Fans of the bestselling novel Julie and Romeo and anyone looking for a delightfully funny novel with a clever punch: add Calling Invisible Women by Jeanne Ray to your TBR list! Jeanne Ray satirizes the ups and down of family and friendship in middle age with great wit and charm. Her strong, funny, smart female characters will keep you laughing and turning the pages. A perfect way to ease into your summer reading!

RIFers! We know you’re big Lisa Unger fans, and we love sharing advance copies of her thrillers with you well before they hit the shelves. Her latest will captivate you. Heartbroken is the story of three women, strangers, on a heart-wrenching collision course none of them could have seen coming. It will keep you turning pages late into the night. We have a treat for you: a downloadable excerpt of Heartbroken by Lisa Unger. Enjoy the read, and good luck, all!

“On a raw night in February,” writes author Alyssa Shelasky, author of Apron Anxiety, “I ordered a peppermint tea in a bright Greenwich Village diner and unwrapped a bound galley of my book. It was the first time I saw how everything came together – from the cover selection, to the blurbs on the back, to my 80,000–something words. Oh, those words! The words that were my core being for an entire year straight! Just touching the pages was surreal. I started to cry. And then I laughed. Because as I read the story, as a girl sitting in a diner, not an author wrestling with ‘her art,’ this cool-looking paperback was actually funny and touching!”

“Rocky Flats was the big secret of my childhood,” says Kristen Iversen, author of Full Body Burden. “No one knew what they did at the plant; the rumor in the neighborhood was that they made household cleaning products. We knew nothing about radioactive and toxic contamination. My childhood was also shadowed by the secrecy surrounding my father’s alcoholism. My family was very close and loving but also troubled. I wrote the book to learn what really happened at Rocky Flats, to learn everything I could about plutonium pits and nuclear weapons and the crucial role the plant played during and after the Cold War.”

“When I set out to write The Watch, I wanted to give voice to the statistics, especially those counted as collateral damage in our foreign wars of choice,” says novelist Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya. “I decided to tell the story of one brave and representative young Afghan woman who refuses to yield her right to bury the body of her brother killed during a battle with an American combat company. In modeling my Pashtun protagonist explicitly on Sophocles’ Antigone, I introduced a figure from Greek tragic drama – perhaps its purest figure – in order to enable you to feel her sorrow, sorrow of a magnitude to which we’ve become immunized, despite our best intentions, in an age of the ceaseless warfare.”

“I cannot say this urgently enough,” says Scott Smith, New York Times bestselling author of The Ruins and A Simple Plan, “you have to read Gone Girl. It’s as if Gillian Flynn has mixed us a martini using battery acid instead of vermouth and somehow managed to make it taste really, really good. Gone Girl is delicious and intoxicating and delightfully poisonous.” Scott Smith’s not the only one urging you to read Gillian Flynn’s latest. Karin Slaughter, New York Times bestselling author of Fallen, says “Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl reminds me of Patricia Highsmith at the top of her game.” Be among the first to read it! RIF is excited to give you the chance to win a copy of Gone Girl months before its June 2012 release.