An Entertaining Story

© An Entertaining Story by India Hicks, Rizzoli New York, 2020

India Hicks is world-renowned for her irreverent take on style and interior design. In her two previous books, she invited readers into her homes on Harbour Island and in England, and in her latest, AN ENTERTAINING STORY, Hicks presents her own slightly madcap spin on entertaining. Organized by meal, the book begins marvelously with the most important meal of the day—cocktail hour—and ends with breakfast. In between, there are family suppers and big dinners, birthday cakes and Christmas crackers, great British breakfasts, quick teas, and long lunches. Like Hicks, herself, these stories are full of personality, from the Panic Dinner (or what to do when you suddenly have a crowd descending) to Find a Theme (and buy a glue gun) and Hot and Cold Christmas (and our weird traditions) —as well as a parade of memorable guests from Mick Jagger to an uninvited snake who startled a group of magazine editors from New York.

Each celebration includes clever advice and inspiration for place settings, homemade flower arrangements, table design, and more. These are parties that make use of what is on hand, whether it is beach towels and bed covers thrown down a long table, children’s candy piled in cups on a tray, mustard pots used as vases, or massing palm fronds collected from the garden. Beautifully photographed and embellished with a bit of Hicks family lore, AN ENTERTAINING STORY is rounded out with a sprinkling of recipes from India’s beloved cook, Claire Williams, fondly known as Top Banana, and other family members, from traditional English fare such as Victoria Sponge to tropical treats such as the Marquess’s Banana Daiquiri.

photo credit: Brittan Goetz

Humorous, deeply personal, and thoroughly inviting, this is the book that fans of this style icon have been waiting for.

About the Author
Author, model, entrepreneur, TV personality, and daughter of famed designer David Hicks, India Hicks comes from both British and design royalty. She and her work have been featured in numerous magazines including Architectural Digest, Town & Country, House Beautiful, People, Forbes, and many other publications. Hicks hosted the second season of the Bravo interior design competition Top Design and is the New York Times best-selling author of several books including India Hicks: Island Style and India Hicks: A Slice of England, both published by Rizzoli New York.

Additional Contributors
Brooke Shields is an award-winning actress, model, and bestselling author. Brittan Goetz is a lifestyle photographer, art director and digital designer who whose work has appeared in Martha Stewart Weddings, Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Award-winning, and internationally acclaimed photographer David Loftus has photographed more than 100 books over the past twenty years.

The Girl from Widow Hills

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Last House Guest – a Reese Witherspoon Book Club selection – comes a new novel of psychological suspense about a young woman plagued by night terrors who wakes one evening to find a corpse at her feet.

Inspired by the story of Baby Jessica, Miranda tells us the story of the girl from Widow Hills. Arden Maynor was just six years old when she was swept away while sleepwalking during a terrifying rainstorm and went missing for days. Strangers and friends, neighbors and rescue workers, set up search parties and held vigils, praying for her safe return. Against all odds, she was found, alive, clinging to a storm drain. The girl from Widow Hills was a living miracle. Arden’s mother wrote a book. Fame followed. Fans and fan letters, creeps, and stalkers. And every year, the anniversary. It all became too much. As soon as she was old enough, Arden changed her name and disappeared from the public eye.

Now a young woman living hundreds of miles away, Arden goes by Olivia. She’s managed to stay off the radar for the last few years. But with the twentieth anniversary of her rescue approaching, the media will inevitably renew its interest in Arden. Where is she now? Soon Olivia feels like she’s being watched and begins sleepwalking again, like she did long ago, even waking outside her home. Until late one night she jolts awake in her yard with the corpse of a man she knows from her previous life at her feet. And now, the girl from Widow Hills is about to become the center of the story, once again.

photo credit: Magen Marie Photography

Through Arden’s rebirth into anonymity, a twisted female friendship, and a fraught mother-daughter relationship, Miranda continues to blur the borders of genre fiction and explore the foundations and complexities of female relationships. THE GIRL FROM WIDOW HILLS is another propulsive page-turner from suspense master Megan Miranda.

About the Author
Megan Miranda is the New York Times best-selling author of The Last House Guest, The Perfect Stranger, and All the Missing Girls. She has also written several books for young adults, including The Safest Lies, Fragments of the Lost, and Come Find Me. She grew up in New Jersey, graduated from MIT, and lives in North Carolina with her husband and two children.

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

Kira Navárez dreamed of finding life on new worlds.

Now she has awakened a nightmare.

While exploring a distant planet, she discovers an alien relic that thrusts her into an epic journey of transformation and discovery.

Her odyssey will carry her to the far reaches of the galaxy.
Earth and her colonies are on the brink of annihilation.

One woman.
The will to survive.
The hope of humanity.

photo credit: Lo Hunter

This epic novel follows Kira Navárez, who, during a routine survey mission on an uncolonized planet, finds an alien relic that thrusts her into the wonders and the nightmares of first contact. Epic space battles for the fate of humanity take her to the farthest reaches of the galaxy and, in the process, transform not only her ― but the entire course of history.

About the Author
Christopher Paolini was born in Southern California and has lived most of his life in Paradise Valley, Montana. He published his first novel, Eragon, in 2003 at the age of 19, and quickly became a publishing phenomenon. His Inheritance Cycle – Eragon and its three sequels – have sold nearly 40 million copies worldwide. This is his first adult novel.

Black Bottom Saints

An enthralling literary tour-de-force that pays tribute to Detroit’s legendary neighborhood, a mecca for jazz, sports, and politics, Black Bottom Saints is a powerful blend of fact and imagination reminiscent of E.L. Doctorow’s classic novel Ragtime and Marlon James’ Man Booker Award-winning masterpiece, A Brief History of Seven Killings.

From the Great Depression through the post-World War II years, Joseph “Ziggy” Johnson, has been the pulse of Detroit’s famous Black Bottom. A celebrated gossip columnist for the city’s African-American newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle, he is also the emcee of one of the hottest night clubs, where he’s rubbed elbows with the legendary black artists of the era, including Ethel Waters, Billy Eckstein, and Count Basie. Ziggy is also the founder and dean of the Ziggy Johnson School of Theater. But now the doyen of Black Bottom is ready to hang up his many dapper hats.

As he lays dying in the black-owned-and-operated Kirkwood Hospital, Ziggy reflects on his life, the community that was the center of his world, and the remarkable people who helped shape it.

Inspired by the Catholic Saints Day Books, Ziggy curates his own list of Black Bottom’s venerable “52 Saints.” Among them are a vulnerable Dinah Washington, a defiant Joe  Louis, and a raucous Bricktop. Randall balances the stories of these larger-than-life “Saints” with local heroes who became household names, enthralling men and women whose unstoppable ambition, love of style, and faith in community made this black Midwestern neighborhood the rival of New York City’s Harlem.

Accompanying these “tributes” are thoughtfully paired cocktails—special drinks that capture the essence of each of Ziggy’s saints—libations as strong and satisfying as Alice Randall’s wholly original view of a place and time unlike any other.

About the Author
Alice Randall is the Harvard-educated author of novels, including The Wind Done Gone, Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, Rebel Yell, and Ada’s Rules. An award-winning songwriter, she co-wrote the #1 hit XXX’s and OOO’s which celebrates Aretha Franklin. With her daughter, Caroline Randall Williams, she co-authored the acclaimed cookbook Soul Food Love which won the NAACP Image award and the young adult novel The Diary of B. B. Bright, Possible Princess, which received the Phillis Wheatley Award. A Professor and Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University, Randall teaches courses on soul food, African-American children’s literature, and African-American film. A native of Detroit, she lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

The Exiles

Seduced by her employer’s son, Evangeline, a naïve young governess in early nineteenth-century London, is discharged when her pregnancy is discovered and sent to the notorious Newgate Prison. After months in the
fetid, overcrowded jail, she learns she is sentenced to “the land beyond the seas,” Van Diemen’s Land, a penal colony in Australia. Though uncertain of what awaits, Evangeline knows one thing: the child she carries will be born on the months-long voyage to this distant land.

During the journey on a repurposed slave ship, the Medea, Evangeline strikes up a friendship with Hazel, a girl little older than her former pupils who was sentenced to seven years transport for stealing a silver spoon. Canny where Evangeline is guileless, Hazel—a skilled midwife and herbalist—is soon offering home remedies to both prisoners and sailors in return for a variety of favors.

Though Australia has been home to Aboriginal people for more than 50,000 years, the British government in the 1840s considers its fledgling colony uninhabited and unsettled, and views the natives as an unpleasant nuisance. By the time the Medea arrives, many of them have been forcibly relocated, their land seized by white colonists. One of these relocated people is Mathinna, the orphaned daughter of the Chief of the Lowreenne tribe, who has been adopted by the new governor of Van Diemen’s Land.

In this gorgeous novel, Christina Baker Kline brilliantly recreates the beginnings of a new society in a beautiful and challenging land, telling the story of Australia from a fresh perspective, through the experiences of Evangeline, Hazel, and Mathinna. While life in Australia is punishing and often brutally unfair, it is also, for some, an opportunity: for redemption, for a new way of life, for unimagined freedom. Told in exquisite detail and incisive prose, The Exiles is a story of grace born from hardship, the unbreakable bonds of female friendships, and the unfettering of
legacy.

photo credit: Beowulf-Sheehan

About the Author
Christina Baker Kline is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, including The Exiles, Orphan Train, and A Piece of the World, and has been published in 40 countries. Her novels have received the New England Prize for Fiction, the Maine Literary Award, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Award, among other prizes, and have been chosen by hundreds of communities, universities and schools as “One Book, One Read” selections. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in publications such as the New York
Times and the NYT Book Review, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Psychology Today, and Salon.

Christina Baker Kline was born in England and raised in the American South and Maine. She is a graduate of Yale (B.A.), Cambridge (M.A.), and the University of Virginia (M.F.A.), where she was a Hoyns Fellow in Fiction Writing. A resident of New York City and Southwest Harbor, Maine, she is married to David Kline and has three sons: Hayden, Will, and Eli. She serves on the advisory boards of the Center for Fiction (NYC), the Jesup Library (Bar Harbor, ME), the Montclair Literary Festival (NJ), the Kauai Writers Conference (HI), and Roots & Wings (NJ); and on the gala committees of Poets & Writers and The Authors Guild (NYC) and Friends of Acadia (ME). She is an Artist-Mentor for StudioDuke at Duke University and the BookEnds program at Stony Brook University.

Kline’s latest novel, The Exiles (2020), captures the hardship, oppression, opportunity and hope of a trio of women’s lives—two English convicts and an orphaned Aboriginal girl — in nineteenth-century Australia. A Piece of the World (2017), an instant NYT bestseller, explores the real-life relationship between the artist Andrew Wyeth and the subject of his best-known painting, Christina’s World. Orphan Train (2013), about a little-known but significant piece of American history, spent more than two years on the NYT bestseller list, including five weeks at #1. Orphan Train and A Piece of the World have been optioned for film.

Kline has written six other novels — The Way Life Should Be, Bird in Hand, Desire Lines, Sweet Water, and Orphan Train Girl— and written or edited five nonfiction books: The Conversation Begins (with Christina L. Baker), Child of Mine, Room to Grow, About Face (with Anne Burt), and Always too Soon (with Allison Gilbert).