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| Special Issue: Exclusive Author Giveaways
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| Dear (Contact First Name), Enter to win the books in this issue the same way as before--the only difference is that these giveaways come from authors and some have book club call-ins attached.
Please email me your feedback about this kind of giveaway! I need to hear your thoughts--this is your site!
You can still enter to win the books from April 16--winners will be announced May 16. |
| Allegra Goodman is offering 2 book clubs copies of her book, INTUITION | |
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Enter to Win This Book
 "I began "Intuition" as I begin all my novels with an idea about character. I thought of writing about a couple where one begins to understand that the other is dishonest-cheating, but not in the mundane romantic sense, cheating in his work. As I thought about this couple I envisioned them as scientists and I began to see a woman accusing her boyfriend of scientific fraud."
 From a simple idea and two characters, I developed a work family and an institution and a scientific community. I visited real laboratories in Cambridge and watched scientists at work. I drew pictures of the lab mice I saw and took notes in a spiral notebook. I was gathering detail and texture, sounds and smells that I could draw upon as I wrote. I was learning about the work of scientists so that when I wrote I could write about what I knew.
Book Review from O, Oprah's Magazine:
"This is a story of love and science both gone wrong, and Goodman handles the narrative and its wide web of details with efficiency and grace, bringing a novelist's eye to bear on a realm too often ignored." Book Description: Sandy Glass, a charismatic publicity-seeking oncologist, and Marion Mendelssohn, a pure, exacting scientist, are codirectors of a lab at the Philpott Institute dedicated to cancer research and desperately in need of a grant. Both mentors and supervisors of their young postdoctoral protégés, Glass and Mendelssohn demand dedication and obedience in a competitive environment where funding is scarce and results elusive. So when the experiments of Cliff Bannaker, a young postdoc in a rut, begin to work, the entire lab becomes giddy with newfound expectations. But Cliff's rigorous colleague-and girlfriend-Robin Decker suspects the unthinkable: that his findings are fraudulent. As Robin makes her private doubts public and Cliff maintains his innocence, a life-changing controversy engulfs the lab and everyone in it. Author Call-in Info: Email bantamdell@randomhouse.com with the book title INTUITION in the subject line and request a call-in to your book club from Allegra Goodman. | |
| Natasha Mostert is offering one copy of her book, Season of the Witch, to the first 100 book clubs who enter to win | |
 Author Call-in Info: Natasha lives in London, so she cannot call-in, but she is available online for Q&A sessions. Email Natasha your request and tell her you're from BookMovement. Natasha, what inspired you to write this book?
"I started off trying to create a modern-day Scheherazade story. When I was a little girl, my mother told me the Arabian Nights fantasy of Scheherazade and the Sultan while playing the music of Rimsky-Korsakov in the background! The idea of a woman captivating a man -- not by the beauty of her face, but by the power of her words -- is a seductive concept and I wanted to translate this idea into a modern idiom.  Book Review from Kirkus: "A brain-squeezing thriller..." (Starred Review) Book Description
As Gabriel infiltrates the world of the sisters, he finds himself drawn inexorably deeper- becoming entranced even as he realizes that he is in mortal danger. When he is caught snooping, Gabriel must race to unlock their secrets before they can retaliate. To save himself- and the one he loves, presuming she is not guilty-Gabriel will have to fight one of the sisters within the landscape of her own mind. | |
| Nancy Pickard is giving 10 book clubs The Virgin of Small Plains: A Novel of Suspense | |
 "I'm always interested to hear real-life and fictional tales about people
whose lives were interrupted, early on, by other people's misdeeds. How do the innocent bystanders of those misdeeds ever get their lives back when somebody shoots them off track? Will they live forever after in bitterness, or will they find some way to retrieve their own dreams?"  I love novels about ordinary people to whom extraordinary things happen. I love reading about people who've known each other for a lifetime. I love stories with mystery, romance, suspense, family saga, small town life, beautiful or dramatic landscape, and a touch of the mystical." More...
Book Review from Publishers Weekly
Book Description
Small Plains, Kansas, January 23, 1987: In the midst of a deadly blizzard, eighteen-year-old Rex Shellenberger scours his father's pasture, looking for helpless newborn calves. Then he makes a shocking discovery: the naked, frozen body of a teenage girl, her skin as white as the snow around her. Even dead, she is the most beautiful girl he's ever seen. It is a moment that will forever change his life and the lives of everyone around him. The mysterious dead girl-the "Virgin of Small Plains"-inspires local reverence. In the two decades following her death, strange miracles visit those who faithfully tend to her grave; some even believe that her spirit can cure deadly illnesses. Slowly, word of the legend spreads. More... | |
| James Canon is giving 1 book club Tales from the Town of Widows | |
 James' Call-in Info: James is happy to call in to your club and meet with your club if you live in New York City. Email James, say you are a BookMovement member and submit your request.
James, what inspired you to write this book? "The idea for writing this novel came to me after reading a Colombian newspaper. In it there was an article about a village in the Colombian mountains where communist guerrillas had taken most men away. They talked about how it was almost a trend for guerrilla groups to force peasants and Indians into fighting for their cause. My question (which the article didn't answer) was 'What's going to happen to the
 women?' To me, the consequential thing wasn't that many men had been taken away, but rather that many women and their children had been left behind and needed to move on with their lives. Colombian women are very strong and have an incredible capacity to endure (skills they've learned from having lived in the midst of the country's four decades of civil war). So I knew they could survive without their men, the question was how they would go about it, and how this process would transform them as individuals and as a society." More...
The characterizations are drawn as compellingly as the storyline itself, which simply gets increasingly delicious as the pages turn.
Book Description
In the small Colombian mountain village of Mariquita, a band of guerrillas storms in to protest the country's ruling government. They arrive with propaganda and guns, and when they depart they have forcibly recruited all the town's men, leaving behind only a few-the priest and a young, fair-skinned boy disguised as a little girl.
In their wake, Mariquita becomes a sinking wasteland filled with women who quickly resign themselves to food shortages, littered streets, and mourning. Without men, life is hopeless, and getting along, nearly impossible. But, Rosalba viuda de Patiño, wife of the former police sergeant, sees a different fate for the town of widows. She declares herself magistrate and promises to instill law and order while restoring the failing economy and infrastructure. Reluctantly, the women agree to join forces. A utopia emerges, one that ironically resembles the ideal society the guerrilla group claims to promote. Deft, rich, and darkly humorous, Tales from the Town of Widows is a captivating exploration of gender and sexuality that uses the ongoing conflict in Colombia as a backdrop. It presents a fascinating portrait of ill-fated wives and the war that helped them build a peaceful, equality-based society. | |
| Lesley Dormen is giving 1 book club The Best Place to Be | |
Enter to Win this Book
 Lesley's Call-in Info: Lesley would be happy to speak to your book club, is available in June to meet New York City book clubs, and July & August to meet book clubs residing in Fairfield County, CT. Email Nancy and say you are a BookMovement member.
Lesley, what inspired you to write this book?
"I wanted to create a character who talked to the reader as if she were talking to a good friend--with the same truth-telling, humor and hurt, the same self-doubt and self-justification, sharing the small moments of wisdom as well as the crazy mistakes. And I wanted Grace to tell her story at different ages, from different seats in her own psychic theater.
 I found Grace when I found her anger. That was the story "I Asked My Mother," the first story I wrote. Here was Grace at 30--single, sad, despairing of ever getting her life right. I saw how her anger masked a world of hurt. I felt the force of her fury and her pain in the comical, urgent way she confided in the reader. As a writer, I wanted to find out where Grace's complicated feelings came from and where they might take her. More...
Book Review from the Boston Globe
"...what is wonderful in these stories: Grace's cracker jack voice and canny point of view.... 'Then I described a man not unlike the man I was then dating, my future husband, a man who thought tired was a feeling.' As I calculate the weight of most current fiction, this sentence tips the scales."
Book Description
At fifty, Grace Hanford has lived long enough to be a daughter, a stepdaughter, a girlfriend, a sister, a sister-in-law, a wife, a stepmother, and an orphan. She has fallen in and out of love -- with troublesome men, with her glamorous mother, with her wild best friend, and with New York City -- more times than she can count. Still, Grace is more comic than melancholic, and a gifted confessor. She lives life as if every day is a movie in which her role is yet to be determined -- and her audience loves her for it.
In The Best Place to Be, we follow Grace from her fatherless childhood through her years at an all-girls college to adulthood in the city and her many dating escapades (and escapes) as an urban sophisticate. Wherever she may be, Grace tries to find her place in the world with humor and the blunt surprise of truth. And always, in the background, there is Grace's mother, brother, and the man she could or might or will call husband, out of reach -- until she reaches. | |