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August Book Club Picks

Jenna Bush Hager selects The Many Daughters of Afong Moy by Jamie Ford (Atria; LJ starred review).

B&N selects Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra (Hogarth) for its August Book Club. B&N talks with Marra about the book on its Poured Over podcast. There will also be a live event on September 8 in NYC, with a free virtual option.

Mika in Real Life by Emiko Jean (Morrow), is the Good Morning America pick.

Reese Witherspoon’s pick is Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister (Morrow). USA Today shares a slideshow of every Hello Sunshine pick since the beginning.

Amazon’s Sarah Selects book club picks Thank You for Listening by Julia Whelan (Avon). Entertainment Weekly interviews Whelan about channeling her fame as a audiobook narrator to the novel. NPR's All Things Considered also has an interview. 

The Rumpus shares an excerpt from All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews (Viking), its August pick. It is also the Good Housekeeping book club pick.

The Target Book Club pick is All the Lonely People by Mike Gayle (Grand Central).

Awards & News

The 2022 Gordon Burn prize shortlist is announced.

The 2020 Edna Staebler Award shortlist is announced.

The August 2022 Earphones Award Winners are posted at Audiofile.

After a First Amendment lawsuit, New York prisons lift ban on Heather Ann Thompson’s 2016 book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (Vintage), but still censors the map portion. USA Today reports.

Reviews

USA Today reviews Properties of Thirst by Marianne Wiggins (S. & S.; LJ starred review), giving it 4 out of 4 stars: “Wiggins’ writing glides off the page in an onslaught of stylistic flourishes writers are often told not to use: italics, consecutive colons, ellipses, em dashes, paragraphs that go on for pages at a time. But there’s nothing terribly showy about Properties of Thirst. It speaks to the heart as well as the head, and conjures characters to whom you won’t want to say goodbye.”

The Washington Post reviews The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid (Riverhead; LJ starred review): “It’s too sincere for dystopian satire, too earnest for cultural parody. It describes the apocalypse long feared by white supremacists by subjecting that paranoia to blistering attention. Even the book’s style reflects the agility of its racial reflection.” And, The Year of Miracles: Recipes About Love + Grief + Growing Things by Ella Risbridger (Bloomsbury): "a luminous memoir about grieving, renewal and the twin consolations of friendship and cooking."

NYT reviews Mothercare: On Obligation, Love, Death, and Ambivalence by Lynne Tillman (Soft Skull): “there’s still the stubborn fact that for some people and some relationships, caregiving will always feel like a burden, no matter how assiduously one might try to manage it. In Mothercare, the novelist and critic Lynne Tillman offers an account that is startling in its blunt, even brutal, refusal of sentimentality.”

Briefly Noted

LibraryReads and LJ offer read-alikes for Black Dog, by Stuart Woods (Putnam), the top holds title of the week.

LJ’s Barbara Hoffert has new Prepub alerts for Thrillers, History, and Memoirs.

USA Today talks with Steven W. Thrasher about his new book, The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide (Celadon), which “combines memoir and research to create a framework for understanding how viruses disproportionately affect populations, from HIV/AIDS to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

People talks with Crime Junkie podcast host and author Ashley Flowers about her debut novel, All Good People Here (Bantam).

Author Taylor Branch remembers basketball legend Bill Russell, at LA Times.

Entertainment Weekly shares an excerpt from iCarly alum Jennette McCurdy’s new memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (S. & S.), due out next week. NYT has a profile of McCurdy and her book.

Refinery29 shares an excerpt from Nearly All the Men in Lagos Are Mad by Damilare Kuku (Swift Pr.).

AARP updates “The Weekly Read.”

The Millions shares notable new releases for the week.

Bustle has 10 must-read books for the week.

LitHub lists 21 books for the week and 10 New SF and Fantasy Books.

CBC has 12 nonfiction books to read this summer.

Gizmodo gathers 62 New Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror books.

The Guardian rates the top 10 books about cybercrime.

BookPage highlights three romances and two SFF books for August.

Authors On Air

NPR’s Fresh Air talks with Scott Higham about his new book, American Cartel: Inside the Battle to Bring Down the Opioid Industry, written with Sari Horwitz (Twelve).

Audiofile’sBehind the Mic podcast welcomes Ed Yong to read from his book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us  (Random).

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