The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill

Award-winning author Kelly Barnhill brings her singular talents to The Crane Husband, a raw, powerful story of love, sacrifice, and family.

“If I had to nominate a worthy successor to Angela Carter, I would nominate Kelly Barnhill. “—Laura Ruby

A Most Anticipated in 2023 Pick for BuzzFeed The Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Mothers fly away like migrating birds. This is why farmers have daughters.

A fifteen-year-old teenager is the backbone of her small Midwestern family, budgeting the household finances and raising her younger brother while her mom, a talented artist, weaves beautiful tapestries. For six years, it’s been just the three of them—her mom has brought home guests at times, but none have ever stayed.

Yet when her mom brings home a six-foot tall crane with a menacing air, the girl is powerless to prevent her mom letting the intruder into her heart, and her children’s lives. Utterly enchanted and numb to his sharp edges, her mom abandons the world around her to weave the masterpiece the crane demands.

In this stunning contemporary retelling of “The Crane Wife” by the Newbery Medal-winning author of The Girl Who Drank the Moon, one fiercely pragmatic teen forced to grow up faster than was fair will do whatever it takes to protect her family—and change the story.

Empress of the Nile by Lynne Olson

The remarkable story of the intrepid French archaeologist who led the international effort to save ancient Egyptian temples from the floodwaters of the Aswan Dam, by the New York Times bestselling author of Madame Fourcade’s Secret War

In the 1960s, the world’s attention was focused on a nail-biting race against time: Fifty countries contributed nearly a billion dollars to save a dozen ancient Egyptian temples, built during the height of the pharaohs’ rule, from drowning in the floodwaters of the massive new Aswan High Dam. But the extensive press coverage at the time overlooked the gutsy French archaeologist who made it all happen. Without the intervention of Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, the temples would now be at the bottom of a vast reservoir. It was an unimaginably large and complex project that required the fragile sandstone temples to be dismantled, stone by stone, and rebuilt on higher ground.

A willful real-life version of Indiana Jones, Desroches-Noblecourt refused to be cowed by anyone or anything. During World War II she joined the French Resistance and was held by the Nazis; in her fight to save the temples she challenged two of the postwar world’s most daunting leaders, Egypt’s President Nasser and France’s President de Gaulle. As she told a reporter, “You don’t get anywhere without a fight, you know.”

Yet Desroches-Noblecourt was not the only woman who played an essential role in the historic endeavor. The other was Jacqueline Kennedy, who persuaded her husband to call on Congress to help fund the rescue effort. After years of Western plunder of Egypt’s ancient monuments, Desroches-Noblecourt did the opposite. She helped preserve a crucial part of Egypt’s cultural heritage, and made sure it remained in its homeland.

Go As a River by Shelley Read

Set amid Colorado’s wild beauty, a heartbreaking coming-of-age story of a resilient young woman whose life is changed forever by one chance encounter. A tragic and uplifting novel of love and loss, family and survival–and hope–for readers of Great Circle, The Four Winds, and Where the Crawdads Sing

“Shelley Read’s lyrical voice is a force of nature…. Completely unforgettable.” –Bonnie Garmus, author of Lessons in Chemistry

“A splendid American Gothic tale of a young woman broken by circumstances who must find a way to forgive before she can love.”–Adriana Trigiani, author of The Good Left Undone

Seventeen-year-old Victoria Nash runs the household on her family’s peach farm in the small ranch town of Iola, Colorado–the sole surviving female in a family of troubled men. Wilson Moon is a young drifter with a mysterious past, displaced from his tribal land and determined to live as he chooses.

Victoria encounters Wil by chance on a street corner, a meeting that profoundly alters both of their young lives, unknowingly igniting as much passion as danger. When tragedy strikes, Victoria leaves the only life she has ever known. She flees into the surrounding mountains where she struggles to survive in the wilderness with no clear notion of what her future will bring. As the seasons change, she also charts the changes in herself, finding in the beautiful but harsh landscape the meaning and strength to move forward and rebuild all that she has lost, even as the Gunnison River threatens to submerge her homeland–its ranches, farms, and the beloved peach orchard that has been in her family for generations.

Inspired by true events surrounding the destruction of the town of Iola in the 1960s, Go as a River is a story of deeply held love in the face of hardship and loss, but also of finding courage, resilience, friendship, and, finally, home–where least expected. This stunning debut explores what it means to lead your life as if it were a river–gathering and flowing, finding a way forward even when a river is dammed.

Dr. Doug Mader & Lucy Burdette 2022 Florida Book Award Winners


Congratulations to Dr. Doug Mader and Lucy Burdette for winning 2022 Florida Book Awards.

Lucy Burdette won the Bronze in the popular fiction category for A Dish to Die For (Crooked Lane Books), #12 in her popular Key West Food Critic mystery series.

Dr. Doug Mader won the Bronze in general nonfiction for The Vet at Noah’s Ark (Apollo Publishers).

Find the full list here.

March Staff Pick: The Farewell Tour

The Farewell Tour by Stephanie Clifford (Harper, March 7), picked by Assistant Manager Allison

***Now out in paperback!***

It’s 1980, and Lillian Waters is hitting the road for the very last time.

Jaded from her years in the music business, perpetually hungover, and diagnosed with career-ending vocal problems, Lillian cobbles together a nationwide farewell tour featuring some old hands from her early days playing honky-tonk bars in Washington State and Nashville, plus a few new ones. She yearns to feel the rush of making live music one more time and bask in the glow of a packed house before she makes the last, and most important, stop on the tour: the farm she left behind at age ten and the sister she is finally ready to confront about an agonizing betrayal in their childhood.

As the novel crisscrosses eras, moving between Lillian’s youth—the Depression, the Second World War, the rise of Nashville—and her middle-aged life in 1980, we see her striving to build a career in the male-dominated world of country music, including the hard choices she makes as she tries to redefine music, love, aging, and womanhood on her own terms.

Allison enjoyed both the book and audiobook versions of this novel. She writes, “Stephanie Clifford fills out the singular story of one woman’s hard rise to country music stardom with the history of country music and the evolution of American culture. Water Lil is a character you won’t soon forget.”

“This well researched novel is also a love letter to country music and the west. If you’ve spent time with either, this novel will be hell bent on tugging at your heartstrings.”

Allison’s playlist for the book includes Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (the song “Bo Weavil Blues” is central to the novel).

Celebrate Women’s History Month

Read about the most influential newspaper columnist you’ve never heard of in Listen, World!: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman by Julia Scheeres & Allison Gilbert. We had a great event with Allison Gilbert in November. Check out the replay.

Girly Drinks: A World History of Women & Alcohol by Mallory O’Meara was one of Bookseller Riona Jean’s favorite books of 2021. She highly recommends the audiobook.

She writes, “I love beer, books, and history. O’Meara presents a fantastic and inclusive history of women and alcohol, covering such topics as the scientific process, brewing as a means to financial independence, and drinking habits reflecting change in society.”

Social Media Manager Robin has knit or crocheted anything in years, but Crochet Iconic Women by Carla Mitrani has her considering digging out her yarn stash.

You may already know her work as a cartoonist from Hark! A Vagrant. Katie Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is the story of the world she encountered while looking to pay off her student loans – the harsh reality of life in the oil sands, where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet is never discussed.

Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, this urgent book, A Woman’s Life Is a Human Life from historian Felicia Kornbluh reveals two movement victories in New York that forever changed the politics of reproductive rights nationally. Before there was a “Jane Roe,” the most important champions of reproductive rights were ordinary people working in their local communities.

Featuring a new package and an additional 60 pages of material, this revised edition of The Art of Feminism covers an even more impressive range of artworks, artists, movements, and perspectives. Since the debut of the original volume in 2018, The Art of Feminism has offered readers an in-depth examination of its subject that is still unparalleled in scope. The comprehensive survey traces the ways in which feminists—from the suffragettes and World War II–era workers through twentieth-century icons like Judy Chicago and Carrie Mae Weems to the contemporary cutting-edge figures Zanele Muholi and Andrea Bowers—have employed visual arts in transmitting their messages. With more than 350 images of art, illustration, photography, and graphic design, this stunning volume showcases the vibrancy of the feminist aesthetic over two centuries.

Middle-grade novel, A Seed in the Sun by Aida Salazar: A farm-working girl with big dreams meets activist Dolores Huerta and joins the 1965 protest for workers’ rights in this tender-hearted novel in verse, perfect for fans of Rita Williams-Garcia and Pam Muñoz Ryan.

We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: In this personal, eloquently-argued essay—adapted from the much-admired TEDx talk of the same name—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century. Drawing extensively on her own experiences and her deep understanding of the often masked realities of sexual politics, here is one remarkable author’s exploration of what it means to be a woman now—and an of-the-moment rallying cry for why we should all be feminists.

Find these books and many more in store. We’re always happy to help you find what you’re looking for, just ask!

I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai

“A twisty, immersive whodunit perfect for fans of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.” —People 

“Enthralling.” —Wall Street Journal“[An] irresistible literary page-turner.” The Boston Globe

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by TIME, NPR, USA TodayElleNewsweekSalonBustle, AARP, The MillionsGood Housekeeping, and more

The riveting new novel — “part true-crime page-turner, part campus coming-of-age” (San Francisco Chronicle) — from the author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist The Great Believers

A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past—the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s death and the conviction of the school’s athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers—needs—to let sleeping dogs lie.

But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn’t as much of an outsider at Granby as she’d thought—if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.

In I Have Some Questions for You, award-winning author Rebecca Makkai has crafted her most irresistible novel yet: a stirring investigation into collective memory and a deeply felt examination of one woman’s reckoning with her past, with a transfixing mystery at its heart. Timely, hypnotic, and populated with a cast of unforgettable characters, I Have Some Questions for You is at once a compulsive page-turner and a literary triumph.

Wolfish by Erica Berry

For fans of Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk and Mary Roach, Erica Berry’s WOLFISH blends science, history, and cultural criticism in a years-long journey to understand our myths about wolves, and track one legendary wolf, OR-7, from the Wallowa Mountains of Oregon

A Most Anticipated Book of 2023: TIME, Los Angeles Times, Vulture, Salon, Bustle, The Rumpus, The Financial Times, Book RiotDebutiful, and more!

Wolfish starts with a single wolf and spirals through nuanced investigations of fear, gender, violence, and story. A GORGEOUS achievement.” Blair Braverman, author of Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube

“This is one of those stories that begins with a female body. Hers was crumpled, roadside, in the ash-colored slush between asphalt and snowbank.”

So begins Erica Berry’s kaleidoscopic exploration of wolves, both real and symbolic. At the center of this lyrical inquiry is the legendary OR-7, who roams away from his familial pack in northeastern Oregon. While charting OR-7’s record-breaking journey out of the Wallowa Mountains, Erica simultaneously details her own coming-of-age as she moves away from home and wrestles with inherited beliefs about fear, danger, femininity, and the body.

As Erica chronicles her own migration—from crying wolf as a child on her grandfather’s sheep farm to accidentally eating mandrake in Sicily—she searches for new expressions for how to be a brave woman, human, and animal in our warming world. What do stories so long told about wolves tell us about our relationship to fear? How can our society peel back the layers of what scares us? By strategically unspooling the strands of our cultural constructions of predator and prey, and what it means to navigate a world in which we can be both, Erica bridges the gap between human fear and grief through the lens of a wrongfully misunderstood species.

Wolfish is for anybody trying to navigate a world that is often scary. A powerful, timeless, and necessary book for our current and future generations.

We Should Not Be Friends by Will Schwalbe

A warm, funny, irresistible book that follows an improbable and life-changing college friendship over the course of forty years—from the best-selling author of The End of Your Life Book Club

A “searching, tender, insightful, and wise memoir…Reading this beautifully written and generous book, you will find yourself thinking of your own friendships” —Dani Shapiro, author of Signal Fires

By the time Will Schwalbe was a junior at college, he had already met everyone he cared to know: the theater people, writers, visual artists and comp lit majors, and various other quirky characters including the handful of students who shared his own major, Latin and Greek. He also knew exactly who he wanted to avoid: the jocks. The jocks wore baseball caps and moved in packs, filling boisterous tables in the dining hall, and on the whole seemed to be another species entirely, one Will might encounter only at his own peril. 

All this changed dramatically when Will collided with Chris Maxey, known to just about everyone as Maxey. Maxey was physically imposing, loud, and a star wrestler who was determined to become a Navy SEAL (where he would later serve for six years). Thanks to the strangely liberating circumstances of a little-known secret society at Yale, the two forged a bond that would become a mainstay of each other’s lives as they repeatedly lost and found each other and themselves in the years after graduation. 

From New Haven to New York City, from Hong Kong and Panama to a remarkable school on an island in the Bahamas—through marriages and a divorce, triumphs and devastating losses—We Should Not Be Friends tracks an extraordinary friendship over decades of challenge and change. Schwalbe’s marvelous new work is, at its heart, a joyful testament to the miracle of human connection—and how if we can just get past our preconceptions, we may find some of our greatest friends.

Every Man a King by Walter Mosley

In this highly anticipated sequel from Edgar Award-winning “master of craft and narrative,” Walter Mosley, Joe King Oliver is entangled in a dangerous case when he’s asked to investigate whether a white nationalist is being unjustly set up. (National Book Foundation)When friend of the family and multi-billionaire Roger Ferris comes to Joe with an assignment, he’s got no choice but to accept, even if the case is a tough one to stomach. White nationalist Alfred Xavier Quiller has been accused of murder and the sale of sensitive information to the Russians. Ferris has reason to believe Quiller’s been set up and he needs King to see if the charges hold.

This linear assignment becomes a winding quest to uncover the extent of Quiller’s dealings, to understand Ferris’ skin in the game, and to get to the bottom of who is working for whom. Even with the help of bodyguard and mercenary Oliya Ruez—no regular girl Friday—the machine King’s up against proves relentless and unsparing. As King gets closer to exposing the truth, he and his loved ones barrel towards grave danger.

Mosley once again proves himself a “master of craft and narrative” (National Book Foundation) in this carefully plotted mystery that is at once a classic caper, a family saga and an examination of fealty, pride and how deep debt can go.