Title: The Back in the Day Bakery Cookbook: Cakes, Pies, Cookies, Bars, and Breads from the Best Little Bakery in the South
Author: Cheryl and Griffith Day
Genre: nonfiction, cooking
Publisher: Artisan
Publishing Date: March 6
Summary: Food Network star Paula Deen introduces the couple behind Savannah’s Back in the Day Bakery and their cookbook. Broken down by baked good, including “Cupcakes and Cakes,” “Pies,” “Cobblers, Crisps, and Tarts,” and “Cookies,” chapters feature Southern favorites such as baked eggs with grits and ham, and buttermilk chess pie, along with old-time favorites like lemon meringue pie, and strawberry-rhubarb crisp. The author’s “homespun style” permeates the collection—from font and borders to recipes—including the “Savories” chapter, featuring dishes such as roasted chicken and vegetable cobbler (touted as “A potluck favorite”) and vegetable potpie. Sidebars on topics from clever packaging for baked goods to ingredient information for items such as sorghum, as well as a resource pages, add value to this retro-style book that’s all about comfort food.

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Title: The White Pearl
Author: Kate Furnivall
Genre: historical fiction
Publisher: Berkley Trade
Publishing Date: March 6
Summary: “Malaya, 1941.” Connie Thornton plays her role as a dutiful wife and mother without complaint. She is among the fortunate after all-the British rubber plantation owners reaping the benefits of the colonial life. But Connie feels as though she is oppressed, crippled by boredom, sweltering heat, a loveless marriage. . . Then, in December, the Japanese invade. Connie and her family flee, sailing south on their yacht toward Singapore, where the British are certain to stand firm against the Japanese. En route, in the company of friends, they learn that Singapore is already under siege. Tensions mount, tempers flare, and the yacht’s inhabitants are driven by fear. Increasingly desperate and short of food, they are taken over by a pirate craft and its Malayan crew making their perilous way from island to island. When a fighter plane crashes into the sea, they rescue its Japanese pilot. For Connie, that’s when everything changes. In the suffocating confines of the boat with her life upended, Connie discovers a new kind of freedom and a new, dangerous, exhilarating love.

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Title: The Rescue of Belle and Sundance: One Town’s Incredible Race to Save Two Abandoned Horses
Author: Birgit Stutz, Lawrence Scanlan
Genre: nonfiction
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Publishing Date: March 6
Summary: In December 2008, snowmobilers spot two abandoned horses high in the Canadian Rockies. Starving and frostbitten, the horses have trampled the ten-foot-deep snow into a narrow white prison. Those who reach them bring hay but also a gun, in case the horses are too far gone. A glint of life in the horses’ eyes earns them the hay. The harrowing yet inspiring story of their near impossible rescue–involving the volunteer efforts of an entire village, first the excavation of a trench six feet deep and over 3280 feet long, and then a nearly 20 mile descent at negative 40 degrees–is sure to be read in one breathless sitting.

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Some books to look forward to in the future include:

• Time magazine writer Lisa Cullen’s debut novel THE PASTORS’ WIVES, following the lives of three women whose lives converge and intertwine at an Atlanta evangelical mega-church, a dramatic portrayal of the private lives of pastors’ wives, caught between the demands of faith, marriage, duty and love, inspired by her magazine reporting
• Nicholas Mennuti’s debut EXILE, written with SAFE HOUSE screenwriter David Guggenheim (originally announced by publisher as Guggenheim’s book written with Mennuti), a fast-paced, Hitchcock-esque thriller about an American businessman living in exile in Cambodia, who gets mistaken for a mysterious government operative
• Two-time National Book Award finalist Melissa Fay Greene’s WONDER DOG, based on the NYT Magazine story, about a pioneering service-dog-training school in rural Ohio, the challenged children and families whose lives are transformed by the dogs trained there, and the modern science of human/canine interactions underpinning the joyful and life-saving breakthroughs

Happy reading!