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Monday, March 25, 2013

Today's Deals 3/25

Amazon's Android Free App of the Day is Crossword.

Today's Kindle Kids Daily Deal is The Wide-Awake Princess ($1.99), by E. D. Baker [Bloomsbury USA].
Book Description
In this stand-alone fairy tale, Princess Annie is the younger sister to Gwen, the princess destined to be Sleeping Beauty. When Gwennie pricks her finger and the whole castle falls asleep, only Annie is awake, and only Annie-blessed (or cursed?) with being impervious to magic-can venture out beyond the rose-covered hedge for help. She must find Gwen's true love to kiss her awake.But who is her true love? The irritating Digby? The happy-go-lucky Prince Andreas, who is holding a contest to find his bride? The conniving Clarence, whose sinister motives couldn't possibly spell true love? Joined by one of her father's guards, Liam, who happened to be out of the castle when the sleeping spell struck, Annie travels through a fairy tale land populated with characters both familiar and new as she tries to fix her sister and her family . . . and perhaps even find a true love of her own.

Age Range: 10 and up

Today's Kindle Daily Deal is The Middlesteins ($2.99), by Jami Attenberg [Hachette], an Amazon Best Book of the Month from October, 2012.
Book Description
For more than thirty years, Edie and Richard Middlestein shared a solid family life together in the suburbs of Chicago. But now things are splintering apart, for one reason, it seems: Edie's enormous girth. She's obsessed with food--thinking about it, eating it--and if she doesn't stop, she won't have much longer to live.

When Richard abandons his wife, it is up to the next generation to take control. Robin, their schoolteacher daughter, is determined that her father pay for leaving Edie. Benny, an easy-going, pot-smoking family man, just wants to smooth things over. And Rachelle-- a whippet thin perfectionist-- is intent on saving her mother-in-law's life, but this task proves even bigger than planning her twin children's spectacular b'nai mitzvah party. Through it all, they wonder: do Edie's devastating choices rest on her shoulders alone, or are others at fault, too?

With pitch-perfect prose, huge compassion, and sly humor, Jami Attenberg has given us an epic story of marriage, family, and obsession. The Middlesteins explores the hopes and heartbreaks of new and old love, the yearnings of Midwestern America, and our devastating, fascinating preoccupation with food.

Today's Kindle Romance Daily Deal is Texas Hold Him ($1.99), by Lisa Cooke [Montlake].
Book Description
To save her family from ruin, a Southern belle appeals to a high-stakes gambler to teach her poker, but he’s more interested in giving her lessons in love.

Today's Kindle SciFi/Fantasy Daily Deal is Tales of Pirx the Pilot ($1.99), by Stanislaw Lem [Houghton Mifflin Harcourt].
Book Description
In Pilot Pirx, Lem has created an irresistibly likable character: an astronaut who gives the impression of still navigating by the seat of his pants-a bumbler but an inspired one. By investing Pirx with a range of human foibles, Lem offers a wonderful vision of the audacity, childlike curiosity, and intuition that can give humans the courage to confront outer space. Translated by Louis Iribarne. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (£0.99 UK), by David McRaney, is the Kindle Deal of the day for those in the UK (the US edition is $9.99).
Book Description
How many of your Facebook friends do you think you know? Do you think you’d rush to a stranger’s help when no one else would? Do you think you choose which product to buy based on whether you like it? Do you think you know why you procrastinate? The truth is, you’re probably wrong. You are not so smart. In fact, you’re pretty irrational, just like everyone else. But that’s OK – because that’s all part of being human. Based on the popular blog, You Are Not So Smart explores in 48 short chapters the assorted ways we mislead ourselves everyday. In this pithy celebration of self-delusion, prepare for a whirlwind tour of the latest research in psychology, and to discover finally why we never get round to our New Year resolutions.

Shoveling Smoke: A Clay Parker Crime Novel ($7.99 Kindle, $1.99 B&N), by Austin David, is the Nook Daily Find.
Book Description
Reveling in outrageous shenanigans and hilariously off-kilter characters, Shoveling Smoke does for East Texas what Carl Hiaasen's novels do for South Florida. Burned-out corporate lawyer Clay Parker chucks it all and moves from Houston to a tiny firm in a dusty small town, searching for his lost integrity and a simpler life. Instead, he lands in the middle of a bungled fraud case defending the disreputable and downright nasty Bevo Rasmussen, accused of torching the stables housing his overinsured thoroughbreds. Immediately confronted with corrupt officials, crazed survivalists, an incompetent hit man, an emu, and a naked county clerk, along with an assortment of vengeful wives and great barbecue, Clay discovers that nothing is what it seems to be. By the end, our hero gets way more than he bargained for, justice (Texas-style) gets served, and the reader gets a laugh-out-loud first novel.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

UK Kindle Spring Sale

Plant the seeds for a book-filled spring with hundreds of great titles in the Kindle Spring Sale from £0.99 each. Choose from a selection of bestsellers and hot new releases to popular authors and debut novelists, including James Patterson, Peter May and CJ Box. For fantasy fans, I definitely recommend you pick up A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness, if you haven't red it. New books will be added daily, so be sure to check back during the sale.

Offer ends 11:59 pm, April 4, 2013. Additional terms and conditions apply.

Author Spotlight - Andre Norton

Premier Publishing is celebrating Women's History Month with a 50% off sale on all of Andre Norton's titles that they publish. They don't have them all, as Baen Books has a few and there are some stories in the public domain, and there are some not digitized, as yet. Still, that leaves 32 titles by World Fantasy Life Achievement honoree and Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, Andre Norton, that you can pick up at bargain prices of 99 cents to $1.99, including several of the Witch World novels, which are available for the first time as eBooks.

Audible $6.95 48-Hour Series Sale

Audible is having a 48-Hour Series Sale, with the "Top Series in Your Favorite Genres - Each book just $6.95". Included are Mystery/Thrillers, Romance, Science Fiction, Urban Fantasy and Teen titles. Click any title in a series and you'll then see all the book for that series that are included in the sale. If you have a wishlist set up, that's another good way to check for included titles, as the $6.95 sale price will be shown for any titles you've saved there to look at later.

Prices appear to be for those with a subscription membership only. Sale ends March 26 @ 11:59 PM ET (US).

Today's Deals 3/24

Today's Kindle Daily Deal is Started Early, Took My Dog ($1.99), by Kate Atkinson [Hachette].
Book Description
Tracy Waterhouse leads a quiet, ordered life as a retired police detective-a life that takes a surprising turn when she encounters Kelly Cross, a habitual offender, dragging a young child through town. Both appear miserable and better off without each other-or so decides Tracy, in a snap decision that surprises herself as much as Kelly. Suddenly burdened with a small child, Tracy soon learns her parental inexperience is actually the least of her problems, as much larger ones loom for her and her young charge.

Meanwhile, Jackson Brodie, the beloved detective of novels such as Case Histories, is embarking on a different sort of rescue-that of an abused dog. Dog in tow, Jackson is about to learn, along with Tracy, that no good deed goes unpunished.

Today's Kindle Romance Daily Deal is The Lady Risks All ($1.99), by Stephanie Laurens [HarperCollins]. Wow! This is over 700 pages in print.
Book Description
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Capture of the Earl of Glencrae, romance fiction superstar Stephanie Laurens has done it again with this passionate tale of an oh-so-proper lady and the dangerous man for whom she throws caution to the wind. The Lady Risks All in this delightfully sexy and sensuous historical romance novel from the creator of the recklessly romantic Cynster family—Regency England’s most irrepressible clan of sexy rogues and ladies—as well as the acclaimed Bastion Club books. The notorious Neville Roscoe, who lives boldly outside the bounds of proper society, is one of Laurens’s most unforgettable heroes—and the story of his seduction of prim, straight-laced Miranda Clifford is filled with intrigue, danger, and passion that will thrill not only Stephanie Laurens fans, but devoted readers of Lisa Kleypas, Johanna Lindsey, and Mary Balogh as well.

Today's Kindle SciFi/Fantasy Daily Deal is God Save the Queen ($1.99), by Kate Locke [Hachette].
Book Description
Queen Victoria rules with an immortal fist.

The undead matriarch of a Britain where the Aristocracy is made up of werewolves and vampires, where goblins live underground and mothers know better than to let their children out after dark. A world where being nobility means being infected with the Plague (side-effects include undeath), Hysteria is the popular affliction of the day, and leeches are considered a delicacy. And a world where technology lives side by side with magic. The year is 2012.

Xandra Vardan is a member of the elite Royal Guard, and it is her duty to protect the Aristocracy. But when her sister goes missing, Xandra will set out on a path that undermines everything she believed in and uncover a conspiracy that threatens to topple the empire. And she is the key-the prize in a very dangerous struggle.

Extinction Point (£0.99 UK), by Paul Antony Jones, is the Kindle Deal of the day for those in the UK (the US edition is $2.99 with the companion audiobook for $1.99).
Book Description
First comes the red rain: a strange, scarlet downpour from a cloudless sky that spreads across cities, nations, and the entire globe. In a matter of panicked hours, every living thing on earth succumbs to swift, bloody death. Yet Emily Baxter, a young newspaper reporter, is mysteriously spared—and now she’s all alone.

But watching the happy life she built for herself in New York City slip away in the wake of a monstrous, inexplicable plague is just the beginning of Emily’s waking nightmare. The world isn’t ending; it’s only changing. And the race that once ruled the earth has now become raw material for use by a new form of life never before seen…on this planet.

With only wits, weapons, and a bicycle, Emily must undertake a grueling journey across a country that’s turning increasingly alien. For though she fears she’s been left to inherit the earth, the truth is far more terrifying than a lifetime of solitude.

A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband "Master" ($8.63 $2.99 Kindle, B&N), by Rachel Held Evans, is the Nook Daily Find. Update: Now price matched on Kindle.
Book Description
What is "biblical womanhood" . . . really?

Strong-willed and independent, Rachel Held Evans couldn't sew a button on a blouse before she embarked on a radical life experiment--a year of biblical womanhood. Intrigued by the traditionalist resurgence that led many of her friends to abandon their careers to assume traditional gender roles in the home, Evans decides to try it for herself, vowing to take all of the Bible's instructions for women as literally as possible for a year.

Pursuing a different virtue each month, Evans learns the hard way that her quest for biblical womanhood requires more than a "gentle and quiet spirit" (1 Peter 3:4). It means growing out her hair, making her own clothes, covering her head, obeying her husband, rising before dawn, abstaining from gossip, remaining silent in church, and even camping out in the front yard during her period.

See what happens when a thoroughly modern woman starts referring to her husband as "master" and "praises him at the city gate" with a homemade sign. Learn the insights she receives from an ongoing correspondence with an Orthodox Jewish woman, and find out what she discovers from her exchanges with a polygamist wife. Join her as she wrestles with difficult passages of scripture that portray misogyny and violence against women.

With just the right mixture of humor and insight, compassion and incredulity, A Year of Biblical Womanhood is an exercise in scriptural exploration and spiritual contemplation. What does God truly expect of women, and is there really a prescription for biblical womanhood? Come along with Evans as she looks for answers in the rich heritage of biblical heroines, models of grace, and all-around women of valor.

Today's Teen Kids Daily Deal is Unbreak My Heart ($1.99), by Melissa Walker [Bloomsbury USA Childrens].
Book Description
You can't help who you fall in love with. It's a lesson Clementine Williams knows all too well. She's headed into the summer with a broken heart and zero social life. So even though her parents' plan to spend the summer (trapped) on their sailboat should make Clem break out in hives, she doesn't really mind the chance to float away for a while. Even if it means most of her social interaction will be with her nine-year-old sister. Then she meets James at one of their stops on the Great Loop-a classic sailing track in the US. He and his dad are sailing the same track and he's just the distraction Clem needs. But will he be able to break down Clem's walls and heal her broken heart? Told in alternating chapters that chronicle the year that broke Clem's heart and the summer that healed it, Unbreak My Heart is a wonderful dual love story from magazine writer/editor and rising star, Melissa Walker.