New and Coming Soon

Blue Ear Books authors and staff have been busy throughout 2021, publishing several compelling books and preparing several more for planned publication early in 2022. Thomas MacDonald‘s autobiography Here Is What Happened: A Black Man’s Discoveries and Decisions, several years in the works and finally published in September, is partly about, as the Bermuda-born author ruefully puts it, “learning how to be Black in America.” An enhanced second edition of Christo Brand’s memoir of his friendship with Nelson Mandela is in the last stages of preparation for publication, with a new foreword by Mandela’s eldest daughter and a rich assortment of additional material lovingly solicited and selected by editor Andrew Russell.

David Howell and I both wrote pandemic diaries during 2020. Howell’s lovely book The Serenity Experiment is a kind of local, close-to-home sequel or companion to his earlier book of ruminative bicycle travel The Descent into Happiness and was published in spring 2021. My own diary, In the Before Time, is planned for publication in book form in March 2022, to mark two years since the Covid pandemic hit my home city of Seattle.

Consequences: An Intelligence Officer’s War by David Grantham continues selling well and getting excellent notices and, along with What They Signed Up For by Jeb Wyman, is helping establish a model for further personal accounts written by military veterans. Look for information soon about other projects on this website’s new Veterans page. Dennis Rea‘s entertaining novella-length Tuva and Busted, about his musical adventures in the far reaches of Central Asia, remains available as a free PDF download.

Coming soon: Lisa Carrington Firmin‘s book on military sexual trauma, Jay Joshi‘s ordeal as a physician during the opioid epidemic, a second edition of What They Signed Up For, and more. As the saying goes, watch this space!

– Ethan Casey, Publisher, Blue Ear Books, October 10, 2021