This month Book of the Month gave us a special treat by including an option to add on the Margaret Atwood novel, The Blind Assassin, for just $9.99! For all you fans of The Handmaid’s Tale, you probably don’t want to miss this. The September book selections are really solid this month too, so If you’ve been wanting to try BotM this is an excellent month to do so!
Don’t forget – make your book choice by September 5 to get this month’s titles!
Price: $9.99-16.99/month (save 30% on your subscription and get a free tote bag by clicking here!)
Box Type: Monthly book subscription! Choose one of 5 specially selected titles, plus add on any other book they have (even in their archives) for just $9.99/each (way cheaper than retail for a hardcover).
Why you’ll love it: These are new release hardcovers for $10-17. You can’t beat that price. It’s a great way to keep your reading list updated! PLUS, use the link above to get 30% off your order and a free tote bag! Don’t like a month? No problem, just skip it. As if you needed another reason to love BoTM, they regularly have highly anticipated new releases as add-ons and even some freebies!
Check out this month’s book selections:
Lies She Told by Cate Holahan (this was my choice this month!)
Sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.
Liza Cole has thirty days to write the thriller that could put her back on the bestseller list. In the meantime, she’s struggling to start a family with her husband, who is distracted by the disappearance of his best friend, Nick. With stresses weighing her down in both her professional and her personal lives, Liza escapes into writing her latest heroine, Beth.
Beth is a new mother who suspects her husband is cheating on her while she’s home alone caring for their newborn. Angry and betrayed, she sets out to catch him in the act and make him pay for shattering the illusion of their perfect life. But before she realizes it, she’s tossing the body of her husband’s mistress into the East River.
Then the lines between fiction and reality begin to blur. Nick’s body is dragged from the same river and Liza’s husband is arrested for his murder. Before her deadline is up, Liza will have to face up to the truths about the people around her, including herself. If she doesn’t, the end of her heroine’s story could be the end of her own.
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
From the bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You, a riveting story set in meticulously planned Shaker Heights that traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives.
In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned—from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.
Enter Mia Warren—an enigmatic artist and single mother—who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenaged daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past and a disregard for the status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.
When old family friends of the Richardsons attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town—and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia’s past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs.
Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood—and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster.
Sourdough by Robin Sloan
Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions. She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall from which she orders dinner every evening. Then, disaster! Visa issues. The brothers close up shop, and fast. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. She must keep it alive, they tell her—feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it. Lois is no baker, but she could use a roommate, even if it is a needy colony of microorganisms. Soon, not only is she eating her own homemade bread, she’s providing loaves daily to the General Dexterity cafeteria. The company chef urges her to take her product to the farmer’s market, and a whole new world opens up.
When Lois comes before the jury that decides who sells what at Bay Area markets, she encounters a close-knit club with no appetite for new members. But then, an alternative emerges: a secret market that aims to fuse food and technology. But who are these people, exactly?
Emma in the Night by Wendy Walker (I also added this one on!)
One night three years ago, the Tanner sisters disappeared: fifteen-year-old Cass and seventeen-year-old Emma. Three years later, Cass returns, without her sister Emma. Her story is one of kidnapping and betrayal, of a mysterious island where the two were held. But to forensic psychiatrist Dr. Abby Winter, something doesn’t add up. Looking deep within this dysfunctional family, Dr. Winter uncovers a life where boundaries were violated and a narcissistic parent held sway. And where one sister’s return might just be the beginning of the crime.
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
In Jesmyn Ward’s first novel since her National Book Award–winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi’s past and present that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. Ward is a major American writer, and in Sing, Unburied, Sing she is at the height of her powers.
Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie’s children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.
Sing, Unburied, Sing grapples with the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power, and limitations, of the bonds of family. Rich with Ward’s distinctive, musical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic new work and an essential contribution to American literature.
Special New Release Add-On:
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood’s masterpiece is a genre-bending novel that’s the literary equivalent of a Russian nesting doll, hurtling from detective noir and sci-fi to romance and back again. The Blind Assassin contains a story within a story within a whole other story, but its ultimate mystery concerns matters of the heart, as so many of the best stories do.
Final Rating: A+
I couldn’t help myself this month – I got THREE books! I love thrillers and mysteries, so when I’m given so many awesome options it’s not that surprising that I’m going to take advantage of it! Plus I’m going on vacation in a couple of week so I really need some new reads for all the laying around in the sun I’m planning on doing.
What’d you think of the titles? Tell us in the comments!
xo,
Jill
I bought this box, all opinions are my own. Post contains referral link.