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Full Circle for Viking Penguin
Daisy Maryles -- 6/23/97
The very successful Oprah Book Club -- her first seven selections all hit the top of the national charts within a week or two -- began with the Viking first fiction The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard. Now, it's Penguin's and Mary McGarry Morris's turn to reap the benefits. The author's third book, Songs in Ordinary Time, published July 1995, is Oprah's eighth pick and the last before she g s on her summer hiatus. Oprah noted the book's length (it's about 740 pages long) when she told her audience of her choice, waxing enthusiastic about what a good summer read it would make. The book enjoyed considerable critical success when it was published ("contemporary Dickens," said PW; "a nearly perfect summer book," noted the Minneapolis Star-Tribune), and sales were modest -- in the mid-40,000s in hardcover and 18,000 a year later in paper. That's now pre-Oprah history. Penguin is printing 775,000 copies in paper, 15,000 in hardcover and bringing out 10,000 copies of the audio. This is also the first Oprah choice to be sold in the Starbucks coffee chain (778 outlets nationwide). Morris's first novel, Vanished (1988), was a National Book Award finalist. She had sent a query letter to agent Jean Naggar, who, per her habit, asked for a sample chapter. She was enthralled, and the rest is history. Naggar recently sold two other debut novels -- The Keeper of the Crystal Spring by Naomi and Deborah Baltuck and The Secrets of Ancient Goddess by Brenda Smith -- also as a result of query letters.

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