March is Women's History Month. Many of my favorite women authors have new books being published this month, a perfect way to relax and celebrate!
A Sunlit Weapon: A Novel by Jacqueline Winspear
October 1942. Jo
Hardy, a 22-year-old ferry pilot, is delivering a Supermarine
Spitfire—the fastest fighter aircraft in the world—to Biggin Hill
Aerodrome, when she realizes someone is shooting at her aircraft from
the ground. Returning to the location on foot, she finds an American
serviceman in a barn, bound and gagged. She rescues the man, who is
handed over to the American military police; it quickly emerges that he
is considered a suspect in the disappearance of a fellow soldier who is
missing.
Tragedy strikes two days later, when another ferry
pilot crashes in the same area where Jo’s plane was attacked. At the
suggestion of one of her colleagues, Jo seeks the help of psychologist
and investigator Maisie Dobbs. Meanwhile, Maisie’s husband, a
high-ranking political attaché based at the American embassy, is in the
thick of ensuring security is tight for the first lady of the United
States, Eleanor Roosevelt, during her visit to the Britain. There’s
already evidence that German agents have been circling: the wife of a
president represents a high value target. Mrs. Roosevelt is clearly in
danger, and there may well be a direct connection to the death of the
woman ferry pilot and the recent activities of two American servicemen.
To guarantee the safety of the First Lady—and of the soldier being held
in police custody—Maisie must uncover that connection. At the same
time, she faces difficulties of an entirely different nature with her
young daughter, Anna, who is experiencing wartime struggles of her own.
This does not come out until March 22, so you have time to brush up on what has happened to Maisie it the previous books...
Johnny Frias has California in his blood. A descendant of the state’s Indigenous people and Spanish settlers, he has Southern California’s forgotten towns and canyons in his soul. He spends his days working for the California Highway Patrol pulling over speeders, ignoring their racist insults, and pushing past the trauma of his rookie year, when he killed a man who was in the midst of assaulting a young woman named Bunny, who proceeded to run away. But like the Santa Ana winds, which every year bring risk of fire, Johnny’s moment of action twenty years ago sparks a slow-burning chain of connections that unites a vibrant, complex cast of characters in ways they never saw coming.
Susan Straight crafts an unforgettable American epic, examining race, history, family, and destiny through the interlocking stories of a group of native Californians all gasping for air. With sensitivity, furor, and a cinematic scope that captures California in all its injustice, history, and glory, she tells a story of the American West through the eyes of the people who built it—and continue to sustain it. As the stakes get higher and the intertwined characters in Mecca slam against barrier after barrier, we find that when push comes to shove, it’s always better to push back.
The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever leave home, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband, Robin. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily, could not have less in common. Their youngest, David, is already intent on escaping his family’s orbit, for reasons none of them understand. Yet, as these lives advance across decades, the Garretts’ influences on one another ripple ineffably but unmistakably through each generation.
Full of heartbreak and hilarity, French Braid is classic Anne Tyler: a stirring, uncannily insightful novel of tremendous warmth and humor that illuminates the kindnesses and cruelties of our daily lives, the impossibility of breaking free from those who love us, and how close—yet how unknowable—every family is to itself.
Jason Bennett is a suburban dad who owns a court-reporting business, but one night, his life takes a horrific turn. He is driving his family home after his daughter’s field hockey game when a pickup truck begins tailgating them, on a dark stretch of road. Suddenly two men jump from the pickup and pull guns on Jason, demanding the car. A horrific flash of violence changes his life forever.
Later that awful night, Jason and his family receive a visit from the FBI. The agents tell them that the carjackers were members of a dangerous drug-trafficking organization - and now Jason and his family are in their crosshairs.
The agents advise the Bennetts to enter the witness protection program right away, and they have no choice but to agree. But WITSEC was designed to protect criminal informants, not law-abiding families. Taken from all they know, trapped in an unfamiliar life, the Bennetts begin to fall apart at the seams. Then Jason learns a shocking truth and realizes that he has to take matters into his own hands.
The next book is not fiction, but talks about many works of fiction that have been considered controversial over the course of history:
Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times by Azar Nafisi
The
author of Reading Lolita in Tehran returns with a guide to the power of
literature in turbulent times, arming readers with a resistance reading
list, ranging from James Baldwin to Zora Neale Hurston to Margaret
Atwood.
What is the role of literature in an era when the
president wages war on writers and the press? What is the connection
between political strife in our daily lives, and the way we meet our
enemies on the page in fiction? How can literature, through its free
exchange, affect politics?
Structured as a series of letters to
her father, Baba, who taught her as a child about how literature can
rescue us in times of trauma, Nafisi explores the most probing questions
of our time through the works of Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, James
Baldwin, Margaret Atwood, and more.
Books on Nafisi’s Resistance
Reading List: Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments);
James Baldwin (If Beale Street Could Talk, Notes of a Native Son, The
Fire Next Time, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country); Ta-Nehisi Coates
(Between the World and Me); David Grossman (To the End of the Land);
Elliot Ackerman (Green on Blue, Places and Names); Zora Neale Hurston
(Their Eyes Were Watching God); Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye); Salman
Rushdie (The Satanic Verses); Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451); Plato (The
Republic); The Arabian Nights
Celebrate the power of words and your freedom to read!
Remember to support Independent Bookstores and your local library
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