New Edelweiss E-galleys (4/19/22)

Hello e-galley readers! Check out some of the exciting e-galleys that were recently added to Edelweiss for your downloading pleasure:

OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA by Julia Armfield
ISBN 9781250229892 | on sale 7/12/22

Leah is changed. A marine biologist, she left for a routine expedition months earlier, only this time her submarine sank to the sea floor. When she finally surfaces and returns home, her wife Miri knows that something is wrong. Barely eating and lost in her thoughts, Leah rotates between rooms in their apartment, running the taps morning and night. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded, Leah has carried part of it with her, onto dry land and into their home. As Miri searches for answers, desperate to understand what happened below the water, she must face the possibility that the woman she loves is slipping from her grasp.

By turns elegiac and furious, wry and heartbreaking, OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA is an exploration of the unknowable depths within each of us, and the love that compels us nevertheless toward one another. Fathomlessly inventive and original, Julia Armfield’s debut is a portrait of marriage as we’ve never seen it before.

SEASONAL FEARS by Seanan McGuire
ISBN 9781250768261 | on sale 5/3/22

Melanie has a destiny, though it isn’t the one everyone assumes it to be. She’s delicate; she’s fragile; she’s dying. Now, truly, is the winter of her soul.

Harry doesn’t want to believe in destiny, because that means accepting the loss of the one person who gives his life meaning, who brings summer to his world.

So, when a new road is laid out in front of them—a road that will lead through untold dangers toward a possible lifetime together—walking down it seems to be the only option.

But others are following behind, with violence in their hearts.

It looks like Destiny has a plan for them, after all….

THE WIDOWMAKER by Hannah Morrissey
ISBN 9781250795977 | on sale 12/6/22

Ever since business mogul Clive Reynolds disappeared twenty years ago, the name “Reynolds” has become synonymous with “murder” and “mystery.” And now, lured by a cryptic note, down-on-her-luck photographer Morgan Mori returns home to Black Harbor and into the web of their family secrets and double lives. The same night she photographs the Reynolds holiday get-together, Morgan becomes witness to a homicide of a cop that triggers the discovery of a long-buried clue.

This could finally be the evidence to crack open the chilling cold case, and Investigator Ryan Hudson has a chance to prove himself as lead detective. If only he could stop letting his need to solve his partner’s recent murder distract him. But as Morgan exposes her own dark demons, could her sordid history be the key to unlocking more than one mystery?

THE VIRAL UNDERCLASS: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher
ISBN 9781250796639 | on sale 8/2/22

In March 2020, the COVID pandemic plunged the world into fear and chaos. People around the globe locked themselves in their houses and stocked up on food, fearing unemployment, the loss of loved ones, and an uncertain future. But as the weeks went on, one devastating truth began to emerge more prominently than any other: we were not all impacted by this virus the same way. While wealthier people could keep themselves safe by working from home and using food delivery, the marginalized members of society were left much more vulnerable. They held risky jobs as “Essential Workers”; they did not have health insurance; they lost employment and the ability to afford housing and food; they were old and viewed as disposable; they were undocumented and afraid to go to the hospital; they were at far greater risk because of living with a disability. It quickly became startlingly clear the vast inequalities in who was able to survive the virus.

And yet for prominent scholar Steven Thrasher, none of this was a surprise. Having spent his ground-breaking career studying the racialization, policing, and criminalization of HIV, Dr. Thrasher had seen first hand how viruses intersect with racism, capitalism, homophobia, and ableism. He knew that the ways in which viruses spread, kill, and take their toll are much more dependent on social structures than they are on biology. And he had a term for it: the viral underclass.

In THE VIRAL UNDERCLASS, Dr. Thrasher will present, for the first time, his unified theory of one of the most pressing social justice issues of our time: how viruses expose the fault lines of society. Told through the heart-rending stories of friends, activists, and teachers navigating COVID, HIV, and other viruses, Dr. Thrasher brings the reader with him as he develops his theory and lays bare its inner workings–all in an engaging, accessible, and personable voice. In the tradition of Isabel Wilkerson’s CASTE, Michelle Alexander’s THE NEW JIM CROW, and Naomi Klein’s THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, THE VIRAL UNDERCLASS helps us understand the world more deeply by showing the fraught relationship between privilege and survival.

LEECH by Hiron Ennes
ISBN 9781250811189 | on sale 9/27/22

In an isolated chateau, as far north as north goes, the baron’s doctor has died. The doctor’s replacement has a mystery to solve: discovering how the Institute lost track of one of its many bodies.

For hundreds of years the Interprovincial Medical Institute has grown by taking root in young minds and shaping them into doctors, replacing every human practitioner of medicine. The Institute is here to help humanity, to cure and to cut, to cradle and protect the species from the apocalyptic horrors their ancestors unleashed.

In the frozen north, the Institute’s body will discover a competitor for its rung at the top of the evolutionary ladder. A parasite is spreading through the baron’s castle, already a dark pit of secrets, lies, violence, and fear. The two will make war on the battlefield of the body. Whichever wins, humanity will lose again.

NOTES ON YOUR SUDDEN DISAPPEARANCE by Alison Espach
ISBN 9781250823144 | on sale 5/17/22

For much of her life, Sally Holt has been mystified by the things her older sister, Kathy, seems to have been born knowing. Kathy has answers for all of Sally’s questions about life, about love, and about Billy Barnes, a rising senior and local basketball star who mans the concession stand at the town pool. The girls have been fascinated by Billy ever since he jumped off the roof in elementary school, but Billy has never shown much interest in them until the summer before Sally begins eighth grade. By then, their mutual infatuation with Billy is one of the few things the increasingly different sisters have in common. Sally spends much of that summer at the pool, watching in confusion and excitement as her sister falls deeper in love with Billy—until a tragedy leaves Sally’s life forever intertwined with his.

Opening in the early nineties and charting almost two decades of shared history and missed connections, NOTES ON YOUR SUDDEN DISAPPEARANCE is both a breathtaking love story about two broken people who are unexplainably, inconveniently drawn to each other and a wryly astute coming-of-age tale brimming with unexpected moments of joy.