Want to get the latest book news delivered to your inbox each day? Sign up for our daily Book Pulse newsletter.

March Book Clubs, Picks & Awards

B&N selects One Italian Summer by Rebecca Serle (Atria) for its March Book Club. Serle will discuss her book at a live virtual event April 5th.

Jenna Bush Hager selects Groundskeeping by Lee Cole (Knopf) for her March book club pick.

The Love of My Life by Rosie Walsh (Pamela Dorman Books), is the Good Morning America pick.

The March Amazon Editors’ Picks are out with a spotlight on The Unsinkable Greta James by Jennifer E. Smith (Ballantine; LJ starred review).

The buyer’s pick in March’s Costco Connection is the new trade paperback edition of Women in White Coats: How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine by Olivia Campbell (Park Row; LJ starred review). Also featured are two cookbooks by J. Kenji López-Alt: The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, and new release, The Wok: Recipes and Techniques, both published by Norton.

The British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Awards shortlist is announced. 

Sheree Renée Thomas wins the Dal Coger Memorial Hall of Fame Award.

The Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses announces its 2022 longlist. 

Trade shows issue statements on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Publishing Perspectives has coverage. 

Reviews

NYT reviews I Was Better Last Night by Harvey Fierstein, (Knopf; LJ starred review): “Fierstein shares his life less in conventional chapters than in colorful patches: 59 of them, stitched together with photos and a plush index. The sum of this is warm and enveloping and indeed two-sided: One is a raw, cobwebby tale of anger, hurt, indignation and pain; flip it over and you get billowing ribbons of humor, gossip and fabulous, hot-pink success.” And, The Verifiers by Jane Pek (Vintage): “In…Jane Pek’s debut, the world of social media, big tech and internet connectivity provides fertile new ground for humans to deceive, defraud and possibly murder one another.”  Also, In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss by Amy Bloom (Random): “The way Bloom tells her story feels like a dam breaking; to expel the emotional weight of it seems an almost physical need. The only drawback to this outpouring is a sometimes excessive use of parentheticals.”  And, Groundskeeping by Lee Cole (Knopf): “A sterling novel that presages a major career, Groundskeeping puts a fresh spin on the divided self adrift in a divided nation.” And, The Doloriad by Missouri Williams (MCD x FSG Originals): “Williams’s prose is fantastically elaborate, presenting itself in long, bricklike blocks of text. At its best, it reads as Faulknerian, sinuous and formal. When well matched with what it describes, it is evocative, and takes on a historical, almost biblical weight.” Also, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts by Silvia Ferrara, trans. by Todd Portnowitz (Farrar; LJ starred review): “Some of Ferrara’s most far-reaching ideas stem from her collaboration with scientists, including the claim that writing literally changes the brains of those who learn it.” And, Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada, trans. by Margaret Mitsutani (New Directions): ““By the time we are reading the trilogy’s final volume, the climate-fiction scenario Tawada drapes in the trappings of picaresque comedy will no longer seem speculative.” And, Run and Hide by Pankaj Mishra (Farrar): “a novel of modern India that takes some of the big-picture phenomena from Age of Anger and — as good social novels have always done — gets us to engage on the level of feeling by returning those abstractions to human scale.” Plus, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke (Riverhead): “a commentary on medicine as it exists today, puncturing our fantasy that diagnosticians can reliably make clear diagnoses, that the course of treatment upon diagnosis is usually clear and specific, that medicine is straightforward and that bodily ills can be targeted.” Lastly, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory by Sarah Polley (Penguin Pr.): “The little girl who carried the weight of Hollywood movie budgets and theater actors’ salaries on her shoulders is now a grown woman whose stolen childhood has made her at once a stunningly sophisticated observer of the world and an imperfect witness to the truth.”

NPR reviews Border Less by Namrata Poddar (7.13 Books): “She has created an engaging debut by bringing us into the lives of those who leave and those who stay. If she is tilling familiar ground, she is also giving us a new set of characters. That the individual stories in Border Less can stand on their own is testament to her literary dexterity.”

The Washington Post reviews The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir by Karen Cheung (Random; LJ starred review): “By 2020, Cheung writes, it was clear that China’s promise of universal suffrage for Hong Kong residents — a promise made at the time of the handover — was a lie. It is easy to succumb to defeatism, yet Cheung doesn’t. Her memoir conveys a delicate mix of hope and caution.”

LA Times reviews Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett (Riverhead): “For the unnamed narrator at the center of Claire-Louise Bennett’s wildly imaginative, unabashedly odd and mordantly funny second novel, Checkout 19, books are life itself: essential as water, ordinary as wallpaper. But reading them won't save the world.”

Briefly Noted

Mark Greaney discusses his latest installment of the Gray Man series, Sierra Six (Berkley), with Entertainment Weekly. EW also has a first-look at Jamie Lee Curtis’s eco-horror graphic novel, Mother Nature (Titan Comics), adapted from the script of her forthcoming horror movie of the same name.

Oprah Daily shares an excerpt and cover reveal for the forthcoming novel, If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery (MCD), due out September 6th.

Margaret Atwood joins Salman Rushdie, Olga Tokarczuk, Colm Tóibín, and more than 1,000 other writers in condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Guardian has the story.

OprahDaily shares "Keith Gessen’s 7 Must-Read Books to Understand Ukraine and Russia.”

The Millions highlights notable new releases for the week.

NYT suggests 14 new books for March.

The Washington Post shares “10 noteworthy books for March.” 

Entertainment Weekly has the best new books for the month.

USA Today recommends the best rom-coms for March. 

LA Times has 10 books to add to your reading list this month.

Tor previews Indie speculative fiction for March and April.

Authors On Air

Journalist Meghan O’Rourke, author of the new book The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (Riverhead), discusses her reporting on long COVID-19 on NPR’s Fresh Air.

NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour recommends books about the lives of women for the “Books We Love” project.

Gish Jen, Thank You, Mr. Nixon: Stories (Knopf) reads Grace Paley on The New Yorker podcast. 

NPR’s Life Kit shares creativity advice from Julia Cameron’s latest book, Seeking Wisdom: A Spiritual Path to Creative Connection (St. Martin’s Essentials).

Anna Malaika Tubbs, The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation (Flatiron), discusses what it means to be a Black mother with Good Morning America.

Want to get the latest book news delivered to your inbox each day? Sign up for our daily Book Pulse newsletter.