Publishers Lunch

January Bookseller Picks

Amazon joins the Indie Next list and Library Reads in naming Chloe Benjamin's The Immortalists as their spotlight pick for January, and Karen Cleveland's Need to Know is their featured debut. (Benjamin's novel and A.J. Finn's thriller The Woman In the Window -- also on Amazon's January list -- are both featured in our free Buzz Books January sampler as well.)

The rest of Amazon's top picks, presented in a new graphic format, are:

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, Denis Johnson
Here Is Real Magic, Nate Staniforth
Oliver Loving, Stefan Merrill Block
The Road Not Taken, Max Boot
The Windows of Malabar Hill, Sujata Massey
When, Daniel Pink
Green, Sam Graham-Felsen

The January Pennie's Pick at Costco is We Were the Lucky Ones, by Georgia Hunter.

And in other recommendations, former President Obama continued his tradition of naming the best books he read during the year:

The Power, Naomi Alderman
Grant, Ron Chernow
Evicted, Matthew Desmond
Janesville, Amy Goldstein
Exit West, Mohsin Hamid
Five-Carat Soul, James McBride
Anything Is Possible, Elizabeth Strout
Dying, Cory Taylor
A Gentleman In Moscow, Amor Towles
Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward

 

People, Etc.

Sue Grafton, 77, author of the Kinsey Millhone series, died of cancer at her home in Santa Barbara on December 28. The alphabetical series began with A is for Alibi in 1982 and continued through her last book, Y Is for Yesterday, published in August 2016. She had not yet begun writing the final book of the series, which was to be titled Z Is for Zero and published August 2019. Her daughter Jamie Clark wrote in a message on Grafton's Facebook page, "She was adamant that her books would never be turned into movies or TV shows, and in that same vein, she would never allow a ghost writer to write in her name. Because of all of those things, and out of the deep abiding love and respect for our dear sweet Sue, as far as we in the family are concerned, the alphabet now ends at Y."

Our news editor Sarah Weinman wrote a remembrance of the author for Vulture. Other crime writers paying tribute to Grafton included Laura Lippman, Jeff Abbott and, Meg Gardiner.
In a short piece, the New Yorker catches up with Walter Minton, 94, former president of Putnam, who "reminisced about the controversial novels he championed in his youth and the trials of getting them into print. Minton was dressed in slacks and a cardigan, with a thinning head of white hair; he still wears the trim, boxy beard that he adopted mid-career. He was thirty-one when he took over Putnam’s, in 1955, and the shelves of his living room offer a higgledy-piggledy tour of his route through twentieth-century publishing, from John le Carré to Mario Puzo to Scott Turow