MAILBOX MONDAY

For the last two weeks I have been extremely busy with work and my daughter's 10th birthday shinanigans.  Now that things are back to normal, I can concentrate on book blogging... which I have MISSED! 

First I want to send a HUGE THANK YOU to Michelle at Simon and Schuster Canada for sending me these ARC's!!!!  You are awesome!

So, in my mailbox today from a week or so ago

The 13th Hour by Richard Doetsch

This is an ARC, and I was pretty pumped when I read the premise, it sounds very cool!  It comes out December 29th.

Here's the blurb from Amazon.ca:

A mesmerizing thriller -- told in reverse! The 13th Hour is the story of a man given the chance to go back in time in one-hour increments to prevent a vicious crime from destroying his life.

Nick Quinn is being held in jail, accused of the murder of his beloved wife, Julia. He knows she's dead; he saw her bloody corpse, shot in the head at point-blank range. The police tell him they found the murder weapon with his fingerprints on it in the trunk of his car. Nick is confused, grief-stricken -- and completely innocent.

At 9 p.m. on July 28, a gray-haired gentleman visits Nick in the police interrogation room and asks him a simple question: "If you could get out of here, if you could save her, would you?" He hands Nick a golden talisman that allows Nick to go back in time, one hour at a time, for a total of twelve hours. With each hour that Nick travels back, he finds more clues to the identity of Julia's real killer, but he also discovers that his actions in the past may have unexpected repercussions in the future.

In his race against time to save the woman he loves most in the world, Nick will find that friends become enemies, old loyalties are tested, and Julia's murder is part of a larger scheme that has its roots in greed and vengeance. Nick has the ability to save Julia, the chance to put his own world in balance, but he is venturing down a precarious route. If he hasn't set things right by the thirteenth hour, his desperate attempts to save Julia's life may lead to a far greater catastrophe than he could have ever imagined.

A surprising and utterly original thriller, The 13th Hour is pure page-turning suspense -- full of double crosses, cliffhangers, and shocking revelations.
 

And an ARC of "Gone" by Lisa McMann, which will be released  Feb 9, 2010.  This is YA and looks pretty interesting.  It is the third book that follows the main character Janie, but it is not a trilogy.  I think it's more of a series.Here's the blurb from the authors website:

Janie thought she knew what her future held. And she thought she'd made her peace with it. But she can't handle dragging Cabel down with her.


She knows he will stay with her, despite what she sees in his dreams. He's amazing. And she's a train wreck. Janie sees only one way to give him the life he deserves--she has to disappear. And it's going to kill them both.

Then a stranger enters her life--and everything unravels. The future Janie once faced now has an ominous twist, and her choices are more dire than she'd ever thought possible. She alone must decide between the lesser of two evils. And time is running out...

And the third one is an ARC called "falling apart in one piece - one optimist's journey through the hell of divorce"  by Stacy Morrison.  (Release date:  March 2010) (no cover image available)  Here's the blurb on the back cover:

Just when Stacy Morrison thought she had it all, her husband of ten years announced that he wanted a divorce.  She was left alone with a new house that needed lots of work, a new baby who needed lots of attention, and a new job in the high pressured world of New York publishing.  Told with humor and heart, her honest and intimate account of the stress of being a working mother while trying to make sense of her unraveling marriange offers unexpected lessons of love, forgiveness, and dignity that will resonate with women everywhere. 

WAITING ON WEDNESDAY and the Proximidade award!

Waiting on Wednesday" is a weekly meme hosted by Breaking the Spine that
highlights upcoming releases that we are eagerly anticipating.

My WOW are: Echo in the Bone by
Diana Gabaldon

This is the next installment of the much loved Outlander series, and I can tell you from personal experience that there are LEGIONS of (mostly) women practically hyperventilating waiting for the release of this one on Sept 22!!!!!

The next one, I just found out about this yesterday in Bookmarks Magazine, is a new novel by Barbara Kingsolver author of The Poisonwood Bible. It is called The Lucana. Here is the blurb from the publisher, Harper Collins:

Book Description
Born in the United States, reared
in a series of provisional households in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is mostly a liability to his social-climbing flapper mother, Salomé. From a coastal island jungle to the unpaved neighborhoods of 1930s Mexico City, through a disastrous stint at a
military school in Virginia and back again, his fortunes never steady as Salomé finds her rich men-friends always on the losing side of the Mexican Revolution.
Sometimes she gives her son cigarettes instead of supper.
He aims for invisibility, observing his world and recording everything with a peculiar selfless irony in his notebooks. Life is whatever he learns from servants putting him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs in the streets, and one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Making himself useful in the household of Rivera, his wife Frida Kahlo and exiled Bolshevik leader Lev Trotsky, young Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution, and the howling gossip and reportage that dictate public opinion.
A violent upheaval sends him north to a nation newly caught up in
the internationalist good will of World War II. In the mountain city of
Asheville, North Carolina, he remakes himself in America’s hopeful image. Under
the watch of his peerless stenographer, Violet Brown, he finds an extraordinary
use for his talents of observation. But political winds continue to throw him
between north and south, in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable
breach—the lacuna—between truth and public presumption.
This is a gripping story of identity, connection with our past, and the power of words to create or devastate, unfolding at a moment when the entire world seemed bent on
reinventing itself at any cost.

PLUS I would like to send out a HUGE THANKYOU and the
warmest utmost gratitude to Natalie at The Book Inn for awarding me with one
of THE nicest awards out there. Natalie is a book blogger with an enormous heart
and gives lots of encouragement and support to her fellow bloggers. Reading the description of this award brought tears to my eyes. Thank you so much, Natalie!

Being a recipient of this award affirms that this blog invests and believes in the Proximity – nearness in space, time and relationships.
This blog receives this great award as a further way to re iterate that it is exceedingly charming, and aims to find and be friends. They are not interested in prizes or self-aggrandizement! Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers!

I nominate the following:

• Jo- Jo at Jo-Jo Loves to Read


• Jessica at A Booklovers Diary


• Kate at The Never Ending Shelf


• Jenny at Take Me Away


• Amy at My Friend Amy


• Mel at He Followed Me Home

I sincerely hope that the folks above accept this award with all that it has behind it. I believe each and every one of them has such a great spirit that they add to our great community of Book Bloggers!

Have a WONDERFUL day! And what book are YOU waiting for???