This was the year of displaced persons.

The Invisible Bridge, by Julie Orringer. The untold story of Hungarian Jews forced to flee as Europe’s tragedy unfolds, renders the unthinkable poetic.

Brooklyn, by Colm Toibin. The story of Eilis who leaves her small village in Ireland in the 1950′s for Brooklyn, where she learns to live away from the only home she’s ever known.

Last Night at the Lobster, by Stewart O’Nan. Manny, the manager of a Red Lobster, wishes his last shift would never end because after tonight, the restaurant will close its doors forever and he will be demoted to a position at a nearby Olive Garden.

These stories, fueled by hope and despair, where no one leaves of their own accord, are filled with longing for the people and places left behind. With each one, I felt the way a child feels when suddenly separated from his parents on the street–that first struggle with being disconnected, a rippling anxiety, and the hopeful glimpse of a familiar skirt, that isn’t your mother’s after all.

Martha Southgate, author of The Taste of Salt

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Ambitious and genre-breaking in an unexpected and surprising way, this novel’s acclaim is well-deserved. Egan swings for the fences and hits them.

Open City by Teju Cole. Another surprising, ambitious winner, this time from a debut novelist. An elegiac tone poem to post-9/11 New York City narrated by a fascinating, complex protagonist.

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans. Like Egan, Evans has received great acclaim for her work. And like Cole, it’s her debut–in this case, a collection of short stories. Like Egan’s the acclaim is deserved; like Cole’s,it’s a book you shouldn’t miss.

Hillary Jordan, author of When She Woke

A Hundred and One Nights by Benjamin Buccholz. This debut novel about Afghanistan is a spike in the heart. To quote my own blurb for it: “Fearless and seductive. . . . A powerful testimony to the insanity of war and the undeniable demands of love.”

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett. I’d follow Ann just about anywhere, including the muggy, buggy Amazon.

Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie. What a marvelous, joyful writer. “Do Not Go Gentle” has to be one of my favorite stories ever.

Lauren Grodstein, author of A Friend of the Family

The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson was inventive, sharp, alarming, surprising, and occasionally heartbreaking. It was everything I love in a novel, plus art, plus bad parents, plus bad children. Read it in a day.

One of my students turned me on to David Gordon’s The Serialist, which features porn, savage violence, and grown men dressing like their mothers. While these are not the sorts of things I usually go for in a novel, The Serialist was surprising in the best ways – hyper funny and fun to read.

Jesse Browner’s Everything Happens Today was also a true pleasure – the story of a too-smart, too-sensitive Greenwich Village teenager who grapples with life, death, sex, and regret all in the course of a memorable day in which he keeps forgetting to walk the dog.

Caroline Leavitt, author of Pictures of You

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett. The Amazon. A missing scientist. An  Anaconda about to swallow a boy. Patchett could write a grocery list and have me in a state of awe and this latest novel is absolutely enthralling.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. A thrillingly real look at a bonafide genius who could be as nasty and self-centered as he was brilliant about changing the world. Reading this, I had nightmares that Jobs was following me and yelling at me–but I’d read it again in a heartbeat.

Hemingway’s Boat by Paul Hendrickson. A sympathetic portrait of a complicated, complex, and sometimes brutal man, Hendrickson’s bio shows the full beating heart of Hemingway.

Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies

Emily Alone by Stewart O’Nan, who became a new favorite. I went on to read several other novels by him including Wish You Were Here and Last Night at the Lobster.  A wonderfully detailed and absorbing portrayal of a old age and solitude.  It’s amazing how carefully and humbly and beautifully O’Nan casts his spell.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Eagan. I know this novel garnered a lot of praise and earned many awards, which I’d add, are well deserved! I felt mesmerized by these interlocking narratives and Eagan’s ability to capture so many different sensibilities.  I also felt as an older novelist that I was getting a glimpse of the styles, wild inventions, about the concerns of a new “postmodern” generation of novelists.

Room by Emma Donoghue. Hands down, this was my favorite novel of the year, and up there with other “permanent” favorites.  A haunting  novel  from the language and perspective of a five-year old—the voice slowly and quietly invaded my thinking so that even after I put the novel down, I was thinking about the world and hearing language in the style of young Jack —the last time I remember this happening  in such an absorbing way was with A Hundred Years of Solitude by García Marquez.

Jon Michaud, author of When Tito Loved Clara

Nothing I read this year gave me more pleasure than Steven Millhauser’s short story, “Getting Closer,” published in The New Yorker in January. As for books, my favorites in 2011 were the widely praised debut novels by Chad Harbach—The Art of Fielding—and Karen Russell—Swamplandia!. This year was also the centenary of Mervyn Peake’s birth, which the Overlook Press marked by releasing a gorgeous, illustrated edition of Peake’s peerless fantasy epic, The Gormenghast Trilogy. That was the book I most enjoyed rereading.

Robert Goolrick, author of A Reliable Wife

Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield — If the words Garamond, Baskerville or Helvetica give you a thrill, this book tells you everything you’ve ever wanted to know about how and why type faces are what they are and how they got that way. Fascinating and odd.

Lives Other Than My Own by Emmanuel Carrere — A memoir-as-novel that explores the effect on two lovers of the endless aftershocks of a tsunami in Sri Lanka. A wise, kind and infinitely sad work about the ripples and quakes of the human heart.

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey — This book doesn’t come out until February, but when it does, you’ll find a brilliant first novel that continues to enchant long after the snow has melted. If Willa Cather and Gabriel Garcia Marques had written a book together, this would be it.

Jonathan Evison, author of West of Here

The Ringer, by Jenny Shank: Please don’t judge this book by the cover. I happen to know that the author cried for two days when she saw it. As good as Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding is (and I wrote a blurb for it which started with the word “spectacular”), The Ringer may be even better. Like Harbach’s Fielding, baseball serves only as a framing device for this promising debut about such durable American themes as race, class, and family. Make no mistake though, Shank knows baseball like the sister of the major league ballplayer she is.

Zazen, by Vanessa Veselka: At turns hilarious, unsettling, and improbably sweet, Veselka’s debut is, above all, a highly engaging, and totally unique experience, which will have you re-reading passages and dog-earing pages. But best of all, in the end, Zazen is that rare novel which dares to be hopeful in the face of despair, and succeeds. Veselka has a shit-ton of voice, and you know within the first paragraph that you’re in for a ride. She could write about dog turds and I’d happily read it.

Damascus, by Joshua Mohr: The third novel from San Fransisco’s Joshua Mohr is his best to date. Mohr is the bard of the underbelly, and the Mission District is his playground. Part Harry Crews, part Charles Bukowski, and part Franz Kafka, Mohr will make you squirm, laugh, recognize, and take pause. Behind his wayward and dissolute characters, burns the clear-eyed moral vision of a very unique artist.

Robert Morgan, author of Boone

On China by Henry Kissinger. This is an extraordinary survey of Chinese history and culture from the beginnings to the present day. Part memoir, part meditation, part analysis and prediction, Kissinger’s magnum opus gives us a detailed and authoritative narrative of how China and the United States and the West reached the present state of their complex relations.

The Penguin Book of English Verse by Paul Keegan. Just when you thought there were no surprises to be found in the canon of English poetry along comes this selection to reveal new examples from both the famous and obscure. Poems are showcased more than the poets. Both refreshing and comprehensive.

Wildflowers & Plant Communities of the Southern Appalachian Mountains & Piedmont by Timothy P. Spira. The photographs are stunning, the text vivid, learned, succinct and alive. Need I say more?

Richard Louv, author of The Nature Principle

Empire of the Summer Moon, by S.C. Gwynne. The truth about the West is always more amazing than the myth.

White Fang, by Jack London. Who tells a better nature story?

Jack Kennedy, Elusive Hero, by Chris Matthews.  JFK was….elusive, but Matthews reminds us why, in 1969, when Americans were polled on who should be added to Mount Rushmore, they picked the 35th president.

“One of the best books of the year … An instant classic for the 21st Century.”–Publishers Weekly

“An inventive tale about a new America that has lost its way – whose values echo fundamentalism – When She Woke is, at its heart, a tense, energetic and lively paced story about self-discovery and reclamation in the wake of enormous shame. It is a story about the price of love.” – Minneapolis Star Tribune

“When She Woke serves as a cautionary tale both gripping and grim. It hits too close to home to ignore as ‘just a story.’” —Dallas Morning News

“Jordan’s elegant prose and thrilling plot make for an engrossing read, while her well-structured examination of our Schadenfreude-hungry culture and the precarious position of women’s rights within it make for a thought-provoking one…. Owing much to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, When She Woke lives up to its influences.” —Shelf Awareness

“[A] provocative, politically charged novel… [Hannah’s] journey to reclaim herself is equally chilling and riveting.”—Family Circle

“[A] chilling futuristic novel.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

“Jordan blends hot-button issues such as separation of church and state, abortion, and criminal justice with an utterly engrossing story, driven by a heroine as layered and magnetic as Hester Prynne herself, and reminiscent, too, of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Absolutely a must-read.”—Booklist, starred review

“Hillary Jordan channels Nathaniel Hawthorne by way of Margaret Atwood in this fast-paced, dystopian thriller.  Unputdownable.”—Valerie Martin, author of The Confessions of Edward Day

“When she woke, she was red. Not flushed, not sunburned, but the solid, declarative red of a stop sign.

She saw her hands first. She held them in front of her eyes, squinting up at them. For a few seconds, shadowed by her eyelashes and backlit by the hard white light emanating from the ceiling, they appeared black. Then her eyes adjusted, and the illusion faded. She examined the backs, the palms. They floated above her, as starkly alien as starfish . . .”

—from When She Woke

So begins Hillary Jordan’s riveting new novel, When She Woke, publishing today. In the haunting first scene, Hannah Payne wakes up on a table in a bare room, covered by nothing but a flimsy paper gown. Her skin is now red and her every movement is broadcasted live on national television. In this grim vision of America’s not-too-distant future, watching “Chromes”–criminals whose skin color has been genetically altered to match the class of their crime–has become a sinister form of entertainment. Hannah is a Red; her crime is murder. The victim, according to the state of Texas, was her unborn child. Hannah is determined to protect the identity of the father, a public figure with whom she shared a fierce and forbidden love.

In her Bellwether Prize-winning debut, Mudbound, Jordan gave us a stunning recreation of America’s past. Now she returns with a haunting and all-too-familiar vision of America’s future in which faith, love, and sexuality have fallen prey to politics. When She Woke is a powerful re-imagining of The Scarlet Letter, set in an America where the line between church and state no longer exists and criminals are no longer imprisoned and rehabilitated, but “chromed” and released back into society to survive as best they can. In Hannah’s attempts to find solace in a hostile world, she unknowingly embarks on a journey of self-discovery that will force her to question her country’s values–and her own. When She Woke is both a timely fable of a society that politicizes the personal and a powerful story of one woman’s struggle to reclaim herself.

We’ve set aside three copies for our devoted fans. For a chance to win one, just leave a comment here or on our Facebook page and you’ll be automatically entered!

When She Woke has already garnered rave reviews from critics and booksellers alike.  So far, it’s been:

• The #1 Indie Next pick for October
• One of Publishers Weekly Top 10 Literary Fiction picks for the fall
• One of O Magazine‘s Fall Reading picks

Check out some of Hillary Jordan’s fantastic reviews below and don’t miss the excerpt at the bottom of this page.

“[A] chilling futuristic novel.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

“[A] provocative, politically charged novel… [Hannah’s] journey to reclaim herself is equally chilling and riveting.”—Family Circle

“Jordan’s elegant prose and thrilling plot make for an engrossing read, while her well-structured examination of our Schadenfreude-hungry culture and the precarious position of women’s rights within it make for a thought-provoking one.” —Shelf Awareness

“When She Woke is one of those books I did not want to put down. I read it in one sitting because the story was so desperate and dark and engrossing … It’s a well-paced literary thriller, very engaging.”–Bookslut

“Christian fundamentalists may shun this novel, but book clubs will devour it, and savvy educators will pair it with Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. Essential.”—Library Journal

“Jordan blends hot-button issues such as separation of church and state, abortion, and criminal justice with an utterly engrossing story, driven by a heroine as layered and magnetic as Hester Prynne herself, and reminiscent, too, of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Absolutely a must-read.”—Booklist, starred review

Hillary Jordan is the author of two novels: Mudbound, which won the 2006 Bellwether Prize and a 2009 Alex Award from the American Library Association, and When She Woke, publishing October 4, 2011.

Michael Dahlie is the recipient of a 2010 Whiting Writers Award. He is the author of the novel A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living, which won the PEN/Hemingway award in 2009, and has a second novel due out in late 2012.

HJ:

You’ve just finished (as I have) your second novel. For me they were two very different kinds of ecstasy and agony: With Mudbound I experienced the joy of discovering my voice and learning that I was in fact capable of writing a novel and getting it published (what a feeling, holding the book in my hands for the first time!); and the torment of spending five years wondering whether it was any good and would ever be finished and read and liked by anyone not related to me by blood. With When She Woke I had the thrill and terror of being under contract (“Wow, I’m actually being paid to write!” and “Uh oh, this means I owe them a book”) and the sporadic reassurance that came from having written a pretty successful first novel, which of course gave rise to anxiety over whether WSW would rise to the standards of MB or fall prey to the dreaded “sophomore slump.” What was the experience like for you?

MD:

I always feel like writing is something close to dreaming – I’m inhabiting a world that’s both imaginary and also entirely my own. So taking something that seems to belong to my imagination and turning it over to the so-called world feels strange. So far this has been my experience with both books, even though the second one will not be out for a bit. Anyway, I think that’s something like what you’re talking about with WSW. There are the publication pressures you describe, but there’s also the sense of unreality when other people read the story and talk about it. It’s what it would be like meeting Robinson Crusoe or Maggie Tulliver at a cocktail party. Two different and unresolvable realities have somehow collided.

HJ:

Writing is like dreaming, isn’t it? And publication is the wake-up call. And as much as you want the book to be out there in the world, part of you just wants to pull the covers over your head and drift back into the safe cocoon of sleep… But to return to my original question: were Gentleman’s Guide and your forthcoming novel different kinds of dreaming for you?

MD:

Strange to think about now that I’m asked, but the truth is that I remember so little about writing them. I suppose there are a few distinct moments I can recall – researching the correct spelling of Lobster Newburg for instance (there’s quite a literature on this topic). But writing for me is really like reading (or dreaming, once again). Even with the books/dreams I love the most, the details always escape me later on.

Okay, here’s a question for you – one I’d be quite annoyed by – what’s up with book three? Are you going to be writing the next novel on tour? I ask this now because I find embarking on fictional projects to be quite calming. Perhaps this is the way you deal with delayed plane connections and unsettling hotels?

HJ:

I didn’t write much when I was touring for MB, unless you count all those breakfast menu door hangers I filled out (“NO home fries please”). I need intense focus to write, and I find that elusive when I’m constantly packing and unpacking and returning my seat and tray table to their fully upright position and praying that the guy coughing his lungs out next to me has allergies and not avian bird flu and that the hotel I’ll be staying in doesn’t wrap the glasses in plastic. The tour for WSW is going to be even more epic than the last one—I’ll be doing 38 events between mid-September and the end of the year—so realistically I don’t think I’ll be able to start the third novel until early 2012. And yes, I know what it is, but I’m not telling!

And because I just finished reading the manuscript of your most excellent second novel last night (I devoured it in one sitting), I’m going to abruptly change the subject and ask: as unique as the two books are, both of them center on hapless but lovable rich guys. What draws you to this type of character? And will you return to the same territory in book three—or do you even know yet?

MD:

I think what I most like writing about is money. From an artistic standpoint, I can’t get enough of rich people, especially the ones getting the bad end of things, although I tend to be very sympathetic towards my characters. But it now all seems even more interesting to me given what’s going on these days with the economy. Maybe my protagonists are some kind of stand-in for the reported decline of American economic dominance. On a more personal level, though, I think my artistic fascination with cash also comes from living in New York for so long, especially since I was always on the ragged edge of financial disaster. The credit card debt I amassed over that decade was absolutely colossal and a lot of that was via cash advances for rent. At any rate, I suppose I spent significant time thinking about what it would be like to have a lot of money. (Back to my dream life again.) Anyway, this leads to two questions for you. First, what was it like for you to write two novels that are both equally excellent but also so different – kind of an impressive feat. Second, you just moved back to the city. How is it influencing your writing?

HJ:

You know, I don’t think I’ve never really sat down and defined what I most like writing about. People in really effed-up situations, I suppose, and also people battling other people’s notions of what’s right and wrong. And love; I think I’ll always write about love. Both my novels are about those things, so in that sense they’re not entirely different. But it was really exciting to me, after spending 7 years in 1940s Mississippi, in the past tense and in the first person (all of which I was heartily sick of), to jump 35 years into the future, into the thirrd person limited POV of a young woman nothing like my MB characters.

As for being in NYC—who’s going to be in NYC? Certainly not me, at least not till the book tour’s over. How is that for you, meaning the author part of the job vs. the writer part? For me it’s surreal (and lovely) that people would actually care about meeting me. I’ve been an avid reader my whole life, and until I became an author I never once went to a reading or cared about getting a book signed. Though I probably would have, if Jane Austen or Flannery had been doing the reading and signing.

MD:

Yeah, touring for a book can be quite baffling, but aside from the opportunities for people to meet and socialize, I do think there can be something artistically important about them, with readings specifically. Authors can add a certain kind of inflection and emotion to their words when they read aloud that can’t always be captured in print. For instance, when you and I first met we were reading together and your selection from Mudbound was truly exceptional. You read at a slower pace than I would have read it and I really think it added something, and certainly colored how I read the book later on. Anyway, as you know, we’re going to track you down in Chicago, so it will be interesting to see what you do with WSW – the book is so memorable and arresting already that I wonder how you’ll handle it out loud. (I’ll give you my full review at the bar afterwards.)

HJ:

Aw shucks, Michael. The admiration is mutual.

My favorite book from this summer is Graham Greene’s novel Travels With My Aunt, narrated by a man in his fifties who, at his mother’s funeral, runs into his aunt, who tells him that his mother was not his mother, and who drags him into a series of illegal adventures across Europe and into Turkey and South America. This is one of Greene’s so-called entertainments, but I often like his entertainments more than his supposedly serious novels, and I love this novel most of all, for the reasons I love Muriel Spark novels: an unlikely, wry, sneakily sad novel about what it means to start a new life.

– Brock Clarke, author of An Arsonist’s Guide to Writer’s Homes in New England

Maybe because I’ve been caretaking two elderly parents (95 and 85), both stricken with Alzheimer’s, I’ve been attracted to books by older authors who address the experience of being old, of approaching death. Googling “old age memoirs and women,” I hit on a memoir by Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End. A former British editor with a long, renowned career publishing the likes of Jean Rhys and V. S. Naipaul, Athill discovered late in her own life that she herself could write. The memoir is a gem, clear-eyed and unsentimental, remorseless and cranky, and tender and true. Athill focuses her sharp eye on everything from sex in old age (Ninety-one when the book was published, Athill ceased to be a sexual being in her seventies; the plus side: “other things became more interesting”) to her preference for nonfiction in her old age (“I do still want to be fed facts, to be given material which extends the region in which my mind can wander”). I found myself underlining passages and starring every other page, wondering if my markings would some day elucidate what I had dreaded or looked forward to in old age for a loved one.

– Julia Alvarez, author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

Every year, as the summer solstice approaches, I get a hankering to reread The Sun Also Rises. I’ve now given into that hankering so often that it doesn’t really feel like summer to me anymore unless I’ve spent a few days with Hemingway’s masterpiece. And, as much as I love its bittersweet depiction of expatriate life in Paris in the nineteen-twenties and its rendering of the reckless bacchanal of the Pamplona fiesta, nothing is dearer to me than the quiet center of the book: the fishing trip Jake takes to Roncesvalles with his friend Bill. I don’t fish, but those passages, which so evocatively capture the blissful escape from workday life and the satisfactions of leisure, are redolent of every great vacation I’ve ever taken. All the more so, since in the novel–as in life–the happiness is so fragile and fleeting.

– Jon Michaud, author of When Tito Loved Clara

Lord of the Rings. I think I was thirteen that summer. I devoured the whole trilogy in about a week and was utterly bereft when I turned the last page. Oh, to be in Middle Earth!

– Hillary Jordan, author of Mudbound

I first read Larry McMurtry’s Moving On, the summer when my first husband was busy leaving me. It was a rough summer but I lost myself in this big huge book peopled with characters so alive, I felt they were at my side. Every summer after that, I dipped back down into this story of desperate rodeo people, Texas grad students and the very unhappy Patsy Carpenter, who are all doing just what the title says–moving on. It’s funny, moving and brilliant–and it saved my life.

– Caroline Leavitt, author of Pictures of You

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson is my new favorite summer book! It’s an illustrated novel centered on 6-year-old Sophia and her aging grandmother and set on a small Finnish island that the two adventurers explore each day. It’s a heart-warming story that holds some important life lessons. Think The Little Prince with a little bite to it. I fall in love with Sophia every time I read this book. I think you will too. How can you resist the little girl who is writing a treatise on angleworms that become split in half and concludes: “Nothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment.”

– Heidi Durrow, author of The Girl Who Fell From The Sky

As a kid, I think these books made their indelible mark in summer: Lad: A Dog by Albert Payson Terhune and of course Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. I remember the exact feel of the days I spent with these books, reading them in the afternoons when the Missouri heat drove me out of the woods and fields and off the melting asphalt street, and indoors. After my father and mother bought an air conditioner, when I was a preteen and teenager, on some of those hot summer afternoons — particularly if my parents were gone — I would make hot tea, crank the air conditioner to the coldest setting, and burrow into the good living room couch I wasn’t supposed to use, and read novels by Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. I did this while other kids tried smoking. No, wait. I did that, too. With the air conditioner cranked up. In college, Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion got me through the long, last summer. After that, memory blurs.

– Richard Louv, author of The Nature Principle


“Summer read” implies guilty pleasure, the easy beach or airplane read, something we eat for flavor, not nutrition, purely as entertainment. I can’t name a single title but I can name an author, Tony Hillerman, and his series of mysteries featuring Navajo Tribal Police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. The characters are both men I’d like to know. The mysteries work on two levels, giving the reader both a question he can’t answer and a world he doesn’t understand, and it’s the latter I find most inviting, books set on the Navajo reservation of the “four corners” area where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado meet, with its buttes and mesas, arroyos and dry river beds, lit in what seems like perpetual sunset. Maybe it’s because as a young man, headed away from home for the first time to attend a graduate writing program in Tucson and scared out of my mind, I pulled off the highway to get gas, somewhere west of Tucumcari, and I leaned against the fender of my car to rest, smoke a cigarette, drink a Coke and watch the hills all around me turn from gold to red, and I thought, “Something huge is happening here, something I’ll never know in full.” Hillerman’s books, where the landscape and the mystery fuse, take me back to that moment and give me a second chance, and feel 24 again, the age when everything seems like a mystery. That’s a pleasure, usually one I’ve savored summers, and I don’t feel guilty about it.

– Pete Nelson, author of I Thought You Were Dead

“When she woke, she was red. Not flushed, not sunburned, but the solid, declarative red of a stop sign.

She saw her hands first. She held them in front of her eyes, squinting up at them. For a few seconds, shadowed by her eyelashes and backlit by the hard white light emanating from the ceiling, they appeared black. Then her eyes adjusted, and the illusion faded. She examined the backs, the palms. They floated above her, as starkly alien as starfish.”

—from When She Woke

From the author whose international bestseller, Mudbound, so hauntingly re-created America’s past comes a stunning creation of America in the near future, where faith, love, and sexuality have fallen prey to politics.

Hannah Payne’s life has been devoted to church and family, but after her arrest, she awakens to a nightmare: she is lying on a table in a bare room, covered only by a paper gown, and cameras are broadcasting her every move to millions at home, for home observing new Chromes—criminals whose skin color has been genetically altered to match the class of their crime—is a new and sinister form of entertainment. Hannah is a Red; her crime is murder. The victim, says the state of Texas, was her unborn child, and Hannah is determined to protect the identity of the father—a public figure with whom she’s shared a fierce and forbidden love.

When She Woke is a stunning story about a stigmatized woman struggling to navigate an America of a not-too-distant future, where the line between church and state has been eradicated and convicted felons are released back into the population after being “chromed.” In seeking a path to safety in an alien and hostile world, Hannah unknowingly embarks on a path of self-discovery that forces her to question the values she has held true and the righteousness of a country that politicizes the personal.

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Praise from Booksellers

“I can’t wait to put When She Woke into everybody’s hands. Bravo to Hilary Jordan. “ —Roberta Rubin, The Bookstall at Chestnut Court, Winnetka, IL

“When She Woke is a masterpiece . . . It is powerful, compelling, sensitive, and poignant. I read it in one sitting.” —Bill Cusumano, Nicola’s Books, Ann Arbor, MI

“Be prepared to lose sleep over the too-close-to-reality aspects of this beautifully written novel. Hillary Jordan’s When She Woke delves and connects and exposes in profound ways.” —Dana Brigham, Brookline Booksmith, Brookline, MA

“A novel that will inspire a provocative discussion among readers.” —Michele Filgate, McNally Jackson Books, New York, NY

“When She Woke is a page turner. Just as Jordan so beautifully wrote about the injustice and tragedies of racism in America in her last novel, Mudbound, she now artfully exposes the injustices and heartbreak caused by religious extremism that, as she demonstrates in When She Woke, can arise from any rigid doctrine, even in heartland America.” —Cathy Langer, Tattered Cover Book Store, Denver, CO

“Wow! What a read! When She Woke has everything good and delicious that one wants in a book: great characters, steady plotting, and a thought-provoking, heart-wrenching, compelling, and unsettling story.” —Melinda Powers, Capitola Book Café, Capitola, CA

“I’m gobsmacked! When She Woke is riveting from page one.” —Emily Crowe, The Odyssey Bookshop, South Hadley, MA

“There’s no doubt that When She Woke is an intense book!” —Jenn Northington, Word, Brooklyn, NY

“Put this one on your book club list, because everyone is going to want to discuss it.” —Valerie Koehler, Blue Willow Bookshop, Houston, TX

“When She Woke reads like a really good movie. It’s a transformational, awakening story disguised as a fast-paced thriller.” —Debra Linn, Books & Books, Bal Harbour, FL

“I found myself telling everyone I met about When She Woke—the story is that compelling.” —Christie Olson Day, Gallery Bookshop, Mendocino, CA

“Hillary Jordan is one of our most important political writers, and When She Woke is a very brave work.” —Lucy Kogler, Talking Leaves Books, Buffalo, NY

We can’t wait to hear what you think. Talk to us on Twitter and Facebook or leave a comment here.

.What books recently rocked my world: This is not a shameless Algonquin plug (OK, maybe it is a shameless Algonquin plug, but it doesn’t make the love any less real):

When She Woke by Hillary Jordan. Didn’t think it was going to be for me at all, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.  (Publishing October 4, 2011.)

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi Durrow. Read it in one plane flight (a long plane flight) and turned into that person in the aisle seat crying as she reads.

Long Drive Home by Will Allison

Create Dangerously by Edwidge Danticat

Where She Went by Gayle Forman – but I haven’t finished any of them yet because my personal civilian book club chose Bossypants this month.

Best damn event(s) we’ve hosted: We host 60 author events a month (really), so it’s tough to pick just one or two. Instead, I’m going to tell you about the two most memorable damn events:

1) When I broke my toe while dressed like Medusa in a Gothic style church. Clipped the pinky toe on my right foot on the base of a pew (“busted it up good,” to quote my doctor) in front of 500 kids awaiting Rick Riordan’s arrival. I’m still awaiting my gold medal for not cursing at the top of my lungs — in a church, in front of 500 kids – upon smashing the toe. The following week, I hobbled around BEA with my broken toe.

2) When I broke my toe climbing over a barricade of my own making at our Ricky Martin signing. Fourth toe on my right foot. The barricade was made out of pricey limited edition art books. Six days later, I hobbled around Spain with my broken toe for my long-dreamed-of trip there.

Most entertaining author(s) we’ve hosted:

I never laughed so much as at Ann Patchett and Alexander McCall Smith’s events. And Dave Barry (but he’s Books & Books family, so it doesn’t feel so much like “hosting”). Plus last week I got to watch Robert Sabuda create a pop-up right before my very eyes. Brilliant. Oh, and the Pete the Cat author and illustrator, Eric Litwin and James Dean. I was singing, dancing and jumping around – and it was my job!

Strangest question a customer has ever asked:
It’d be the strangest if I didn’t hear it with such frequency at author events, “Do you sell the book?”

Why our store kicks ass: When you walk in any of our stores, you know immediately that you’re in a Books & Books store – and yet each one has its own personality. Quiet but with an energy. Warm and inviting like you hope a bookstore will be and still new, modern, classy – and knowledgeable. Our carefully curated selection is just that. Every book is there for a reason. And here’s how dedicated and enamored of books we are – Children’s Book Buyer Becky Quiroga’s right arm is tattooed with original works-of-art drawn on her flesh by Eric Carle, Mo Willems and Lane Smith.

What makes our neighborhood and customers awesome: Well, one of our neighborhoods is a Caribbean island. Another is the most lucrative shopping mall in the United States. Another is the heart of South Beach. And another is Gate D25. … No, in all seriousness, Miami is like no other place on Earth. It’s a world unto itself with a mix of people and cultures and ideas – all combined with a whole lotta humidity – and that makes it truly vibrant (if not a little sticky.) Our customers don’t come to cultural events at the store; they are the cultural events. They bring the ideas, the questions, the give-and-take and passion that visiting authors always remember. And a book is a commitment to our readers, a bond shared, a discussion started – with much more to come.

I promise you won’t find this at any other store: A table signed by three presidents (Carter, Clinton and W.), two First Ladies (Clinton and Laura Bush), two Secretaries of State (Clinton and Albright), Julie Andrews, Barbara Walters, Kurt Vonnegut – and Paul McCartney (!), among many others.

Why I do what I do: When you recommend the right book for the right person, you’ve given him a gift for life. And when you bring the author of that book in for an event, you’ve given that reader a memory for life. (Wow, that sounds hokey. Yikes. But it’s true, I guess.)

If I weren’t selling books I’d be: A former newspaper sports editor forced into a buy-out and looking for a job.

Books that changed my life: Me by Ricky Martin and Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan (see aforementioned broken toe stories).

Top three authors, living or dead, I’d invite to my dinner party: William Shakespeare (see aforementioned fondness for double entendre), Nathan Englander (not a wasted word in his writing) and George Clooney (has George Clooney written a book?  Well, he should).

Top three songs on the soundtrack to my life: “Band on the Run” by Paul McCartney & Wings (first thing I ever bought with my own money – when I was 6).  “Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns ‘N Roses (my college boyfriend used to sing it to me – GNR was never so sweet).  “Let’s Stay Together” by Al Green (no explanation needed).

My last meal request: Smoked fish dip at Le Tub in Hollywood, Fla., fried calamari (accompanied by a Hazed & Confused pint) at Lou’s Beer Garden in Miami Beach, pan con tomate from La Boqueria in New York, boquerones at that place in Barcelona (accompanied by an Estrella Galicia pint), baguette, pumpernickel onion rolls from Joe’s Stone Crab, radicchio and arugula salad, my mother’s brisket (legendary!), mashed potatoes, Bob the Potato (my creation), Chef Bernie Matz’s yuca fries from the Café at Books & Books (and that pan-fried grouper sandwich that goes with them), roasted asparagus and wilted spinach, ricotta cheesecake at Specchio in Surfside, Fla., Key lime pie at Mrs. Mac’s Kitchen in the Keys, carrot cake from Publix and chocolate chip cookies.