Feeling Musical? There’s a Book for Your Broadway Craving!

For Hamilton fans: If you’ve never heard of Hamilton, then you have been missing out on a phenomenon that has shaken the theater world to its core. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop musical about founding father Alexander Hamilton has not only reinvigorated the historical fiction genre and the musical world, but also sparked interest in the complicated lives of early Americans. One of the musical’s most beloved figures is Alexander’s devoted wife, Elizabeth “Eliza” Schuyler, who sings the powerful ballad “Burn” after Alexander makes his affair with another woman public. If you’re desperate to learn more about her (despite her erasing herself from the narrative, as the song “Burn” goes), give My Dear Hamilton a try. The novel, a fictionalized retelling of Schuyler’s life based on thousands of letters and original sources, leads readers through the tumultuous world of a general’s daughter turned founding father’s wife. The book also explores Eliza’s life after Alexander’s death by duel, highlighting how passionate and driven she was. If you cried at Hamilton (no shame, we all did!), then grab those tissues and dive into this beautifully written story.

From the award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author whom USA TODAY calls a “master of the page-turner,” comes the spectacular story of a woman’s complex quest to form a family.

Every life has a soundtrack. All you have to do is listen.

Music has set the tone for most of Zoe Baxter’s life. There’s the melody that reminds her of the summer she spent rubbing baby oil on her stomach in pursuit of the perfect tan. A dance beat that makes her think of using a fake ID to slip into a nightclub. A dirge that marked the years she spent trying to get pregnant.

For better or for worse, music is the language of memory. It is also the language of love.

In the aftermath of a series of personal tragedies, Zoe throws herself into her career as a music therapist. When an unexpected friendship slowly blossoms into love, she makes plans for a new life, but to her shock and inevitable rage, some people—even those she loves and trusts most—don’t want that to happen.

Sing You Home is about identity, love, marriage, and parenthood. It’s about people wanting to do the right thing for the greater good, even as they work to fulfill their own personal desires and dreams. And it’s about what happens when the outside world brutally calls into question the very thing closest to our hearts: family.

The latest novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Philippa Gregory features one of the most famous women in history, Lady Jane Grey, and her two sisters, each of whom dared to defy her queen.

Jane Grey was queen of England for nine days. Her father and his allies crowned her instead of the dead king’s half-sister Mary Tudor, who quickly mustered an army, claimed her throne, and locked Jane in the Tower of London. When Jane refused to betray her Protestant faith, Mary sent her to the executioner’s block, where Jane transformed her father’s greedy power-grab into tragic martyrdom.

“Learn you to die,” was the advice Jane wrote to her younger sister Katherine, who has no intention of dying. She intends to enjoy her beauty and her youth and fall in love. But she is heir to the insecure and infertile Queen Mary and then to her sister Queen Elizabeth, who will never allow Katherine to marry and produce a Tudor son. When Katherine’s pregnancy betrays her secret marriage, she faces imprisonment in the Tower, only yards from her sister’s scaffold.

“Farewell, my sister,” writes Katherine to the youngest Grey sister, Mary. A beautiful dwarf, disregarded by the court, Mary keeps family secrets, especially her own, while avoiding Elizabeth’s suspicious glare. After seeing her sisters defy their queens, Mary is acutely aware of her own danger, but determined to command her own life. What will happen when the last Tudor defies her ruthless and unforgiving cousin Queen Elizabeth?

For Come from Away fans: Come from Away chronicles the amazing and heartbreaking true story of passengers from 38 different flights who were diverted to Newfoundland on September 11, 2001. The various characters of the play, passengers and Canadians alike, deal with the fallout of the news as well as trying to figure out who they are now in the wake of a mass tragedy that has turned everything around. If this kind of introspection in the face of disaster is the type of narrative you’re looking for, then you’ll also be drawn to The Hundred-Year Flood. The book follows Tee, a twenty-two-year-old Korean-American who escapes to Prague in the wake of his uncle’s suicide in the aftermath of 9/11. There his life gets tangled up with the artist Pavel, his wife Katka, and their companion Rockefeller, as he tries to figure out who he is in a strange new land. The work’s dream-like narrative, particularly from Tee’s perspective, captures feelings of loss, confusion, and a sometimes murky sense of what it means to belong. No matter where you come from, or who you are, these two works will touch your heart and remind you how we are all connected.

February 2016 Indie Next List Pick

This snappy, sassy redemption story set in small-town Montana is “a wild and crazy debut novel by a talented young writer” (Jackie Collins), filled with an uproarious and unforgettable cast of characters you won’t want to leave behind.

“[The Flood Girls] includes barfights and AA meetings, a parade, a wedding, and a black bear, all of which Fifield juggles beautifully...The Wild West earns its name all over again in this lovable chronicle of small-town insanity.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Welcome to Quinn, Montana, population: 956. A town where nearly all of the volunteer firemen are named Jim, where The Dirty Shame—the only bar in town—refuses to serve mixed drinks (too much work), where the locals hate the newcomers (then again, they hate the locals, too), and where the town softball team has never even come close to having a winning season. Until now.

Rachel Flood has snuck back into town after leaving behind a trail of chaos nine years prior. She’s here to make amends, but nobody wants to hear it, especially her mother, Laverna. But with the help of a local boy named Jake and a little soul-searching, she just might make things right.

In the spirit of Empire Falls and A League of Their Own, with the caustic wit of Where’d You Go, Bernadette thrown in for good measure, Richard Fifield’s hilarious and heartwarming debut will have you laughing through tears.

Now a major motion picture starring Melissa McCarthy—Lee Israel’s hilarious and shocking memoir of the astonishing caper she carried on for almost two years when she forged and sold more than three hundred letters by such literary notables as Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, Noel Coward, and many others.

Before turning to her life of crime—running a one-woman forgery business out of a phone booth in a Greenwich Village bar and even dodging the FBI—Lee Israel had a legitimate career as an author of biographies. Her first book on Tallulah Bankhead was a New York Times bestseller, and her second, on the late journalist and reporter Dorothy Kilgallen, made a splash in the headlines.

But by 1990, almost broke and desperate to hang onto her Upper West Side studio, Lee made a bold and irreversible career change: inspired by a letter she’d received once from Katharine Hepburn, and armed with her considerable skills as a researcher and celebrity biographer, she began to forge letters in the voices of literary greats. Between 1990 and 1991, she wrote more than three hundred letters in the voices of, among others, Dorothy Parker, Louise Brooks, Edna Ferber, Lillian Hellman, and Noel Coward—and sold the forgeries to memorabilia and autograph dealers.

“Lee Israel is deft, funny, and eminently entertaining…[in her] gentle parable about the modern culture of fame, about those who worship it, those who strive for it, and those who trade in its relics” (The Associated Press). Exquisitely written, with reproductions of her marvelous forgeries, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is “a slender, sordid, and pretty damned fabulous book about her misadventures” (The New York Times Book Review).