New Edelweiss E-galleys (11/14/22)

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

BEYOND THAT, THE SEA by Laura Spence-Ash
9781250854377 | 3/21/23

As German bombs fall over London in 1940, working-class parents Millie and Reginald Thompson make an impossible choice: they decide to send their eleven-year-old daughter, Beatrix, to America. There, she’ll live with another family for the duration of the war, where they hope she’ll stay safe.

Scared and angry, feeling lonely and displaced, Bea arrives in Boston to meet the Gregorys. Mr. and Mrs. G, and their sons William and Gerald, fold Bea seamlessly into their world. She becomes part of this lively family, learning their ways and their stories, adjusting to their affluent lifestyle. Bea grows close to both boys, one older and one younger, and fills in the gap between them. Before long, before she even realizes it, life with the Gregorys feels more natural to her than the quiet, spare life with her own parents back in England.

As Bea comes into herself and relaxes into her new life—summers on the coast in Maine, new friends clamoring to hear about life across the sea—the girl she had been begins to fade away, until, abruptly, she is called home to London when the war ends.

Desperate as she is not to leave this life behind, Bea dutifully retraces her trip across the Atlantic back to her new, old world. As she returns to post-war London, the memory of her American family stays with her, never fully letting her go, and always pulling on her heart as she tries to move on and pursue love and a life of her own.

As we follow Bea over time, navigating between her two worlds, BEYOND THAT, THE SEA emerges as a beautifully written, absorbing novel, full of grace and heartache, forgiveness and understanding, loss and love.

BIOGRAPHY OF X by Catherine Lacey
9780374606176 | 3/21/23

When X—an iconoclastic artist and shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow CM, wild with grief, hurls herself into writing X’s biography. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. In CM’s quest to unravel it, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification.

A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, BIOGRAPHY OF X follows CM as she traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America’s divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. And when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined.

Pulsing with suspense and intellect, BIOGRAPHY OF X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.

THE DEEP SKY by Yume Kitasei
9781250875334 | 7/18/23

It is the eve of Earth’s environmental collapse. A single ship carries humanity’s last hope: eighty elite graduates of a competitive program, who will give birth to a generation of children in deep space. But halfway to a distant but livable planet, a lethal bomb kills three of the crew and knocks the Phoenix off course. Asuka, the only surviving witness, is an immediate suspect.

Asuka already felt like an impostor before the explosion. She was the last picked for the mission, she struggled during training back on Earth, and she was chosen to represent Japan, a country she only partly knows as a half-Japanese girl raised in America. But estranged from her mother back home, the Phoenix is all she has left.

With the crew turning on each other, Asuka is determined to find the culprit before they all lose faith in the mission—or worse, the bomber strikes again. Now, in order to survive, she must burn brighter than the stars that surround her.

NO TWO PERSONS by Erica Bauermeister
9781250284372 | 5/2/23

Alice has always wanted to be a writer. Her talent is innate, but her stories remain safe and detached, until a devastating event breaks her heart open, and she creates a stunning debut novel. Her words, in turn, find their way to readers, from a teenager hiding her homelessness, to a free diver pushing himself beyond endurance, an artist furious at the world around her, a bookseller in search of love, a widower rent by grief. Each one is drawn into Alice’s novel; each one discovers something different that alters their perspective, and presents new pathways forward for their lives.

Together, their stories reveal how books can affect us in the most beautiful and unexpected of ways—and how we are all more closely connected to one another than we might think.

BAD SUMMER PEOPLE by Emma Rosenblum
9781250887009 | 5/23/23

Jen Weinstein and Lauren Parker rule the town of Salcombe, Fire Island every summer. They hold sway on the beach and the tennis court, and are adept at manipulating people to get what they want. Their husbands, Sam and Jason, have summered together on the island since childhood, despite lifelong grudges and numerous secrets. Their one single friend, Rachel Woolf, is looking to meet her match, whether he’s the tennis pro—or someone else’s husband. But even with plenty to gossip about, this season starts out as quietly as any other.

Until a body is discovered, face down, off the side of the boardwalk.

Stylish, subversive, and darkly comedic, this is a story of what’s lurking under the surface of picture-perfect lives in a place where everyone has something to hide.

PROMISES OF GOLD by José Olivarez
9781250878496 | 2/7/23

Love is at the heart of everything we do, and yet it is often mishandled, misrepresented, or narrowly defined. In the words of José Olivarez: “How many bad lovers have gotten poems? How many crushes? No disrespect to romantic love—but what about our friends? Those homies who show up when the romance ends to help you heal your heart. Those homies who are there all along—cheering for us and reminding us that love is abundant.”

Written in English and combined with a Spanish translation by poet David Ruano, PROMISES OF GOLD explores many forms of love and how “a promise made isn’t always a promise kept,” as Olivarez grapples with the contradictions of the American Dream laying bare the ways in which “love is complicated by forces larger than our hearts.”

He writes, “For those of us who are hyphenated Americans, where do we belong? PROMISES OF GOLD attempts to reckon with colonial legacy and the reality of what those promises have borne out for Mexican descendants. I wrote this book to imagine and document an ongoing practice of healing—healing that requires me to show up for myself, my community, my friends, my family, and my loves every day.”

Whether readers enter this collection in English or Spanish, these extraordinary poems are sure to become beloved for their illuminations of life—and love.

DID YOU HEAR ABOUT KITTY KARR? by Crystal Smith Paul
9781250815309 | 5/9/23

When white silver screen icon Kitty Karr Tate dies and bequeaths her multimillion-dollar estate to the three Black St. John sisters, it prompts questions.

A celebrity in her own right, Elise St. John would rather focus on sorting out Kitty’s affairs than deal with the press. But what she discovers in one of Kitty’s journals rocks her world harder than any other brewing scandal could—and between a cheating fiancé and fallout from a controversial social media post, there are plenty. And if this isn’t enough, her Vogue shoot has been complicated by the arrival of Jasper, a handsome and knowing photographer who may offer the Elise a chance at her most authentic pose yet—if she can defy her publicist, plan Kitty’s memorial, and figure out how she really feels under the harsh gaze of the paparazzi, the public—and her mother. The discovery that her longtime neighbor and mentor was her grandmother, a Black woman who had been passing for white for over sixty years, threatens to expose a web of unexpected family ties, debts owed, and debatable crimes that could, with one pull, unravel the all-American fabric of her sisters and those closest to them.

DID YOU HEAR ABOUT KITTY KARR? is a sprawling tale that explores the celebrity machine, the burdens of being Black­, the privileges gained by fading to white, and the power that family secrets have to erode and complicate the lives of future generations.

CAN’T I GO INSTEAD by Lee Geum-yi
9781250859556 | 5/2/23

CAN’T I GO INSTEAD follows the lives of the daughter of a Korean nobleman and her maidservant in the early 20th century. When the daughter’s suitor is arrested as a Korean Independence activist and she is implicated during the investigation, she is quickly forced into marriage to one of her father’s Japanese employees and shipped off to the United States. At the same time, her maidservant is sent in her mistress’s place to be a comfort woman to the Japanese Imperial army.

Years of hardship, survival, and even happiness follows. In the aftermath of WWII, the women make their way home, where they must reckon with the tangled lives they’ve led, in an attempt to reclaim their identities, and find their place in an independent Korea.