Pop Fiction, from Caroline Frost to Danielle Steel, Mar. 2024, Pt. 4 | Prepub Alert

Life, love, moving on. 

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Frost, Caroline. The Last Verse. Morrow. Mar. 2024. 368p. ISBN 9780063265486. $30. CD. POP

Gonzalez, Xochitl. Anita de Monte Laughs Last. Flatiron: Macmillan. Mar. 2024. 352p. ISBN 9781250786210. $28.99. Downloadable. POP

Graves, Tracey Garvis. The Trail of Lost Hearts. St. Martin’s. Mar. 2024. 304p. ISBN 9781250280275. $29. Downloadable. POP

Hunter, Becky. One Moment. Forever: Hachette. Mar. 2024. 352p. ISBN 9781538741757. $29. Downloadable. FRIENDSHIP

Ko, Lisa. Memory Piece. Riverhead. Mar. 2024. 304p. ISBN 9780593542101. $28. lrg. prnt. COMING OF AGE

Lapid, Lihi. On Her Own. HarperVia. Mar. 2024. 320p. tr. from Hebrew by Sondra Silverton. ISBN 9780063309760. $30. FAMILY

Lovering, Carola. Bye, Baby. St. Martin’s. Mar. 2024. 352p. ISBN 9781250289360. $29. Downloadable. POP

Maupin, Armistead. Mona of the Manor. Harper. Mar. 2024. 256p. ISBN 9780062973597. $30. CD. POP/LGBTQ+

Quindlen, Anna. After Annie. Random. Mar. 2024. 304p. ISBN 9780593229804. $30. lrg. prnt. CD/downloadable. FAMILY

Serle, Rebecca. Expiration Dates. Atria. Mar. 2024. 272p. ISBN 9781982166823. $27. CD. POP

Steel, Danielle. Never Too Late. Delacorte. Mar. 2024. 256p. ISBN 9780593498408. $29. POP

In The Last Verse, Frost’s follow-up to her award-winning debut, Shadows of Pecan Hollow, aspiring country-music singer Twyla Finch is anxious about laying claim to a song she performed just once but later hears sung by someone else on the radio; it’s about a terrible crime in which she was inadvertently involved (75,000-copy first printing). In Anita de Monte Laughs Last, Gonzalez’s follow-up to her multi-best-booked Olga Dies Dreaming, first-generation Ivy League student Raquel discovers the remarkable work of forgotten artist Anita de Monte, whose tangled relationships before her suspicious death eerily echo Raquel’s own (200,000-copy first printing). After her fiancé’s death, Wren Waters learns that he was married with children and follows The Trail of Lost Hearts as she goes geocaching (something like treasure hunting) in the Pacific Northwest, where fellow geocacher Marshall Hendricks helps her overcome her grief; New York Times best-selling Graves’s latest (50,000-copy first printing). In only One Moment, Scarlett has died, but she can’t seem to let go, watching the effects of her death on best friend Evie, who furiously blames Nate for Scarlett’s passing even as he keeps showing up proactively in her life; former UK book publicist Hunter’s debut (50,000-copy first printing). Following Ko’s National Book Award finalist, PEN/Bellwether–winning The Leavers, Memory Piece visits teenagers Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng in the early 1980s, then revisits them as adults, when performance activist Giselle, coder Jackie, and community activist Ellen find their dreams getting bent. In best-selling Israeli novelist Lapid’s On Her Own, Russian immigrant teenager Nina runs away from her just-scraping-by homelife and after witnessing a murder ends up terrified in the stairwell of a Tel Aviv apartment, where a lonesome widow mistakes her for her granddaughter (40,000-copy first printing). Following Hulu hit Tell Me Lies, Lovering’s Bye, Baby features Cassie, now married, wealthy, and eager to leave behind single, lusterless Billie, who knows Cassie’s worst secrets and has just kidnapped her baby (100,000-copy first printing). Having married Lord Teddy Roughton to allow him to remain in San Francisco, Mona Ramsey finds herself Mona of the Manor, the widowed lady of a grand Cotswolds estate, and with adopted son Wilfred sets about repairing both the house and the troubles of some U.S. visitors; 10th in Maupin’s durable “Tales of the City” series (50,000-copy first printing). The redoubtable Quindlen’s After Annie contemplates the effect of Annie Brown’s death on her husband, best friend, and daughter Ali, the eldest of Annie’s four young children, who is now responsible for holding everyone else together. In the New York Times best-selling Serle’s Expiration Dates, every time Daphne Bell starts dating someone new, she mysteriously receives a slip of paper indicating how long the relationship lasts—but not when she meets blind date Jake. For the recently widowed Kezia Cooper Hobson, it’s Never Too Late to start life afresh, as she moves from San Francisco to New York, a city she loves where her daughters now live, and draws close to her movie-star neighbor Sam as they volunteer together when a crisis hits the city; the second of seven Steel originals in 2024.

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Barbara Hoffert

Barbara Hoffert (bhoffert@mediasourceinc.com, @BarbaraHoffert on Twitter) is Editor, LJ Prepub Alert; winner of ALA's Louis Shores Award for reviewing; and past president, awards chair, and treasurer of the National Book Critics Circle, which awarded her its inaugural Service Award in 2023.

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