Thanks for the opportunity to preview these books! It's great to see so many exciting debuts on the way, as well as books from old favourites. I wasn't even aware that Slimani had another book being translated into English so now I'm super excited for that one!

I love this - this is my first year working with netgalley and am happy to cap it off with this! Also satisified with the diversity represented in these works. Thank you very much.for allowing me to be part of NetGalley.

Still the best way to explore new books. I look for Buzz Books each season.. Thank you very much.for allowing me to be part of NetGalley.

A great resource for new and upcoming titles! My only complaint is that I wish there were more YA titles included, as that was what I was looking for. But I was able to find some interesting ones regardless!

Good books upcoming but the link to request most didn't work. I like to see what is being released and this is a good way to do it!

This is an excellent resource for any book nerd out there like myself who wants to explore offerings in the near future and make room on their TBR!

Great tool for discovering new authors📚

I was pleasantly surprised by the number of book samples included in this anthology. Just going through their summaries I identified around a dozen books that looked enticing by authors I would probably never have checked out otherwise. There is no way I would have time to request advance copies and read them all, even if the publishers should choose to share them with a simple avid reader and reviewer like me, but the samples are long enough to give me a feel for an author's writing style which has a major influence on the books I choose to read.

Thanks to Publishers Lunch and NetGalley for offering this useful sampler; this is my voluntary and honest review.

Wow! What a great resource! Thank you NetGalley. Can't wait to dig in and discover new reads! It's quite comprehensive!

I always enjoy reading excerpts for some of the new upcoming publications! There are so many great books coming out this spring/summer! Thanks!

I found several samples of books coming out soon that I am very excited to read. I love these little blips of books to find new titles being published.

This was an excellent guide to 2021 new releases. I am going to be using the information in Buzz Books to guide my reading this year. There were so many picks I cannot wait to read, I am not sure there is enough time to read them all. Thank you Netgalley for my copy of this book.

Such a wonderful resource to check out all the upcoming books! I used to find some potential new reads to add to my Goodreads TBR shelf.

Wonderful collection of upcoming releases for fiction, nonfiction, debut, and young adult, along with excerpts, summaries, and the covers. Thank you to both NetGalley and the publisher for this opportunity.

5★
“You can’t tell from the outside, but the IRA has this city under its thumb. They run security rackets. Every building site has to pay them protection money, and all the restaurants in west Belfast have doormen.
. . .
MI5 comes here to test new methods, to build capacity, to prepare its agents for their real fight, which is against international terror groups. We’re only their training ground.”
from Northern Spy

Oh, there are some good ones here! As always, there’s something for almost everybody. Each entry, whether from an established or a debut author, has a reasonably detailed introduction to the book followed by an excerpt of a chapter or so. The Goodreads blurbs probably come from the same publicity and will give you a brief idea, too.

This publication is divided into Fiction, Debut Fiction, Non-fiction, and Young Adult. I have a quick look at each introduction (often a page or more long) and then read the selections that appeal to me. I tend to skim or skip what look like light romances or chick lit and avoid horror and dragon-wizard fantasy, but even then, I never say never.

I’ll just mention a few that I’d like to read myself. The first quote is from Northern Spy by Flynn Berry, about two sisters, one of whom is asked by police where the other is. They say her sister has joined the IRA - could she be held hostage? It reads well and the author's first book won an Edgar Award (mystery) for best first novel.

My next choice is Viet Thanh Nguyen's latest, The Committed a follow-up to The Sympathizer, which I haven’t read and wasn’t planing to. It won the Pulitzer Prize but had such mixed reviews, I figured I wouldn’t like it. Having read a chapter or two of this one, I can see I love the quirky style that I think irritated other readers. (Takes all kinds, eh?)

The protagonists are Vietnamese men, newly landed in Paris and offered hashish by one’s “aunt”. There's enough background for me to know they've come from prison and desperate circumstances, and this woman's elegant lifestyle is foreign to them (but enjoyed).

“Marijuana was what hippies and teenagers smoked, its symbol the terminally unfashionable band called the Grateful Dead, whom Yves Saint-Laurent would have lined up and shot for popularizing tie-dyed T-shirts. Hashish evoked the Levant and the souk, the strange and the exciting, the decadent and the aristocratic. One might try marijuana in Asia, but in the Orient, one smoked hashish.
. . .
Given their gastronomic peculiarities for eating brains, guts, snails, and the like, the French were honorary Asians in their heroic determination to eat every kind and part of an animal.”
from The Committed

The Lowering Days is a debut by Gregory Brown and looks like a winner to me. It’s told by one of the sons of an alternative (my term) couple who live on the Penobscot River in Maine, where father builds wooden boats but doesn’t charge customers enough (to mother's annoyance). There is description of the old ways and now talk of a push to reopen an old paper mill. Mother decides to publish a paper and call it The Lowering Days. When told this sounds ominous, she says “People don't pay for cheer.”

“Over the years she’d sometimes tell people the name came from her great-grandfather, who’d been a doctor up the Penobscot in Prospect and also routinely presided over funerals, gathering the townspeople in mourning on these lowering days, as he called them, when a body was sent into the earth. Other times she said the name came from the birthing day for a boat, the lowering day, when the finished hull was first slipped into the waiting sea.” from The Lowering Days

The references to death and birth remind me of the shorthand often used for the section of the newspaper referred to as Hatch, Match, and Dispatch, although there’s no matching included here.

Another appealing debut is The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot by Marianne Cronin, about a 17-year-old girl with terminal cancer, who tells us that the nurses keep correcting themselves and saying “life-limiting condition” instead. Of course, I immediately reminded myself of the black humour that says birth is a terminal disease.

But I digress. In this excerpt, Lenni has discovered she can visit a part of the hospital she’s never seen – the chapel. And they have to let her go there! An adventure, of sorts. At least it's somewhere new.

“I wheeled my drip behind me and as I reached the pew, I tied my dressing gown more tightly around my waist. ‘Can you tell God I’m sorry about my pajamas?’ I asked as I sat.

‘You just told him. He’s always listening,’ Father Arthur said as he sat beside me. I looked up at the cross.

‘So tell me, Lenni, what brings you to the chapel today?’

‘I’m thinking about buying a secondhand BMW.’”
from The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot

I hope to meet Lenni and the 83-year-old Margot who between them have 100 years, hence the title.

I’m interested in Her Here, the debut of Amanda Dennis* about a young woman who accepts the task of tracking down someone’s missing daughter. I gather her own memory issues get mixed up with the journals she’s reading to find the missing person.

“Her is Ella. She is so alive in her journals, the way I want to be. Looking for her feels urgent, a task with clear edges, purpose. She is someone I might love.”
. . .
“In the coldness of her face, I wanted to find that smile again. It was my mother’s.”
from Her Here

*Note, this is not the Amanda Dennis that the Goodreads entry links to. This is her first book and here is her website. https://www.amandadennis.net/home

My last selection sounds like my kind of historical mystery, An Unlikely Spy, although I bet I wouldn't have picked it up because of the cover. Shouldn't judge.

England. Evelyn and Stephen have met for their weekly drink and are chatting, not quite as a couple, but not quite as not a couple. We don't know. He has actually said he must go to Italy for a month and will miss her. Would she consider going with him?

As she seems to stall a bit, he says quickly that she doesn’t have to answer now, and he thinks he’d like another whisky. He leaves the table to go to the bar, and Evelyn looks out the window, seeing a little girl and a woman, browsing at a picture card stand.

“Evelyn watched the graceful swoop of her gloved hand until, almost as if she sensed she was being watched, the woman turned. Her eyes met Evelyn’s and what followed was a moment of perfect calm, just as the air had felt before a shell dropped.”
from An Unlikely Spy

The woman comes in, “the past” is spoken of, the War Office is mentioned, and Stephen is confused. Evelyn worked in a hospital during the war . . . didn’t she?

Plenty to choose from! Thanks to NetGalley and PublishersLunch for my copy, but if you’d like to read their Buzz Books without using NetGalley, they are all available for download on their own website. Lots of genres, too. You’ve got nothing to lose but more sleep, right?
http://buzz.publishersmarketplace.com/

Please note that all of these quotations are from preview copies and may well have changed by the time the books are in print. I just hope to give some idea of what appealed to me.

These covers may change, too, of course.
Northern Spy by Flynn Berry The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen The Lowering Days by Gregory Brown The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot by Marianne Cronin Her Here by Amanda Dennis An Unlikely Spy by Rebecca Starford

I always look forward to these publishing. They are a wonderful way to see what's coming. Also especially enjoy the new author section.

I discovered Buzz Book a while ago and now I have come to look forward to them. I waste no time in jumping on each new edition; it's such a great way to preview upcoming titles! This one is packed with four sections: fiction, debut, nonfiction and young adult. There's really something for everyone, from returning favorites like Viet Thanh Nguyen to new voices like Sarah Penner (The Lost Apothecary).

I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I love these previews now that I'm more in tune with the book release world, because it makes me feel so ahead of the game! I'm very excited for so many of these releases, and love the chance to get a sneak peek. I've marked down many that I will keep an eye out for on NetGalley and online when they release!

I love these previews of the upcoming books. Always a great way to find my next read. I particularly the debut author section and the non fiction section.

My TBR just got a lot longer! This is a quick and informative read that will get you ready for all the books you didn't know you needed in 2021.

I always enjoy when Buzz Books comes out so I can get a sneak peek of some of the new books coming out in 2021. This was a great look into what I might like and I have added several books to my TBR pile. It's a quick read and very informative!!