Free Books by Random House Publishing

What better way to relax than sitting or lounging on your favorite chair or sofa with a good book to take your mind miles away from reality.

For your reading pleasure, we introduce the following three books you can order for FREE. Click on the books to order your free issue. While supplies last.

ABOUT THIS BOOK
Take chocolate candy, add a family business at war with itself, and stir with an outsider’s perspective. This is the recipe for True Confections, the irresistible new novel by Katharine Weber, a writer whose work has won accolades from Iris Murdoch, Madeleine L’Engle, Wally Lamb, and Kate Atkinson, to name a few.

Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky’s marriage into the Ziplinsky family has not been unanimously celebrated. Her greatest ambition is to belong, to feel truly entitled to the heritage she has tried so hard to earn. Which is why Zip’s Candies is much more to her than just a candy factory, where she has worked for most of her life. In True Confections, Alice has her reasons for telling the multigenerational saga of the family-owned-and-operated candy company, now in crisis.

Nobody is more devoted than Alice to delving into the truth of Zip’s history, starting with the rags-to-riches story of how Hungarian immigrant Eli Czaplinsky developed his famous candy lines, and how each of his candies, from Little Sammies to Mumbo Jumbos, was inspired by an element in a stolen library copy of Little Black Sambo, from which he taught himself English. Within Alice’s vivid and persuasive account (is her unreliability a tactic or a condition?) are the stories of a runaway slave from the cacao plantations of Côte d’Ivoire and the Third Reich’s failed plan to establish a colony on Madagascar for European Jews.

Richly informed, deeply moving, and spiked with Weber’s trademark wit, True Confections is, at its heart, a timeless and universal story of love, betrayal, and chocolate.



ABOUT THIS BOOK
Opera singer Sabine Conrad is the toast of nineteenth-century New York high society. A celebrated soprano with the voice of an angel, she is showered with adulation by her audiences and courted by wealthy patrons. But behind the scenes, her every move is controlled by a Svengali-like manager, Gideon Price.

When her attempt to escape him goes tragically awry, she flees, leaving behind a grisly murder. Three years later, as Marguerite Olson, she has put aside the prima donna she once was to run a low-class theater in Seattle. Hidden among prostitutes, drunks, and miners, a desperate and determined Marguerite carefully guards the secrets of her old life—until her past returns to offer a terrifying proposition.

Prima Donna captures both the glittering decadence of New York and the rough raunchy waterfront of Seattle, as Marguerite, caught between two worlds, must find the strength to confront the truth of her past and choose which voice defines her in this dark and harrowing novel.

ABOUT THIS BOOK
Cora Sledge is horrified when her children, who doubt her ability to take care of herself, plot to remove her from her home. So what if her house is a shambles? Who cares when she last changed her clothes? If an eighty-two-year-old widow wants to live on junk food, pills, and cigarettes, hasn’t she earned the right?

When her kids force her into The Palisades, an assisted living facility, Cora takes to her bed, planning to die as soon as possible. But life isn’t finished with her yet, not by a long shot. Deciding that truth is the best revenge, Cora begins to write a tell-all journal that reveals once and for all the secret she has guarded since she was a young woman. In entries that are profane, profound, and gossipy, she chronicles her childhood in rural Missouri, her shotgun wedding, and the terrible event that changed the course of her life. Intermingled with her reminiscences is an account of the day-to-day dramas at The Palisades—her budding romance with a suave new resident, feuds with her tablemates, her rollicking camaraderie with the man who oversees her health care, and the sinister cloud of suspicion that descends as a series of petty crimes sets everyone on edge.

The story builds to a powerful climax as Cora’s revelations about her past mesh with the unraveling intrigue in the present. Cora is by turns outrageous, irreverent, and wickedly funny. Despite a life with more than its share of disappointment and struggle, she refuses to go gently into her twilight years, remaining intensely curious, disinclined to play it safe, and willing to start over. Breaking Out of Bedlam captures the loneliness and secrets that lurk within families, the hardscrabble reality facing women with limited resources, and the resilience of a woman who survives, despite all the odds, through an unlikely combination of passion, humor, and faith.

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