OK, you're probably freezing your buns off right now. But, eventually, the snow will be gone and you'll be making summer vacation plans. Maybe you'll go to the beach. Maybe you'll go to a quiet cabin in the woods. But, wherever you go, you'll want some reading material. We have you covered.
Bookmark this quick-look-at some of the highly anticipated books that will be published between now and July. And tell us what novels and non-fiction tomes you're most looking forward to in the comments section.
1. Blood Will Out by Walter Kirn. This true-story thriller is billed as "An In Cold Blood for our time, a chilling, compulsive story of a writer unwittingly caught in the wake of a grifter-turned-murderer." And fellow writer Amy Tan says of Kirn's work: "A Hitchcockian psychological thriller and one of the most honest and affecting memoirs I've read. It is superbly written, each sentence a wonder, each page deepening my appreciation of Kirn's precise observation of human nature." (Scheduled for February release.)
2. Flash Boys by Michael Lewis. The author of Moneyball and The Big Short returns to Wall Street for another sure-to-riveting tale of high finance. There are rumblings that the book will deal with the controversial topic of high-frequency trading. (Scheduled for March release.)
3. Panic by Lauren Oliver. The best-selling Young Adult author is back with a tale of a high-stakes game, Panic, played by seniors in the "dead-end town" of Carp. This novel has already been optioned by Hollywood. Will it be the next Hunger Games? (Scheduled for March release.)
4. Love & Treasure by Ayelet Waldman. This based-on-a-true-story novel is set in modern day and focuses on what happened to a Hungarian gold train during World War II. Joyce Carol Oates calls it "a treasure trove of a novel." (Scheduled for April release.)
5. The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham. Author Cunningham, who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Hours, sets his sixth novel in New York City in 2004. It focuses on two brothers, one who experiences a religious awakening after an unexplainable experience and the other, a musician, who tumbles into drug use as he attempts to come to terms with his fiance's illness. (Scheduled for May release.)
6. The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death by Colson Whitehead. Whitehead, the author of the zombie-novel-with-a-twist Zone One, turns to non-fiction and immerses himself in the World Series of Poker and all of its colorful characters and peculiarities. The book developed from a 2011 assignment from Grantland magazine. (Scheduled for May release.)
7. The Lobster Kings by Alexi Zentner. This sweeping novel follows the Kings family, which has had a lobster dynasty on Loosewood Island for three hundred years. Weave in a death, sibling rivalry, meth dealers, Johnny Cash and romance and you have a can't-put-it-down beach read. (Scheduled for May release.)
8. Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King. The grandmaster of horror is back with a novel about a retired cop who is haunted by a crime he couldn't solve, involving a Mercedes plowing into a crowd of people lined up for a job fair, and by the crazy taunts of a man who claims to have something even worse in mind. (Scheduled for June release.)
9. The Girls of August by Anne Rivers Siddons. Here's a beach book about going to the beach. This novel follows the lives of four women who spend a week at a different beach house each August, until tragedy changes their lives in unexpected ways. Stephen King calls it "maybe the book she was born to write." (Scheduled for July release.)
10. Armada by Ernest Cline. The author of the 1980s geek-nostalgia trip Ready Player One returns with a novel about poor Zack Lightman who "is daydreaming through another dull math class when the high-tech dropship lands in his school's courtyard." Out pop some Men in Black who tell Zack that his favorite video game is part of a top-secret government program to defend Earth from aliens. And now the aliens are coming. (Scheduled for July release.)
