APRIL 2025
TILT, by Emma Pattee
Available from Simon & Schuster
Sign-up deadline for this title: March 15, 2025
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Set over the course of a single day, an electrifying debut novel from “a powerful new literary voice” (Vogue) following one woman’s journey across a transformed city, carrying the weight of her past and a fervent hope for the future.
“[A] nail-biting debut… Pattee’s depiction of a post-earthquake Portland feels bracingly realistic, and her depictions of marriage and impending motherhood are achingly raw. Shocking and full of heart, this leaves a mark.” —Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
“[A] fascinating and emotional debut… compelling… Instantly readable and filled with dry humor, this book follows in the footsteps of other disaster novels while bringing a fresh take to the genre.” —Booklist (starred)
Last night, you and I were safe. Last night, in another universe, your father and I stood fighting in the kitchen.
Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, there’s nothing to do but walk.
Making her way across the wreckage of Portland, Annie experiences human desperation and kindness: strangers offering help, a riot at a grocery store, and an unlikely friendship with a young mother. As she walks, Annie reflects on her struggling marriage, her disappointing career, and her anxiety about having a baby. If she can just make it home, she’s determined to change her life.
A propulsive debut, Tilt is a primal scream of a novel about the disappointments and desires we all carry, and what each of us will do for the people we love.
MAY 2025:
BUZZ KILL, by J. Robert Lennon (Mulholland Books)
Sign-up deadline: April 15, 2025
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When the shadowy circumstances of a relative's death are brought to light, Jane and Lila are plunged into the recesses of an underground drug operation with links to a burgeoning fascist movement.
The Pool sisters have gone into business together: a down-home, if unequal, PI enterprise. But then Lila receives a shocking piece of news from an old friend of their Aunt Ruth's: their aunt's suicide more than a decade earlier might not have been what it seemed. A lawyer, she had represented a disgraced chemist working on a dangerous synthetic opioid. But once the client, Travis Nutt, was poised to lose, he went rogue and unleashed the adulterant as a street drug, in conjunction with a shadowy cartel. Can the twins solve the mystery of their aunt's death and bring this cultlike billionaire to justice?
Meanwhile, Jane has been invited to attend a writers' conference, an outlet she relishes until her dangerously confessional prose is seen by the wrong eyes. Her teenage daughter, Chloe, becomes the victim of a deepfake video while campaigning for class president and aggressively pursues the instigators, unaware of the muscle behind them. And old Harry, Jane's father, has stumbled upon a piece of unknown history that opens an unexpected door.
Buzz Kill is a rambunctious, kinetic, elastically braided narrative of a ride that shows J. Robert Lennon is at the height of his powers.
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