Mailbox Holiday Monday: Off Island and Morning Will Come

I am feeling very Christmassy now that December is well underway. I've been buying people books for Christmas presents, which I am not going to show here because that would ruin the surprise, of course.

But I did get a couple of new books last week -- so new they are preview copies, both coming out in January. I am excited about these books because both stories sounds really creative, definitely not formula fiction.



Off Island by Lara Tupper. This new novel weaves an imagined historical story of the artist Paul Gauguin living on an island off the the coast of Maine with a modern-day story of another painter in Maine who finds the paintings and letters Gauguin left behind.

Off Island launches January 6, 2020 and is available for pre-order from Encircle Publications.

From the publisher's description:

With wry humor and clear-eyed precision, Tupper captures the lure of the unknown, the pull of the familiar and the strangers our loved ones turn out to be. A novel of love and disappointment, duty and wanderlust, Off Island questions what it means to be loyal to one’s art, one’s family and one’s home.

Morning Will Come by Billy Lombardo. This is a "re-issued, re-titled, re-edited, re-beautifully jacketed version" Lombardo's 2009 novel, How to Hold a Woman. The cover is riveting, I agree. This new edition is available for pre-sale from Tortoise Books and launches in January.

Morning Will Come is the story of a marriage and family struggling with the disappearance of the oldest daughter.

From the back cover:

Alan and Audrey Taylor are raising three children and coping with the demands of busy careers when their eldest child, Isabel, on the verge of precocious womanhood, goes missing in the middle of the night. Thus begins this intimate portrait of a barely functioning family left to decipher the mysteries of how to go on in the aftermath of violence and loss. Morning Will Come, a haunting, sometimes raw exploration of grief, is also by turns hilarious and sexy, exploring the bonds of blood and the redemptive power of love.

What new books came into your house last week? Feel free to share them in a comment here or link your blog post on the Mailbox Monday official page.

Thanks for joining me for Mailbox Monday, a weekly "show & tell" blog event where participants share the books they acquired the week before. Visit the Mailbox Monday website to find links to all the participants' posts and read more about Books that Caught our Eye.

Mailbox Monday is graciously hosted by Leslie of Under My Apple Tree, Serena of Savvy Verse & Wit, and Martha of Reviews by Martha's Bookshelf.