“[A] white knuckle thriller…Burke expertly weaves real-life headlines into her plot…without ever sacrificing originality.”
- Publishers Weekly
Cybercrime is in the news almost daily, sometimes moving beyond the usual email scams into the horrific realm of the Craig’s List Killer. In today’s Free Fridays selection, 212, thriller writer Alafair Burke creates a truly terrifying story ripped straight from the headlines.
A young NYU student suspects that her life is in danger—a series of hateful anonymous web postings suggest that someone is watching her every move. Her friends assure her it’s only a prank, but they soon find out how wrong they were, when she turns up murdered.
When NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher and her no-nonsense partner J. J. Rogan begin digging into the murder, they find some strange connections to a seemingly unrelated case. As they peel back the layers, it becomes clear that the web is the ideal place for strange bedfellows to connect, and an even better place for a motivated murderer to find their next victim.
This fast-paced introduction to Burke’s thrilling Ellie Hatcher series will have you ready to download Hatcher’s other adventures as soon as you turn the last page.
Free Fridays Recommends
Each week, we ask our featured author to recommend a book or author that you may want to check out. Since authors are such passionate readers themselves, we thought you might like to find out what they love to read, too! Here’s what Alafair recommends:
I love the inside-baseball details of a good police procedural. I also love strong characters who continue to evolve and reveal themselves to us, years after we first met them. Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch series is about as good as they come. I've read them all, but The Black Echo was the beginning.
NOOK owners: go to shop and search for “Alafair Burke” to download her thrilling detective novels.
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As a parent, I absolutely love the NOOK Kids Read & Play books. The interactive elements in each book offer hours of creative fun for young readers.
That’s why I’m extra excited about today’s news: Four bestselling Llama Llama books are now available for NOOK. There’s nothing cuter than Anna Dewdney’s Llama adventures, and kids will have a blast reading and interacting with their favorite friendly camelid friend.
NOOK owners: go to shop and search for “Anna Dewdney” to download her fun-filled adventures today.
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In 2007, Professor Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture video became an instant internet sensation. His strength in the face of a terminal diagnosis was utterly moving, and the book that followed was equally touching and inspiring.
Now Pausch’s widow Jai has written an impressive book of her own: Dream New Dreams: Reimagining My Life after Loss. In her book, Jai recounts the intimate, harrowing, and ultimately life-affirming experience of caring for a loved one at the end of life, and rebuilding your own life following a tragic loss. Today, she shares why she chose to write about her experience, and lists some of the books that helped her get through the toughest times.
The first step I had to take in getting to where I’m at today — publishing my book, Dream New Dreams — was to convince myself that I had a unique story to share with people. As a caregiver, I was in the background, on the periphery of the action. My voice was most often silent. It wasn’t until I gave a talk about my experience at a local health care forum that I realized how valuable sharing my pain and insights learned during the 23-months I spent caring for my late husband as he battled pancreatic cancer could be to others in the same situation. And so I wrote, and reflected, and wrote. Then my book proposal was sent out to publishing houses. One publisher rejected my book, saying the caregiving part was just too gritty and not upbeat enough. So true! Caregiving isn’t pretty. It’s difficult, emotionally messy, and gut-wrenching. But there is a lot of inspiration to be gleamed from human adversity and heartache that can inspire people to reframe their lives and be a better person.
Now that Dream New Dreams has been published I try to keep the caregiver’s story at the forefront of the discussion. We need to talk about the caregiver’s courage to overcome unforeseen challenges and the impact cancer has on every member of the family, not just the patient. I don’t lecture, or give lectures, but in Dream New Dreams speak honestly about the difficulties of grieving and moving forward with one’s life. I hope readers will read my story and sit in the caregiver’s seat for a little while to experience the difficult journey that I and millions of others have taken.
Some books that helped me get through the emotionally raw times were:
by Joan Didion
by Elizabeth Gilbert
by Stephenie Meyer
by Martha Whitmore Hickman
by Michele Reiss
A free sample excerpt from this book is available for download on the product page now!
NOOK owners: go to shop and search for “Jai Pausch” to download her inspiring memoir.
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“Taut drama and constant action surge through the engrossing first book in Griffin’s Tracers series”
-Publishers Weekly
Romantic suspense readers will be on the edge of their seats as they devour our newest $0.99 Spotlight title—Untraceable by Laura Griffin, the first in her bestselling Tracer series.
P.I. Alexandra Lovell’s specialty is helping clients disappear—when you’re on the run, Alexandra’s a good person to know. But when one of her clients, a woman who’s hiding from an abusive ex-husband, disappears for real, she enlists a group of professional ‘tracers’ to bring her client back to safety.
Along the way, handsome homicide detective Nathan Deveraux joins the search. While there’s no dead body, and Alexandra is still hoping for a happy ending, Deveraux’s detective skills are an invaluable help. Will working so closely under so much pressure turn Alex and Nathan’s relationship into something more than professional?
A free sample excerpt from this book is available for download on the product page now!
NOOK owners: go to shop and search for “Laura Griffin” to download her hit romantic suspense novels.
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In her new novel The Newlyweds, acclaimed author Nell Freudenberger once again takes readers on a cross-cultural journey. In today's exclusive guest blog post, the author recounts how a chance meeting on an international flight turned—6 years later—into a novel about an unlikely marriage between an American man and a Bangladeshi woman.
The morning I was supposed to go to Bangladesh, I woke up at five to a message on my answering machine, telling me my traveling companions were going to miss their connecting flight. My Bangladeshi friend Farah was panicked and her normally unflappable American husband, Dave, was upset too; neither one of them was the type to miss a plane, and they had in fact arrived early at the airport in Rochester, only to find that all flights were grounded due to a storm. They were going to get in the car and drive, but doubted they would make the Air Emirates flight, which would leave for Dhaka via Dubai later that morning. When I looked into the airshaft outside my bedroom window, the snow was already coming down hard.
I had met Farah and Dave on the opposite leg of the same flight the previous spring. I’m not the type of person who talks to strangers on airplanes, much less makes plans to travel with them. Usually I would rather read. On that flight to Rochester I was reading Amitav Ghosh’s “The Hungry Tide,” which takes place in the Sundarbans, the southernmost, estuarine region of Bangladesh that extends across the happenstance border into West Bengal. As it happened, Farah had been born in a village just outside the Sundarbans National Park, a region periodically devastated by cyclones and one of the last natural habitats of the Bengal tiger, where her grandmother still lived. We started talking, and she described how she and her husband had met online, through an international dating site. After corresponding for nine months, she’d come to Rochester to marry him.
This was before I was married, before my children were born, and I traveled alone a great deal. I liked being alone in international airports, particularly the big anonymous ones (Bangkok, Singapore, Dubai) where people from disparate places uneasily converge. It’s amazing to think of now, but the first time I went to Asia to spend a year teaching I didn’t have a cell phone; if I wanted to call home, I had to take a bus a half an hour to the “German bakery,” where I used a bright yellow international pay phone. I had an email account, but no connection; I communicated with my friends by mail. This was almost fifteen years ago, and it seems like another life. Being unreachable, of course, allows you to shed your identity, which happens also to be what you have to do in order to write a piece of fiction.
I went to Bangladesh because I was hoping to write a novel based on Farah’s experiences. This was a project she had endorsed, and she was eager to take me to see both her parents’ apartment in Dhaka and her grandmother’s house in the village where she’d been born. I wasn’t surprised when Farah and her husband failed to show up at the airport; the whole endeavor had the slightly ludicrous feel of a practical joke.
A journalist friend had cautioned me that as a western writer in Bangladesh, I would be trailed by surveillance men everywhere I went. This friend is a reporter for the New York Times, among other important publications, and is used to such scrutiny; needless to say I was never followed, except occasionally by small children, and once, by an unhealthy-looking, brown-and-white goat. When people asked what I was doing in Bangladesh, it was hard to answer: what I was doing was waiting for more of the accidents that generate fiction—in other words, places where my own experience converges with someone else’s. That night, alone on the massive Air Emirates 777, I was still awake when they turned off the lights in the cabin. The icon representing our progress crept across the map: Time to Dubai 1:46. We passed over cities with irresistible names: Hurghada, Aynunah, Dammam.
The first thing Farah’s mother said to me, when she met me outside the airport, was “You are my daughter.” And then, “You are very fair.” At home I’m olive-skinned, the darkest person in my family. Farah’s parents took me home and fed me, and I went to bed in Farah’s room, in her bed. I woke up early that first morning to the call to prayer over loudspeakers, and saw her parents bowing their heads in the direction of the holy city. After she had washed and prayed, Farah’s mother made me breakfast, a delicious crepe-like thing with egg, rice flour and sugar.
“What is this?” I asked, eager to begin my research.
“Mumlek,” Farah’s mother said.
“Mumlek,” I said, and then again, attempting the correct inflection: “Mumlek.”
Farah’s mother looked at me, puzzled. “Yes,” she said, “Mumlek.” (I later realized she was simply pronouncing “omelet” in the local way). Then she left the room and returned with an ancient boombox, into which she put a cassette. Soon she was performing a series of calisthenics, unselfconsciously singing along:
Last Christmas
You gave me your heart
But the very next day you gave it away
Research for fiction is a funny thing. No matter how diligent you are (and I’m the diligent type, an early-riser, A-student, not much of a drinker—utterly unwriterly in almost every way) there’s no way to hurry it along. It depends on accidental encounters, which then have to sit in your consciousness until everything unimportant falls away. You can take all the notes you want (I filled up two notebooks in two weeks) but you can’t determine what will be useful. Neither wham! nor the miscommunication over breakfast ultimately made it into The Newlyweds, the novel I finished six years after I met Farah for the first time.
Later that morning, on our way to visit relatives, concealed under the umbrella hood of a cycle rickshaw, Farah’s mother linked her arm through mine. I knew this was the route she and Farah had traveled together every day to the English-medium school where her parents had sacrificed to send her—their diligent, A-student daughter, who managed to come first in her class until her father could no longer pay the fees, and then to pass her O-level exams studying entirely on her own.
“You are Farah’s only friend in America,” her mother told me. “You are my daughter.”
And for that odd and magical moment, entirely by accident, I was.
A Free sample excerpt from this book is available for download on the product page now!
NOOK owners: go to shop and search for “Nell Freudenberger” to download her critically-acclaimed books.
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I was hoping that the NOOK app would be as helpful and easy to use as the website, and it really, truly is. The app does a nice job showing all hotels in a specific city, and then I can filter further by price or by neighborhood. Restaurants can also be filtered by ethnicity, food type, country. Whether you're a seasoned traveler or just getting started, this app is a must have in your NOOK library!
If you've never used TripAdvisor, this is a real treat. It is an incredibly extensive resource for travel information, and you can use it to check out restaurants in your own neighborhood, or plan a trip to a city on the other side of the world. I was astonished at the plethora of information in TripAdvisor's databases. I have also found the MySaves function really useful – it lets me access past favorites on my NOOK.
With over 60 million reviews, photos and opinions by real travelers, you'll find awesome places to eat, sleep, and play, wherever you travel.
“Laird Barron is horror’s new messiah. If you want to experience this guy’s singularly brilliant writing...read this collection now.”
- Paul Goat Allen, B&N Explorations Blog
Today’s Free Fridays selection is a groundbreaking short story collection from horror master Laird Barron: Occultation and Other Stories. Since I don’t read a lot of horror myself, I’m turning to an expert in the field, book reviewer Paul Goat Allen, to introduce this week’s book:
“Inducing real fear in readers is no easy task—I can probably list the authors that have actually scared me in one breath: Lovecraft, Poe, King, Barker, Koontz, Matheson, and Campbell, although I’m most definitely forgetting a few… A lot of contemporary horror isn’t scary at all: it’s just gross. Shocking readers is easy. Scaring them takes talent.
Reading Laird Barron reminds me of what it was like discovering works from the aforementioned horror masters. The nine stories featured in his latest collection are painstakingly constructed—a darkly poetic narrative fuels these deftly plotted stories of existential angst…I’ll say it right now. Laird Barron is horror’s new messiah…And after you’ve devoured these nine dark gems, make sure you check under the bed before you go to sleep. As Barron wrote in “Mysterium Tremendum,” 'there are frightful things lurking in the shadows...' " (You can read Paul’s full review here).
Unsurprisingly, Paul also loved Barron’s new novel, The Croning, available now for NOOK.
Free Fridays Recommends
Each week, we ask our featured author to recommend a book or author that you may want to check out. Since authors are such passionate readers themselves, we thought you might like to find out what they love to read, too! Here’s what Laird recommends:
House of Windows by John Langan—it's among the finest supernatural horror novels to appear this young century. Stylish and lushly imagined, there is a hypnotic quality at play that intensifies the dread as events unspool within the narrative. Ghosts, hauntings, and visions of the arcane and the numinous richly accent a twisting tale of love, loss, and damnation. An acknowledged master of the short form, Langan arrives with a first novel that is remarkably assured, and most assuredly a chiller.
NOOK owners: go to shop and search for “Laird Barron” to download his incredibly haunting books.
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We live in an instant-gratification world – with DVR you can watch your favorite shows whenever you like, Twitter brings you up-to-the-second news, and you can pop a TV dinner in the microwave and be ready to eat 5 minutes later. In a lot of ways, our short attention spans can be attributed to all of these modern conveniences. And hey, instant-gratification has an upside too—with your NOOK, the next great book is always immediately available for download whenever you’re ready to read.
The work of Robert Caro—including his newest book The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson - Volume 4—exists very far outside of the instant-gratification realm. Here is a writer who has spent almost 40 years producing four volumes on the career of the complex and fascinating Lyndon Johnson. If you’re looking for the polar opposite of a Tweet or a two-minute cable news story, you’ll find it in this Pulitzer Prize-winning series.
In the newest volume, Caro details one of the most important eras of Johnson’s life—from 1958-1964. The beginning finds him at the top of his game, serving as a powerful and influential Senate Majority Leader. Next, Johnson transitions to the vice presidency, where his figurehead status proved to be a low point for the motivated and ambitious man. Then the period ends with Johnson’s early presidency, when the frustrated VP was thrust into the Oval Office following JFK’s assassination.
Robert Caro’s impeccable research and ability to create an engrossing and revealing account of his subjects has garnered him two Pulitzer Prizes and countless glowing reviews. Like all of the books that came before, The Passage of Power is a must-read for fans of serious history.
A Free sample excerpt from this book is available for download on the product page now!
NOOK owners: go to shop and search for “Robert Caro” to download his award-winning books now.
Read more...Our newest NOOK First collection—a chance for NOOK readers to be the first to get access to some hot new books—features everything from a Civil War romance to a haunted house tale.
Magic has never been a part of Reandn's life. Until the people under his care start dying. Until the threat extends to his family–and then turns on him. Someone, somewhere, is trying to draw magic back into Keland, and they don't care what—or who—is destroyed in the process. Follow the adventure in Doranna Durgin’s Touched By Magic.
A Southern Belle and a Union Soldier collide in a small Kansas town.Jack took a chance on the feisty beauty with the reddish-brown curls, and she surprised him with her ability and her courage. Samantha was upset that he had been a Northern soldier, but as their passions swirl they decide to take the biggest risk of all in ABILENE GAMBLER by Maggie Sefton.
In bestselling author Patricia Ryan’s Pure and Simple, Ally Turner is shaken by the death of her childhood friend, starlet Willow Scott—and horrified when devilishly charming Tom Proctor starts digging into Willow’s past for a tell-all bio, threatening to unearth a scandalous secret that must be kept hidden at all costs.
With a suitcase full of Jane Austen novels en español, Amy Elizabeth Smith set off on a year-long Latin American adventure: a traveling book club with Jane. In six unique, unforgettable countries, she gathered book-loving new friends— taxi drivers and teachers, poets and politicians— to read Emma, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice. And in the end, Amy discovered that All Roads Lead to Austen.
In Amanda Brice’s Pointe of No Return, aspiring ballerina Dani Spevak’s visions of sugar plums are dashed when she’s assigned to understudy her nemesis, Hadley Taylor, in the Nutcracker. Pretty, popular, and rich, that girl has all the luck. Or so she thought.
When Hadley mysteriously disappears with opening night just around the corner, Dani can’t sit idly by, even if it means losing the part. Now she’s running all over Phoenix in a race against the clock. From reality TV trophy wives to sleazy real estate developers to a possible drug ring, the cast of suspects begins to add up. Will she find Hadley before the curtain rises?
In My Merlin Awakening , book two of the My Merlin Series, Excalibur has been pulled from the stone, but what does it mean? Arriane (aka Ryan) DuLac doesn’t really care. She's got bigger problems—as student president, she's got to organize the Prom. While the Wizard Council debates their next move, she leaves the craziness behind and heads home.
But she can’t hide at home forever. Sooner than she’d like, Merlin (aka Matt) has her chasing mermaids on the trail of the Fisher King. The wounded King, defeated by Merlin’s brother Vane in the past, holds the key to save the future. One wrong decision and the world falls apart.
From Blake Crouch—author of the runaway bestsellers Run and Serial—comes Eerie, a chilling, gothic thriller in the classic tradition of The Shining and The Sixth Sense.
On a crisp autumn night in 1980, seven-year-old Grant Moreton and his five-year-old sister Paige were nearly killed in a mysterious accident in the Cascade Mountains that left them orphans. It's been thirty years since then. Grant is a detective with the Seattle Police Department and long estranged from his sister. But now his investigation into the bloody past of a high-class prostitute has led right to her door.
What lies beyond is a horror he never could have imagined. He becomes trapped inside a house with frightening power over anyone who enters. His only hope of surviving and saving his sister is to confront the terror that inhabits its walls...and endure a brutal physical and psychological ordeal that will challenge everything he thinks he knows about himself and the world.
“Welcome to Manderley Prep – where the rich and bitchy rule the school, and good girls finish last…”
Cindy Ellis has plans for the rest of her life that start with a scholarship to Manderley Prep. When Marco, the school’s hot new transfer student and star soccer player notices her on the first day of school, she thinks all her dreams have come true. But that’s where the fairy tale ends, because inside the hallowed halls of Manderley, Cindy stands out like a generic brand among the designer labels. Her cheerleader step-sisters make her life miserable until Marco, the Prom King takes a second look at the tall, clarinet-playing Cindy and decides she should be his Prom Queen. Could the happy ending really conclude with Cindy and the Prom King together at last?
NOOK owners: go to shop and search by author name to download these NOOK First titles now.
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S.E. Hinton’s seminal work, The Outsiders, has influenced writers of Young Adult fiction since its 1967 publication. Hinton wrote this debut novel—later turned into a hit film—while in high school, and her no-holds-barred look at social stratification and violence among students caused a public controversy at the time. Hinton’s book went on to sell millions of copies worldwide, and now serves as a standard-bearer in Young Adult literature.
As we celebrate the digital publication of The Outsiders, we asked S.E. Hinton to reflect on the original publication, and what it’s meant to readers and fellow writers throughout its history.
The Outsiders is one of the very first books written exclusively for a teen audience. Now, there’s an entire market for YA fiction. Can you explain what it’s like to have been the pioneer for an entire genre of books?
I'm glad I opened up the field. There wasn't much to choose from when I was a teen.
Are there any current young adult novels today you would have enjoyed as a teen?
I don't know. I have never read YA!
What would be your advice to an aspiring author?
Read and practice. Read and practice. Oh yeah, read and practice. That's what I did.
You wrote this novel when you were a young girl in high school. Did you have any help from adults?
No. I wrote every sentence in it.
The Outsiders is set in a very specific time and place. What do you think the modern day
equivalent of this type of scenario would be in today’s society?
The uniforms change, the labels change, but the "groups" go on forever.
The film came out about 16 years after the book was published. What was your experience like as an adult revisiting the original story you wrote as a teen.
Lots of fun. I was very involved in the filming, on the set every day, and it was a great experience. Especially since Francis Coppola wanted to remain faithful to the book.
What in your experience has aided you to write from the male point of view?
I grew up with boys, and had a hard time identifying with the female culture of the time.
In other words, it was easier to write from a male point of view and I am lazy.
Do you write for you as a personal outlet, or are you hoping to reach people with your stories?
I always write for myself first, then hope people like it.
A Free sample excerpt from this book is available for download on the product page now!
NOOK owners: go to shop and search for “SE Hinton” to download her groundbreaking books.
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