Winter/Spring 2016 Indies Introduce Titles

opens in a new windowThe American Booksellers Association recently announced their Winter/Spring 2016 Indies Introduce selections. Chosen by panels of booksellers from across the U.S., the list honors the top upcoming debuts publishing between January and June 2016, including these Macmillan titles:

HIDE by Matthew Griffin
On sale: February 16, 2016

Set in a declining textile town in North Carolina, HIDE is the love story of Wendell Wilson, a taxidermist, and Frank Clifton, a veteran of World War II. They meet after the war, in a time when such love holds real danger. But, severing nearly all ties with the rest of the world, they carve out a home for themselves on the outskirts of town and for decades the routine of self-reliant domesticity-Wendell’s cooking, Frank’s care for a yard no one sees, and the vicarious drama of courtroom TV-seems to protect them.

But when Wendell finds Frank lying motionless outside at the age of eighty-three, their carefully crafted life together begins to unravel. As Frank’s physical strength deteriorates and his memory dissolves, Wendell struggles in vain to keep him healthy and to hold onto the man he once knew until, faced with giving care beyond his capacity, he must come to terms with the consequences of half a century in seclusion, the sacrifices they made for each other, and the different lives they might have lived-and most especially the impending, inexorable loss of the one they had.

WE’VE ALREADY GONE THIS FAR by Patrick Dacey
On sale: February 16, 2016

In Dacey’s stunning story collection, we meet longtime neighbors and friends of working-class Wequaquet, a place where people are searching for an almost out-of-reach version of the American Dream. Here, after more than a decade of boom and bust, love and pride are closely twinned and dangerously deployed: a lonely woman attacks a memorial to a neighbor’s veteran son; a dissatisfied housewife goes overboard with cosmetic surgery on national television; a young father walks away from one of the few jobs left in town, a soldier writes home to a mother who is becoming increasingly unhinged.

Story by story, Dacey draws us into the secret lives of recognizable strangers and reminds us that life’s strange intensity and occasional magic is all around us, especially in the everyday. With a skewering insight and real warmth of spirit, Dacey delivers that rare and wonderful thing in American fiction: a deeply-felt, deeply-imagined book about where we’ve been and how far we have to go.