Shelf Awareness - Daily Enlightenment for the Book Trade

Starred Review

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  The Prince's Boy

  by Paul Bailey

  In 1927, 19-year-old Dinu Grigorescu arrives in Paris from Bucharest, sent by his father to spend a summer adventuring in the City of Light and recovering from the unexpected death of his mother. In the late 1960s, an elderly Dinu sits down in London to write the story of that summer in Paris, recalling with tenderness his first visit to a whorehouse known to offer men the services of men; the lover he found at that establishment and kept for a lifetime; and the unexpected ways that a forbidden affair could

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  Gretel and the Dark

  by Eliza Granville

  Eliza Granville's debut novel, Gretel and the Dark, is a grim, spooky fairy tale, but it boasts another layer: it is also a meditation on historical good and evil, set both in Nazi Germany and fin-de-siècle Austria.
  
  In 1899, a shockingly beautiful young woman is rescued off the street and delivered to the home of celebrated Viennese psychoanalyst Josef Breuer. She is emaciated, beaten, shorn, with numbers inked on her arm; she claims to have no identity, so the besotted Josef calls her Lilie. Her story

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  The Young Elites

  by Marie Lu

  A Game of Thrones meets X-Men in this 14th-century fantasy from Marie Lu (the Legend trilogy), in a world where "fear is power."
  
  Sixteen-year-old Adelina Amouteru is a malfetto, one whose appearance is "marked" by the blood fever that crippled the country of Kenettra and claimed her mother's life. The blood fever took Adelina's left eye, turned her hair silver and gave her a power that's remained dormant--until the fateful night her merchant father agrees to trade her to a suitor in exchange for cleared debts.

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