The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris
The imprint's first book, The Unnamed, is about a couple, Tim and Jane Farnsworth, who have been married 20 years and have a charmed life, much of it thanks to Tim's work as a high-powered lawyer. But Tim has battled a strange illness that suddenly comes back with a vengeance, "driving him out of his life and into a world and a self that he can't recognize and Jane is helpless to control."
"All signs are pointing to a serious literary event," Reagan Arthur said of The Unnamed, which is Ferris's second book, following Then We Came to the End, a National Book Award finalist. Marlena Bittner highlighted the book's three starred pre-pub reviews and the fact that much of the post-BEA media coverage highlighted the book.
We were a voice in the early chorus of praise. Shelf Awareness (December 20, 2009) wrote, "A meditation on love, selfishness and the human condition, The Unnamed is a beautifully told, profoundly sad tale that resonates long after the last page is turned."
The imprint is sending Ferris on tour to nearly a dozen cities. First serial rights have been sold to Granta and Scott Rudin has bought film rights. The book's website includes a book trailer filmed by the author and his brother. The website features 35 voiceovers, all reading original passages written by Ferris especially for the site. Some of the voices belong to industry professionals, performed as special cameos. The images were filmed in Grand Central Terminal and evoke an appropriately mysterious atmosphere. The novel is gaining major review attention already: in Time magazine, Lev Grossman called it "rich and profound," while the Los Angeles Times critic hailed it as "an accomplished and daring work by a writer just now realizing what he is capable of creating."
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Marriage and Other Acts of Charity by Kate Braestrup (January)
The author of the award-winning memoir Here if You Need Me, Braestrup is a minister who performs weddings and has been married twice and widowed once. With quite some authority, she writes here about love and commitment, modern marriage and how God figures in our relationships. Self magazine declared the memoir to be "the most honest you may ever read about the roller coaster of marriage. Coupled or single, you'll enjoy the ride."
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Doors Open by Ian Rankin
"Beloved in the crime community," as Bittner put it, Edgar winner Rankin here offers a tale of three upstanding friends who decide to steal several paintings from the National Gallery in Edinburgh. This unlikely adventure tosses them together with master forgers, crime bosses and a Hell's Angel named Hate, and their bravado brings them more wealth, seduction and danger than they ever anticipated.
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Black Hills by Dan Simmons
The author of The Terror is back, seamlessly weaving together the story of a young Sioux warrior named Paha Sapa with that of Custer and the American West. Haunted by Custer's ghost, Paha Sapa is driven by a dramatic vision he experienced as a boy. In August of 1936, now a dynamite worker on Mount Rushmore, Paha Sapa plans to silence his ghost forever and reclaim his people's legacy--on the very day FDR comes to dedicate the Jefferson face.
PW's starred review declared: "Simmons stands almost unmatched among his contemporaries."
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Still Midnight by Denise Mina
Scottish crime writer Mina, author of the Garnethill trilogy, introduces a new character in Still Midnight: up-and-coming police detective Alex Morrow. As she navigates an urban underworld seeped in every gradation of crime--drugs, robbery, murder and religious bigotry--she crosses paths with her half-brother, who may be at its center. All the while, she's trying to keep from getting swept into the complications of police-force politics and a marriage every bit as tangled as the burglary she's trying to solve.
Bittner relates an early review of sorts she just received in an e-mail from Vick Mickunas of the Dayton Daily News, "I finished Still Midnight last night. Could not put it down--well past midnight. Wow! This could be her breakout in the U.S. I have loved her other books but this one opens up a whole new level of potency for her."
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Next by James Hynes
Next takes place all in one day, a day in which Kevin Quinn, "an average, middle-aged, liberal-leaning, self-centered, emotionally damaged American," secretly flies to Austin, Tex., for a job interview and simultaneously is entranced by a young woman he meets on the plane, terrified about terrorism and hopes to reinvent himself.
Next has already been praised by Jim Crace, Laura Lippman, Kate Christensen and Madison Smartt Bell.
Among titles appearing soon:
The Island by Elin Hilderbrand
When
Arthur was a young editor at St. Martin's, Elin Hilderbrand was an
assistant to Tom McCormack for seven or eight months. Hilderbrand left
to go to the Iowa Writers Workshop, then started writing novels set on
Nantucket, the first half dozen of which were published by St.
Martin's. "I thought, 'That's someone I shared an office phone with!' "
Arthur said.
Several years ago, Little, Brown signed her up and, in 2007, it published Barefoot, which went on to spend six months on the New York Times bestseller list in paperback. Her subsequent titles, A Summer Affair and The Castaways,
have followed suit. As Arthur describes the very popular Hilderbrand:
"She is a mother of three, a natural-born storyteller, an endless
traveler, and you want to read her books as much as you want to be her
friend." Her next book, The Island, is due in July.
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Day for Night by Frederick Reiken
Each chapter of this book has a different character and different location, but all connect "like a magic trick," as Bittner put it. As Margot Livesey said, "Here is a world, our world, in which no-one gets to escape the net of history and no-one, finally, gets to deny their human connections. I held my breath while I watched Reiken assemble his own extraordinary minyan." Reiken is the author of The Odd Sea and Lost Legends of New Jersey, and his short stories have appeared in the New Yorker.
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The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton
Catton is a New Zealand native whose debut novel, The Rehearsal,
has won several major New Zealand prizes and will be published here by
Reagan Arthur Books this summer. She is now at the Iowa Writers
Workshop. Arthur called her "an adventurous person, and her book is
adventurous stylistically and in terms of ideas." Not only that, "She's
sweet as pie." Reviews from the U.K. have been excellent: the Sunday Times exclaimed, "It represents a starburst of talent, the arrival of an author wholly different from anyone else writing today."