Indie Bound Picks House And Home

With all the other exciting HOUSE AND HOME news, we forgot to mention that it was on Indie Bound's (formerly Book Sense) Indie Next list for July, praised as "timely and thoughtful" by one independent bookseller who obviously has very good taste.

Catch Kathleen In Your Own House And Home!

If Kathleen McCleary isn't coming to a bookstore near you, you an still catch her on tour without leaving your house! (Yes, our puns on the title are even worse than usual.)

During the month of September, Kathleen will appear on numerous blogs as part of her whirlwind virtual book tour. Her dates are below:

Wednesday, September 3rd: Hooked on Houses

Friday, September 5th: It's All About Books

Monday, September 8th: The Literate Housewife

Wednesday, September 10th: Books and Cooks

Friday, September 12th: Breaking the Spine

Monday, September 15th: She Is Too Fond Of Books

Wednesday, September 17th: Caribou's Mom

Friday, September 18th: Age 30 - A Year of Books

Monday, September 22nd: Booking Mama

Wednesday, September 24th: The Inside Cover

Friday, September 26th: In the Shadow of Mt. TBR

Not Just Sitting About The House And Home

Kathleen McCleary, whose novel HOUSE AND HOME is out now, certainly has been keeping herself busy! She was recently interviewed in USA Weekend. She was also a guest blogger at Planet Books and was reviewed on Books and Cooks.

Check out her website for tour dates and to share your own "house" story with other readers!

House and Home Featured in Home & Garden

Kathleen McCleary's novel was featured in the Home & Garden section of The New York Times last Thursday:

Four years ago, Kathleen McCleary's husband had a job offer in a consulting firm working for the Department of Homeland Security. They had been living in Oregon, which they loved, but, according to Ms. McCleary, it was one of the states that led the country in unemployment in the tech market, in which her husband worked.

"Working on antiterrorism had a lot of job security," she said, so the couple and their two daughters sold their house and moved to a suburb of Washington, D.C.

For Ms. McCleary, leaving her house was the most agonizing part of the move: it was a 1930s Cape Cod style, only 1,800 square feet, but she adored it.

"It was so personal, because we had all the tough years of our early marriage there," she said, meaning those years of being in the weeds -- raising two young children and scraping by, while she worked as a magazine editor and freelance writer and her husband earned his Ph.D.

Adrift in a new town, Ms. McCleary asked the local coffee shop for a job as a barista one day a week. The rest of the week she spent writing her first novel, about a woman whose husband wants to move the family for a business opportunity; they sell the house, then she promptly decides to burn it down.

The result, "House & Home" (Hyperion; $23.95), is a sharply funny, nicely realized work of catharsis that will be satisfyingly familiar to anyone who has ever suffered seller's remorse.

HOUSE AND HOME went on sale last week, so go pick up your copy today!

A Star For The Given Day

We're very excited to share that Dennis Lehane's forthcoming novel, THE GIVEN DAY, has already received its first (of what we certainly hope will be many) starred review!

The full text from Publishers Weekly is below:

In a splendid flowering of the talent previously demonstrated in his crime fiction (Gone, Baby, Gone; Mystic River), Lehane combines 20th-century American history, a gripping story of a family torn by pride and the strictures of the Catholic Church, and the plot of a multifaceted thriller. Set in Boston during and after WWI, this engrossing epic brings alive a pivotal period in our cultural maturation through a pulsing narrative that exposes social turmoil, political chicanery and racial prejudice, and encompasses the Spanish flu pandemic, the Boston police strike of 1919 and red-baiting and anti-union violence.

Danny Coughlin, son of police captain Thomas Coughlin, is a devoted young beat cop in Boston's teeming North End. Anxious to prove himself worthy of his legendary father, he agrees to go undercover to infiltrate the Bolsheviks and anarchists who are recruiting the city's poverty-stricken immigrants. He gradually finds himself sympathetic to those living in similar conditions to his fellow policemen, who earn wages well below the poverty line, work in filthy, rat-infested headquarters, are made to pay for their own uniforms and are not compensated for overtime. Danny also rebels by falling in love with the family's spunky Irish immigrant maid, a woman with a past. Danny's counterpart in alienation is Luther Laurence, a spirited black man first encountered in the prologue when Babe Ruth sees him playing softball in Ohio. After Luther kills a man in Tulsa, he flees to Boston, where he becomes intertwined with Danny's family.

This story of fathers and sons, love and betrayal, idealism and injustice, prejudice and brotherly feeling is a dark vision of the brutality inherent in human nature and the dire fate of some who try to live by ethical standards. It's also a vision of redemption and a triumph of the human spirit. In short, this nail-biter carries serious moral gravity.