Five thrillers with a main character who can’t remember what matters most… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

The Bourne Identity: Jason Bourne Book #1

by Robert Ludlum
Kindle price: $9.99

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

His memory is a blank. His bullet-ridden body was fished from the Mediterranean Sea. His face has been altered by plastic surgery. A frame of microfilm has been surgically implanted in his hip. Even his name is a mystery. Marked for death, he is racing for survival through a bizarre world of murderous conspirators—led by Carlos, the world’s most dangerous assassin. Who is Jason Bourne? The answer may kill him.

* * *

The Pocket Wife: A Novel

by Susan Crawford
Kindle price: $12.99

A stylish psychological thriller with the compelling intrigue of The Silent Wife and Turn of Mind and the white-knuckle pacing of Before I Go to Sleep—in which a woman suffering from bipolar disorder cannot remember if she murdered her friend.

Dana Catrell is shocked when her neighbor Celia is brutally murdered. To Dana’s horror, she was the last person to see Celia alive. Suffering from mania, the result of her bipolar disorder, she has troubling holes in her memory, including what happened on the afternoon of Celia’s death.

Her husband’s odd behavior and the probing of Detective Jack Moss create further complications as she searches for answers. The closer she comes to piecing together the shards of her broken memory, the more Dana falls apart. Is there a murderer lurking inside her . . . or is there one out there in the shadows of reality, waiting to strike again?

A story of marriage, murder, and madness, The Pocket Wife explores the world through the foggy lens of a woman on the edge.

* * *

The Girl on the Train: A Novel

by Paula Hawkins
Kindle price: $9.99

EVERY DAY THE SAME
Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning and night. Every day she rattles down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their deck. She’s even started to feel like she knows them. Jess and Jason, she calls them. Their life–as she sees it–is perfect. Not unlike the life she recently lost.

UNTIL TODAY
And then she sees something shocking. It’s only a minute until the train moves on, but it’s enough. Now everything’s changed. Unable to keep it to herself, Rachel goes to the police. But is she really as unreliable as they say? Soon she is deeply entangled not only in the investigation but in the lives of everyone involved. Has she done more harm than good?

* * *

Before I Go To Sleep: A Novel

by S. J. Watson
Kindle price: $11.99

Memories define us. So what if you lost yours every time you went to sleep? Your name, your identity, your past, even the people you love–all forgotten overnight. And the one person you trust may be telling you only half the story. Welcome to Christine’s life. Every morning, she awakens beside a stranger in an unfamiliar bed. She sees a middle-aged face in the bathroom mirror that she does not recognize. And every morning, the man patiently explains that he is Ben, her husband, that she is forty-seven-years-old, and that an accident long ago damaged her ability to remember.

In place of memories Christine has a handful of pictures, a whiteboard in the kitchen, and a journal, hidden in a closet. She knows about the journal because Dr. Ed Nash, a neurologist who claims to be treating her without Ben’s knowledge, reminds her about it each day. Inside its pages, the damaged woman has begun meticulously recording her daily events—sessions with Dr. Nash, snippets of information that Ben shares, flashes of her former self that briefly, miraculously appear.

But as the pages accumulate, inconsistencies begin to emerge, raising disturbing questions that Christine is determined to find answers to. And the more she pieces together the shards of her broken life, the closer she gets to the truth . . . and the more terrifying and deadly it is.

* * *

The Flight Attendant: A Novel

by Chris Bohjalian
Kindle price: $9.99

Cassandra Bowden is no stranger to hungover mornings. She’s a binge drinker, her job with the airline making it easy to find adventure, and the occasional blackouts seem to be inevitable. She lives with them, and the accompanying self-loathing. When she awakes in a Dubai hotel room, she tries to piece the previous night back together, counting the minutes until she has to catch her crew shuttle to the airport. She quietly slides out of bed, careful not to aggravate her already pounding head, and looks at the man she spent the night with. She sees his dark hair. His utter stillness. And blood, a slick, still wet pool on the crisp white sheets. Afraid to call the police – she’s a single woman alone in a hotel room far from home – Cassie begins to lie. She lies as she joins the other flight attendants and pilots in the van. She lies on the way to Paris as she works the first class cabin. She lies to the FBI agents in New York who meet her at the gate. Soon it’s too late to come clean-or face the truth about what really happened back in Dubai. Could she have killed him? If not, who did?

Set amid the captivating world of those whose lives unfold at forty thousand feet, The Flight Attendant unveils a spellbinding story of memory, of the giddy pleasures of alcohol and the devastating consequences of addiction, and of murder far from home.

* * *

According to Lexy Perez from The Hollywood Reporter, ‘Twilight‘ author Stephenie Meyer to release companion novel ‘Midnight Sun‘…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

The news trickled out Monday morning after a countdown on Meyer’s website ended but fans were unable to reach the site.
It’s been 15 years since author Stephenie Meyer took the book world by storm with her debut novel, Twilight. Now Meyer is making her return to the Twilight world with Midnight Sun, the much-anticipated companion novel to the franchise.

The author first teased a surprise announcement by featuring a clock on her website’s homepage, seemingly counting down to the Monday reveal. The clock was also posted on the social media pages of her production company, Fickle Fish Films. The suspense drew fans into a frenzy as many were left theorizing whether the author would finally release Midnight Sun or return with a new book altogether. Indeed, when the countdown ended Monday morning, Meyer’s website seemingly crashed from all of the interest as fans were unable to reach it to find out the news. But, in a video that aired on Good Morning America, Meyer announced the release of Midnight Sun on Aug. 4. The book’s release date and information was also posted to her publisher’s website.

Though the author was originally set to publish Midnight Sun in 2008, Meyer canceled the publication plans after a copy of her manuscript was leaked online. The author then posted a partial rough draft of the work on her website but never released a completed story. At the time, she referred to Midnight Sun as “an exercise in character development that got wildly out of hand.”

Meyer’s Midnight Sun is a retelling of her Twilight love story but told from the point of Edward Cullen instead of Bella Swan.

Read full post on The Hollywood Reporter

Pre-Order Midnight Sun

The texts basically take literature’s great lover-boys and imagine how they’d behave with an iPhone. The results are pretty priceless. (Published on cheezburger.com) Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

1. Great Gatsby

2. Romeo and Juliet

3. Jane Eyre

4. Les Misérables

See full post on Cheezburger.com

 

The rhyming children’s classics you’ve read over and over to your kids are never going to be the same, according to Annie Reneau from Upworthy…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Filmmaker Wes Tank has taken some of Dr. Seuss‘s most popular stories and rapped them over Dr. Dre beats in a mashup so perfect it’s a wonder it hadn’t been done a million times before.

Check out his rap of the tongue-twisting Fox in Sox. If you’ve ever tried to read this book out loud, you know how challenging it is not to flub, especially the second half. To rap it like Tanks does is an incredibly impressive—and enjoyable—feat.

Read full post on Upworthy

“The Inseparables,” a novel Beauvoir abandoned in 1954, tells the story of a doomed friendship based on one from her own childhood, according to Alexandra Alter from the New York Times… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

In her 1963 memoir, “Force of Circumstance,” Simone de Beauvoir made a fleeting and tantalizing reference to a work of fiction she had abandoned. She described her attempt to write a story centered on her best friend Zaza, who died young of viral encephalitis.

Beauvoir started writing the novel in 1954, five years after publishing her groundbreaking feminist treatise “The Second Sex.” She worked on it for a few months, then showed it to Jean-Paul Sartre, her longtime romantic partner. Sartre was unimpressed. Beauvoir wrote in her memoir that she agreed with his wilting assessment: The story, she wrote, “seemed to have no inner necessity and failed to hold the reader’s interest.”

In the decades since, literary scholars have wondered what became of the manuscript. Even as other posthumous Beauvoir works came out, including volumes of her wartime journals and her love letters (to Sartre, Nelson Algren and Jacques-Laurent Bost), the fate of the novel remained a mystery.

Now the book, “The Inseparables,” is finally being published, after Beauvoir’s adopted daughter, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, decided to start releasing the works of fiction from the archive she inherited.

The 176-page novel, which is being released in France this fall and in the United States next year, illuminates a formative chapter of Beauvoir’s early life, and a pivotal relationship that shaped her views on gender inequality and sexism.

It could also offer new insight into Beauvoir’s development as a writer, and reshape scholars’ and readers’ understanding of her literary legacy. While Beauvoir published several works of fiction during her lifetime, including the novels “She Came to Stay” and “The Mandarins,” which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1954, she is best known today for her political and philosophical writing.

Read full post at The New York Times

Not everybody is happy with the speed of Amazon’s work these days, according to Julie Bort from Business Insider…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Many Amazon products are now showing shipment delays of over a month, reports Business Insider’s Eugene Kim. And even many of the items it deems essential, which it has prioritized restocking over all non-essential third-party items, are showing delays of days to weeks for delivery, such as tampons.

A growing number of Prime members who pay $119 a year for the free two-day delivery benefit are frustrated. Thousands have taken to Twitter or Facebook to complain.

“Amazon prime orders usually come like the next day or two … my cookware won’t come until the end of next month. It would be nice if Prime members got a refund during all of this,” one person tweeted on Monday.

“So does that mean all the Amazon Prime Members get a partial refund for the time period when Prime is no longer Prime?” another one tweeted.

Amazon’s statement to Business Insider points out that Prime membership includes a lot of other benefits, the implication being that it has no plans at the moment to refund customers on an automatic or widespread basis.

Here’s a tip from a reader who did get Amazon to refund him for one-month of his Prime membership:

He called customer service and specifically complained about buying Prime for its two-day shipping and not receiving his latest orders for five days. The customer service rep promptly refunded him one month’s of Prime, $14.03, according to the email on the transaction seen by Business Insider.

Amazon’s No. 1 rule of its famed Leadership Principals is Customer Obsession, which involves working “vigorously to earn and keep customer trust.”

The transaction shows that Amazon customer reps are authorized to refund a month’s Prime membership when dealing with an unhappy customer. But you can’t just bemoan about it on social media. If you buy Prime for its shipping benefit and you are genuinely unhappy about these delays during this time, a phone complaint could do the trick. You may walk away surprised and happy with the result.

Read full post on Business Insider

“Effectively every interaction between a citizen and her government depends on literacy,” the court held, according to Andrew Albanese from Publishers Weekly…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

In a potential landmark ruling, the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held this week that access to a basic minimum education “that can plausibly impart literacy” is a fundamental, Constitutionally protected right.

In a 2-1 ruling released on April 23, the court held that basic literacy is “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,” and central to “the basic exercise of other fundamental rights,” including political participation.

“The recognition of a fundamental right is no small matter,” the court conceded in its written opinion. “But just as this Court should not supplant the state’s policy judgments with its own, neither can we shrink from our obligation to recognize a right when it is foundational to our system of self-governance. Access to literacy is such a right. Its ubiquitous presence and evolution through our history has led the American people universally to expect it. And education—at least in the minimum form discussed here—is essential to nearly every interaction between a citizen and her government.”

The Appeals court ruling reverses and remands a 2016 case in which lawyers claim that the State of Michigan failed to provide a suitable education to a plaintiff group of Detroit Public School students, after invoking the state’s Emergency Management Powers to take over control of the plaintiff’s schools. At trial, the plaintiffs argued that they were forced to sit in classrooms that were “functionally incapable of delivering access to literacy,” marked by “unqualified instructors,” and “a dearth of textbooks and other school supplies.” The result: a number of students with “zero or near-zero” proficiency levels on state-administered tests.

See full post on Publishers Weekly