Barnes & Noble’s Selects Next Title for the Barnes & Noble Recommends Program “Main Selection”: Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin

New York, NY - Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, today announced that Tom Franklin’s new novel, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (William Morrow) is the latest “Main Selection” in the Barnes & Noble Recommends program. The book is on sale now and can be purchased at any Barnes & Noble store, online at Barnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com/recommends), or instantly downloaded on NOOK™.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter was chosen from the many fall publications under consideration for the honor. The title has received accolades from Barnes & Noble booksellers around the country. Jami Davis of Florence, Kentucky, one of the many Barnes & Noble booksellers who participated in the choice of the newest Recommends selection, called Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, “A literary mystery about the tragedy of the secrets we keep. I couldn’t help but be reminded of To Kill a Mockingbird.” Several booksellers seconded the similarity to Harper Lee’s masterpiece, while Melissa Moore of Duluth, Minnesota, compared Franklin to two contemporary bestselling authors, “It kept me awake until 3:00 a.m. It was so well written, on par with Greg Iles and Dennis Lehane.”

A suspenseful tale of fate and friendship, Franklin’s novel begins when Larry Ott returns home to find an intruder waiting for him. When a gun is jammed into Larry’s chest, death seems a certainty for the reclusive outcast. Folks in his Mississippi hometown had wished him dead for more than 20 years. As Cindy Walker’s date on the night she disappeared, Larry has continued to remain under suspicion by his neighbors, though the law considered the case closed long ago. But this book-loving boy, raised in a culture of hard-drinking men, never fit in, long before Cindy’s disappearance.

When Silas Jones and his mother moved into an abandoned cabin nearby, Larry and Silas became fast friends. Silas was fascinated by Larry’s gun collection and his interest in Stephen King; Larry was intrigued by the black boy’s baseball prowess and popularity. But still-simmering racial tensions would force them to hide their friendship, and when Larry was suspected of killing the missing girl, their bond was broken.

Years later, they’re reunited by fate when another girl disappears. While Larry lies in a hospital bed suspected of murder and attempted suicide, Silas, now the town constable, must plunge into the past to excavate a long buried secret. A beautifully composed blend of crime drama and literary fiction, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is a gripping revelation of human truths.

The Barnes & Noble Recommends program includes:

* Barnes & Noble store events. Reading group discussions and author appearances for Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter will be held in select Barnes & Noble stores.
* The online experience. A video interview with Tom Franklin will be posted online at www.bn.com/recommends.
* A free reading group guide. A free reader’s guide, including discussion questions and more about the author, is available at any Barnes & Noble store and at www.bn.com/recommends.
* Advice for reading groups. Customers can ask any Barnes & Noble bookseller for a copy of our free guide on how to start a reading group. The guide can also be found online at www.bn.com/bookclubs.

Each Barnes & Noble Recommends “Main Selection” is a book that Barnes & Noble believes is “unputdownable” and is especially appropriate for book discussion groups. The books can be discussed online at www.bn.com/recommends.

Previous Barnes & Noble Recommends Main Selections include:

* Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale
* Marisa de los Santos’ Belong to Me
* Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44
* Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’ The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
* Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo
* Louise Penny’s The Brutal Telling
* Nancy Pickard’s The Scent of Rain and Lightning
* Isabel Wolff’s A Vintage Affair


About Barnes & Noble, Inc.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller and a Fortune 500 company, operates 717 bookstores in 50 states. Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Barnes & Noble, also operates 633 college bookstores serving nearly 4 million students and faculty members at colleges and universities across the United States. Barnes & Noble is the nation’s top bookseller brand for the seventh year in a row, as determined by a combination of the brand’s performance on familiarity, quality, and purchase intent; the top bookseller in quality for the second year in a row and the number two retailer in trust, according to the EquiTrend® Brand Study by Harris Interactive®. Barnes & Noble conducts its online business through Barnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com), one of the Web’s largest e-commerce sites, which also features more than one million titles in its eBookstore (www.bn.com/ebooks). Through Barnes & Noble’s NOOK™ eReading product offering, customers can buy and read eBooks on the widest range of platforms, including NOOK eBook Readers, devices from partner companies, and hundreds of the most popular mobile and computing devices using free NOOK software.

General information on Barnes & Noble, Inc. can be obtained via the Internet by visiting the company’s corporate website: www.barnesandnobleinc.com.

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