Top Pop Names: Feb. 2024, Pt. 3 | Prepub Alert

From James Lee Burke to Kristin Hannah to Valerie Martin. 

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Burke, James Lee. Harbor Lights. Atlantic Monthly. Jan. 2024. 368p. ISBN 9780802160966. $28.SHORT STORIES

Hannah, Kristin. The Women. St. Martin’s. Feb. 2024. 480p. ISBN 9781250178633. $30. CD/downloadable. POP

Kapelke-Dale, Rachel. The Fortune Seller. St. Martin’s. Feb. 2024. 320p. ISBN 9781250286130. $29. Downloadable. POP

Martin, Valerie. Mrs. Gulliver. Doubleday. Feb. 2024. 304p. ISBN 9780385549950. $28. POP

Williams, Tia. A Love Song for Ricki Wilde. Grand Central. Feb. 2024. 352p. ISBN 9781538726709. $29. Downloadable. ROMANCE

In the New York Times best-selling Burke’s Harbor Lights, a story collection following the multi-starred Flags on the Bayou, characters range from a father and son watching the sinking of a German submarine to a young woman attacked outside a bar even as her father wrestles with new love and vicious threats from neo-Nazis. In No. 1 New York Times best-selling Hannah’s The Women, good-girl nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows her brother to Vietnam but finds herself unprepared for the brutality of war and the tumult of a divided United States when she returns home (one-million-copy first printing). Following the brightly received The Ingenue, Kapelke-Dale’s The Fortune Seller features middle-class Rosie Macalister, not altogether comfortable with her wealthy friends on the Yale equestrian team and further unsettled by a remarkable new rider (and tarot card reader) who suddenly appears on the team after Rosie’s junior year abroad (50,000-copy first printing). On a remote tropical island in the 1950s, beautiful, blind Carità Bercy insists on entering the brothel run by Mrs. Gulliver, where a wealthy young client falls recklessly in love with her; from Kafka/Orange–winning Martin. Following the Reese Witherspoon Bookclub pick Seven Days in June, Williams’s A Love Song for Ricki Wilde features a freewheeling young woman who leaves behind her stuffy Atlanta family for a contemporary New York still echoing with the Harlem Renaissance and meets a handsome stranger who will change her life.

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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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