Hello all! You may have noticed that I’m back from my vacation, as I was able to publish some book reviews. However, the progress of this blog from hiatus back to full news status will take a few more weeks. This coming week I’m preparing my move out east, and then it’ll be a bit before I have internet access full-time again. Graduate school and my whole new life is coming so quickly!

Meanwhile, I will do my best to publish Upcoming Books and Book Reviews until I’m back in the full swing of things. Thank you for your patience, and for following this blog!

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Title: The Light Between Oceans
Author: M.L. Stedman
Genre: historical fiction
Publisher: Scribner
Publishing Date: July 31
Summary: In 1918, after four harrowing years on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia to take a job as the lighthouse keeper on remote Janus Rock. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes only four times a year and shore leaves are granted every other year at best, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Three years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel is tending the grave of her newly lost infant when she hears a baby’s cries on the wind. A boat has washed up on shore carrying a dead man and a living baby. Tom, whose records as a lighthouse keeper are meticulous and whose moral principles have withstood a horrific war, wants to report the dead man and the infant immediately. But Isabel has taken the tiny baby to her breast. Against Tom’s judgment, they claim the child as their own and name her Lucy, but a rift begins to grow between them. When Lucy is two, Tom and Isabel return to the mainland and are reminded that there are other people in the world…and one of them is desperate to find her lost baby.

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Title: The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors: The Story of Three Sisters
Author: Juliet Barker
Genre: nonfiction
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Publishing Date: August 1
Summary: In a revised and updated edition, the real story of the Brontë sisters, by distinguished scholar and historian Juliet Barker.
The story of the tragic Brontë family is familiar to everyone: we all know about the half-mad, repressive father, the drunken, drug-addicted wastrel of a brother, wildly romantic Emily, unrequited Anne, and “poor Charlotte.” Or do we? These stereotypes of the popular imagination are precisely that—imaginary—created by amateur biographers like Elizabeth Gaskell who were primarily novelists and were attracted by the tale of an apparently doomed family of genius.
Juliet Barker’s landmark book is the first definitive history of the Brontës. It demolishes the myths, yet provides startling new information that is just as compelling—but true. Based on firsthand research among all the Brontë manuscripts and among contemporary historical documents never before used by Brontë biographers, this book is both scholarly and compulsively readable.
The Brontës is a revolutionary picture of the world’s favorite literary family.

Beyond beyond BEYOND excited for this one!!! If I was working on a literature PhD, it would be Brontë studies! To see Barker’s ranking of the novels, see this link.