days ago
Here are the 14 best new book releases this week: October 15-21, 2024. It’s fall and the holidays are happening! Halloween , Thanksgiving , Hanukkah , Kwanzaa, Christmas and New Year’s Eve and they all involve…food. I mean, if you have any sense they involve food. Food as a gift. Food as a trick-or-treat . Food as a peace offering (you didn’t really mean to insult your brother-in-law’s taste in clothes!). Food as love when the family gathers. This week, I’ve picked out three of the best foodie books of the year: a memoir by Stanley Tucci and two great cookbooks.
You’ll also find romances and a memoir by Al Pacino and a new novel by Susan Minot and an adorable picture book and investigative reporting by Bob Woodward and a work of historical fiction I consider one of the best of the year (and certainly one of the most entertaining). Scroll down to find them all! So let’s get reading. At the head of the Parade are…
The 14 Best New Book Releases This Week: Oct. 15-21, 2024
Courtesy of Carnival&comma Gallery Books&comma Flatiron Books
I fell hard for Prue Leith, an acclaimed foodie with the unenviable task of following Mary Berry on The Great British Bake Off. She proved quite fun and is on brand for this cookbook by brandishing a drink. (Contestants always know a little alcohol will appeal to her.) You know Stanley Tucci. You love Stanley Tucci. You wish Stanley Tucci would cook for you. (I have ever since the quiet, perfect final scene of his masterpiece Big Night. ) Now he shares a year of his life and the reviews say it’s candid and charming, as expected. Finally, Julia Turshen isn’t just going to teach you some recipes. She’s explaining what goes with what, so you can enjoy an endless combination of possibilities from a few basics. Great! Though I’d still rather Stanley Tucci does the cooking and I clean up.
We’ve had the TV series Bosch and that immediately led to the sequel series Bosch: Legacy . A third and final season of that launches in March of 2025, but never fear! Det. Renée Ballard will get her own spin-off series. And the books keep coming. In the latest, Ballard accepts an assist from rookie cop Maddie Bosch, Harry’s daughter. Along with Bosch himself, they’re looking to nail a serial rapist and solve one of L.A.’s most infamous cold cases in The Waiting . (Which is the hardest part.) This is the 25th book in the series and critics are saying it’s one of author Michael Connelly’s best. You just can’t kill off good characters! Just ask Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Two very different romances. In Bull Moon Rising, Ruby Dixon takes her unabashed pleasure in pairing characters with… unlikely partners. In this case, it’s a noble woman who must pose as a commoner, marry a minotaur to gain access to a Guild so she can save her family’s fortunes and he’s in on it and perfectly fine with the subterfuge though he must mention the fact that said minotaur is about to go into rut. Dixon delivers the goods.
Far less anatomically challenging–but emotionally fraught–are the challenges of the holiday season and family. That’s why single gal Hailey foregoes the constant nagging of her family and heads to Podunk, Oregon for some solo time this Christmas. Enter handsome local Jay, who encourages all-but-buried dreams of songwriting, followed quickly by personal revelations and family drama. But it’s Debbie Macomber so fingers crossed we’ll get a Hallmark ending.
War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, sang Edwin Starr. But it makes for gripping investigative journalism, with Bob Woodward already making headlines with his latest, behind-the-scenes work filled with revelations and inside scoop on who did what when when it comes to the Ukraine and the ever-troubled Middle East. Note to self: if I ever become President, do not give Woodward any access.
Novelist Susan Minot takes her time. Don’t Be A Stranger is her first novel in a decade. But her protagonist Ivy–52 years old and divorced–can’t spare a thought for anything but her new lover. He’s 20 years her junior, intense, smolderingly handsome, fresh out of prison (it was a minor rap, don’t sweat it) and their chemistry is overwhelming. Ivy keeps it together, almost. But it can’t end well, can it? Should it? And does it have to end at all?
Writer Daniel M. Lavery models the women’s hotel in his new novel after the Barbizon, a mainstay of young New York women on the go. His hotel the Beidermeier is a tad seedier, but bursting with stories about gals on the way down and on the way up and on the way out, as you might well imagine. Cue the TV series, if I know my streaming services. The folks at Goodreads agree. Book lovers on the site named this one of the six most anticipated books out this week ; they've either read an advance copy and loved it or they are most excited to dive in.
Mark Haddon gained eternal fame with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Steady and accomplished work followed, until he was waylaid by both heart bypass surgery and Long Covid. Now Haddon found he could shake off the resulting brain fog by toying with Greek classic myths. The result is Dogs and Monsters, a collection of stories that range from the classic (like the minotaur trapped in his labyrinth) to how kids can be just as capricious and cruel as the gods. Welcome back.
It’s been a bad few weeks for director Francis Ford Coppola. Perhaps he can take some solace in the memoirs of Al Pacino, the actor he fought the studio over to be the lead in The Godfather. The result was not one but two masterpieces and a career for Pacino that went from strength to strength on stage and screen for decades to come. Pacino may dish, but mostly about what matters: the craft of acting.
I’ve read Neal Stephenson’s classic cyberpunk novel Snow Crash. But I’ve somehow never tackled his other big books, like Cryptonomicon or his historical fiction in The Baroque Cycle. I thought he was strictly sci-fi (or speculative fiction, if you wanna get fancy.) He sort of coined cryptocurrency and definitely gave life to the idea of the Metaverse. (Is Zuckerberg paying him royalties?)
But now here’s Polostan, a rich historical novel that’s the first in a series set from the 1920s to at least the Cold War. Stephenson worked on this for a good decade and it shows. The work is deeply convincing, from polo playing out West to a meeting of varied officials in Russia that is so engrossing in the subtle dynamics at play (despite being a scene of only minor importance) that I’m reminded of John Le Carré.
Yet–and I wasn’t quite expecting this–the novel is also wildly, almost shamelessly entertaining. Like Saturday afternoon movie serial cliffhanger sort of entertaining. My jaw dropped when the story was sidetracked by a religious fanatic who doesn’t mind preying on orphans and yet again by a scene of torture set in Siberia-like conditions where a person is suspended over a hole in the ice and threatened with being dropped in for good. When our protagonist grabs a Tommy gun and says coldly, “I’ve got this” at another key moment? Oh, I was all in. No wonder the mainstream critics don’t embrace Stephenson as much as the sci-fi community. He’s too much damn fun. Polostan is only 320 pages, which is trim and sprightly by his sprawling standards. Several more volumes are set to come, says Stephenson, though he’s not even sure of the scope this work will take yet. Fine, but keep them coming fast.
Who are you? What are your roots? What did your forebears sacrifice to get you where you are today? All these questions come bubbling up at the Bornday family gathering in North Carolina. Generations come together to hear about Grannylou and Babylou and the almost supernatural protection afforded the family from their enslavers hundreds of years ago. But debts must be paid and evil is sometimes sleeping. And maybe that protection thanks to Great Dismal swamp isn’t “almost” supernatural after all. In this acclaimed work, Birmingham, Alabama author Randi Pink delivers what Publishers Weekly calls “mesmerizing storytelling.”
Writer and illustrator Christopher Denise scored a Caldecott award for his charming picture book Knight Owl. It showed Knight Owl determined to join the Knights of the Watch, despite the insurmountable problem of being rather small. That didn’t stop him at all. Now in the sequel Denise flips the script. Knight Owl is firmly established at his job and enjoys the quiet solitude of the Night Watch. That is until the even smaller Early Bird shows up, chatting nonstop and desperate to prove he too can be a Knight of the Watch. Denise executes this idea impeccably. Kids will demand you read both of them back to back, again and again. But you won’t mind since Early Bird’s chirpy dialogue is so fun to deliver.
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