Sunday, March 1 / 1 p.m. | Ted Wheeler will sign In Our Other Lives ($14.95). American missionary and ROTC cadet Tyler Ahls, long missing in Pakistan, has just surfaced, proselytizing in an Afghani terrorist propaganda video. For Omaha nurse Elisabeth Holland, it's a shock that her brother is even alive. Now she must ask herself a more grave question: Is he a hostage or a traitor?
Seasoned FBI special agent Frank Schwaller is asking this too. He's come to Nebraska armed with countless hours of video, audio, and email surveillance. The object of his unyielding gaze is Elisabeth. But the more Schwaller uncovers about her--from her and Tyler's evangelical Christian upbringing to her shattered youthful dreams to her broken marriage to a drifter--the more mystifying Elisabeth and the two men in her life become.
To find out the truth about these entwined lives--and the desperation that comes from love, fear, and the need to disappear--Agent Schwaller will discover how even the most lonesome corners of the Plains can be darkened by the long shadow of war.
Saturday, March 7 / 1 p.m. | Peter Heller will sign his Edgar Award nominated The River (Vintage, $16.00). Wynn and Jack have been best friends since college orientation, bonded by their shared love of mountains, books, and fishing. Wynn is a gentle giant, a Vermont kid never happier than when his feet are in the water. Jack is more rugged, raised on a ranch in Colorado where sleeping under the stars and cooking on a fire came as naturally to him as breathing. When they decide to canoe the Maskwa River in northern Canada, they anticipate long days of leisurely paddling and picking blueberries, and nights of stargazing and reading paperback Westerns. But a wildfire making its way across the forest adds unexpected urgency to the journey.
One night, with the fire advancing, they hear a man and woman arguing on the fog-shrouded riverbank; the next day, a man appears on the river, paddling alone. Is this the same man they heard? And if he is, where is the woman? From this charged beginning, master storyteller Peter Heller unspools a headlong, heart-pounding story of desperate wilderness survival.
Thursday, March 19 / 6:30 – 7:30 p.m. | Karina Yan Glaser will sign The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street (Houghton Mifflin, $7.99), a Golden Sower nominee and New York Times Notable Children's Book.
The Vanderbeekers have always lived in the brownstone on 141st Street. It's practically another member of the family. So when their reclusive, curmudgeonly landlord decides not to renew their lease, the five siblings have eleven days to do whatever it takes to stay in their beloved home and convince the dreaded Beiderman just how wonderful they are. And all is fair in love and war when it comes to keeping their home.
Saturday, March 28 / 1 p.m. | Matthew Norman will sign Last Couple Standing (Ballantine, $27.00). The Core Four have been friends since college: four men, four women, four couples. They got married around the same time, had kids around the same time, and now, fifteen years later, they've started getting divorced around the same time, too. With three of the Core Four unions crumbling to dust around them, Jessica and Mitch Butler take a long, hard look at their own marriage. Can it be saved? Or is divorce, like some fortysomething zombie virus, simply inescapable?
To maximize their chance at immunity, Jessica and Mitch try something radical. Their friends' divorces mostly had to do with sex--having it, not having it, wanting to have it with other people--so they decide to relax a few things. Terms are discussed, conditions are made, and together the Butlers embark on the great experiment of taking their otherwise happy, functional marriage and breaking some very serious rules.
Jessica and Mitch are convinced they've hit upon the next evolution of marriage. But as lines are crossed and hot bartenders pursued, they each start to wonder if they've made a huge mistake. What follows is sexy, fun, painful, messy, and completely surprising to them both. Because sometimes doing something bad is the only way to get to the heart of what's really good
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Sunday, March 29 / 1 p.m. | Dr. Sasha K. Shillcutt will sign Between Grit and Grace: The Art of Being Feminine and Formidable (Health Communications, $15.95). Women need to know it's okay to be kind and assertive. Between Grit and Grace will show you that success comes when you are comfortable living in the space between grit and grace--grit meaning being resilient and taking charge of your life (socially-acceptable masculine attributes), and grace meaning showing others mercy (socially-acceptable feminine trait). Sasha Shillcutt will explain how to give yourself permission to disappoint nice people (and know that you are still a nice person anyway). You'll learn how to stop apologizing for showing your strength and grit, and embrace your grace, too. This is where personal peace lives.
Using real-life stories--ranging from women in law and medicine to women in education--the book explains how women can be feminine and formidable. Leadership and lipstick are not mutually exclusive. You'll realize you can be bossy and caring, fearless and vulnerable, relentless and forgiving, smart and humble--and make it to the top. Across the space of ten chapters, you'll learn how to navigate the forces that have shaped the modern workplace while doing so with grit and grace. When a woman lives authentically--she succeeds.
Sunday, April 12 | The Bookworm will be closed in observance of Easter Sunday.
Tuesday, April 14 (time and place pending) | Veronica Roth in conversation with Rainbow Rowell will discuss Chosen Ones (Houghton Mifflin, $26.99), the first novel written for an adult audience by the mega-selling author of the Divergent franchise.
Fifteen years ago, five ordinary teenagers were singled out by a prophecy to take down an impossibly powerful entity wreaking havoc across North America. He was known as the Dark One, and his weapon of choice-catastrophic events known as Drains-leveled cities and claimed thousands of lives. Chosen Ones, as the teens were known, gave everything they had to defeat him.
After the Dark One fell, the world went back to normal . . . for everyone but them. After all, what do you do when you're the most famous people on Earth, your only education was in magical destruction, and your purpose in life is now fulfilled?
Of the five, Sloane has had the hardest time adjusting. Everyone else blames the PTSD-and her huge attitude problem-but really, she's hiding secrets from them . . . secrets that keep her tied to the past and alienate her from the only four people in the world who understand her.
On the tenth anniversary of the Dark One's defeat, something unthinkable happens: one of the Chosen Ones dies. When the others gather for the funeral, they discover the Dark One's ultimate goal was much bigger than they, the government, or even prophecy could have foretold-bigger than the world itself.
And this time, fighting back might take more than Sloane has to give.
Saturday, April 18 / 1 p.m. | Lisa and Tim Trudell will sign 100 Things to do in Nebraska Before You Die ($18.00). The Good Life. The Beef State. The Cornhusker State. We've used a lot of slogans over the years to describe Nebraska. But The Good Life does seem to sum up how the vast majority of Nebraskans feel about living here. Whether it's Cornhusker football in the fall or canoeing the Niobrara River in the summer, Nebraska is a special place. And with 100 Things to Do in Nebraska Before You Die as your guide, you'll see just what it is people love so much about the state.
The book is a veritable bucket list of places to visit, things to do, and top tips for the best places to eat and sleep. Explore the birthplaces of Nebraska-centric events and people. From the founding of Arbor Day to the hometown of Johnny Carson, as well as great places to eat and drink, 100 Things to Do in Nebraska Before You Die explores the diversity and beauty of the country's 16th largest state.
Local authors and travel bloggers Tim and Lisa Trudell are your expert guides through the diversity and beauty of the country's sixteenth largest state. Whether you call yourself a Husker, or are just passing through, this book will help you see Nebraska in a new light.
Tuesday, April 28 / 6 p.m. | Two authors will sign:
Mindy Megjia will sign Strike Me Down (Atria, $27.00). Nora Trier catches thieves. As a forensic accountant and partner in her downtown Minneapolis firm, she's unearthed millions in every corner of the world. She prides herself on her independence, the most essential currency of accounting, until her firm is hired by Strike.
An anti-corporate, feminist athletic empire, Strike is owned by Logan Russo, a brash and legendary kickboxer, and her marketing genius husband, Gregg Abbott. They're about to host a major kickboxing tournament with twenty million dollars in prize money, and the chance for the champion to become the new face of the company. Gregg suspects his wife already has a new face in mind--a young trainer named Aaden, for whom Logan feels an unexpected connection.
Days before the tournament begins, it's discovered that the prize money is missing. Gregg hires Nora's firm to find both the thief and the money but Nora has a secret connection to Strike that threatens her independence. Her partner pressures her into taking the case anyway, hinting he has information about Strike that could change the course of the investigation in a shocking and deadly way.
Tosca Lee will sign A Single Light (Howard, $17.00. Six months after vanishing into an underground silo with sixty-one others, Wynter and Chase emerge to an altered world. There is no sign of Noah and the rest of the group that was supposed to greet them when they surfaced--the same people Wynter was counting on to help her locate the antibiotics her gravely ill friend, Julie, needs.
As the clock ticks down on Julie's life, Wynter and Chase embark on a desperate search for medicine and answers. But what they find is not a nation on the cusp of recovery but one decimated by disease. What happened while they were underground?
With food and water in limited supply and their own survival in question, Chase and Wynter must venture further and further from the silo. They come face-to-face with a radically changed society, where communities scrabble to survive under rogue leaders and cities are war zones. As hope fades by the hour and Wynter learns the terrible truth of the last six months, she is called upon again to help save a nation she no longer recognizes--a place so chaotic she's no longer sure it can even survive.
Wednesday, April 29 / 6 p.m. | Marie Mockett will sign American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland (Graywolf, $28.00). For over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand-acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett's father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in bohemian Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but forsworn it.
In American Harvest, Mockett accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland at the invitation of Eric Wolgemuth, the conservative farmer who has cut her family's fields for decades. As Mockett follows Wolgemuth's crew on the trail of ripening wheat from Texas to Idaho, they contemplate what Wolgemuth refers to as "the divide," inadvertently peeling back layers of the American story to expose its contradictions and unhealed wounds. She joins the crew in the fields, attends church, and struggles to adapt to the rhythms of rural life, all the while continually reminded of her own status as a person who signals "not white," but who people she encounters can't quite categorize.
American Harvest is an extraordinary evocation of the land and a thoughtful exploration of ingrained beliefs, from evangelical skepticism of evolution to cosmopolitan assumptions about food production and farming. With exquisite lyricism and humanity, this astonishing book attempts to reconcile competing versions of our national story.
