Interviews of Early Summer

After getting overwhelmed with books I had to read for various types of interviews, I cut back a bit so that I could focus on my own research and novels—hence the various writing posts here on the blog. But now I’m catching up again, and here are four interviews I expect to conduct, either here on the blog or for the New Books Network. My NBN channel is booked into November, in fact, so you can expect a few more such overviews before the end of the year.

And yes, I know I covered these four books in my Spring Bookshelf post, but I hadn’t read any of them then!

Shana Galen, A Shop Girl’s Guide to Wooing a Lord (Heiress Hunters 1) (Berkley, June 2026)

Tamsin Archer and Garret Kildare are just about as far apart in terms of social status as a couple can be. She lives hand to mouth in one of London’s less reputable neighborhoods, so poor she can’t afford to ransom her two younger siblings, sold off to a chimney sweep by her employer.

He is the son of an Irish earl, and although his late grandfather’s reckless ways have left the family seeking an heiress bride to avoid selling off their ancestral estate, Garret himself has little understanding of true poverty until he encounters Tamsin by chance at a party where he is supposed to be wooing said heiress.

Sparks fly, of course, and the whole is a delightful exploration of what brings people together despite society’s insistence that they should want nothing to do with each other. You can hear the author’s take on that question from my June interview for New Books in Historical Fiction. Check back here for the link.

April Howells, The Unforgettable Mailman (Alcove Press, 2026) already came out in April, but I wasn’t able to talk to her then, as I had already agreed to feature Linda Hamilton on the NBN that month.

Set in 1960s Chicago, this novel—although technically historical fiction—gives me that rather creepy chill down the spine because I lived in Chicago during the events the book describes, so it doesn’t feel like historical fiction to me. Nonetheless, I am reining in my natural reactions, because I really do look forward to reading the book in time to draw up questions and chat with April Howells for my July NBN interview.

Here on the blog, I have two more conversations planned between now and what’s sure to be an over-the-top July 4. It’s the semi-quincentennial, after all (a term I forget even more often than I remember it). Neither book is historical fiction per se, but they go in very different directions.

Caitlin Shetterly, The Gulf of Lions (Harper, May 2026)

Like it or not, we all remember the COVID shutdown, even though daily masking and the time before protective vaccines have receded into the distance. Imagine all that happening when you also face a life-threatening cancer diagnosis and discover your husband is having an affair.

Alice, the main narrator of this standalone sequel to Shetterly’s Pete and Alice in Maine, reacts by taking off on a tour of southern France with her two daughters, leaving the formerly straying Pete behind in New York.

But what sets this novel apart is the way it pulls the reader into the moment-to-moment experience of good food, great wine, and a beautiful countryside, despite the unavoidable tensions of driving with a fourteen- and an eight-year-old through unfamiliar territory where people speak a language you knew well about two decades ago but haven’t brushed up on since.

Marian Yee, 4 Janes (Little A, June 2026)

As a general rule—although I break it surprisingly often and even wrote such a novel myself—I tend to avoid books that revisit other authors’ characters. Jane Austen is, of course, front and center in the “beloved authors’ spinoffs” stakes, but Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, and other favorites have also been pressed into service.

What appeals to me about this one is that Marian Yee imagines what would have happened if Jane Eyre had not held out for Rochester but had instead gone off with St. John Rivers—and then reincarnated three times between 1853 and 2008. That’s quite a hook, and I’m curious to see both how it turns out and what the author has to say about what prompted her, first to write the book and then to bring Jane back in these different lives, when she answers my questions here on the blog a few weeks from now.