Last dance on the starlight pier

Awakening exhausted on the Galveston beach after a dance marathon, Evie Grace Devlin witnesses the fiery destruction of the Starlite Palace, a performance venue, while recalling a terrible mistake she made. Following this striking opening, the story rewinds three years to 1929 as Evie flees her traumatic vaudeville past and her vain, abusive mother by enrolling in nursing school in Galveston. Here she finds friendship and her calling. When her nursing pin is unjustly withheld, Evie grudgingly returns to the entertainment world as nurse for a dance marathon group, including its dashing star, Zave. Bird (Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen, 2018) is a master at crafting narrative voices, and Evie's is an irresistible blend of scrappy determination and vulnerability. Despite her street smarts, her instincts sometimes lead her astray. The Depression is a multifaceted character in this addictive tale, which evokes ferocious dust storms, dance marathons' demanding rules, and Chicago nightlife as acutely as the emotions of desperate Americans seizing happiness wherever they can. As the novel stirringly demonstrates in multiple ways, home can be found amid people who accept us for ourselves.

Bird's immersive latest (after Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen) dives into the gritty world of the Depression-era dance marathon craze. In 1932, all 21-year-old Evie Grace Devlin wants is to become a registered nurse. But she's denied graduation and the coveted RN pin from a Catholic nursing school in Galveston, Tex., after revelations surface about her past as a vaudeville performer. While in Houston visiting her mother, Evie stops in to watch a marathon competition that pits locals against professional dancers. There, she treats the sprained ankle of star pro dancer Zave Cassidy, and when the promoter sees Evie dance, he pairs her with Zave, to the delight of the audience. Evie stays with the show because she needs the money and time to figure out how to get her nursing pin. Plus she and Zave have fallen in love. His reluctance to get married stems from his conviction that, despite his best intentions, he'll make a poor husband. A disaster during a dance forces Evie to reevaluate her plans and to confront the inadequacies of modern medicine. The author brings her spunky heroine to vivid life amid the atmospheric setting. Bird's finely crafted novel is sure to delight. Agent: Kristine Dahl, ICM Partners. (Apr.)

From Barenbaum, author of Barnes & Noble Discover pick A Bend in the Stars, Atomic Anna features a renowned nuclear scientist who is sleeping as Chernobyl melts down in 1986 and rips through time to meet her estranged daughter Molly in 1992, shot in the chest and begging her to go back and change the past (50,000-copy first printing). In Bird's Last Dance on the Starlight Pier, Evie Grace Devlin tries to leave vaudeville behind to become a nurse in 1930s Galveston, TX, but encounters setbacks and instead gets caught up in the shady world of dance marathons; following the Dublin International Literary Award long-listed Above the East China Sea (75,000-copy first printing). In Spur Award-winning Dallas's 1918 Denver-set Little Souls, sisters Helen and Lutie care for the daughter of a flu victim, and an abusive man's murder is covered up by leaving his body on the streets with all the other corpses to be collected (30,000-copy first printing). PEN/Robert W. Bingham finalist Llanos-Figueroa explores 19th-century Puerto Rican plantation society through Pola, A Woman of Endurance, captured in Africa and brought to Puerto Rico to bear babies subsequently taken from her and enslaved (40,000-copy first printing). First in a tetralogy, Scurati's internationally best-selling, Strega Award-winning M.--short for Mussolini--explores the rise of fascism in Italy (40,000-copy first printing). In The Good Left Undone, the New York Times best-selling Trigiana returns to Italy, where Matelda, the dying matriarch of a Tuscan artisan family, reveals her mother's love of the Scottish sea captain that fathered Matelda during World War II.