“How do you say goodbye to a piece of your heart? If you’re a quilter, you have a time-honored way to express yourself. “A quilt is an object of peculiar intimacy. By virtue of the way it is created, every inch of the fabric is touched. Each scrap absorbs the quilter’s scent and the invisible oils of her skin, the smell of her household and, thanks to the constant pinning and stitching, her blood in the tiniest of quantities. And tears, though she might be loath to admit it….” That’s a quote from the beginning of THE GOODBYE QUILT, a story about letting go, leaving home, and obviously, quilting. I am not a quilter, but I’m a quilt-appreciator. The background of the author photo for this book is a family heirloom quilt, which is about a century old, yet just as sturdy now as when it was stitched. A really good quilter knows how to make things that last. When my own daughter was leaving home, I made her a scrapbook. However, The Goodbye Scrapbook doesn’t resonate in quite the same ways as THE GOODBYE QUILT. In the novel, the narrator, Linda, creates her quilt from the bits and pieces…

April 2011 On Sale: April 5, 2011 Featuring: Tina Fey 252 pages ISBN: 0316056863 EAN: 9780316056861 Hardcover $26.99  Add to Wish List Non-Fiction Memoir Buy at Amazon.com Bossypants by Tina Fey Before Liz Lemon, before “Weekend Update,” before “Sarah Palin,” Tina Fey was just a young girl with a dream: a recurring stress dream that she was being chased through a local airport by her middle-school gym teacher. She also had a dream that one day she would be a comedian on TV. She has seen both these dreams come true. At last, Tina Fey’s story can be told. From her youthful days as a vicious nerd to her tour of duty on Saturday Night Live; from her passionately halfhearted pursuit of physical beauty to her life as a mother eating things off the floor; from her one-sided college romance to her nearly fatal honeymoon — from the beginning of this paragraph to this final sentence. Tina Fey reveals all, and proves what we’ve all suspected: you’re no one until someone calls you bossy. Previous Picks

Susan Mallery has entertained millions of readers with her witty and emotional stories of women and the relationships that move them. In her latest novel, ALREADY HOME, Jenna Stevens, still reeling from a recent divorce, is unpleasantly surprised by the arrival of her birth parents, who seem to want her to feel a family bond immediately. She was perfectly happy with the loving, traditional parents who raised her. Can she learn to love a second mother without damaging her relationship with the woman who raised her? Join Susan’s Members Only area at www.susanmallery.com for exclusive sneak peeks, short stories, and more. Recently, a friend recommended a cookbook to me. She said the chocolate chip cookie recipe in her favorite cookbook was to die for. Thick, soft, chewy, chocolatey goodness. I’m a sucker for chocolate chip cookies, so I ordered the book. This is a cookbook for someone who loves cooking. The thing is, though – and I’m letting you in on a big secret here – I don’t love cooking. I understand my friend’s mistake. After all, the heroine of my latest book, ALREADY HOME, is a chef. During the course of the book, she reconnects with her creativity in…

April 2011 On Sale: April 1, 2011 Featuring: Linda Davis; Molly Davis 400 pages ISBN: 0778329968 EAN: 9780778329961 Hardcover $16.95  Add to Wish List Women’s Fiction Buy at Amazon.com Advice for letting go… The Goodbye Quilt by Susan Wiggs Endearing and straight from the heart, a story about the bonds between mother and daughter. Linda Davis’ local fabric shop is a place where women gather to share their creations: quilts commemorating important events in their lives. Wedding quilts, baby quilts, memorial quilts – each is bound tight with dreams, hopes and yearnings. Now, as her only child readies for college, Linda is torn between excitement for Molly, and heartache for herself. Who will she be when she is no longer needed in her role as mom? What will become of her days? Of her marriage? Mother and daughter decide to share one last adventure together – a cross-country road trip to move Molly into her dorm. As they wend their way through the heart of the country, Linda pieces together the scraps that make up Molly’s young life. And in the stitching of each bit of fabric – the hem of a christening gown, a snippet from a Halloween costume…

November 2010 On Sale: November 9, 2010 208 pages ISBN: 0061958948 EAN: 9780061958946 Hardcover $22.99 Add to Wish List Non-Fiction Inspirational, Non-Fiction Memoir, Non-Fiction Buy at Amazon.com Motherly lessons Don’t Sing at the Table: Life Lessons from My Grandmothers by Adriana Trigiani The Wisdom Of My Grandmothers As devoted readers of Adriana Trigiani’s New York Times bestselling novels know, this “seemingly effortless storyteller” (Boston Globe) frequently draws inspiration from her own family history, in particular from the lives of her two remarkable grandmothers, who have found their way into all Trigiani’s cherished novels. In Don’t Sing at the Table, this much-beloved writer has gathered their estimable life lessons, revealing how her grandmothers’ simple values have shaped her own life, sharing the experiences, humor, and wisdom of her beloved mentors to delight readers of all ages. Lucia Spada Bonicelli (Lucy) and Yolanda Perin Trigiani (Viola) lived through the twentieth century from beginning to end as working women who juggled careers and motherhood. From the factory line to the family table, Lucy and Viola, the very definition of modern women, cut a path for their granddaughter by demonstrating moxie and pluck in their fearless approach to life, love, and overcoming obstacles. Lucy’s…

Beauty-queen survivalists, time travel, blood magic and a little Cyrano de Bergerac–this jumbo-sized edition of Fresh Takes has a whole bunch of somethings for everyone. CONTEMPORARY (mostly) NOVELS The YA lexicon has yet to come up with a standardized way to classify the wide variety of the category. I usually break my recommendations up into “Paranormal” and “Contemporary” meaning “non-paranormal.” But this time I have a historical novel. And how can I them “realistic” novels when I lead off with a book about a plane-full of Beauty Queens that crash lands on a Lost-slash-Survivor type island? I could, of course, just call them delicious. BEAUTY QUEENS by Libba Bray. (Scholastic; May 24) It’sMiss Teen America plus Lost plus Heart of Darkness. Only funnier. I am constantly awed and amazed by Libba Bray’s ability to reinvent herself between books. Trust me on this–Bray is one Literary Prize Winning author who will never bore you. Beauty Queens mixes slap-stick fun with action adventure, genuine peril and real issues. Devilishly clever and funny, even while asking why girls apologize for things that aren’t their fault, and what does “act like a lady” really mean, and what does it mean to be a girl…

In the pictures I have of my mother she looks like the Duchess of Windsor. My husband, who didn’t like her, would say, “Uh oh, here comes the Duchess,” when he heard her car in the driveway. Raised in an orphanage, how did my mother come by that royal presence? How could she have been so fragile, and yet accomplish so much in her young widowhood, raising my brother and me? How can she exist so powerfully after she is dead? She seems to have left tracks in my brain like indelible markers that are more than memory, leaking into my present. She died while I was downstairs in the hospital coffee shop drinking a milkshake and leafing through Newsweek. I found her on the floor after her last desperate moment of pride trying to get to the bathroom alone. She was crumpled at the foot of the bed, a terrifying stranger in a hospital gown. I screamed for the nurse who came running. It took the two of us to get her back in the bed where she lay, dignified once again, even in this unbelievable death. In life she didn’t look like anyone’s mother. She was too young-looking,…

Pia Giovanni is the heroine for my new book DRAGON BOUND, the first in the Elder Races series released May 3rd.  Pia is all too well aware that she is problematic.  She is half-human and half-Wyr, with a deep sense that she doesn’t fully belong anywhere, so she has to work twice as hard to pretend to fit in.  So she tends bar and listens to other people’s problems.  It pays the bills and it gives her the sense of community she needs. But let’s face it:  she’s just getting by, she isn’t really rooted anywhere, and bar tending only pays the bills because she doesn’t have that much of a life.  Then she makes a mistake.  She trusts the wrong guy, the relationship doesn’t last, and he blackmails her.  She thought she had problems before but then her life really goes to hell. That’s when she wakes up.  Call it whatever you like, boredom, depression, loneliness.  She realizes she’s been coasting on a lot of things and not really paying attention to what really matters.  The blackmail kicks her out of the rut she has fallen into, and the melting pot of the Elder Races world turns into her…

There are probably some people who wonder why I decided the world needed another vampire novel, let alone one about a bloodsucker who works for the president. But to me, changing the War on Terror to the War on Horror didn’t seem like that much of a leap. My vampire Nathaniel Cade even has his birth in U.S. history. I got the idea when reading a weird factoid about a sailor pardoned by President Andrew Johnson after being accused of killing two men and drinking their blood. I wondered: What would a man sitting in the Oval Office do with a vampire? Then it hit me. That was the wrong question. The right question is: What wouldn’t the president do with a vampire? Since 9/11, it seems that the United States has struggled with one nightmare after another. There’s a feeling that the ground isn’t stable under our feet; that it might crumble at any moment and the graves will open and all kinds of nasty, hungry things will spring out. You can see how we’re handling it in our hunger for stories of zombies and vampires and conspiracies. John Connolly‘s Charlie Parker is a detective constantly fighting ghosts and…

When a woman’s father dies on his way to the cabin he visited every month, she discovers a secret that threatens everything she’s always held to be true . . . Several years ago, I read an article about a man who’d kept a secret family for years without anyone’s knowledge.I was fascinated that someone could and would actually do this.That one small article lived in my subconscious for years, emerging occasionally as I considered how a person might achieve this, the effects on the primary family as well as the other family, the pain, the grief, the anger, the emotional, financial and psychological entanglements between the two, and the ultimate question; which was the real family? I became so engrossed with the emotion of the situation that I knew I had to create my own characters and my own story and so emerged A FAMILY AFFAIR. No matter how much you love them, families can be complicated and challenging – no doubt about it. As I wrote A FAMILY AFFAIR, I explored the dynamics of a less than ideal family and the more I wrote, the more I understood how people get trapped in situations or circumstances that force…