Check out these five popular adult titles that hit the shelves in March. To see more titles, including new titles in popular series, check out the booklist New March '19 Books You'll Want to Read and our new titles, opens a new window page.
Dexter meets Mr. and Mrs. Smith in this debut thriller by Samantha Downing: My Lovely Wife.
Our love story is simple. I met a gorgeous woman. We fell in love. We had kids. We moved to the suburbs. We told each other our biggest dreams and our darkest secrets. And then we got bored. We look like a normal couple. We're your neighbors, the parents of your kid's friend, the acquaintances you keep meaning to get dinner with. We all have our secrets to keeping a marriage alive. Ours just happens to be getting away with murder.
In the spirit of A Man Called Ove, Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss, by Rajeev Balasubramanyam, proves it's never too late to change your life.
P.R. Chandrasekhar, a celebrated professor of economics at Cambridge, is at a turning point. He has sacrificed his family for his career, but his conservative brand of economics is no longer in fashion, and - yet again - he has lost the Nobel Prize to a rival. His wife has left him for a free-spirited West Coast psychiatrist, and his son is a capitalist guru with a cult following that mocks his father's life work. Meanwhile, his middle daughter - and the apple of his eye - has become a Marxist and refuses to speak to him; while his youngest daughter is struggling through her teenage years with the help of psychedelic drugs. And then, the icing on the cake: He is hit by a bicycle and forced to confront his mortality. Professor Chandra's American doctor instructs him to change his workaholic ways and "follow his bliss" - and so he does, right to the coast of California and into the heart of his dysfunctional family.
"They'd been smelling smoke for days." So opens Peter Heller's fourth novel, The River, foretelling a disastrous outcome for what begins as a leisurely canoe trip.
Experienced wilderness instructors Jack and Wynn paddle through creeks, white water, and a river in northern Ontario, trying to warn other campers of an oncoming wildfire. Soon, they encounter a creepy pair of drunk campers and hear a couple arguing at another campsite. They decide not to interfere, but the husband, Pierre, later arrives at their own campsite disoriented and disheveled and says his wife Maia has disappeared into the woods after their argument. When Jack and Wynn travel back upstream to search for her, they find her barely alive. But how was she injured? The drunk campers? Pierre? A bear? They find further trouble when they return to their campsite, and the two men are tested beyond endurance.
Bridget Jones's Diary meets Americanah in this honest and bold novel: Queenie, by Candice Carty-Williams.
Queenie Jenkins is a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she is constantly forced to compare herself to her white, middle-class peers. After a messy break-up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places - including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth. As Queenie careens from one questionable decision to another, she finds herself wondering, "What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Who do you want to be?" - all of the questions today's woman must face in a world trying to answer them for her.
The Bird King, by G. Willow Wilson, is an epic journey set during the reign of the last sultan in the Iberian peninsula.
Hassan, a palace mapmaker, has a secret - he can draw maps of places he's never seen and bend the shape of reality. Meanwhile, Hassan's friend Fatima - a concubine in the royal court of Granada - befriends one of the newly-arrived Spanish women, not realizing that she will see Hassan's gift as sorcery and a threat to Christian Spanish rule. With their freedom at stake, what will Fatima risk to save Hassan and escape the palace walls?
