Sarah Crichton Books 2018–2016
2018
Happiness Is a Choice You Make
By John Leland
Published January 2018
A New York Times Bestseller
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A People magazine “Best New Book”
The Day She Disappeared
By Christobel Kent
Published March 2018
“Properly eerie.” —Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review
“Christobel Kent is developing into a reliably classy purveyor of psychological suspense, and this is her best book yet.” ―Mail on Sunday
Bringing Down the Colonel
By Patricia Miller
Published October 2018
“Bringing Down the Colonel,” by Patricia Miller, casts timely light on a forgotten 19th-century saga in which a powerful man was held accountable for his exploitative treatment of a young woman.” —New York Times Book Review
2017
No Wall Too High
By Xu Hongci
Published January 2017
Translated and edited by Erling Hoh
“A masterpiece.” ―John Pomfret, The Washington Post
“One of the most compelling and moving memoirs to emerge from Communist China…Absolutely heart-stopping, material for a Hollywood thriller.” — Richard Bernstein, Los Angeles Times
Lover: A Novel
By Anna Raverat
Published March 2017
“A clever novel full of sharp social observations about the shallowness of the contemporary world and its myriad clichés . . . Lover is a little Bridget Jones and a whole lot of Maria Semple.” ―Elizabeth Taylor, National Book Review
The Loving Husband
By Christobel Kent
Published March 2017
“Kent is a champion plotter, using well-placed flashbacks to find interesting characters . . . The novel’s slow-building resolution comes silently, engulfing you like quicksand.” —Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review
Would Everybody Please Stop?
By Jenny Allen
Published June 2017
“Wonderful . . . Allen can be playful, sarcastic, and astute . . . There’s sharp wit and social commentary aplenty . . . As delightful as her humor is, her serious essays hit deeper . . . It’s all good.” —Heller McAlpin, NPR.org
You Belong to Me
By Colin Harrison
Published June 2017
“A classic noir triangle [that] widens quickly to introduce a roundelay of characters with volatile tempers and conflicting agendas . . . The common denominator among them seems to be a voracious hunger: for money, power, revenge . . . deliciously twisty . . . startlingly violent . . . The hard, hot beat of noir goes on.” —Megan Abbott, The New York Times Book Review
The Last Laugh
By Lynn Freed
Published July 2017
“Fast-moving and laced with salty wit, this is a smart, funny summer read” —People
“[A] perfect summer read for anyone who loved Delia Ephron’s Siracusa or Emma Straub’s The Vacationers . . . Sun-dappled and sea-splashed, this is the best type of escapism.” —Booklist
The Devil’s Muse
By Bill Loehfelm
Published July 2017
The fifth book in the Maureen Coughlin series
“Loehfelm conducts a master class in how a writer builds character from the smallest of details. Coughlin remains the star here—she’s still one of the most compelling figures in crime fiction—but this time, the focus is on cops working together; it’s a procedural in the best sense of the word, and it evokes Ed McBain at the top of his game.” —Bill Ott, Booklist (starred review)
Unstoppable: My Life So Far
By Maria Sharapova
Published September 2017
“This is the bildungsroman of a controversial champion, a portrait of the athlete as an uncommonly driven young woman . . . It’s also a Horatio Alger–worthy tale of rags to riches, with a slightly nihilistic Russian twist . . . Sharapova’s a careful observer, and Unstoppable is full of astute psychological insights.” —Julia Felsenthal, Vogue
Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell
By David Yaffe
Published October 2017
“Joni Mitchell's gift was so enormous that it remade the social space around her. As David Yaffe’s new biography, Reckless Daughter, suggests, it is no small burden to possess something as valuable as Mitchell’s talent . . . Yaffe charts [Mitchell's] encounters with a sure hand, and is a brilliant analyst of how Mitchell’s songs are made.” ―Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker
2016
The Crooked House
By Christobel Kent
Published January 2016
“A weird, excellent literary thriller, equal parts psychological profile and twisty, nasty plot.”—Carmen Maria Machado, NPR
Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond
By Sonia Shah
Published February 2016
A finalist for the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize
A finalist for the New York Public Library's 2017 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism
“The world’s ability to put the lid on pandemics has come a long way since the days when the plague, cholera and smallpox ravaged unchecked. Ms. Shah’s book is a superbly written account of how we got here and what might await us.” —The Economist
The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built
By Jack Viertel
Published March 2016
A New York Times Bestseller
A finalist for the Theatre Library Association’s 2016 George Freedley Memorial Award
“Both revelatory and entertaining. Viertel combines a scholarly approach with a light touch that enables us to see anew familiar songs and musical theater moments we'd long taken for granted.” —Robin Pogrebin, The New York Times Book Review
Peacekeeping
By Mischa Berlinski
Published March 2016
“Powerfully intelligent . . . A politically sophisticated novel that plants, like pushpins, a handful of memorable characters into Haiti’s arid soil . . . [Peacekeeping's] depths reside in Mr. Berlinski’s rich portrait of a society, and his cool, probing writing about topics like sex, politics, journalism, race, class, agriculture, language and fear . . . Berlinski has a knack for writing short, sharp, surreal scenes . . . There’s a good deal of magic in the way that Mr. Berlinski, in command of fact and emotion, pilots this big novel safely home.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
Save Room for Pie: Food Songs and Chewy Ruminations
By Roy Blount, Jr.
Published March 2016
“A distinct delight . . . Like a cook over a large stew pot, he loves stirring up a mess of words, swirling them this way and that, taking some out, putting some in, and then pouring his concoctions out in savory servings.” —The Wall Street Journal
“[Blount] knows from rhythm and melody. His prose can sing in deft comic rifts.” —Robert Pinsky, The New York Times Book Review
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
By Dominic Smith
Published April 2016
A New York Times Bestseller
The 2017 ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year
Long-listed for the 2017 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
The 2017 Philosophical Society Award of Merit
“Incandescent from the first sentence . . . extraordinary . . . sublime.” ―Caroline Leavitt, SF Gate
“Glorious . . . Gorgeous storytelling: wry, playful, and utterly alive.” ―Laura Collins-Hughes, The Boston Globe
The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks
By Terry Tempest Williams
Published May 2016
A 2017 ABA Indies Choice Adult Nonfiction Honor Book
The winner of the MPIBA Reading the West Book Award
Long-listed for the ALA's 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence
Recommended Reading by the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award
“The Hour of Land is one of the best nature books I’ve read in years, filled with seductive prose . . . It’s impossible to do Williams’s thought-provoking insights and evocative images justice in a short review. My only advice is to read the book. And then read it again, with pen in hand. And then visit a national park, because as Williams reminds us, they are ‘portals and thresholds of wonder,’ the ‘breathing spaces for a society that increasingly holds its breath.’” —Andrea Wulf, The New York Times Book Review
They May Not Mean To, But They Do
By Cathleen Schine
Published June 2016
The winner of the 2017 Ferro–Grumley Award
The winner of the Jessie Redmon Fauset Book Award
A finalist for a 2017 Lambda Literary Award
A finalist for the California Book Awards
“Cathleen Schine [is] one of our most realistically imaginative, dependably readable novelists. . . [H]er ten books comprise a sly, illuminating corpus that seems more related to the English comic novel than to most contemporary American fiction. [S]hapely and precisely structured. . . ruefully satiric. . . buoyant. . . sharply observant. . . Her tenth and newest novel . . . cuts deeper, feels fuller and more ambitious, and seems to me her best.” —Phillip Lopate, New York Review of Books
The House of Hidden Mothers
By Meera Syal
Published June 2016
“[A] rumbustious, confrontational and ultimately heartbreaking book.” —Alfred Hickling, The Guardian
Let the Devil Out
By Bill Loehfelm
Published July 2016
The fourth book in the Maureen Coughlin series
“Not only has Loehfelm created the most compelling, complex patrol cop in the genre—part take-no-prisoners badass, part too-sensitive-for-the street rookie—he has also reenergized New Orleans as a setting for the best in crime fiction, going well beyond the clichés (no Cafe du Monde here) and nailing that rich Treme vibe—edgy, dangerous, but pulsing with life. Maureen Coughlin is as good as it gets.” —Bill Ott, Booklist (starred review)
Not Pretty Enough: The Unlikely Triumph of Helen Gurley Brown
By Gerri Hirshey
Published July 2016
“This engrossing biography of Helen Gurley Brown, the legendary editor of Cosmopolitan, who shook up the sixties with her book ‘Sex and the Single Girl,’ is written in a style worthy of its subject.”—The New Yorker
“A compassionate, psychologically complex biography . . . Ms. Hirshey writes with energy and swing. . . Ms. Hirshey’s meticulous re-creation of Brown’s single-girl years in Los Angeles, where she went through 19 secretarial jobs and juggled boyfriends like plates, are alone worth the price of admission to this circus.”—Jennifer Senior, The New York Times
Black Water
By Louise Doughty
Published September 2016
“Doughty’s excellent new novel is a character study, a glimpse at mid-century American civil rights, a thriller, a meditation on the effects of foreign policy on individuals, a modern love story and a portrait of Indonesian unrest in the 20th century. . . If it sounds like a handful, it is. But Doughty has found an ideal vehicle for her wide-ranging interests.” —Olen Steinhauer, The New York Times Book Review