First, a few quick updates:
Moneyball is now 25 cents in the Kindle store!
The Australian Google Book Deal is on
An Idiot Abroad: The Travel Diaries of Karl Pilkington by Karl Pilkington, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, which looks like it has dropped to $1.05 for Aussies in the Kindle store.
The only movie rental match I've seen with the Play promotion:
Vicky Cristina Barcelona is 25 cents to rent from Amazon (which means it can be watched on Roku!
Ordinary Thunderstorms (
$0.99), by William Boyd, is on a great mark down for those of us in the US (those in the UK can instead get
Restless for $0.31 Main/£0.20
UK).
Book Description
One May evening in London, Adam Kindred, a young climatologist in town for a job interview, is feeling good about the future as he sits down for a meal at a little Italian bistro. He strikes up a conversation with a solitary diner at the next table, who leaves soon afterward. With horrifying speed, this chance encounter leads to a series of malign accidents, through which Adam loses everything—home, family, friends, job, reputation, passport, credit cards, cell phone—never to get them back.
The police are searching for him. There is a reward for his capture. A hired killer is stalking him. He is alone and anonymous in a huge, pitiless modern city. Adam has nowhere to go but down—underground. He decides to join that vast army of the disappeared and the missing who throng London’s lowest levels as he tries to figure out what to do with his life and struggles to understand the forces that have made it unravel so spectacularly. Adam's quest will take him all along the river Thames, from affluent Chelsea to the gritty East End, and on the way he will encounter all manner of London's denizens—aristocrats, prostitutes, evangelists, and policewomen—and version after new version of himself.
Ordinary Thunderstorms, William Boyd's electric follow-up to his award-winning Restless, is a profound and gripping novel about the fragility of social identity, the corruption at the heart of big business, and the secrets that lie hidden in the filthy underbelly of every city.
Warriors: Omen of the Stars #1: The Fourth Apprentice (
$1.08 Kindle AU), by Erin Hunter, is on sale for Australian Kindlers only.
Book Description
After the sharp-eyed jay and the roaring lion, peace will come. . . .
Four warrior Clans have shared the land around the lake as equals for many moons. But a prophecy foretells that three ThunderClan cats will hold the power of the stars in their paws. Jayfeather and Lionblaze know that they are two of the cats in the prophecy. Now the brothers must wait for a sign from StarClan to discover the identity of the third cat.
Meanwhile, Dovekit and Ivykit—kin of the great leader Firestar—are poised to become ThunderClan apprentices. Soon one sister will have an ominous dream—and will begin to realize that she possesses mystical skills unmatched by any other cat.
In the midst of a cruel season that threatens the lives of all four warrior Clans, bonds will be forged, promises made, and three young cats will start to unravel the secrets that bind them together.
House of Thieves (
$4.99), by Kaui Hart Hemmings, contains the short story "The Minor Wars," which was later expanded into her debut novel
The Descendants, which was adapted into George Clooney’s Oscar-nominated film. This collection of short stories is an Amazon exclusive.
Book Description
In her debut collection of short stories, House of Thieves, Kaui Hart Hemmings has set the magnificent islands of Hawaii as a backdrop to describe bold frustrated adolescents and adults as they wrestle with themselves and each other over the age-old issues of deprived freedom, misguided love, being cool, and being true; and as they experience together the loneliness of feeling miserable in paradise.
The nine stories in House of Thieves are told from varied points of view--a father, a child, a young woman, an adolescent boy, and more. Rooted in the circumstances and situations of island people, they reveal the mundane cycle of small triumphs and tragedies that make up the lives of ordinary people everywhere. A single mother's discovery of a pornographic magazine in her thirteen-year-old son's room sends her down a spiral of jealousy that ultimately guarantees her loss of him. A middle-aged man struggles with this secret hatred for his brother and finds a way to enact a revenge whose absolute destructiveness promises to heal him. A white man who is left by his native Hawaiian wife struggles to understand why he and his daughter, abandoned together, feel such deep resentment for each other. A boy who insists on the illusion of his happy family suddenly recognizes his father's lack of real love and comes to "the understanding that certain things are severed and they can't grow back again, the sorrow from loving a place that doesn't love you back."
Hemmings' tart, confident voice plunges headfirst into the unfamiliar world of a Hawaii far from the tourist track, providing glimpses of the islands' divisive racial and class issues, as well as the proud heritage of kings and warriors and the legacy of colonialists and missionaries. Her unceremonious dealing with issues like drugs, sex, and abandonment and her entirely unself-conscious prose allow her stories to wash effortlessly like an ocean wave, portraying with unsentimental insight and wry humor the complex forces that bind family members together in love and hate.
Odd Jobs (
$0.99), by Ben Lieberman, is self-published, but he apparently managed to get a good quote for the cover from James Patte
Book Description
College student Kevin Davenport is working any and every odd job to make it through school. He discovers who killed his father while working at the corrupt, mob-controlled, Kosher World Meat factory. Now he will stop at nothing to prevent the killers from ruining other families and to get his revenge, as well. Conventional techniques, such as going to the police, have not only been ineffective for others, these methods have proven to be virtual suicide.
So all bets are off and Davenport uses the grittiest and strangest methods as tools to bring down the killers. The characters, misadventures and odd jobs will have the readers laughing. But the hazard is real and Davenport is in over his head.
The Lonely Polygamist (
$3.99), by Brady Udall, looks pretty interesting and would be a huge book in print (603 pages), so is much easier to read as an ebook.
Book Description
Golden Richards, husband to four wives, father to twenty-eight children, is having the mother of all midlife crises. His construction business is failing, his family has grown into an overpopulated mini-dukedom beset with insurrection and rivalry, and he is done in with grief: due to the accidental death of a daughter and the stillbirth of a son, he has come to doubt the capacity of his own heart. Brady Udall, one of our finest American fiction writers, tells a tragicomic story of a deeply faithful man who, crippled by grief and the demands of work and family, becomes entangled in an affair that threatens to destroy his family’s future. Like John Irving and Richard Yates, Udall creates characters that engage us to the fullest as they grapple with the nature of need, love, and belonging.
Beautifully written, keenly observed, and ultimately redemptive, The Lonely Polygamist is an unforgettable story of an American family—with its inevitable dysfunctionality, heartbreak, and comedy—pushed to its outer limits.
Gone (
$2.99), by Michael Grant, is apocalyptic fiction for the teen market. Check your Kindle library on this one, though, as a special edition of this was sold in March of last year and you won't see on the main product page if you bought that edition.
Book Description
In the blink of an eye. Everyone disappears. GONE.
Except for the young. Teens. Middle schoolers. Toddlers. But not one single adult. No teachers, no cops, no doctors, no parents. Just as suddenly, there are no phones, no internet, no television. No way to get help. And no way to figure out what's happened.
Hunger threatens. Bullies rule. A sinister creature lurks. Animals are mutating. And the teens themselves are changing, developing new talents—unimaginable, dangerous, deadly powers—that grow stronger by the day.
It's a terrifying new world. Sides are being chosen, a fight is shaping up. Townies against rich kids. Bullies against the weak. Powerful against powerless. And time is running out: On your birthday, you disappear just like everyone else...
Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin (
$3.62), by Piers Bizony and Jamie Doran
Book Description
On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first person in history to leave the Earth's atmosphere and venture into space. His flight aboard a Russian Vostok rocket lasted only 108 minutes, but at the end of it he had become the most famous man in the world. Back on the ground, his smiling face captured the hearts of millions around the globe. Film stars, politicians and pop stars from Europe to Japan, India to the United States vied with each other to shake his hand.
Despite this immense fame, almost nothing is known about Gagarin or the exceptional people behind his dramatic space flight. Starman tells for the first time Gagarin's personal odyssey from peasant to international icon, his subsequent decline as his personal life began to disintegrate under the pressures of fame, and his final disillusionment with the Russian state. President Kennedy's quest to put an American on the Moon was a direct reaction to Gagarin's achievement--yet before that successful moonshot occurred, Gagarin himself was dead, aged just thirty-four, killed in a mysterious air crash. Publicly the Soviet hierarchy mourned; privately their sighs of relief were almost audible, and the KGB report into his death remains secret.
Entwined with Gagarin's history is that of the breathtaking and highly secretive Russian space program - its technological daring, its triumphs and disasters. In a gripping account, Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony reveal the astonishing world behind the scenes of the first great space spectacular, and how Gagarin's flight came frighteningly close to destruction.
Stress Fracture ($18.21 Hardcover; no Kindle edition), the first title in the Dub Walker series by Douglas P. Lyle, is free from Barnes & Noble, courtesy of Medallion Press.
