Top Ten Tuesday: Most Anticipated

I love these Top Ten Tuesdays that are all about getting excited about the books slated for release this year.  I don't think I did one for the first six months of the year, but after reading a lot of BEA recap posts and realizing how many authors I like who have new books coming out in the latter part of this year, this list practically wrote itself.  So in conjunction with The Broke and the Bookish, I give you my top ten most anticipated releases for the rest of 2016.

1. Darktown by Thomas Mullen (Atria 9/13/2016) - You may have heard me go on (and on and on) about Mullen's book The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers, so there's no doubt that I'll need to track down his next round of historical fiction which features Atlanta's first black police officers.

2. A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (Viking 9/6/2016) - Speaking of historical fiction, I can't wait to get my paws on the sophomore work by the author of Rules of Civility, which I loved.  Gentleman is about an unrepentant aristocrat sentenced by Bolshevik tribunal to live out his life under house arrest in a Moscow hotel.  Sounds very different but equally enticing!

3. Commonwealth by Ann Patchett (Harper 9/13/2016) - Ann Patchett is another author I've been loving for a while between Bel Canto and The Magician's Assistant and Truth & Beauty.  Her latest sounds like a true family saga that follows the reverberations from one misplaced kiss.

4. This Must Be the Place by Maggie O'Farrell (Knopf 7/19/2016) - I loved O'Farrell's style in The Hand That First Held Mine and After You'd Gone (the book that contributed my header quote!), so a new book by her is always cause for celebration. I don't have too awful long to wait for this one about an American professor who falls in love with a world famous actress while on holiday in Ireland. 

5. The Motion of Puppets by Keith Donohue (Picador 10/4/2016) - Donohue's The Stolen Child is another book I rave about, and this one sounds like it has a bit in common with it, except creepier and with puppets.

6. Nobody's Son by Mark Slouka (W.W. Norton 10/18/2016) - I was totally captivated by Slouka's writing in his last novel, Brewster, so I'm hoping the same magic carries over to this memoir that centers on his parents, Czechoslovakian refugees.

7. I Will Send Rain by Rae Meadows (Henry Holt 8/9/2016) - This one keeps landing on my radar, historical fiction about a woman trying to keep her family together in 1930s Oklahoma, where drought and dust storms threaten.  I love the cover, and the story sounds compelling, too.


At this point in my list, I became uncertain of which book to feature as number eight, so naturally I got sucked into a Goodreads vortex of "Omigosh this one sounds good!  And this one sounds good!  And this one sounds good, too!" until I had to take a break to tremble in a corner for a while and cry out to all my friends that it's not fair that there are so many books to read and so much time that I spend not reading them.  Hold on, let me gather myself here.


But this one...  And that one...  And...and...uh, one more minute.  Okay.

8. Mischling by Affinity Konar (Little Brown/Lee Boudreaux 9/6/2016) - I am a sucker, a total and complete sucker, for Holocaust related historical fiction.  I have been since I was but a young reader. There are twins and Auschwitz and Mengele and liberation...and I must have it. 

9. The Wonder by Emma Donaghue (Little, Brown 9/20/2016) - In the authors I don't read so much as I collect, is Emma Donaghue with a new book that sounds every interesting.  A girl in Ireland is fasting and surviving only on "manna from heaven."  Is it a miracle or a murder?

10. The Infinite by Nicholas Mainieri (Harper 11/15/2016) - And then, out of left field comes this debut I heard about during Harper's fall books preview webinar-y thing that I totally left work early to attend before BEA.  It's a post-Katrina love story of sorts.  There are undocumented immigrants and babies and violence, and I am enticed all over again.


I could go on and on and on.  I mean, I didn't even hazard a glance at the YA side of things lest be reduced to a quivering mass of to-be-readness.  I trust that there will be a boat load of YA focused Top Ten posts that will reduce me thus, anyhow.  What's one (ha, one!) book you're looking forward to that's coming out later this year?

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