On Sale This Week
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
NIGHT SCHOOL by Lee Child (Delacorte Press)
It’s 1996, and Reacher is still in the army. In the morning they give him a medal, and in the afternoon they send him back to school. That night he’s off the grid. Out of sight, out of mind. Two other men are in the classroom—an FBI agent and a CIA analyst. Each is wondering what the hell they are doing there. Then they find out: A Jihadist sleeper cell in Hamburg, Germany, has received an unexpected visitor—a Saudi courier, seeking safe haven while waiting to rendezvous with persons unknown. A CIA asset, undercover inside the cell, has overheard the courier whisper a chilling message: “The American wants a hundred million dollars.” From Langley to Hamburg, Jalalabad to Kiev, NIGHT SCHOOL moves like a bullet through a treacherous landscape of double crosses, faked identities, and new and terrible enemies, as Reacher maneuvers inside the game and outside the law.
AFTER ATLAS by Emma Newman (Roc)
Gov-corp detective Carlos Moreno was only a baby when Atlas left Earth to seek truth among the stars. But in that moment, the course of Carlos’s entire life changed. Atlas is what took his mother away; what made his father lose hope; what led Alejandro Casales, leader of the religious cult known as the Circle, to his door. And now, on the eve of the fortieth anniversary of Atlas’s departure, it’s got something to do why Casales was found dead in his hotel room—and why Carlos is the man in charge of the investigation. To figure out who killed one of the most powerful men on Earth, Carlos is supposed to put aside his personal history. But the deeper he delves into the case, the more he realizes that escaping the past is not so easy. There’s more to Casales’s death than meets the eye, and something much more sinister to the legacy of Atlas than anyone realizes.
THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE by Thomas Hardy (Vintage)
THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE, one of Thomas Hardy’s most powerful novels, opens with a scene of shocking heartlessness. In a fit of drunken rage, Michael Henchard, an out-of-work laborer, sells his wife and baby daughter to a passing sailor. When the horror of what he has done dawns on him the next day, he determines to set his life on a different path, and through years of hard work and ambition rises to become the rich and respectable mayor of his town. Secret guilt continues to haunt this proud and brooding man, however, and when his wife and grown daughter return to Casterbridge, Henchard is set on the path to a dramatic confrontation with his own deeply flawed nature. Hardy’s keen insight into the course of wayward lives and his instinctive feel for the beauty of the rural landscape come together in this unforgettable portrait of a tragic hero.
LEOPARD’S FURY by Christine Feehan (Jove)
With her own bakery in San Antonio, Evangeline Tregre made a new life far from the brutal lair of shifters she was born into. Though she is all too aware of her leopard-shifter blood, she never felt the sensation of a wild animal stirring inside her. Not until Alonzo Massi walked into her bakery. The powerful shifter is as irresistible as he is terrifying, but his icy demeanor tells her to keep her distance. Alonzo knows better than to let himself get involved with someone like Evangeline. But even with his lean muscle and iron will, Alonzo isn’t strong enough to stay away from the one woman who can make him feel at peace. And when their secret lives draw a mortal threat, Alonzo unleashes the feral passion he keeps pent up inside himself.
NONFICTION
THE ARTIST’S WAY MORNING PAGES JOURNAL by Julia Cameron (TarcherPerigee)
Elegantly repackaged, THE MORNING PAGES JOURNAL is one of THE ARTIST’S WAY’S most effective tools for cultivating creativity, personal growth, and change. Now more compact and featuring spiral binding to make for easier use, these Morning Pages invite you to do three pages daily of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness, which provoke, clarify, comfort, cajole, prioritize, and synchronize the day at hand. This daily writing, coupled with the twelve-week program outlined in The Artist’s Way, will help you discover and recover your personal creativity, artistic confidence, and productivity.
BUTTER CELEBRATES! by Rosie Daykin (Knopf)
What’s a celebration without something delicious that’s been baked with love? Rosie Daykin, author of Butter Baked Goods and owner of the Vancouver bakery of the same name, believes that celebrating is about much more than just circling a date on the calendar. It’s a chance to spend time with your family and friends, to laugh really hard, to let things get a little chaotic, and to eat lots of delicious baked goods. Whether you’re an experienced baker or just starting out, Rosie’s straightforward recipes are easy to follow and will produce irresistible results. It will inspire you to celebrate life and to create new traditions and memories along the way.
THE VANILLA BEAN BAKING BOOK: Recipes for Irresistible Everyday Favorites and Reinvented Classics by Sarah Kieffer (Avery)
Readers find the Vanilla Bean blog while hunting for the perfect chocolate cake or cinnamon roll recipe, or another everyday favorite. They stay for founder Sarah Kieffer’s simple approach to home baking, the utterly transporting, dreamlike quality of her photography, and her evocative storytelling. Most of all, the Vanilla Bean blog celebrates the soulfulness of baking. Kieffer mastered the art of home baking while working in tiny kitchens in the back of coffeehouses and bakeries in Minnesota. With recipes that help simplify the process behind complicated techniques, Vanilla Bean has built a dedicated following of several hundred thousand loyal readers and won several awards, including the Reader’s Choice Award for best baking blog from Saveur.
MY LOST POETS by Philip Levine (Knopf)
In prose both as superbly rendered as his poetry and as down-to-earth and easy as speaking, Levine reveals the things that made him the poet he became. In the title essay, originally the final speech of his poet laureate year, he recounts how as a boy he composed little speeches walking in the night woods near his house and how he later realized these were his first poems. He wittily takes on the poets he studied with in the Iowa Writing Program: John Berryman, who was his great teacher and lifelong friend, and Robert Lowell, who was neither. His deepest influences–jazz, Spain, the working people of Detroit–are reflected in many of the pieces. There are essays on Spanish poets he admires, William Carlos Williams, Wordsworth, Keats, and others. A wonderful, moving collection of writings that add to our knowledge and appreciation of Philip Levine–both the man and the poet.
YOUNG READERS
DEAD GIRLS SOCIETY by Michelle Krys (Delacorte Press)
Hope is sick of everyone treating her like she’s breakable. Sure, she has cystic fibrosis (basically really bad lungs), but she’s tired of being babied by her mom and her overprotective best friend, Ethan, not to mention worrying about paying for her expensive medication and how she’s going to afford college. And she’s bored with life in her run-down New Orleans suburb. When an invitation arrives from a mysterious group that calls itself the Society, Hope jumps at the chance for some excitement. This could be her ticket out. All she has to do is complete a few dares and she just might win some real money. But the Society isn’t all that it seems . . . and soon Hope finds that playing the game isn’t a choice—it’s a requirement.
DOUBLE ECLIPSE by Melissa de la Cruz (G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers)
Twin witches Mardi and Molly Overbrook are back for another summer in North Hampton, and this year they’re serious about two things: avoiding trouble and dedicating themselves to rest and relaxation. Molly’s headed to Aunt Ingrid’s, while Mardi has convinced their father, Troy—a.k.a. Thor, the god of thunder—to let her crash with her boyfriend, Trent, who also happens to be Tyr, the god of war. It’s a tangled web they weave, but that’s to be expected where gods and goddesses are concerned. Their vacation’s just begun when an old secret is revealed, leaving Molly and Mardi to question everything they’ve ever known about their family. Then a hot new guy comes to town and starts brewing even more trouble . . . and soon enough, the twins are back to their old tricks.
THE DOOR THAT LED TO WHERE by Sally Gardner (Delacorte Press)
AJ Flynn has just failed all but one of his major exams, and at almost seventeen years old, he sees a future that’s far from rosy. So when he’s offered a junior clerk position at a London law firm, he hopes his life is about to change—and it does, but he could never have imagined how much. While on the job, AJ finds an old key labeled with his birth date, and he’s determined to find the door it will open. When he does just that, AJ and his group of scrappy friends begin a series of amazing journeys to the past—1830, to be exact. When they discover a crime that only they can solve, the boys go from wayward youths to intrepid young men with a purpose in life. But with enemies all around, can they unravel the mysteries of the past before the past unravels them?
THE SEELIE KING’S WAR by Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple (Viking Books for Young Readers)
The war that Prince Aspen and midwife’s apprentice Snail started—purely by accident—is at hand. The Unseelie Army, the evil side of Faerie, will soon invade and destroy the Seelie kingdom. Aspen is terrified, not simply because his homeland is on the verge of ruin, but because he is now, after the death of his father and brothers, the Seelie King. He is a young, untried king; a king without a battle plan. But he has Snail, his first and only friend, and the only one who can raise the army Aspen needs—an army of changelings, like her. First, however, she has to convince the mysterious, dangerous Professor Odds, the changelings’ leader, who has a destructive plan of his own.