Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

The best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road returns with the second volume of The Passenger series: Stella Maris is an intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence.

1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia’s psychiatric sessions, Stella Maris is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger, a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.

Elizabeth Taylor by Kate Andersen Brower

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Residence and First Women, the first ever authorized biography of the most famous movie star of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Taylor.

No celebrity rivals Elizabeth Taylor’s glamour and guts or her level of fame. She was the last major star to come out of the old Hollywood studio system and she is a legend known for her beauty and her magnetic screen presence in a career that spanned most of the twentieth century and nearly sixty films. But her private life was even more compelling than her Oscar-winning on-screen performances. During her seventy-nine years of rapid-fire love and loss she was married eight times to seven different men. Above all, she was a survivor—by the time she was twenty-six she was twice divorced and once widowed. Her life was a soap opera that ended in a deeply meaningful way when she became the first major celebrity activist to lead the fight against HIV/AIDS. A co-founder of amfAR, she raised more than $100 million for research and patient care. She was also a shrewd businesswoman who made a fortune as the first celebrity perfumer who always demanded to be paid what she was worth.

In the first ever authorized biography of the Hollywood icon, Kate Andersen Brower reveals the world through Elizabeth’s eyes. Brower uses Elizabeth’s unpublished letters, diary entries, and off-the-record interview transcripts as well as interviews with 250 of her closest friends and family to tell the full, unvarnished story of her remarkable career and her explosive private life that made headlines worldwide. Elizabeth Taylor captures this intelligent, empathetic, tenacious, volatile, and complex woman as never before, from her rise to massive fame at age twelve in National Velvet to becoming the first to negotiate a million-dollar salary for a film, from her eight marriages and enduring love affair with Richard Burton to her lifelong battle with addiction and her courageous efforts as an AIDS activist. 

Here is a fascinating and complete portrait worthy of the legendary star and her legacy.

Elizabeth Taylor features a photo insert.

Black Cake – Charmaine Wilson

In this case, you can judge a book by it’s cover. It’s the whole package: good writing, strong plotting and relatable characters. Twisty, fun and moving. “She said that you had to love the sea more than you feared it. You had to love the swimming so much that you would do anything to keep on going.” His mother looked out the car window. “Just like life, you know?” 

Robin (Staff)

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A World of Curiosities by Louise Penny

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache returns in the eighteenth book in #1 New York Times bestseller Louise Penny’s beloved series.

It’s spring and Three Pines is reemerging after the harsh winter. But not everything buried should come alive again. Not everything lying dormant should reemerge.

But something has.

As the villagers prepare for a special celebration, Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir find themselves increasingly worried. A young man and woman have reappeared in the Sûreté du Québec investigators’ lives after many years. The two were young children when their troubled mother was murdered, leaving them damaged, shattered. Now they’ve arrived in the village of Three Pines.

But to what end?

Gamache and Beauvoir’s memories of that tragic case, the one that first brought them together, come rushing back. Did their mother’s murder hurt them beyond repair? Have those terrible wounds, buried for decades, festered and are now about to erupt?

As Chief Inspector Gamache works to uncover answers, his alarm grows when a letter written by a long dead stone mason is discovered. In it the man describes his terror when bricking up an attic room somewhere in the village. Every word of the 160-year-old letter is filled with dread. When the room is found, the villagers decide to open it up.

As the bricks are removed, Gamache, Beauvoir and the villagers discover a world of curiosities. But the head of homicide soon realizes there’s more in that room than meets the eye. There are puzzles within puzzles, and hidden messages warning of mayhem and revenge.

In unsealing that room, an old enemy is released into their world. Into their lives. And into the very heart of Armand Gamache’s home.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa

Introduction by Amal Clooney

From the recipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, an impassioned and inspiring memoir of a career spent holding power to account.

 Maria Ressa is one of the most renowned international journalists of our time. For decades, she challenged corruption and malfeasance in her native country, the Philippines, on its rocky path from an authoritarian state to a democracy. As a reporter from CNN, she transformed news coverage in her region, which led her in 2012 to create a new and innovative online news organization, Rappler. Harnessing the emerging power of social media, Rapplercrowdsourced breaking news, found pivotal sources and tips, harnessed collective action for climate change, and helped increase voter knowledge and participation in elections.

 But by their fifth year of existence, Rappler had gone from being lauded for its ideas to being targeted by the new Philippine government, and made Ressa an enemy of her country’s most powerful man: President Duterte. Still, she did not let up, tracking government seeded disinformation networks which spread lies to its own citizens laced with anger and hate. Hounded by the state and its allies using the legal system to silence her, accused of numerous crimes, and charged with cyberlibel for which she was found guilty, Ressa faces years in prison and thousands in fines.

 There is another adversary Ressa is battling. How to Stand Up to a Dictator is also the story of how the creep towards authoritarianism, in the Phillipines and around the world, has been aided and abetted by the social media companies. Ressa exposes how they have allowed their platforms to spread a virus of lies that infect each of us, pitting us against one another, igniting, even creating, our fears, anger, and hate, and how this has accelerated the rise of authoritarians and dictators around the world. She maps a network of disinformation—a heinous web of cause and effect—that has netted the globe: from Duterte’s drug wars to America’s Capitol Hill; Britain’s Brexit to Russian and Chinese cyber-warfare; Facebook and Silicon Valley to our own clicks and votes.

Democracy is fragile. How to Stand Up to a Dictator is an urgent cry for Western readers to recognize and understand the dangers to our freedoms before it is too late. It is a book for anyone who might take democracy for granted, written by someone who never would. And in telling her dramatic and turbulent and courageous story, Ressa forces readers to ask themselves the same question she and her colleagues ask every day: What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth?

All the Broken Places by John Boyne

“You can’t prepare yourself for the magnitude and emotional impact of this powerful novel.” —John Irving, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The World According to Garp

“Exceptional, layered and compelling…This book moves like a freight train.” —Amy Bloom, New York Times bestselling author of In Love

From the New York Times bestselling author John Boyne, a devastating, beautiful story about a woman who must confront the sins of her own terrible past, and a present in which it is never too late for bravery

Ninety-one-year-old Gretel Fernsby has lived in the same well-to-do mansion block in London for decades. She lives a quiet, comfortable life, despite her deeply disturbing, dark past. She doesn’t talk about her escape from Nazi Germany at age 12. She doesn’t talk about the grim post-war years in France with her mother. Most of all, she doesn’t talk about her father, who was the commandant of one of the Reich’s most notorious extermination camps. 

Then, a new family moves into the apartment below her. In spite of herself, Gretel can’t help but begin a friendship with the little boy, Henry, though his presence brings back memories she would rather forget. One night, she witnesses a disturbing, violent argument between Henry’s beautiful mother and his arrogant father, one that threatens Gretel’s hard-won, self-contained existence.

All The Broken Places moves back and forth in time between Gretel’s girlhood in Germany to present-day London as a woman whose life has been haunted by the past.  Now, Gretel faces a similar crossroads to one she encountered long ago. Back then, she denied her own complicity, but now, faced with a chance to interrogate her guilt, grief and remorse, she can choose  to save a young boy. If she does, she will be forced to reveal the secrets she has spent a lifetime protecting. This time, she can make a different choice than before—whatever the cost to herself….

Butts: A Backstorty by Heather Radke

*ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF FALL: Esquire, Time, LitHub, The Every Girl, BookPage*

“Lively and thorough, Butts is the best kind of nonfiction—the kind that forces you to see something ordinary through completely new eyes.” —Esquire, Best Books of 2022 So Far

“One of the year’s most ingenious and eye-opening cultural studies.” —Publishers Weekly, Best Books of 2022

Whether we love them or hate them, think they’re sexy, think they’re strange, consider them too big, too small, or anywhere in between, humans have a complicated relationship with butts. It is a body part unique to humans, critical to our evolution and survival, and yet it has come to signify so much more: sex, desire, comedy, shame. A woman’s butt, in particular, is forever being assessed, criticized, and objectified, from anxious self-examinations trying on jeans in department store dressing rooms to enduring crass remarks while walking down a street or high school hallways. But why? In Butts: A Backstory, reporter, essayist, and RadioLab contributing editor Heather Radke is determined to find out.

Spanning nearly two centuries, this “whip-smart” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) cultural history takes us from the performance halls of 19th-century London to the aerobics studios of the 1980s, the music video set of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” and the mountains of Arizona, where every year humans and horses race in a feat of gluteal endurance. Along the way, she meets evolutionary biologists who study how butts first developed; models whose measurements have defined jean sizing for millions of women; and the fitness gurus who created fads like “Buns of Steel.” She also examines the central importance of race through figures like Sarah Bartmann, once known as the “Venus Hottentot,” Josephine Baker, Jennifer Lopez, and other women of color whose butts have been idolized, envied, and despised.

Part deep dive reportage, part personal journey, part cabinet of curiosities, Butts is an entertaining, illuminating, and thoughtful examination of why certain silhouettes come in and out of fashion—and how larger ideas about race, control, liberation, and power affect our most private feelings about ourselves and others.

December Staff Pick: The Light Pirate

The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton (Dec. 6, 2022, Grand Central Publishing) picked by store manager Emily

Tragic, but hopeful and completely enthralling. The Light Pirate is an essential read.

After living in Florida for nearly a decade, I’ve prepared for a few hurricanes. I was drawn to the first few lines of the description – a family prepares for a storm. I’ve been very lucky when it comes to storms, but I know as well as anyone the internal drama that comes with deciding if you should stay or go as a hurricane approaches. I thought it would be an interesting read but I wasn’t prepared for how deep it would take me down the rabbit hole.

Since reading this book, not a day has gone by that I haven’t brought it up in conversation. As Key West prepared for Hurricane Ian (or didn’t prepare as the case may be) I found my chatter increased. I think I became a little annoying as I told all of my fellow booksellers that they needed to read The Light Pirate.

The book begins as the Lowe family, Kirby, his wife Frida (pregnant with their first child) and his two sons from a previous marriage prepare for an incoming hurricane. This is nothing new for the family living on the east coast of Florida. But Frida feels this one is different, and of course she is right. It’s a story of our changing planet, yes, but at its core it’s a story of family and what and who makes a place a “home.”

~ Emily Berg, store manager

Author Lily Brooks-Dalton will be in conversation with Emily and store co-founder Judy Blume at Hugh’s View at The Studios of Key West on December 8th at 6:30pm. Tickets include a copy of The Light Pirate and are available for purchase now online.

A Q&A with Lily Brooks-Dalton

We had the opportunity to talk with Lily Brooks-Dalton, author of The Light Pirate (12/6, Grand Central Publishing) in advance of her December 8 in-person event (click here for ticket information) in conversation with store co-founder Judy Blume and store manager Emily Berg at Hugh’s View at The Studios of Key West. We are wildly excited about meeting Lily and can’t recommend The Light Pirate enough (it is also our featured staff pick for December)!

Q: How did you arrive at the story you tell in The Light Pirate? Did you start out with a specific goal or idea or character?

A: I was actually here in Key West when I first started ruminating on preparing for storms and wondering whether there was a story I wanted to tell wrapped up in that rhythm. I was doing a residency at The Studios of Key West and there was a hurricane coming that didn’t end up hitting the Keys, but there was this palpable tension in the air that I kept coming back to. And then I started thinking about linemen, and all this labor that goes into keeping the lights on… so probably the first concrete story moment I had was imagining this little girl tagging along on storm duty with her father, waiting for him in the bucket truck while he worked on the downed lines. That exact scene didn’t actually make it into the book, but that was where I began. And the story grew from there.

Q: The book is told from the perspective of more than a few characters. Was there one you think of as your protagonist? 

A: I think of Wanda as my protagonist. The book begins on the day she’s born (I guess technically the day before) and it spans her lifetime, so even though we’re also following the people around her, I’d say she is at the center.

Q: You’re from Florida but now living in California. Did you ever think of telling this story from a West Coast perspective?

A: Well, I actually grew up in Vermont. I struck out on my own fairly young, and right around that time my parents decided to relocate. So Florida has always been my home base as an adult, but I’m not sure I get to say I’m from here. I started working on The Light Pirate about a year before I moved to California. At that point I was actually living out of my truck and traveling around, but I had just spent a big chunk of time in Florida and so the landscape was still very fresh for me. I didn’t even consider setting it somewhere else, Florida was at the heart of the idea from the start.

Q: What was the process like seeing Good Morning, Midnight go from book to film? Could you see The Light Pirate as a movie?

A: It was extraordinary. It’s hard to describe really, beyond saying that it was special and weird and it had a resounding impact on my life. I’m really grateful that it happened. As for The Light Pirate, if we were to do an adaptation, I see it as a TV show. There is more story to tell in this world than even the book contains, and I wouldn’t want to shrink down what is already on the page to fit it into a 2 hour container. I would want to let it expand and breathe! So, I think television offers more space to let something like this unfold.

Q: What are you reading and recommending these days?

A: I just finished Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet, which I liked very much, and then I will also recommend Beneficence by Meredith Hall. I read it a while ago but I’m still thinking about how gorgeous it was. And I also want to chat up The Water Will Come by Jeff Goodell, which is nonfiction, because it has a terrific Florida chapter and just in general was a text that I really valued and learned a lot from while I was working on the novel.

The Year in Review: 2022 Featured Staff Picks

We had a lucky baker’s dozen of featured staff picks this year. Any one of these will make an excellent gift for the discerning readers on your holiday shopping lists.

Store manager Emily launched the year with A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers (Unnamed Press), which she said “checked all the boxes.” Emily continued, “How did she become a ruthless killer? Did her victims have it coming? Will she ever find the perfect duck confit? I had to know.” Read the review.

To coincide with Black History Month, in February, bookseller Lori picked Yonder by Jabari Asim (Simon & Schuster, out in paper Jan. 10), which she especially recommended for readers who enjoyed The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr. (out in paper, Feb. 8). Read Lori’s review.

Social media manager Robin is still thinking about Black Cake months later. “Twisty, fun and moving, you’ll enjoy this book where everyone has (a lot of) secrets,” Robin wrote. Read her review.

Taste reminds me that whomever you are and wherever you come from the sharing of food connects us,” wrote bookseller Gina about Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci (Gallery Books). “Plus,” she notes, “I learned how to make the ‘perfect’ martini!” Read her review.

Store co-founder George wrote of Booth by Karen Joy Fowler (G.P. Putnam’s Sons), “This is historical fiction at its finest.” He continues, “When I learned that Fowler, author of the witty and surprising We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves had a new novel, I jumped at the chance to preview it.” Read George’s review.

“This is an enthralling tale that will sweep you off into the night,” bookseller Riona Jean writes of
Daughter of the Moon Goddess
 by Sue Lynn Tan (Harper Voyager). Read Riona’s review, dive into Daughter of the Moon Goddess and it’s sequel, Heart of the Sun Warrior.

July was a double feature. Store co-founder Judy picked Love Marriage by Monica Ali and George picked River of the Gods by Candice Millard. Read what they had to say.

“This isn’t the kind of fairy tale where the princess marries a prince. It’s the one where she kills him,” reads the jacket copy for Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher (Tor Books, look for the paperback Feb. 28). Bookseller Camila loved it, calling it “a perfect summer read, a blend of fantasy, horror, unforgettable characters, humor, and a brave feminist protagonist.” Read Camila’s review.

Written for a middle-grade audience, Unseen Magic by Emily Lloyd-Jones (Greenwillow Books, look for the paperback Feb. 21) will also appeal to adults looking for a charming mystery with Scooby-Doo vibes. Read Robin’s review.

“Do you love weird animal facts? Do you love academia? Do you love sticking it to the patriarchy?” Then bookseller Riona Jean has just the book for you. Read her review of Bitch: On the Female of the Species by Lucy Cooke (Basic Books).

Assistant manager Allison calls A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt (W. W. Norton & Company) “A gorgeously written debut novel that poses the question, how can I write a novel, how can I expose myself to life and love through the lens of queer indigenous authenticity.” Read her review.

“Tragic, but hopeful and completely enthralling. The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton (coming Dec. 6, Grand Central Publishing) is an essential read.” Read Emily’s review and don’t miss our event with author Lily Brooks-Dalton, Judy Blume and Emily in-person December 8.

Find even more books we love, on our staff recs shelf and scattered around the store, and online on our staff recs page.