“A tightly wound family drama that reads like a psychological thriller.”—NPR

“Bold, stark, genre-bending, Audition will haunt your dreams.”—The Boston Globe

One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love.



Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.

Taut and hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best.

The 10 by E.A. Hanks

From Vanity Fair and The New York Times contributor comes a beautifully written, deeply felt memoir recounting the solo, cross-country journey she made along the Ten across the American southwest: a mission to uncover both what harrowing violence may or may not have happened to her late mother, but also, to look within and discover who she herself is—where her mother ends and she begins.

In her trusted loaded-up minivan “Minnie,” E.A. Hanks follows the same route as a long-ago road trip with her mother in an attempt to better understand the complicated woman who gave her life. Along the way, as she follows her mother’s diaries and her own recollections of the route, she begins to uncover secrets—some unexpectedly wonderful, and others darker and more violent than she ever imagined—that bring more questions than answers.

From the quiet expanses of White Sands National Park to the bustling streets of New Orleans, and the Texas-Mexico border to the swamps of the Florida panhandle, she interacts with the amazing breadth and diversity of the people that call these places home. Reckoning with the past, the present, her memories, and herself, Hanks brings us along a beautiful voyage towards understanding how the stories we tell about the places we’re from ultimately become the stories we tell about the people we are.

A daring art heist on the eve of Molly’s wedding reveals long-buried secrets in this intriguing and heartwarming novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Maid and The Mystery Guest.

”A big-hearted examination of wealth and social class.”—Oprah Daily

”A glorious read . . . intrigue, heart, and humanity in spades.”—Lucy Foley

Molly Gray’s life is about to change in ways she could never have imagined. As the esteemed Head Maid and Special Events Manager of the Regency Grand Hotel, two good things are just around the corner—a taping of the hit antiquities TV show Hidden Treasures and, even more exciting, her wedding to Juan Manuel.

When Molly brings in some old trinkets to be appraised on the show, one item is revealed to be a rare and coveted artifact worth millions. Molly becomes a rags-to-riches sensation, and a media frenzy swirls as she prepares to sell her priceless treasure. Then, on auction day, the treasure suddenly vanishes. and Molly and her friends find themselves at the center of the boldest art heist in recent memory.

But the key to this mystery lies in the past, in a long-forgotten diary written by Molly’s Gran. For the first time ever, Molly learns about her grandmother’s secrets: how she was born into a wealthy family and fell head-over-heels in love with a young man her parents deemed below her. As fate would have it, Gran’s greatest love was someone Molly knows quite well.

A spirited heist caper and an epic love story, The Maid’s Secret is a spell-binding whodunit that will capture your heart.

“We think we know everything, but author Ian Leslie proves otherwise. His new book, ‘John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs,’ is, astonishingly, one of the few to offer a detailed narrative of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s partnership. And it’s a revelation.”Los Angeles Times

“It is stunning to follow Leslie’s insights into how far and fast John and Paul traveled, how profound their preternatural alliance was, and how epic their heroic journey. I’m sorry John isn’t here to read this book. I hope if Paul does read it he feels the depth of appreciation and gratitude and intelligence it contains.” ―The New York Times

John Lennon and Paul McCartney knew each other for twenty-three years, from 1957 to 1980. This book is the myth-shattering biography of a relationship that changed the cultural history of the world.

The Beatles shook the world to its core in the 1960’s and, to this day, new generations continue to fall in love with their songs and their story. At the heart of this phenomenon lies the dynamic between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Few other musical partnerships have been rooted in such a deep, intense and complicated personal relationship.

John and Paul’s relationship was defined by its complexity: compulsive, tender and tempestuous; full of longing, riven by jealousy. Like the band, their relationship was always in motion, never in equilibrium for long. John & Paul traces its twists and turns and reveals how these shifts manifested themselves in the music. The two of them shared a private language, rooted in the stories, comedy and songs they both loved as teenagers, and later, in the lyrics of Beatles songs.

In John & Paul, acclaimed writer Ian Leslie uses the songs they wrote to trace the shared journey of these two compelling men before, during, and after The Beatles. Drawing on recently released footage and recordings, Leslie offers us an intimate and insightful new look at two of the greatest icons in music history, and rich insights into the nature of creativity, collaboration, and human intimacy.

April 2025 Staff Pick: Isola

Isola by Allegra Goodman, picked by Assistant Manager Sara

Sara, pictured with Isola by Allegra Goodman, in front of Field Theory by Tory Mata at The Studios of Key West.

Isola by Allegra Goodman is based on the true story of a young woman who sails from France to the New World in 1542 and is abandoned on an island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence with her forbidden lover and nurse. This was a historical fiction read that was easy to get wrapped up in.

Marguerite de La Rocque de Roberval, a French noblewoman, who in the mid-sixteenth century grew up destined for a life of prosperity, is orphaned and left with her guardian – her uncle, a volatile and self centered man, who spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on his new adventure to New France. During this adventure you learn more about her character and who on the ship can be trusted. As Marguerite challenges her uncle, you can’t help but cheer her on as she keeps her loved ones safe even when faced over and over again with adversity. When she is left by her uncle on an uninhabited island, you immerse yourself in her journey of self-discovery, courage and strength as she is in the mercy of nature to survive. Battling hunger, lack of resources, adverse weather conditions, she searches for tools to build their new home. You will be delighted as she finds the little joys in this secluded place and how she embraces a faith that she never had before. 

This book has it all – a woman fighting for survival in this timeless story about love, resilience and finding the strength within to survive against all odds. I mean, she even fights a bear!

~ Sara

Independent Bookstore Day 2025

Join us Saturday, April 26, for the biggest indie bookstore party of the year!

Plan to join us or the indie bookstore in your neighborhood on Saturday, April 26 for Independent Bookstore Day. Bookstore Day is a nationwide celebration of what makes indie bookstores special – and of the people who love them.

Here in Key West, expect lots of bookish fun! Stay tuned for all the details of our big day!

April is Poetry Month

Organized by the Academy of American Poets and celebrated each year since 1996, Poetry Month is designed to celebrate poetry and encourage people to read and write poetry.

Looking for ways to engage more with poetry? The Academy has a suggested list of 30 poetry-based activities at https://poets.org/national-poetry-month/30-ways-celebrate-national-poetry-month, including the opportunity to sign up for their poem-a-day email for April.

According to the National Poetry Month website, the most read contemporary poem in 2024 was “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye from her book Honeybee.

At the store, our recent favorites include Bicycles, love poems by Nikki Giovanni, who passed away late last year. Read Lori’s review of Bicycles in our online newsletter, check out our poetry section and display in store, or share your favorite with us on our social media.

And, if you’re looking for another way to experience poetry, try an audiobook. Find a great selection of poetry audiobooks at https://libro.fm/genres/poetry.

Here’s a few titles we’re reading and recommending for poetry month:

A Q&A with Andrew Furman

We are delighted to welcome back author Andrew Furman! Join us for an event with him, April 28, at 6:30 at the bookstore.

We asked him a few questions to introduce you to the author and his book:

Q: Would you tell us about how you came to write Of Slash Pines and Manatees: A Highly Selective Field Guide to My Suburban Wilderness and what you hope readers will get out of it?

A: Florida, and particularly my southeastern patch of it, is one of the most overdeveloped places in the country but one of the most environmentally unique and gorgeous places, too. After nearly 30 years of living here, I remain gobsmacked by its special animals and plants, whether it’s a gray fox that makes a surprise appearance in my suburban neighborhood, or a manatee mother and her calves that float past my swim group in the ocean, or a slash pine tree that my younger daughter insists that we plant in our front yard. I still feel like I’m just coming to know this state. The chapters that make up this new book represent, maybe on the most essential level, my ongoing attempt to know my place just a little bit better. I hope that readers in all fifty states will take inspiration in these pages to seek out a closer relationship with the unique “placeness” of their own home state, wherever that happens to be. 

Q: Sense of place seems very important in both your fiction and nonfiction, how did you come to call south Florida home?

A: I wish I had a more romantic story here, but the truth is that I was just lucky enough to get my first (and probably last) academic job at Florida Atlantic University. What’s more, my love affair with the state didn’t really happen so quickly. I was scrapping very hard those first few years here to write my scholarly articles and books to earn tenure so I wasn’t very attuned to the natural splendor outside my school office. But then I just started to notice stuff, like the pretty warblers that were suddenly flitting all about the trees on my campus during their fall and spring migrations, so I learned what kind of warblers they were and learned that we were located smack in the middle of their migratory flyway, and then I learned that the trees were called live oaks and wanted to learn all I could about the history of live oaks and us. I joke that I became a Floridian sort of the way that Hemingway went broke: gradually, then all at once. 

Q: What’s one thing you do every time you visit Key West or one thing you think visitors shouldn’t miss?

A: Well, I just mentioned Hemingway, and I know it’s sort of the obvious answer, but it’s still true for me: I love visiting the Hemingway House when I’m in Key West. They’ve done such a great job maintaining the look and feel of the place, right down to the cats. As a writer, it gives me chills to walk through the rooms and imagine what it must have felt like to be a young Hemingway, tapping furiously away on the keys of his typewriter, the balmy, sea-funk-smelling air drifting through the open windows. I also think that any experience out on the water (a fishing charter, a kayak through the mangroves) is a must. A few years ago, I participated in the 12.5-mile Swim Around Key West (held annually), which I tend to work into conversations pretty early. It was definitely my most memorable, environmental Key West experience, swimming above nurse sharks and whatnot as I crossed under that last bridge. If I can extend my answer to the other Keys—and since this special place is featured in one of my chapters—I’d recommend that people take a walk through the Dagny Johnson Key Largo Hammock Botanical State Park, where they might glimpse a mangrove cuckoo or summer tanager or (more likely) a white-crowned pigeon roosting in one of the hardwoods. Experts say that this hammock may be the site of the greatest tree diversity in the entire United States.   

Q: For you, what drives the decision to write fiction versus nonfiction?

A: People ask me this question a lot and I truly don’t have a great answer as I tend to choose the genre on instinct more than anything else. I would say that my default genre may be nonfiction, but I suppose that sometimes my imagination just gets the better of me and I feel that I want to go somewhere beyond what the “truth” or the “facts” allow. When this happens, I segue to fiction. My fascination with seaweed is a good example of this. I have a chapter on seaweed in Of Slash Pines and Manatees, which is nonfiction, and which I’m really happy with, but I’m currently working on a novel, which imagines what might happen if our Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt goes berserk.   

Q: As a writing professor, what’s your best writing advice?

A: What I come back to with my students all the time is that they shouldn’t necessarily “write what they know,” which they hear all the time, but write what interests them. I think that lots of us fear that our lives aren’t dramatic or traumatic enough to be the stuff of great art. My life sure isn’t and thank heavens for that! I tell students that they don’t have to be interesting, per se, but they DO have to be interested. Having and developing interests and even passions, being receptive to new discoveries, hobbies, long-buried talents, and having the curiosity and even bravery to pursue these passions—in life and art—is key, in my view. 

Q: What are you reading and recommending these days?

A: Oh boy, I’m always reading lots of things, and try to move between fiction and nonfiction, and some poetry. As I’m in the middle of my semester, I’ve had the opportunity to re-read and teach Willa Cather’s My Antoniawhich was one of the first books that moved me in that special way that only great writing can when I was just an undergrad, myself. So it’s been a treat to read it with my own students and simultaneously get swept away by its romance and interrogate some of its more problematic environmental and racial implications. I’m following this up with Percival Everett’s Jameswinner of the 2024 National Book Award, which imagines Twain’s book, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the voice and perspective of “Jim.”

In terms of nonfiction, The Light Eatersby Zoe Schlanger, made me see plants in a whole different way, and I just got Satellite in the mail, Simmons Buntin’s collection of desert essays, which I can’t wait to read. It’s an environment so different in every way than our subtropics.

As for fiction, outside of what I’m teaching this semester, I just read and was blown away by the quiet power of Morgan Talty’s Fire Exitwhich takes place in and around Maine’s Penobscot Reservation, and I also finally got around to reading something by Sigrid Nunez, The FriendIt’s a gem of a novel, and as a dog lover, it really resonated with me. I should also mention the reading I do in litmags, several issues of which I have lying around in various places in my house, to my wife’s consternation. Partly to keep current, and partly to be a good literary citizen, I subscribe to five or six litmags at any given time and dip into them between the books I’m reading for the latest stories, essays, and poems out there.  

Twist by Colum McCann

A propulsive novel of rupture and repair in the digital age, delving into a hidden world deep under the ocean—from the New York Times bestselling author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin

“The spirit of Joseph Conrad hovers over the text, but here the heart of darkness lies at the bottom of the ocean.”—Salman Rushdie

“Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken.”

Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.

Fennell’s journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London.

When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging, and the perils of our severed connections. Can we, in our fractured world, reweave ourselves out of the thin, broken threads of our pasts? Can the ruptured things awaken us from our despair?

Resoundingly simple and turbulent at the same time, Twist is a meditation on the nature of narrative and truth from one of the great storytellers of our times.

Cellar Rat

Town & Country‘s Best Books of Spring 2025 | Kirkus Reviews’s Most Anticipated Nonfiction of Spring 2025

What happens when a career you love doesn’t love you back?

As Hannah Selinger will tell you, to be a good restaurant employee is to be invisible. At the height of her career as a server and then sommelier at some of New York’s most famed dining institutions, Selinger was the hand that folded your napkin while you were in the bathroom, the employee silently slipping into the night through a side door after serving meals worth more than her rent. 

During her tenure, Selinger rubbed shoulders with David Chang, Bobby Flay, Johnny Iuzzini, and countless other food celebrities of the early 2000’s. Her position allowed her access to a life she never expected; the lavish parties, the tasting courses, the wildly expensive wines – the rare world we see romanticized in countless movies and television shows. But the thing about being invisible is that people forget you’re there, and most act differently when they think no one is looking. 

In Cellar Rat, Selinger chronicles her rise and fall in the restaurant business, beginning with the gritty hometown pub where she fell in love with the industry and ending with her final post serving celebrities at the Hamptons classic Nick & Toni’s. In between, readers will join Selinger on her emotional journey as she learns the joys of fine fine dining, the allure and danger of power, and what it takes to walk away from a career you love when it no longer serves you.