Literary

Country People by Daniel Mason Read More »

Who would expect a novel with interludes from John Milton and scenes from Tolstoy to be such a good time? It’s a feat that it feels as if only Daniel Mason can pull off. I loved following the many misadventures of Miles Krzelewski, a disappointing husband, pretty good dad, and extremely distracted academic who would rather tag along with the “country people” of Vermont than sit down and finish his dissertation. This is an utterly entertaining read and also a meditation on nature, storytelling, the fine line between fact and fiction, and the human quest for paradise, which might just be deep in the forest of your own backyard.

Country People by Daniel Mason, (List Price: $30, Random House, 9798217197453, July 2026)

Reviewed by Lady, The Snail on the Wall in Huntsville, AL

Country People by Daniel Mason

Country People by Daniel Mason Read More »

In Mason’s engaging and amusing story, Miles moves with his wife and children from California to rural Vermont, where his curiosity and willingness to suspend disbelief leads to unexpected community. This big-hearted novel offers a balm for our times and perhaps some good lessons for all of us.

Country People by Daniel Mason, (List Price: $30, Random House, 9798217197453, July 2026)

Reviewed by Lia, Wordsworth Books in Little Rock, AR

Skin Contact by Elisa Faison

Skin Contact by Elisa Faison Read More »

Really loved this book! I couldn’t get enough of it. Elisa Faison has such a good eye for meaningful details that deepen the understanding of her characters. It’s a story about a couple navigating non-monogamy, but it covers so much of the human experience: love, loss, sensual pleasure, pandemic loneliness, etc. This is literary fiction at its best. The characters don’t take themselves too seriously (healthy doses of humor throughout), yet there is always another level to explore beyond the surface.

Skin Contact by Elisa Faison, (List Price: $29, Cardinal, 9781538776018, June 2026)

Reviewed by Daniel, Pearl’s Books in Fayetteville, AR

Country People by Daniel Mason

Country People by Daniel Mason Read More »

Come to this book with your sorrows, malaise, and dread, and leave revitalized, renewed, reborn! I just can’t think of another writer who understands so well the profundity of true delight, its ability to transport and transform a reader. Country People gives us back the wonder that many of us lost in childhood, that feeling of being lost in a book, and yet is so narratively sophisticated that I feel my brain has grown in size. To say nothing of my heart! Peak Vermont weirdness, family pathos, rollicking side-quests, and a perfect dog named Guiseppe–Daniel Mason, you’re a special kind of genius.

Country People by Daniel Mason, (List Price: $30, Random House, 9798217197453, July 2026)

Reviewed by Kristen, Thank You Books in Birmingham, AL

Agnes Lives! by Hallie Elizabeth Newton

Dark Humor, Fiction, Literary, Women

Agnes Lives! by Hallie Elizabeth Newton Read More »

Agnes is like a piece of glass that our patriarchal, image-obsessed society has trampled all over. She’s fractured. The beauty industry has her by the throat, she indulges the toxic behaviors of the men in her life, and Instagram is the safe haven where she tries to bury her head in the sand only to be assaulted with a constant influx of information on how to better herself aesthetically. Like someone who walks into oncoming traffic, she places herself directly in the path of the male gaze, spends her days in service to it, walks a tightrope to stay in its sightline, and gets repeatedly run over in the hopes of being seen. Thus, her maddening and manic spiral as she searches for someone to kill her, to set her free from this Plato’s Cave of warped womanhood refracted through the Conjunctiva of the male gaze. In a chaotic whirlwind of stream of consciousness prose, we follow Agnes through what she hopes will be the last day in her life. Agnes Lives! is a smart commentary on toxic femininity, on being an aging woman, on the ways women feel pressured to sacrifice their bodies at the altars of men, on all the toxic little crimes men commit against women and women commit against themselves. It’s full of killer lines and insights about our culture, and the characterization is precise and blazing. This novel is as enraging as it is insightful. So if you like chaotic, weird girl Lit. Fic. with an unhinged woman on an equally unhinged mission, then take a big bite, this one’s worth the calories.

Agnes Lives! by Hallie Elizabeth Newton, (List Price: $26.99, Bloomsbury Publishing, 9781639738564, June 2026)

Reviewed by Savannah, The Country Bookshop in Southern Pines, NC

Agnes Lives! by Hallie Elizabeth Newton

Dark Humor, Fiction, Literary, Women

Agnes Lives! by Hallie Elizabeth Newton Read More »

A blistering manifesto of a book that crams so much into its pages; a kind of reverse American Psycho telling the story of one woman downtrodden by mid-2010’s rat race existence in New York. As wild, unexpected, and original as a hypnotic Instagram spiral, it’s hard to believe this is a debut novel.

Agnes Lives! by Hallie Elizabeth Newton, (List Price: $26.99, Bloomsbury Publishing, 9781639738564, June 2026)

Reviewed by Doron Klemer, Octavia Books in New Orleans, LA

On the Other Side Is March by Sólrún Michelsen

On the Other Side Is March by Sólrún Michelsen Read More »

The first female Faroese writer to publish in English has written truth about women caretakers the world over. The main character is a woman in her 60’s who is caring for her grandchildren and mothering her own aging mother. She is waiting for a nursing home for her mother, but her name doesn’t come up. As she is caring for others, she remembers scenes of her youth and caring for her own children when they were small. Even though this story is told from the Faroe Islands, it is the same story played over and over. She honestly even thinks of feeling angry at her ancient mother for growing old and feeble. Love and caring are displayed with the work and worry of caretaking.

On the Other Side Is March by Sólrún Michelsen, (List Price: $18.95, Transit Books, 9798893380491, June 2026)

Reviewed by Nancy, Bookmiser in Marietta, GA

Take Me With You by Steven Rowley

Adult Fiction, Family Life, LGBTQ+, Literary

Take Me With You by Steven Rowley Read More »

Take a deep, slow breath and prepare for Rowley’s unique combination of tenderness, longing, sorrow, and humor. The biggest mystery isn’t how a man disappears into a beam of light; it’s the human vulnerability of moving on, facing mistakes, and naming losses. Every character has hidden stories. Getting a ringside seat to their journeys is the best gift any reader could want.

Take Me with You by Steven Rowley, (List Price: $30, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 9780593851494, May 2026)

Reviewed by Jan, Main Street Books in Davidson, NC

Partita by Barbara Kingsolver

Partita by Barbara Kingsolver Read More »

Barbara Kingsolver has once again claimed the status of THE VERY BEST in my reading world with this beautiful novel. She deftly writes about class, isolation and abandonment, music, and so much more. Can we overcome the traumas we experience as children? Do we forget the first love? Is obsession really love? Do we outgrow our hometowns or does time and wisdom show us the very best of our places that root us to who we are? The writing is gorgeous. The musical connections are beautiful (even though many of the references were over my head). The characters are flawed and fascinating. I’m still wrestling a bit with the ending and how it all fell into place. But I will always read a Kingsolver work and praise it.

Partita by Barbara Kingsolver, (List Price: $32, Harper, 9780063577541, October 2026)

Reviewed by Christina, The Snail on the Wall in Huntsville, AL

Taipei Story by R. F. Kuang

Adult Fiction, Asia, Asian American & Pacific Islander, Bereavement, Coming of Age, Cultural Heritage, Death, Family Life, Fiction, Grief, Humorous, Literary, Multigenerational, Travel & Vacation, Women

Taipei Story by R. F. Kuang Read More »

Kuang never misses, and this insanely bingeable story was quickly added to my favorites. Kuang expertly depicts the specific brand of grief that arises from an unexpected loss of a family member that you wish you were closer to. Read this book if you want to be inspired to pick up your language studies again.

Taipei Story by R. F. Kuang, (List Price: $32, William Morrow, 9780063583597, August 2026)

Reviewed by Em, Bookmiser in Marietta, GA

Book Buzz: Land by Maggie O’Farrell

Adult Fiction, Historical, Literary, Women

Maggie O'Farrell, photo credit Maggie O'Farrell “I’ve always really been fascinated in maps and the idea of mapping and the impulse to map. I think it is a real human instinct to do it. It actually – as humans, it predates our ability to write. You know, the first known map in the world is an Iron Age map on the walls of a cave in what’s now the Italian Alps in a place called Bedolina. And somebody at some point was filled with the urge to draw, to scratch into the rock this exquisite rendering of their home – their fields and huts and their sort of town, I suppose you would call it. And it’s just such an interesting representation of the urge to say, this is who I am. This is where I am. But of course, you fast-forward a – say, a thousand years or so and you get to the Roman Empire. And from that point on, it’s impossible to disentangle the urge to map from the urge to possess, the – from colonialism.”
― Maggie O’Farrell, NPR Fresh Air

What booksellers are saying about Land

I’ll always go wherever Maggie O’Farrell leads me… Her lush prose and interweaving of facts and folklore brought this time and place to life for me, in the same way my grandmother’s stories once evoked Ireland of long ago. As always her prose, characters, and plot created a powerful story of family and survival. All that and a great dog, too.
― Liz, E. Shaver, Bookseller, Savannah, Georgia | BUY
Immersive and atmospheric, this magnificent story takes us on a journey through time as the fate of one Irish family is woven through the history and geography of the land they call home.
― Anderson, Page & Palette, Fairhope, Alabama| BUY
A book of strange, uncommon tenderness…O’Farrell transports us expertly to the steely reality of 19th century Ireland and America, with all the hardships, oppression and possibility of those times, infused with a hint of magic when the tale occasionally slips into the distant past.
― Doron, Octavia Books, New Orleans, Louisiana | BUY
I loved this book like I love a sad song. It made my heart ache and race and break in only the ways that great art can…I will carry the stories of Tomas, Phina, Enda, Rose, Liam, Eugene and sweet brave Bran for a long time.
― Amanda, Tombolo Books, St. Petersburg, Florida | BUY

About Maggie O’Farrell

Maggie O’Farrell was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1972. Her novels include Hamnet (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction), The Marriage Portrait, After You’d Gone, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine (winner of the Costa Novel Award), and Instructions for a Heatwave. She has also written a memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. She lives in Edinburgh.

Book Buzz: Land by Maggie O’Farrell Read More »

Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead

Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead Read More »

Cool Machine showcases Colson Whitehead’s razor-sharp but warm-hearted storytelling. The last book in The Harlem Trilogy brings NYC and protagonist Ray Carney into the 1980s. From the outside, The City is on the rise with shiny skyscrapers filled with the super rich enjoying the economic boom. In Harlem, Ray must go underground to secure money for his wife Elizabeth’s expanding travel agency. Pepper, Carney’s partner in crime, agrees to babysit a Midwestern businessman while chasing an African mask that is getting people killed. This book is a carnival thrill ride that barely lets you catch your breath, as old and new characters jump out from dark places. A must-read!

Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead, (List Price: $30, Doubleday, 9780385550505, July 2026)

Reviewed by Judy, Bookmarks in Winston-Salem, NC

American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee