FREE/BARGAIN — Fiction (everything else)

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

Why would that invalidate the price match? Aren't all sales discounts?

Yes, but not all discounts are sales. Some are specific circumstances and not for everyone. No doubt only universal discounts count.

[SomeSteve]

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk is $1.99 at Amazon US and Kobo US.

https://www.amazon.com/Drive-Your-Pl.../dp/B07KNV4RC3

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/dri...-of-the-dead-2

[SomeSteve]

The Stories of John Cheever is $1.99 at Amazon US and Kobo US.

https://www.amazon.com/Stories-John-.../dp/B003WUYQC8

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the...f-john-cheever

[Cactus Chef]

Before the Coffee Gets Cold: A Toshikazu Kawaguchi Book Set (Before the Coffee Gets Cold Series) by Toshikazu Kawaguchi is $5 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

What would you do if you could travel back in time? Discover the internationally bestselling novels of Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, now a worldwide phenomenon and BookTok sensation, in this special new box set. Step inside Tokyo’s whimsical Café Funiculi Funicula and travel back in time with a cast of unforgettable characters, including:

Before the Coffee Gets Cold: estranged sisters, a newly pregnant customer, and the wife of a man with early onset Alzheimer’s
Tales from the Café: a detective with a gift, a son with regrets, and a man chasing “the one who got away”
Before Your Memory Fades: a comedian with big dreams, a grieving sister, and childhood lovers

For new and longtime fans alike, this boxed set is the perfect collection of heartwarming, uplifting tales that remind us we “don’t have to live burdened by regret” (New York Times). Translated from Japanese in the signature prose of Geoffrey Trousselot, each installment of this series brings new adventure that has captivated millions of readers around the world.

[salty-horse]

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
In 2008, a group of women writers read the book and annotated it with their conversations, so technically it's already free to read online: https://thegoldennotebook.org/

Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna resolves to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.

Lessing's best-known and most influential novel, The Golden Notebook retains its extraordinary power and relevance decades after its initial publication.

[salty-horse]

Woman of Light by Kali Fajardo-Anstine is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

There is one every generation, a seer who keeps the stories.

Luz “Little Light” Lopez, a tea leaf reader and laundress, is left to fend for herself after her older brother, Diego, a snake charmer and factory worker, is run out of town by a violent white mob. As Luz navigates 1930s Denver, she begins to have visions that transport her to her Indigenous homeland in the nearby Lost Territory. Luz recollects her ancestors’ origins, how her family flourished, and how they were threatened. She bears witness to the sinister forces that have devastated her people and their homelands for generations. In the end, it is up to Luz to save her family stories from disappearing into oblivion.

Written in Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s singular voice, the wildly entertaining and complex lives of the Lopez family fill the pages of this multigenerational western saga. Woman of Light is a transfixing novel about survival, family secrets, and love—filled with an unforgettable cast of characters, all of whom are just as special, memorable, and complicated as our beloved heroine, Luz.

[salty-horse]

The Sand-Reckoner by Gillian Bradshaw is $3 on Amazon (Kobo still full price, but I think it's price-matchable)
This is historical fiction, but reimagines Greece with more advanced tech than it has, so is kind of science fiction.

The Sand-Reckoner from author Gillian Bradshaw is a historical account that reimagines the life of one of ancient Greek's greatest minds.

The young scholar Archimedes has just had the best three years of his life at Ptolemy's Museum at Alexandria. To be able to talk and think all day, every day, sharing ideas and information with the world's greatest minds, is heaven to Archimedes. But heaven must be forsaken when he learns that his father is ailing, and his home city of Syracuse is at war with the Romans.

Reluctant but resigned, Archimedes takes himself home to find a job building catapults as a royal engineer. Though Syracuse is no Alexandria, Archimedes also finds that life at home isn't as boring or confining as he originally thought. He finds fame and loss, love and war, wealth and betrayal-none of which affects him nearly as much as the divine beauty of mathematics.

[salty-horse]

Marcovaldo by Italo Calvino is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

A charming portrait of one man’s dreams and schemes, by “the greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century” (The Guardian).

In this enchanting book of linked stories, Italo Calvino charts the disastrous schemes of an Italian peasant, an unskilled worker in a drab northern industrial city in the 1950s and ’60s, struggling to reconcile his old country habits with his current urban life.

Marcovaldo has a practiced eye for spotting natural beauty and an unquenchable longing for the unspoiled rural world of his imagination. Much to the continuing puzzlement of his wife, his children, his boss, and his neighbors, he chases his dreams and gives rein to his fantasies, whether it’s sleeping in the great outdoors on a park bench, following a stray cat, or trying to catch wasps. Unfortunately, the results are never quite what he anticipates.

Spanning from the 1950s to the 1960s, the twenty stories in Marcovaldo are alternately comic and melancholy, farce and fantasy. Throughout, Calvino’s unassuming masterpiece “conveys the sensuous, tangible qualities of life” (The New York Times).

[SomeSteve]

The Books of Jacob by Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk is around $3/€3 at Amazon US, Kobo US, and various EU sites.

https://www.amazon.com/Books-Jacob-N.../dp/B096Z414M3

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-books-of-jacob

[Tarana]

Historical Fiction - Eagles of the Empire series by Simon Scarrow. A number of books in the series are $4.99, a few $2.99. Amazon and Kobo.

Series follows a couple of soldiers in Roman Army.

[Dr. Drib]

Literary Fiction of the highest order:

If on a Winter's Night A Traveler, by Italo Calvino

Only $1.99


Thanks to salty-horse for the sale alert. Details over in Sci-Fi:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...82259&page=619

[Cactus Chef]

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy is on sale for $1.99:

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/no-...d-02acddc22085

https://www.amazon.com/Country-Old-M.../dp/B000WJSB4Q

[salty-horse]

Major Arcana by John Pistelli is $3 on Amazon.com (Kobo is full price but should be eligible for price-matching)
Review by Ian Mond, Review by Catherine Baker in Strange Horizons

“Perhaps the elusive great American novel for the twenty-first century.”

It begins with a gunshot: a student's public suicide on a university campus. The blast radius of this tragic explosion expands to encompass 50 years of our history and two of the grandest characters in recent American fiction: Simon Magnus, a comic-book writer who transfigured popular culture turned gender activist who transfigures the English language, and Ash del Greco, an online occultist who by the age of 20 has seen to the end of everything and wants desperately to prove the superiority of mind over matter. With a decades-spanning but tightly-knit plot, written in an expansive style, Major Arcana canvasses America’s inner life and moral history from coast to coast and across two generations in a delirious saga about art, magic, love, and death.

Originally serialized on the author’s Substack newsletter, Major Arcana is a novel about the transformative power of popular culture. With a nod to Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and for fans of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Pistelli reimagines the expansive novel for the 21st century.

[ZodWallop]

Wake of the Perdido Star by Gene Hackman and Daniel Lenihan is $1 at Amazon and Kobo. Looks like swashbuckling high adventure.

The Oscar-winning actor teams up with a shipwreck diving expert to spin a cinematic tale of nineteenth century pirates, shipwrecks, and sea adventure.

In 1805, seventeen-year-old Jack O’Reilly sets sail with his parents from America to Cuba aboard the Perdido Star. But when tragedy strikes shortly after their arrival, Jack makes a desperate escape, rejoining the departing Star as a member of the crew. On his yearslong journey around the globe, he only grows more obsessed with avenging the murder of his parents.

By the time he returns to Cuba, Jack has faced storms, shipwreck, and deadly battles. He leads a renegade band who call themselves the Right Honourable Brotherhood of the Shipwrecked Men of the Star. But having seen and suffered so much, what is Jack now willing to sacrifice for revenge?

Hackman and Lenihan infuse this swashbuckling tale with authentic details of 19th century seafaring and deep sea diving. The hero Jack is joined by a colorful cast of characters, including Paul Le Maire, the aristocratic intellectual who earns Jack’s friendship; Quince, the first mate, Jack’s mentor and defender; Quen-Li, the mysterious Chinese cook whose skills extend beyond the galley; Hansumbob, the ship’s poet, whose simplicity belies a wisdom born of the heart; and the greedy Count de Silva, whose charm masks a murderous soul.

[salty-horse]

The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr is £3 in the UK (Kobo, Amazon)
Review by Abigail Nussbaum (Part of a Best of 2023 list, but there's a link to a longer post)

WINNER OF THE 2022 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE

When a mudslide strands a train, Baxter, a sleeping car porter, must contend with the perils of white passengers, ghosts, and his secret love affair.

Baxter's name isn't George. But it's 1929, and Baxter is lucky enough, as a Black man, to have a job as a sleeping car porter on a train that crisscrosses the country. So when the passengers call him George, he has to just smile and nod and act invisible. What he really wants is to go to dentistry school, but he'll have to save up a lot of nickel and dime tips to get there, so he puts up with "George."

On this particular trip out west, the passengers are more unruly than usual, especially when the train is stalled for two extra days; their secrets start to leak out and blur with the sleep-deprivation hallucinations Baxter is having. When he finds a naughty postcard of two queer men, Baxter's memories and longings are reawakened; keeping it puts his job in peril, but he can't part with the postcard or his thoughts of Edwin Drew, Porter Instructor.