We’re in the final week of May. In an industry where the currency is words, it’s been months of numbers. Birthdays: two. Banana breads baked: five. Zoom calls: lost track. Boil it down further and you’ll see that the minutiae of a day under a pandemic is kept by personal tallies. Hours of screen time. Trips to the snack drawer. Pages read. There are public tallies being kept too, numbers that bookend our days and dictate the months to come. The sum of their total? Incalculable.
As areas of the country return to some semblance of normalcy, we are asking ourselves how we, as an agency, measure our time spent in lockdown. We look to the numbers again and come up with three: three Friedrich Agency books have been published during the pandemic so far. Three books were brought into the world when a belly-laugh, edge-of-your-seat climax, or dose of joie de vivre could make all the difference.
#1 New York Times bestselling author, Terry Mcmillan returned this March with IT’S NOT ALL DOWNHILL FROM HERE (Ballantine), a funny and perceptive novel about a woman starting her second act. On the eve of Loretha Curry’s sixty-eighth birthday, she is successful in all aspects of her life: in business, in friendship, and in love. She is not one of those women who thinks her best days are behind her—and she’s determined to prove that it’s not all downhill from here. But when an unexpected loss turns her world upside down, Loretha will have to summon all her strength, resourcefulness, and determination to keep on thriving. Terry’s baldly honest but hopeful novel is, as People Magazine aptly put it, “a balm for troubled times.”
A week before Terry’s release, Rachel Harrison’s THE RETURN hit the (virtual) shelves. Published on March 24th by Berkley, Harrison’s debut novel has been equal parts scaring and charming the bejesus out of readers. After a two-year disappearance and Elise’s insistence that she will return, Julie mysteriously surfaces with no memory of where she’s been or what happened to her. Along with their two close friends from college, the women decide to reunite at a remote inn. But the second Elise sees Julie, she knows something is wrong. And as the weekend unfurls, there is one question occupying the women: who—or what—is Julie? You’ll close the last page with an urge to sleep with the lights on but, to quote a recent New York Times review, you’ll also “wish you could stop the clock and replace what they’ve lost, because it is what we’ve all lost: time, with all its pleasure and pain, its many perfect moments and all the people who showed up and disappeared, never to return.”
Rufi Thorpe rounds off our trio with THE KNOCKOUT QUEEN. An LA Times and Oklahoma bestseller, Book of the Month pick, and IndieNext pick for May, Rufi’s fearless novel was published on April 28th by Knopf to rave reviews. “Full of verve and sketched in colors as vibrant as a Tilt-A-Whirl David Hockney landscape” (La Times), THE KNOCKOUT QUEEN takes us to the Californian suburbs, where Bunny Lampert —beautiful, tall, blond, and wealthy—and Michael—with a ponytail down his back and a septum piercing—form an unlikely friendship. Navigating the pitfalls of being “other” (Bunny is six foot three and towering over everyone, while Michael pretends to be straight at school but meets up with men from Grindr at night), their lives are irreversibly changed by a split-second moment of violence.
So, how do you measure a book? Its total is not the aggregate of its pages, the years spent writing, or the sales it brings in. A good book is like a wade through a pond: when you’re in it, you feel it – wet to your knees, a burn in your thighs from the slog through the silt, a humming anxiety about what you might step on – and, then you’re out, you’re finished, months have passed, you pull out your boots for a rainy April day and there, on the left sole, is a cubic inch of dried pond clay. A good book has you in the moment, it offers whatever it is you need at that time. But a good book will also come to you later, again, sometimes when you least expect it.
When we are reminded of these difficult months, I’m hopeful that for every moment of frustration we think back on, it is twinned with a line of perfect cadence or a scene that made us snortlaugh onto the page. There will be tallies we forget (cookies consumed or episodes binged) but good books are notches made to last.
— Hannah Brattesani