Free Book Friday

[jammom]

http://www.freebookfriday.com/
Sign up on left

Every wk on Fri AM they hold a drawing (enter once a wk)

[rebate queen]

Thanks Deb--just added to my favorites

[swede]

Thank you. I just entered for the week

[rebate queen]

There is also a Free Book Friday for teens.

http://teens.freebookfriday.com/

[rebate queen]

FBF Fiction is closed this week. But we will be back next week with an exciting All-Star Author and her newest featured release that you WILL NOT want to miss!
Until then, check out this week's great feature and giveaway on the FBF Teens site!

[jammom]

Bummer-I always enter on Mon

[rebate queen]

BEAUTIFUL MARIA OF MY SOUL


by Oscar Hijuelos

General Fiction

Hyperion
Author's website


5 autographed copies will be given away on Friday, August 13, 2010

PULITZER PRIZE Winning Author!




We're also including 5 copies of the author's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, MAMBO KINGS PLAY SONGS OF LOVE to the winners!

Here is the story of the memorable Castillo brothers, ?migr?s from Havana to New York??™s Upper West Side. The lovelorn songwriter Nestor and his macho brother Cesar find success in the city??™s dance halls and beyond playing the rhythms that earn them their band??™s name, as they struggle with elusive fame and lost love in a richly sensual tale that has become a cultural touchstone and an enduring favorite.



About Beautiful Maria of My Soul:

The Pulitzer Prize??“winning The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is a contemporary American classic, a novel that still captures the imagination twenty years after its first publication. And now, in Beautiful Mar?a of My Soul, Oscar Hijuelos returns to the story, but tells it from the point of view of its beloved heroine, Maria.

She??™s the great Cuban beauty, the woman who stole musician Nestor Castillo??™s heart and broke it, inspiring him to write the Mambo Kings??™ biggest hit, ???Beautiful Mar?a of My Soul.??? Here, in Hijuelos??™s dazzling new stand-alone novel, she finally takes the spotlight.

Now in her early sixties and living in Miami with her pediatrician daughter, Teresa, Beautiful Mar?a still turns heads. Having left Cuba decades before, she has gone on with her life, but has never forgotten Nestor, and as she thinks back to her days??”and nights??”in Havana, an entirely new perspective on the Mambo Kings story unfolds. Beautiful Mar?a of My Soul is a stunning feat of reimagination, another contemporary classic from an extraordinarily talented writer.


Check out Chapter 1 of Beautiful Maria of My Soul here:

Over forty years before, when Nestor Castillo??™s future love, one Mar?a Garc?a y Cifuentes, left her beloved valle in the far west of Cuba, she could have gone to the provincial capital of Pinar del R?o, where her prospects for finding work might be as good??”or bad??”as in any place; but because the truck driver who??™d picked her up one late morning, his gargoyle face hidden under the lowered brim of a lacquered cane hat, wasn??™t going that way and because she??™d heard so many things??”both wonderful and sad??”about Havana, Mar?a decided to accompany him, that cab stinking to high heaven from the animals in the back and from the thousands of hours he must have driven that truck with its loud diesel engine and manure-stained floor without a proper cleaning. He couldn??™t have been more simp?tico, and at first he seemed to take pains not to stare at her glorious figure, though he couldn??™t help but smile at the way her youthful beauty certainly cheered things up. Okay, he was missing half his teeth, looked like he swallowed shadows when he opened his mouth, and had a bulbous, knobbed face, the sort of ugly man, somewhere in his forties or fifties??”she couldn??™t tell??”who could never have been good looking, even as a boy. Once he got around to tipping up his brim, however, she could see that his eyes were spilling over with kindness, and despite his filthy fingernails she liked him for the thin crucifix he wore around his neck??”a sure sign, in her opinion, that he had to be a good fellow??”un hombre decente.

Heading northeast along dirt roads, the Cuban countryside with its stretches of farms and pastures, dense forests and flatlands gradually rising, they brought up clouds of red dust: along some tracks it was so hard to breathe that Mar?a had to cover her face with a kerchief. Still, to be racing along at such bewildering speeds, of some twenty or thirty miles an hour, overwhelmed her. She??™d never even ridden in a truck before, let alone anything faster than a horse and carriage, and the thrill of traveling so quickly for the first time in her life seemed worth the queasiness in her stomach, it was so exciting and frightening at the same time. Naturally, they got to talking.

???So, why you wanna go to Havana???? the fellow??”his name was Sixto??”asked her. ???You got some problems at home????

???No.??? She shook her head.

???What are you gonna do there, anyway? You know anyone????

???I might have some cousins there, from my mam???™s side of the family?????”she made a sign of the cross in her late mother??™s memory. ???But I don??™t know. I think they live in a place called Los Humos. Have you heard of it????

???Los Humos???? He considered the matter. ???Nope, but then there are so many hole-in-the-wall neighborhoods in that city. I??™m sure there??™ll be somebody to show you how to find it.??? Then, picking at a tooth with his pinkie: ???You have any work? A job????

???No, se?or??”not yet.???

???What are you going to do, then????

She shrugged.

???I know how to sew,??? she told him. ???And how to roll tobacco??”my papito taught me.???

He nodded, scratched his chin. She was looking at herself in the rearview mirror, off which dangled a rosary. As she did, he couldn??™t resist asking her, ???Well, how old are you anyway, mi vida????

???Seventeen.???

???Seventeen! And you have nobody there???? He shook his head. ???You better be careful. That??™s a rough place, if you don??™t know anyone.???

Click here to continue reading the entire First Chapter!

About The Author:

OSCAR HIJUELOS, the son of Cuban immigrants, is a recipient of the Rome Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. His seven novels have been translated into twenty-five languages. He lives in New York City and spends part of the year in Durham, North Carolina, where he teaches at Duke University. Visit the author online HERE.

**Please enter to win using the form on the left side bar of our website. Comments left on the post are not used as entry.


Posted by Free Book Friday at 12:01 AM 0 comments
Labels: All-Star Author, Featured Author
Friday, August 6, 2010
The Unexpected Son - Winners!



3 lucky winners will be receiving free autographed copies of The Unexpected Son

And those winners are...

1) Melanie Lynch
2) C-L Rossel
3) Lisa Sperry


If you didn't win, but still want to read The Unexpected Son, be sure to order one from Amazon by clicking here!

Or find it in our official Free Book Friday Amazon Book Store!

[rebate queen]

NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH



by Cammie McGovern


Commercial Fiction

Viking
www.CammieMcGovern.com


4 autographed copies will be given away on Friday, August 27, 2010



About the Book:

After twelve long years, Betsy Treading is released from prison when DNA testing proves that she didn??™t murder her neighbor, Linda Sue Murphy. During those intervening years, her life outside of prison evaporated ??“ her marriage is over and her job as a librarian is no longer available to her (cruelly, the media had dubbed her the ???Librarian Murderess??? as they chronicled the events of her trial). When she returns to her small suburban community, it??™s immediately clear that DNA evidence isn??™t enough to make her innocent in the eyes of her neighbors. Determined to clear her name and find Linda Sue??™s true killer, Betsy sifts through old evidence and tracks down one lead after another. As Betsy??™s past begins to reveal itself, from grief over a series of miscarriages to her own troubled childhood, so do the buried secrets of the neighbors she thought she knew so well.

NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH examines the deep, dark secrets of a small community??”ones that are hidden behind the manicured lawns and white picket fences, and how people who have been your neighbors for years can turn out to be complete strangers in the end.



Free Book Friday's Exclusive Interview with the Author!

1) How did you get the idea for the novel

After watching a beautiful documentary called After Innocence about long-term prisoners getting exonerated and released after DNA testing proved their innocence, I kept thinking about the surprising number of those cases (about half) where the conviction came largely because the person had confessed to a crime they never committed. It??™s unimaginable at first and then, when you consider the complicated sense of guilt and responsibility we all walk around with so much of the time??”our inflated sense of self and our aggrandizing imaginations??”I thought: maybe it??™s not so unimaginable. We have all wished certain people out of our lives. We??™ve all felt responsible for things we had little to do with. Women are especially susceptible to this, I suspect. I wanted to tell the story of an educated but vulnerable woman who finds some evidence implicating her in the murder of her neighbor and decides that yes, she must have killed her. The real mystery unfolds when she discovers, twelve years later, that she didn??™t kill the woman and now has to figure out who did.

2) When you start a new book, do you like to outline the entire story or fly by the seat of your pants? What about your characters? Do you figure them out entirely before you start writing or do they reveal themselves to you along the way?

I wish I did outline more because I??™m sure the process would go so much faster if I did. My background was much more in literary fiction (I have an MFA from Michigan and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford where no one talked about genre writing at all or the practical aspects of telling a suspense story that both twists and surprises and also pays off emotionally). For me, it still starts with characters and writing a whole bunch of scenes where the liveliest and most vivid ones end up taking over parts of the story. Now that I am writing more in a suspense genre though, the fun is in piecing together a really good story out of those scenes.

3) Considering a book from the first word you write to the moment you see it on a bookstore shelf, what??™s your favorite part of the process? What??™s your least favorite?

My favorite part??”absolutely??”is the beginning, when it??™s still a bunch of notes, handwritten in notebooks that I??™ve been filling for a few months and it??™s all still brilliant and all of it works beautifully because I haven??™t actually gone back and re-read it yet. My least favorite part is realizing how far I am from that earlier fantasy and getting what could be a great idea to actually work.

4) Be honest, how many drafts did you have to write for this book? Any horrific scenes that were cut from the original that you want to share?

I will be honest: I write MANY drafts and go back and change a lot as I re-work my books. Neighborhood Watch is my third book and I keep being shocked that the process doesn??™t seem to have gotten any easier, nor have I gotten any smarter particularly. It keeps being true: the things I LOVED in my early drafts don??™t work at all when I go back and re-read them, and then odd, throwaway bits end up taking over the story. The question I can??™t answer is why I don??™t see certain weaknesses from the beginning when they seem so obvious later on. My agent once said I was one of the best editors of my own work he had, by which he clearly meant??”I am willing to cut a lot. I do cut a lot but I think one has to be ruthless to keep a story going.

5) What??™s your strangest writing quirk or habit?

Probably the fact that I still write almost everything longhand in notebooks first. As time consuming as it may seem, I find it helps me writing a lot more often (in odd places, in the car, waiting for appointments) and notebooks never crash on you??¦


About The Author:

Cammie McGovern was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and has received numerous prizes for her short fiction. Her stories have appeared in several magazines and journals, and she is the author of two novels, Eye Contact, which was published in 2006, and The Art of Seeing. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts with her husband and three children. She is one of the founders of Whole Children, a resource center that runs after-school classes and programs for children with special needs. Visit the author online at: www.CammieMcGovern.com

**Please enter to win using the form on the left side bar of our website. Comments left on the post are not used as entry.

[rebate queen]

OUT OF THE SHADOWS



by Joanne Rendell


General Fiction

New American Library
www.JoanneRendell.com


3 autographed copies will be given away on Friday, September 10, 2010



About the Book:

Clara Fitzgerald's recent losses have set her adrift, personally and professionally. Her mother has passed away, and her career seems stalled while her fianc???™s scientific research is poised to take off in an exciting new direction. As great as the potential is for his future, Clare can??™t help ??“ or ignore ??“ that her emotional connection to him has slowly been slipping away.

Remembering the stories her mother used to tell her, Clara decides to research her ancestry-only to uncover an extraordinary link to Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. With her sister in tow and the help of Kay, a retired Shelley scholar, Clara embarks on a search for the nineteenth-century author's long lost journals and letters. As a bond among the three women grows, and as the profound connection between the past and present deepens, Clara discovers where her heart truly belongs.

Told from alternating points of view between Clara and the young Mary Shelley who is preparing to write Frankenstein, Out of the Shadows is a tale of hubris and greed, passion and truth, loss and love.

[rebate queen]

HOW CLARISSA BURDEN LEARNED TO FLY



by Connie May Fowler


Commercial Fiction

Grand Central Publishing
www.ConnieMayFowler.com


5 autographed copies will be given away on Friday, September 17, 2010




About the Book:

The temperature in Hope, Florida reads ninety-two degrees at seven a.m. on the day of the solstice. For writer Clarissa Burden, her routine of being ignored by her artist/husband Iggy while he photographs nude twenty-something??™s is jarred by the realization that her marriage is failed, her writer??™s block is ever-present and the pains of her abusive childhood aren??™t going away. The ghosts haunting Clarissa??™s house empathize with her and yearn for her happiness, but they have watched her become complacent.

Unexpectedly, Clarissa becomes fed-up. Whether it is the searing heat, the call from a sexy, younger colleague, or the naked girls giggling with her husband outside her kitchen window, the combination becomes unbearable and the hottest day of the year becomes a day of reckoning.
With a sharp eye and articulate voice, Connie May Fowler deftly introduces a memorable cast of characters that are as colorful as they are troubled and as familiar as they are complex.

HOW CLARISSA BURDEN LEARNED TO FLY is a compelling exploration of one woman??™s inner life and of the lives she unexpectedly encounters.