There’s a meme that keeps popping up on Facebook that runs something along the lines of “I said to myself ‘I won’t buy any more books until I’ve read the ones on my TBR … and then I laughed and laughed and laughed”.
Honestly, if you paid me a dollar for every time I earnestly declared that to myself, I’d have enough to buy another few hundred books.
At the time, I mean it, after all I have a LOT of unread books but then I see a book promoted on Twitter or in my emails or I wander past it in a bookshop and all thoughts of denying myself the possibility of wondrous new adventures flies from my mind and yet more books are added to the pile.
So, why fight it?
If you want proof that fighting it is futile, take a look at these three books – and at a host of other fantasy and sci-fi titles, courtesy of Gizmodo – and make your peace with the fact that once again you’ll be stumbling from a bookstore, untold numbers of books in your hands, swearing to yourself that it won’t happen again until you’ve read all the books on your TBR.
Hahahaha … sure it won’t …
The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay
SNAPSHOT
A cleverly voiced psychological thriller about an unforgettable—and unsettling—friendship, with blood-chilling twists, crackling wit, and a thrumming pulse in its veins—from the nationally bestselling author of The Cabin at the End of the World and Survivor Song.What if the coolest girl you’ve ever met decided to be your friend?
Art Barbara was so not cool. He was a seventeen-year-old high school loner in the late 1980s who listened to hair metal, had to wear a monstrous back-brace at night for his scoliosis, and started an extracurricular club for volunteer pallbearers at poorly attended funerals. But his new friend thought the Pallbearers Club was cool. And she brought along her Polaroid camera to take pictures of the corpses.
Okay, that part was a little weird.
So was her obsessive knowledge of a notorious bit of New England folklore that involved digging up the dead. And there were other strange things – terrifying things – that happened when she was around, usually at night. But she was his friend, so it was okay, right?
Decades later, Art tries to make sense of it all by writing The Pallbearers Club: A Memoir. But somehow this friend got her hands on the manuscript and, well, she has some issues with it. And now she’s making cuts.
Seamlessly blurring the lines between fiction and memory, the supernatural and the mundane, The Pallbearers Club is an immersive, suspenseful portrait of an unusual and disconcerting relationship. (synopsis courtesy Harper Collins Publishers)
The Pallbearers Club releases today, Tuesday 5 July.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
SNAPSHOT
On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before. (synopsis courtesy Penguin Random House)
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow releases today, Tuesday 5 July.
August Kitko and the Mechas From Space by Alex White
SNAPSHOT
In this new wide-screen space opera, humanity has met its match. An alien race of enormous robotic AI have destroyed most of humanity’s outposts. But, on the eve of the Earth’s destruction, a musician makes one last desperate attempt to reach out and convinces one of humanity’s enemies to switch sides. Now, earth just might have a chance to survive…Expect giant robots, explosive battles and lots and lots of feelings in this queer space opera from Alex White. (courtesy Hachette Australia)
August Kitko and the Mechas From Space releases 12 July.
