Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created and hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.
Top Ten of Kim's Most Anticipated 2016 Debut Novels
1. The Sleep Garden by Jim Krusoe
January 27, 2016
In an underground apartment building called “the Burrow”--essentially purgatory—“twilight souls” inhabit the space between life and death. Interwoven with their stories are those of inhabitants of the living world: a retired sea captain, a psychotic former child actor (possibly the sea captain’s illegitimate son?), and the technicians who monitor the Burrow, making sure its occupants have a constant supply of oxygen and food. Through all of their stories, and the ways in which their lives, past and present, intertwine, Krusoe creates a poignant story about what constitutes a life, what remains when we die, and what we possibly carry with us into the next world.
2. The Dressmaker’s War by Mary Chamberlain
January 5, 2016
A gripping, powerful, compulsively readable work of historical fiction: the story of a brilliant English dressmaker caught in Germany during World War II, the choices she must make to stay alive—and the way she confronts those choices in war’s aftermath. For readers of Amy Bloom and Anthony Doerr.
In London, 1939, Ada Vaughan is a young woman with an unusual dressmaking skill, and dreams of a better life for herself. That life seems to arrive when Stanislaus, an Austrian aristocrat, sweeps Ada off her feet and brings her to Paris. When war breaks out, Stanislaus vanishes, and Ada is taken prisoner by the Germans, she must do everything she can to survive: by becoming dressmaker to the Nazi wives. Abandoned and alone as war rages, the choices Ada makes will come to back to haunt her years later, as the truth of her experience is twisted and distorted after the war. From glamorous London hotels and Parisian cafes to the desperation of wartime Germany, here is a mesmerizing, richly textured historical novel, a story of heartbreak, survival and ambition, of the nature of truth, and the untold story of what happens to women during war.