Top 10 most-anticipated books of May 2014

Posted on 2014-05-05 at 18:33 by Sam

Everyone has their own lists, but here's mine: what I'm most looking forward to this month, in chronological order of release, with audiobook information if I know about it:

MAY 6

Authority by Jeff VanderMeer (FSG Originals, May 6) -- "In Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer introduced the mysteries of Area X—a remote and lush terrain mysteriously sequestered from civilization. It was the first volume of a projected trilogy; well in advance of publication, translation rights had sold all around the world and a major movie deal had been struck. Just months later, the second volume is here. For thirty years, the only human engagement with Area X has taken the form of a series of expeditions monitored by a secret agency called the Southern Reach. After the disastrous twelfth expedition chronicled in Annihilation, the Southern Reach is in disarray, and John Rodriguez (aka “Control”) is the team’s newly appointed head. From a series of interrogations, a cache of hidden notes, and hours of profoundly troubling video footage, the secrets of Area X begin to reveal themselves—and what they expose pushes Control to confront disturbing truths about both himself and the agency he’s promised to serve. And the consequences will reach much farther than that. The Southern Reach Trilogy will conclude in fall 2014 with Acceptance." Audio: Coming concurrent with the print/ebook release, read by Bronson Pinchot for Blackstone Audio. Buy: [Downpour | Indiebound | Kobo | Amazon | Kindle]

The Memory Garden by Mary Rickert (Sourcebooks, May 6) -- I only just heard about this book at all, but straight away it leaps near the top of my interest list this month: "World Fantasy Award winning short story author Rickert has just published her first novel, and we're looking forward to it. From the jacket copy: 'Sixteen-year-old Bay Singer doesn't believe the rumors that her eccentric mother, Nan, is a witch. It's just the gossip of their small town, Bay thinks, until two eccentric friends from Nan's past unexpectedly appear one afternoon. The curious reunion summons haunting memories: of an oath the three women took years ago, when they were girls themselves, and the devastating secret they promised to protect. What they unearth has already claimed one life, leaving Bay wondering who the real witches are, and who is truly wicked.'" (via io9.com; there's also an excerpt at Tor.com). Audio: No audio news. Buy: [Kobo | Indiebound | Amazon | Kindle]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged authority, bronson pinchot, c robert cargill, dioni collins, elizabeth may, ellen datlow, fearful symmetries, jeff vandermeer, jo walton, laline paull, mary rickert, monica byrne, my real children, nazneen contractor, nick harkaway, orlagh cassidy, queen of the dark things, the bees, the falconer, the girl in the road, the man with the compound eyes, the memory garden, tigerman, vikas adam, wu ming-yi

Whispersync Daily Deal: Zachary Jernigan's No Return, read by John FitzGibbon

Posted on 2014-05-03 at 15:03 by Sam

Saturday, May 3, 2014: Remember two days ago in the monthly Whispersync roundup when I said that I wouldn't be doing daily deals with full write-ups on the blog? Well, I lied. Because sometimes there will be a title I think so highly of that I just have to write a bit more about it. Today's Kindle Daily Deal is Zachary Jernigan's No Return: A Novel of Jeroun, at $1.99, and there's a $1.99 Whispersync for Voice upgrade to the Audible edition, performed by John FitzGibbon for Audible Frontiers.

I was blown away by this imaginative, dark fantasy debut both as a story and as a performance. In my review last April I called it "A stunning and original debut fantasy" and wrote the following, with which I still whole-heartedly agree:

Posted in Whispersync Deals | Tagged john fitzgibbon, no return, zachary jernigan

Whispersync Deal Roundup for May 2014: Seanan McGuire's Indexing, Stant Litore's No Lasting Burial, Ania Ahlborn's The Shuddering, Peter Lerangis' Seven Wonders, and Christian Cantrell's Containment

Posted on 2014-05-01 at 18:38 by Sam

In the interests of time (and blog clutter) I'm going to do most "daily" Whispersync Deal posts only on Facebook/Twitter. But! As it's May 1, there's a whole crop of monthly deals to scan through. Which I have. As far as I can tell, they're valid through May 31.

In the 20 Kindle Books for $2 Each listings I found a couple of good ones, starting with Seanan McGuire's Indexing, read by Mary Robinette Kowal, for $2 Kindle plus $1.99 Whispersync for Voice upgrade. "For most people, the story of their lives is just that: the accumulation of time, encounters, and actions into a cohesive whole. But for an unfortunate few, that day-to-day existence is affected - perhaps infected is a better word - by memetic incursion: where fairy tale narratives become reality, often with disastrous results. That's where the ATI Management Bureau steps in, an organization tasked with protecting the world from fairy tales, even while most of their agents are struggling to keep their own fantastic archetypes from taking over their lives. When you're dealing with storybook narratives in the real world, it doesn't matter if you're Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, or the Wicked Queen: no one gets a happily ever after."

And it's the same pricing for Stant Litore's No Lasting Burial (The Zombie Bible), read by Mikael Naramore. I've already talked about how impressed I am with The Zombie Bible series, and here's the pub copy for this one: "What if Jesus of Nazareth had faced both the hungry living and the hungry dead? A man wanders out of the desert one day and finds a village in ruins after a night of the walking dead. The survivors have thrown the snarling corpses into the Sea of Galilee, only to starve as the ghoul-haunted sea stops producing fish. Yeshua has heard their hunger. He hears the suffering of the living and the dead, like moaning in his ears. Desperate to respond, he calls back the fish. Just one thing: The dead are called up, too."

Posted in Whispersync Deals | Tagged ania ahlborn, benjamin darcie, christian cantrell, containment, indexing, johnathan mcclain, kyle mills, mark russinovich, mary robinette kowal, mikael naramore, no lasting burial, peter lerangis, seanan mcguire, seven wonders, stant litore, the colossus rises, the immortalists, the shuddering, the zombie bible, william dufris

Review: Motherless Brooklyn (FINALLY!)

Posted on 2014-05-01 at 05:07 by Dave

Motherless Brooklyn By Jonathan Lethem, read by Geoffrey Cantor 10 hours, 9 minutes

This is the story of a private detective who has Tourette’s syndrome who is obsessed with trying to figure out who killed his boss. It’s mystery novel, but the mystery really takes the backseat to Lionel, a hilarious heartbreak of a protagonist, and one of the most intriguing characters I’ve come across: Lionel Essrog.

At least, that’s how I remembered it. Motherless Brooklyn is a novel I’d read probably a decade ago. It won the National Book Critics Award, and ever since I started listening to audiobooks, it was one I’d been looking forward to hearing. And now - it's FINALLY available to download. So, was it worth the wait?

Without a doubt, yes. As a character, Lionel is still unique. (Just look at that name. Lionel Essrog.) And with that set up, you really have to give Lethem serious credit for that. He could've made this a stupid joke, but he works hard to get underneath Lionel's skin, and show us the man behind the tics. At the same time, he mines the funny - the tics Lionel gets obsessed with EAT ME BAILEY are, well, funny.

Posted in reviews, Uncategorized | Tagged Geoffrey Cantor, jonathan lethem, motherless brooklyn

Release Week: Paul Cornell's London Falling, Mary Robinette Kowal's Valour and Vanity, and Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra

Posted on 2014-04-30 at 16:17 by Sam

APRIL 23-29, 2014: Last week I warned that it would be a quiet week in terms of numbers, and that bore out, though two excellent titles make for two easy top recommendations this week, and Audible's production of no fewer than nine books by Carlos Fuentes make for quite a literary feast. There's ALSO a pile of books for young readers to check out including Christopher Healy's The Hero's Guide to Being an Outlaw and Tania Unsworth's The One Safe Place, as well as plenty more for adults including Jeremy Robinson's Xom-B (read by R.C. Bray, Audie-nominated voice of Andy Weir's The Martian) and a re-release of Hiroshi Sakurazaka's All You Need is Kill, first published in audio last February, which apparently was removed from on-sale listings some while ago to make room for the new Edge of Tomorrow movie tie-in edition. There's also a flight of new MP3-CD editions of Clay and Susan Griffith's Vampire Empire series, read by James Marsters, originally produced by Buzzy Multimedia and now out from new imprint Buzzy Multimedia on Brilliance Audio; at $21.99 for all three volumes it's really quite a good deal. Two big pieces of publishing news for me this week. The first is that SyFy is developing a TV series based on Lev Grossman's The Magicians. The second shows up as an ADDED title in the COMING SOON listings: Unexpected Stories by Octavia E. Butler (Open Road Media, June 24) -- "Two never-before-published stories from the archives of one of science fiction’s all-time masters." Meanwhile, a real shocker for me in the SEEN BUT NOT HEARD listings is Jay Posey's Morningside Fall. I thoroughly enjoyed Three, the first book in Posey's Legends of the Duskwalker series, read by Luke Daniels, but the good news is that details are being worked out to bring book two to audio. So! Get listening. Next week brings a mother-lode, including Jeff VanderMeer's Authority. Enjoy!

PICKS OF THE WEEK:

First published in December 2012 by Tor UK and by Tor in the US in April 2013, another of my "most missing audiobooks of 2013" arrived this week: London Falling by Paul Cornell, narrated by Damian Lynch (BBC's EastEnders: E20) for Audible. A London-set dark urban fantasy from television (BBC's Dr. Who, Robin Hood, and Primeval) and comics writer Cornell, who, I must admit, I primarily know as the quite funny presenter of last year's Hugo Awards ceremony. Here: "Detective Inspector James Quill is about to complete the drugs bust of his career. Then his prize suspect, Rob Toshack, is murdered in custody. Furious, Quill pursues the investigation, co-opting intelligence analyst Lisa Ross and undercover cops Costain and Sefton. But nothing about Toshack’s murder is normal. Toshack had struck a bargain with a vindictive entity, whose occult powers kept Toshack one step ahead of the law – until his luck ran out. Now, the team must find a ‘suspect’ who can bend space and time and alter memory itself. And they will kill again.” A follow-on novel, The Severed Streets, is due out in May. Positive reviews that have stoked my interest? Oh, just a few: Sabine Gueneret for Fantasy Book Critic, Paul Di Filippo for B&N, Andrew Liptak for Geek Magazine, Paul Weimer for SFSignal, and even in mainstream outlets like USA Today. Not to mention the cover blurb on the US edition, from Ben Aaronovitch: "An irresistible blend of guns, gangsters, cops and monsters." And this from Seanan McGuire: “Paul Cornell has written a truly ingenious police procedural which happens to be the best supernatural London story since Neverwhere.” Yup. Press play.

Whew! I wasn't sure this was coming concurrent with the book's release from Tor, but happily here it is right on time: Valour and Vanity by Mary Robinette Kowal, read by the author for Audible. in Kowal’s fourth “Jane and Vincent” (a.k.a. “Shades of Milk and Honey” a.k.a. The Glamourist Histories series) Regency fantasy she sets her sights on the heist novel: "In Valour and Vanity, master glamourists Jane and Vincent find themselves in the sort of a magical adventure that might result if Jane Austen wrote Ocean's Eleven." And, per her Big Idea piece on Scalzi's Whatever blog, there is a gondola chase. And Lord Byron swims the canals of Venice. Did I mention "if Jane Austen wrote Ocean's Eleven"? With magic? Why yes. Yes I did. Kowal is also on tour in support of the book, with events in Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Houston, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, Raleigh, New Orleans, and Madison. Her events are really fantastic, from performing the audiobook "live" to shadow puppetry to who knows what, so get out there if you're in the area and enjoy a reading from someone who really can give a good one.

Posted in Release Week | Tagged Carlos Fuentes, london falling, mary robinette kowal, one safe place, paul cornell, rc bray, terra nostra, valour and vanity

Whispersync Daily Deals: Anne Charnock's A Calculated Life, the Z 2134 series by Sean Platt and David W. Wright, Ian Douglas' Deep Space, and Rysa Walker's Timebound

Posted on 2014-04-30 at 15:31 by Sam

Wednesday, April 30, 2014: I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but, just in time for it to be on sale for $1.99, Anne Charnock’s A Calculated Life has become Whispersync for Voice enabled to the tune of a $2.99 upgrade to the Audible edition, read by Susan Duerden for Brilliance Audio. As I reported back in January, A Calculated Life was nominated for this year’s Philip K. Dick Award, and it’s long been on my “pick this up the second it’s on sale!” list. (No, seriously, I have a bookmarks folder of a few dozen links to check.) A debut novel for journalist Charnock, while first self-published it was picked up by Amazon’s 47North and later also nominated for The Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award for best debut.

Here’s the pitch: “Late in the twenty-first century, big business is booming and state institutions are thriving thanks to advances in genetic engineering, which have produced a compliant population free of addictions. Violent crime is a rarity. Hyper-intelligent Jayna is a star performer at top predictive agency Mayhew McCline, where she forecasts economic and social trends. A brilliant mathematical modeler, she far outshines her co-workers, often correcting their work on the quiet. Her latest coup: finding a link between northeasterly winds and violent crime. When a string of events contradicts her forecasts, Jayna suspects she needs more data and better intuition. She needs direct interactions with the rest of society. Bravely—and naively—she sets out to disrupt her strict routine and stumbles unwittingly into a world where her IQ is increasingly irrelevant…a place where human relationships and the complexity of life are difficult for her to decode. And as she experiments with taking risks, she crosses the line into corporate intrigue and disloyalty. Can Jayna confront the question of what it means to live a “normal” life? Or has the possibility of a “normal” life already been eclipsed for everyone?”

Today’s Kindle Daily Deal in Science Fiction and Fantasy are the two extant books in Sean Platt and David W. Wright’s Z 2134 series, Z 2134 and Z 2135, both on sale for $1.99 in Kindle with $0.99 Whispersync for Voice upgrades to the Audible editions, read by Dan John Miller for Brilliance Audio. “One hundred years after the zombie apocalypse, those lucky enough to survive now exist in scattered cities, under the merciless rule of the City Watch. A simple tenet overshadows all aspects of daily life: obey or die. When Jonah Lovecraft is framed for murder, his status as a Watcher doesn’t spare him from the ultimate punishment: being cast into the Barrens and forced to battle zombies and other criminal contestants in the Darwin Games. As he fights for every heartbeat, his daughter, Ana, embarks on her own desperate quest to uncover the truth about her father. Yet neither expects their efforts to reveal grim secrets that could tear apart the fabric of society - if either lives long enough to expose the truth.”

There’s not too much more time left on the “monthly” Kindle deals for April, which includes quite a few books I’ve already mentioned, including Megan Miranda’s Fracture and Aric Davis’ A Good and Useful Hurt, and all four books in Oliver Pötzsch’s The Hangman’s Daughter series, and there’s a few more I noticed this morning which are worth mentioning. First up is Deep Space: Star Carrier: Book Four by Ian Douglas, on sale for $0.99 in Kindle with a $3.99 Whispersync for Voice upgrade to the Audible edition, read by Nick Sullivan for Harper Audio: “Humanity had appeared to fend off the Sh’daar assault once and for all, though they never learned why the alien empire was driven to halt Earth’s advancement toward technological Singularity. But in this war of worlds, victory is always elusive. And now a new battle begins. After 20 years of peace, not one but two fragile truces are unraveling. Alexander Koenig, the former Navy commander whose heroics forced the Sh’daar into submission, has won a second term as President of the United States of North America. But pursuing his mandate - sovereignty from the centuries-old Earth Confederation - becomes a risky proposition.”

And Rysa Walker’s Timebound (The Chronos Files), released in January by Skyscape (Amazon’s YA sf/f imprint) and on sale for $1.99 in Kindle with a $1.99 Whispersync for Voice upgrade to the Audible edition, read by Kate Rudd for Brilliance Audio. “When Kate Pierce-Keller’s grandmother gives her a strange blue medallion and speaks of time travel, sixteen-year-old Kate assumes the old woman is delusional. But it all becomes horrifyingly real when a murder in the past destroys the foundation of Kate’s present-day life. Suddenly, that medallion is the only thing protecting Kate from blinking out of existence. Kate learns that the 1893 killing is part of something much more sinister, and her genetic ability to time travel makes Kate the only one who can fix the future.”

Posted in Whispersync Deals | Tagged a calculated life, anne charnock, brilliance-audio, david w wright, deep space, ian douglas, kate rudd, rysa walker, sean platt, star carrier, susan duerden, timebound, z 2134

Whispersync Daily Deal: The Cloud Roads, Book 1 of The Books of the Raksura by Martha Wells

Posted on 2014-04-29 at 13:37 by Sam

Tuesday April 29, 2014: One Kindle Daily Deal title today of interest, The Cloud Roads (The Books of the Raksura) by Martha Wells, the first book in a trilogy. Originally published in March 2011 by Night Shade Books, it’s on sale for $1.99 in Kindle with a $1.99 Whispersync for Voice upgrade to the Audible edition, performed by Christopher Kipiniak for Audible Frontiers, which was released later that year. At under $4 for a bit over 15 hours in (highly-recommended!) audio, it’s a very good time to dip into this deep and dark secondary world fantasy — or, depending on how you read it, deeply alien sf? In a starred review, Publishers Weekly says: “Wells…merrily ignores genre conventions as she spins an exciting adventure around an alien hero who anyone can identify with.” There’s a good bit of coming-of-age here, but it’s also a good bit darker than most things marketed as YA (which this isn’t).

”Moon has spent his life hiding what he is - a shape-shifter able to transform himself into a winged creature of flight. An orphan with only vague memories of his own kind, Moon tries to fit in among the tribes of his river valley, with mixed success. Just as Moon is once again cast out by his adopted tribe, he discovers a shape-shifter like himself… someone who seems to know exactly what he is, who promises that Moon will be welcomed into his community. What this stranger doesn’t tell Moon is that his presence will tip the balance of power… that his extraordinary lineage is crucial to the colony’s survival… and that his people face extinction at the hands of the dreaded Fell! Now Moon must overcome a lifetime of conditioning in order to save himself - and his newfound kin.”

Posted in Whispersync Deals | Tagged christopher kipiniak, martha wells, the cloud roads

Whispersync Daily Deal: The Lives (and Deaths) of Tao, The Curiosity, The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope, The Stockholm Octavo, and Flight Behavior

Posted on 2014-04-26 at 14:58 by Sam

Saturday, April 26, 2014: Today’s Kindle Daily Deals listings with excellent Whispersync for Voice deals include recently-announced John W. Campbell for Best New Writer nominee Wesley Chu’s The Lives of Tao and The Deaths of Tao, along with a huge list of “book club” fiction mostly from 2012 and 2013 in a special Gold Box Deal of the Day: Book Club Favorites call-out, including “genre in the mainstream” novels The Curiosity, The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope, and The Stockholm Octavo, along with some mainstream fiction I’ve been considering for a bit, including Flight Behavior and The Orchardist.

First up, Wesley Chu’s The Lives of Tao, on sale for $1.99 in Kindle and offering a $0.99 Whispersync for Voice upgrade to the Audible edition, read by Michael Naramore for Angry Robot on Brilliance Audio. “When out-of-shape IT technician Roen wakes up and starts hearing voices in his head, he naturally assumes he’s losing it. He isn’t. As of last night, he has a passenger in his brain - an ancient alien life-form called Tao, whose race crash-landed on Earth before the first fish crawled out of the oceans. Over the millennia his people have trained human heroes to be great leaders, to advance our species at a rate far beyond what it would have achieved on its own. Split into two opposing factions - the peace-loving, but under-represented Prophus, and the savage, powerful Genjix - the aliens have been in a state of civil war for centuries.”

And the appropriately-named sequel, The Deaths of Tao, also on sale in Kindle for $1.99 and, thanks to the literally just-released audiobook, offering a $3.47 Whispersync for Voice upgrade to the Audible edition, also read by Naramore. “The sequel to The Lives of Tao. The Prophus and the Gengix are at war. For centuries they have sought a way off-planet, guiding humanity’s social and technological development to the stage where space travel is possible. The end is now in sight, and both factions have plans to leave the Earth, but the Gengix method will mean the destruction of the human race. That’s a price they’re willing to pay. It’s up to Roen and Tao to save the world. Oh, dear…”

Next up, a pair of genre in the mainstream (by this I mean “titles marketed as mainstream fiction but having speculative elements”) titles, starting with Stephen P. Kiernan’s The Curiosity: A Novel. On sale for $1.99 Kindle with a $3.99 Whispersync for Voice upgrade to the Audible edition, read by Kate Udall, Erik Bergmann, and George Guidall for Harper Audio. “Dr. Kate Philo makes a breathtaking discovery in the Arctic: the body of a man buried deep in the ice. Heedless of the potential consequences, Kate’s boss orders that the frozen man be reanimated. As the man begins to regain his memories, the team learns that he was - is - a judge, Jeremiah Rice. Thrown together by fate, Kate and Jeremiah grow closer. But the clock is ticking and Jeremiah’s new life is slipping away. Kate must decide how far she is willing to go to protect the man she has come to love.”

Rhonda Riley’s The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope is also a story of romance and a man out of place, but with an even more different “man” at its center. On sale for $1.99 in Kindle, with a $3.99 Whispersync for Voice upgrade to the Audible edition, read by Stina Nielsen for Harper Audio. “In the waning months of World War II, young Evelyn Roe’s life is transformed when she finds what she takes to be a badly burned soldier, all but completely buried in the heavy red-clay soil on her family’s farm in North Carolina. When Evelyn rescues the stranger, it quickly becomes clear he is not a simple man. As innocent as a newborn, he recovers at an unnatural speed, and then begins to change - first into Evelyn’s mirror image, and then into her complement, a man she comes to know as Adam.”

Two more titles have just a bit more tenuous of a “speculative” element, but enough to warrant a mention here. Karen Engelmann’s The Stockholm Octavo: A Novel takes place in an 18th-century Sweden of intrigue, and is on sale for $1.99 in Kindle with a $1.99 Whispersync for Voice upgrade to the Audible edition, read by the always-masterful Simon Vance for Blackstone Audio. “Life is close to perfect for Emil Larsson, a self-satisfied bureaucrat in the Office of Customs and Excise in 1791 Stockholm. He is a true man of the town - a drinker, card player, and contented bachelor - until one evening when Mrs. Sofia Sparrow, a fortune-teller and proprietress of an exclusive gaming parlor, shares with him a vision she has had: a golden path that will lead him to love and connection. She lays an octavo for him, a spread of eight cards that augur the eight individuals who can help him realize this vision - if he can find them.”

Lastly, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior: A Novel takes place in contemporary Appalachia, but with a quasi-mystical event at its center. On sale in Kindle for $1.99, with a $4.99 Whispersync for Voice upgrade to the Audible edition, read by the author for Harper Audio. “Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at 17. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire. She can only understand it as a cautionary miracle, but it sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders, and the media.”

So! A pretty packed day in terms of Whispersync deals. There’s also a lot more titles of interest to those who also read and listen to mimetic (non-speculative) fiction, including Amanda Coplin’s historical fiction The Orchardist and Ron Rash’s Serena. Enjoy!

Posted in Whispersync Deals | Tagged barbara kingsolver, flight behavior, george guidall, karen engelmann, michael naramore, rhonda riley, simon vance, stephen p kiernan, the enchanted life of adam hope, the lives of tao, the stockholm octavo, wesley chu

Whispersync Daily Deal: R.L. Stine's Zombie Town

Posted on 2014-04-25 at 14:13 by Sam

Friday, April 25, 2014: Friday’s Kindle Daily Deal list includes one title of interest with an inexpensive Whispersync upgrade: R.L Stine’s Zombie Town, read by George Kareman and Tara Carrozza for Brilliance Audio. On sale for $1.99 Kindle with a $0.99 Whispersync for Voice upgrade to the Audible edition. A short (44 minute) spook for kids, from the master of children’s scares: “This used to be such a nice, quiet town. But that was before all the zombies. When twelve-year-old Mike and his friend, Karen, go to see a horror movie called Zombie Town, the last thing they expect is for the title characters to come down off the screen and chase them through the theater. And it’s not popcorn these hungry creatures want to chomp on—it’s human brains!”

Posted in Whispersync Deals | Tagged george kareman, rl stine, tara carrozza, zombie town

Release Week: Afterparty, The Serpent of Venice, The Forever Watch, The Deaths of Tao, and Ursula K. Le Guin's Outer Space, Inner Lands

Posted on 2014-04-24 at 18:02 by Sam

APRIL 16-22, 2014: Another quiet week in terms of sheer numbers, with an even quieter week ahead before an absolute audio avalanche to begin May. But! Fear not, there are still several choice audiobooks to check out this week, from near-future thrillers, to historical fantasy comedies, to... well, we'll get there. The ALSO OUT listings have some gems as well: the two concluding volumes of Maurice Broadduss' Knights of Breton Court, Ian McDonald's Empire Dreams, Richard Bowes' Minions of the Moon, David Gerrold's Under the Eye of God, and for teens, Andrea Cremer's The Inventor's Secret and the Printz Prize-winning Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick. But what I really need to talk about up front here is the SEEN BUT NOT HEARD list, which has quite a few books of interest (Neil Williamson's The Moon King, Rachel Bach's Heaven's Queen) but I'm going to talk about one at length: The Islands of Chaldea by Diana Wynne Jones, completed and narrated by Ursula Jones. "But wait!" you say. "You have 'narrated by' right there!" Indeed, but while this audiobook edition has been available at Audible UK for nearly a month, there's no sign of a US audiobook release. So, stamp my feet and curse you in the name of Calcifer, but somebody bring this audiobook to the US, pretty please. As Paul Kincaid writes for me over at Bull Spec, "it’s Diana Wynne Jones, nothing else needs to be said." Indeed. Meanwhile, the "ADDED:" listings to COMING SOON this week include (among a few others) Scott Meyer's Spell of High Water, David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks, Scott Westerfeld's Afterworlds, Stephen King's Revival, and (in January 2015) Kelly Link's collection Get in Trouble: Stories. Enjoy!

PICKS OF THE WEEK:

Afterparty by Daryl Gregory (Tor, April 22, 2014) is the most buzzed-about book this week, and with a concurrent audio release narrated by Tavia Gilbert for Audible Studios, my lead audiobook pick of the week as well. It first came onto my radar via Robin A. Rothman's Omnivoracious preview of 2014: “Before the first chapter even begins, there’s religion, drugs, and suicide — all presented in a crisp, engaging writing style that itself threatens to be addictive. Set in the near-future in a world in which smart drug recipes are opensourced, one church uses dependency on their sacriment, a mind-altering narcotic called “Numinous,” to keep followers in line. One of the drug’s creators tries to undo the damage. I’m so hooked!” And is the subject both of Gregory's recent Big Idea piece as well as Russell Letson's highly positive review for Locus Online, which closes with: "like the best crime and SF novels, those moral and philosophical questions linger, after the mere whodunnit puzzles have been solved." Gilbert is a highly-accomplished narrator, with credits including Alena Graedon's The Word Exchange, TaraShea Nesbit's The Wives of Los Alamos, Jeaniene Frost's Up From the Grave, Jack McDevitt's Starhawk, Neal Stephenson's Anathem, and John Scalzi's Zoe's Tale.

Posted in Release Week | Tagged afterparty, christopher moore, daryl gregory, david ramirez, dina-pearlman, euan morton, michael naramore, tandy cronyn, tavia gilbert, the deaths of tao, the forever watch, the serpent of venice, the unreal and the real, ursula k le guin, wesley chu