New Year, New Reads: The Most Anticipated Books of 2019

New Year, New Reads: The Most Anticipated Books of 2019

The new year is a great time for book lovers – many of us are busy making reading resolutions, re-organising our to-be-read piles, and keenly waiting to see what exciting new books the year will bring. We’ve taken a sneak -peek at what the book world has to offer in 2019 – and we are positively itching to tell you what bookish treats are in store! There are books by authors we know and love, as well as some promising and interesting debut fiction emerging. Take a look at our most anticipated reads for 2019!

The Scholar by Dervla McTiernan

A woman who needs no introduction, Dervla stole the hearts of readers world-wide last year with her stunning debut, The Ruin. And now, not a year later, she is set to release her second novel, The Scholar, a compulsive new crime thriller featuring DS Cormac Reilly.

When Dr Emma Sweeney stumbles across the victim of a hit and run outside Galway University late one evening, she calls her partner, Detective Cormac Reilly, bringing him first to the scene of a murder that would otherwise never have been assigned to him.

A security card in the dead woman’s pocket identifies her as Carline Darcy, a gifted student and heir apparent to Irish pharmaceutical giant Darcy Therapeutics. The multi-billion-dollar company, founded by her grandfather, has a finger in every pie, from sponsoring university research facilities, to funding political parties, to philanthropy. And, it has funded Emma’s own ground-breaking research. The enquiry into Carline’s death promises to be high profile and high pressure.

As Cormac investigates, evidence mounts that the death is linked to a Darcy laboratory and, increasingly, to Emma herself. Cormac is sure Emma couldn’t be involved, but as his running of the case comes under scrutiny from the department and his colleagues, he is forced to question his own objectivity. Could his loyalty to Emma have led him to overlook evidence? Has it made him a liability?

At The Wolf’s Table by Rosella Postorino

We cannot wait for this one to hit our shelves. At The Wolf’s Table is an international bestseller that has, at long last, been translated from Italian to English. Based on the shocking true story of the women conscripted to risk their lives as Hitler’s food tasters, fans of The Tattooist of Auschwitz will be utterly captivated by Rosella’s raw and honest depiction of life during WW2.

Germany, 1943: Twenty-six-year-old Rosa Sauer’s parents are gone, and her husband Gregor is far away, fighting on the front lines. Alone, she has little choice but to leave war-torn Berlin behind and live with her in-laws in a village near the Wolfschanze, the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s hidden headquarters.

Convinced that the enemy wants to poison him, Hitler conscripts ten women, including Rosa, to be his food tasters. Even though food is a luxury, eating the rich and decadent feasts Hitler will soon be served is an act of torture – after each meal, the women must wait an hour to see if they will die. Every minute seems like an eternity. None of the women are allowed to meet Hitler, none can enter the Wolfschanze, but the Führer is a constant presence. He is in every conversation, in Rosa’s thoughts, and forever on the radio. He looms large above them all, like some kind of deity.

As the war outside goes from bad to worse, so do the lives of the ten women trapped in the tasting room, forced to eat what may kill them. Rosa’s friends are keeping explosive secrets, the vindictive SS officer in charge of the tasters takes a special liking to her, and Rosa must figure out how she can stay alive as it becomes clear that she and her friends, her Hitler, everyone she knows, are on the wrong side of history.

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

At the end of 2018, Margaret Atwood announced that she would be writing the sequel to her best-selling novel The Handmaid’s TaleThe Testaments.

Still in its formative stages, we don’t know a great deal about this book as of yet. But what we do know is that it will be set 15 years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three female narrators from Gilead. We personally can’t wait to see what Margaret has in store for us.

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

Elizabeth Gilbert, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love and The Signature of All Things, is gracing us this year with a delicious novel of adventure, sex, and glamour, and a young woman’s journey to discovering that you don’t have to be a good girl to be a good person.

The summer of 1940. Nineteen-year-old Vivian Morris arrives in New York with her suitcase and sewing machine, exiled by her despairing parents. Although her quicksilver talents with a needle and commitment to mastering the perfect hair roll have been deemed insufficient for her to pass into her sophomore year of Vassar, she soon finds gainful employment as the self-appointed seamstress at the Lily Playhouse, her unconventional Aunt Peg’s charmingly disreputable Manhattan revue theatre. There, Vivian quickly becomes the toast of the showgirls, transforming the trash and tinsel only fit for the cheap seats into creations for goddesses.

Exile in New York is no exile at all: here in this strange wartime city of girls, Vivian and her girlfriends mean to be free, to get up to no good, to drink the heady highball of life itself to the last drop. And when the legendary English actress Edna Watson comes to the Lily to star in the company’s most ambitious show ever, Vivian is entranced by the magic that follows in the wake of this true star.

But there are hard lessons to be learned, and bitterly regrettable mistakes to be made. Vivian learns that to live the life she wants, she must live many lives, ceaselessly and ingeniously making them new.

The Binding by Bridget Collins

Bridget Collins’ first adult debut, The Binding, is an unforgettable, magical novel: a boundary-defying love story and a unique literary event that we are waiting to read with bated breath.

Emmett Farmer is working in the fields when a letter arrives summoning him to begin an apprenticeship. He will work for a Bookbinder, a vocation that arouses fear, superstition and prejudice – but one neither he nor his parents can afford to refuse.

He will learn to hand-craft beautiful volumes, and within each he will capture something unique and extraordinary: a memory. If there’s something you want to forget, he can help. If there’s something you need to erase, he can assist. Your past will be stored safely in a book and you will never remember your secret, however terrible.

In a vault under his mentor’s workshop, row upon row of books – and memories – are meticulously stored and recorded.

Then one day Emmett makes an astonishing discovery: one of them has his name on it…

Do you have any books that you can’t wait to read this year? Be sure to comment, we’d love to hear from you!

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  1. DEBBIE BACKWAY says:

    Thank you love your updates.

  2. Heleb says:

    Thsnkyou for this