On Sale This Week
Our Igloo feature On Sale This Week previews a selection of Penguin Random House fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young readers books being published each week.The choices are a mix of titles by both bestselling and emerging authors. We hope this serves as a useful reference for hot new reads hitting shelves everywhere.
FICTION
SURRENDER, NEW YORK by Caleb Carr (Random House)
Caleb Carr, #1 New York Times bestselling author, returns with a contemporary, edge-of-your-seat thriller featuring the brilliant but unconventional criminal psychologist Dr. Trajan Jones. In the small town of Surrender in upstate New York, Dr. Jones, a psychological profiler, and Dr. Michael Li, a trace evidence expert, teach online courses in profiling and forensic science from Jones’s family farm. Once famed advisors to the New York City Police Department, Trajan and Li now work in exile, having made enemies of those in power. Protected only by farmhands and Jones’s unusual “pet,” the outcast pair is unexpectedly called in to consult on a disturbing case.
THE COUPLE NEXT DOOR: A Novel by Shari Lapena (Pamela Dorman Books)
How well do you know the couple next door? Or your husband? Or even—yourself? Anne and Marco Conti seem to have it all—a loving relationship, a wonderful home, and their beautiful baby, Cora. But one night when they are at a dinner party next door, a terrible crime is committed. Suspicion immediately focuses on the parents. But the truth is a much more complicated story. Inside the curtained house, an unsettling account of what actually happened unfolds. Detective Rasbach knows that the panicked couple is hiding something. Both Anne and Marco soon discover that the other is keeping secrets, secrets they’ve kept for years.
BEHOLD THE DREAMERS by Imbolo Mbue (Random House)
Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself, his wife, Neni, and their six-year-old son. In the fall of 2007, Jende can hardly believe his luck when he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Clark demands punctuality, discretion, and loyalty—and Jende is eager to please. With these opportunities, Jende and Neni can at last gain a foothold in America and imagine a brighter future. When the financial world is rocked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Jongas are desperate to keep Jende’s job—even as their marriage threatens to fall apart. As all four lives are dramatically upended, Jende and Neni are forced to make an impossible choice.
THE DOLLHOUSE by Fiona Davis (Dutton)
“The Dollhouse. . . . That’s what we boys like to call it. . . . The Barbizon Hotel for Women, packed to the rafters with pretty little dolls. Just like you.” Fiona Davis’s stunning debut novel pulls readers into the lush world of New York City’s glamorous Barbizon Hotel for Women, where in the 1950’s a generation of aspiring models, secretaries, and editors lived side-by-side while attempting to claw their way to fairy-tale success, and where a present-day journalist becomes consumed with uncovering a dark secret buried deep within the Barbizon’s glitzy past.
NONFICTION
THE TERROR YEARS by Lawrence Wright (Knopf)
With the Pulitzer Prize–winning THE LOOMING TOWER, Lawrence Wright became generally acknowledged as one of our major journalists writing on terrorism in the Middle East. Here, in ten powerful pieces first published in The New Yorker, he recalls the path that terror in the Middle East has taken, from the rise of al-Qaeda in the 1990s to the recent beheadings of reporters and aid workers by ISIS. On the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11, THE TERROR YEARS is at once a unifying recollection of the roots of contemporary Middle Eastern terrorism, a study of how it has grown and metastasized, and, in the scary and moving epilogue, a cautionary tale of where terrorism might take us yet.
THE IRAN WARS by Jay Solomon (Random House)
For more than a decade, the United States has been engaged in a war with Iran as momentous as any other in the Middle East—a war all the more significant as it has largely been hidden from public view. Through a combination of economic sanctions, global diplomacy, and intelligence work, successive U.S. administrations have struggled to contain Iran’s aspirations to become a nuclear power and dominate the region—what many view as the most serious threat to peace in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Iran has used regional instability to its advantage to undermine America’s interests. THE IRAN WARS is an absorbing account of a battle waged on many levels—military, financial, and covert.
THE CYBER EFFECT by Mary Aiken (Spiegel & Grau)
Mary Aiken is the world’s leading expert in forensic cyberpsychology—a discipline that combines psychology, criminology, and technology to investigate the intersection where technology and human behavior meet. In this, her first book, Aiken has created a starting point for all future conversations about how the Internet is shaping development and behavior, societal norms and values, children, safety, security, and our perception of the world. Cyberspace is an environment full of surveillance, but who is looking out for us? THE CYBER EFFECT offers a fascinating and chilling look at a future we can still do something about.
BLOOD IN THE WATER by Heather Ann Thompson (Pantheon)
The first definitive account of the infamous 1971 Attica prison uprising, the state’s violent response, and the victims’ decades-long quest for justice—including information never released to the public—published to coincide with the forty-fifth anniversary of this historic event. Heather Ann Thompson sheds new light on one of the most important civil rights stories of the last century, exploring every aspect of the uprising and its legacy from the perspectives of all of those involved in this forty-five-year fight for justice: the prisoners, the state officials, the lawyers on both sides, the state troopers and corrections officers, and the families of the slain men.
YOUNG READERS
SPONTANEOUS by Aaron Starmer (Dutton Books for Young Readers)
Mara Carlyle’s senior year is going as normally as could be expected, until—wa-bam!—fellow senior Katelyn Ogden explodes during third period pre-calc. Katelyn is the first, but she won’t be the last teenager to blow up without warning or explanation. As the seniors continue to pop like balloons and the national eye turns to Mara’s suburban New Jersey hometown, the FBI rolls in and the search for a reason is on. Whip-smart and blunt, Mara narrates the end of their world as she knows it while trying to make it to graduation in one piece. It’s an explosive year punctuated by romance, quarantine, lifelong friendship, hallucinogenic mushrooms, bloggers, ice cream trucks, “Snooze Button™,” Bon Jovi, and the filthiest language you’ve ever heard from the President of the United States.
SQUISH #8: POD VS. POD by Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm (Random House Books for Young Readers)
From the New York Times bestselling, Eisner-winning creators of Babymouse, it’s green . . . it’s blobby . . . it’s gross . . . it’s SQUISH(!), a comic-book-loving amoeba whose adventures are perfect for fans of Captain Underpants. Uh-oh! Squish’s friend Pod just hasn’t been himself lately. One minute he’s happy-dancing; the next he’s sobbing in his soup. What’s going on? (Hint: “mitosis” is the process that splits single-celled organisms. That’s right, splits.) It is truly pod vs. pod—and may the best pod, umm, win?
THIEVING WEASELS by Billy Taylor (Dial Books for Young Readers)
Cameron Smith attends an elite boarding school and has just been accepted to Princeton University alongside his beautiful girlfriend, Claire. Life for Cameron would be perfect, except that Cameron Smith is actually Skip O’Rourke, and Skip O’Rourke ran away from his grifter family four years ago…along with $100,000 of their “earnings” (because starting a new life is not cheap). But when his uncle Wonderful tracks him down, Skip’s given an ultimatum: come back to the family for one last con, or say good-bye to life as Cameron.
NOT AS WE KNOW IT by Tom Avery (Schwartz & Wade)
Twins Jamie and Ned do everything together. But Ned is sick with cystic fibrosis, and he may someday leave Jamie behind. One day the boys find a strange animal on the beach: smooth flesh on one end, scales at the other, and short arms and legs with long webbed fingers and toes. Could it be a merman, like in the old stories Granddad tells? Together, the boys name the creature Leonard and decide to hide him in a tub in their garage. But why is Leonard here? Jamie hopes he might bring some miracle that will stop his brother from going where he can no longer follow. But Ned, who grows closer to Leonard every day, doesn’t seem to be getting any better.