This is one of my favorite books of all time. Heartwarming and heartbreaking.
The Color Purple by Alice Walker, (List Price: $32, Penguin Classics, 9780143137047, January 2022)
Reviewed by Annastasia Williams, The Bottom in Knoxville, Tennessee
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When Taylor Jenkins Reid writes a book, she crafts a work of art! Setting this story during the 1980s NASA integration of female astronauts, TJR has outdone herself with her world-building, her character development, and her ability to create a story both compelling and enriching. I come away from her books feeling like I’ve lived a life I’ve only ever dreamed of. And this book is exceptional. Evelyn Hugo walked so Joan Goodwin and Vanessa Ford could run… or soar.
Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid, (List Price: $30, Ballantine Books, 9780593158715, June 2025)
Reviewed by Thomas Wallace, Reading Rock Books in Dickson, Tennessee
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The premise, of a family in Japan, draws on my experience directly, because I spent time in Japan with my family when I was a child. But what prompted the novel are less specific memories themselves than the hazy, fragmentary quality of my memories from that time, the extent to which they’re partial and distorted. My memories from that time feel like dreams, and their atmosphere is sometimes quite ominous. Eventually a storyline that departs pretty dramatically from any event of my life came along to suit that weird, ominous tone.
― Susan Choi, Interview, Lithub
What booksellers are saying about Flashlight
About Susan Choi
Susan Choi is the author of Trust Exercise, which received the National Book Award for fiction, as well as the novels The Foreign Student, American Woman, A Person of Interest, and My Education. She is a recipient of the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award, a Lambda Literary award, the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Brooklyn, New York
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A BRILLIANT DEBUT set in 16th-century Netherlands that will stick with you. Honestly, this one really made me rage. It’s a reminder of the injustice women have encountered in time (and to this day). What resonated the most is how the author captures the way in which women are pitted against one another. But, when we come together — like this unlikely pair — we soar. We experience a kind of freedom. Heartbreaking and hopeful.
Raging Clouds by Yudori, (List Price: $34.99, Fantagraphics, 9798875001062, July 2025)
Reviewed by Morgan DePerno, Bookmarks in Winston-Salem, North Carolina
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My skin feels like it’s buzzing and purring after having finished this book. Groff’s writing is very often quite breathtaking at the sentence level, so much so that I was occasionally forgetting to notice how masterfully she was setting up an intricate and many-layered plot. Lotto, Mathilde, and the other characters jump off the page so vividly, it’s hard for me to imagine they aren’t really out there, living their fierce and complicated lives. Five stars.
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff, (List Price: $18, Riverhead Books, 9781594634482, September 2016)
Reviewed by Janet Geddis, Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia
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A hypnotic onion of a puzzle…peel back one layer and find more questions, fewer answers. All the more triumphant in its building frustration, eventual catharsis. Area X is all of us and none of us, nowhere and everywhere, peering at us with a thousand impossible eyes.”
Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer, (List Price: $18, Picador, 9781250824066, July 2024)
Reviewed by Morgan Holub, E. Shaver Bookseller in Savannah, Georgia
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Rhys is a former environmental reporter for a local newspaper. I was a newspaper reporter for about seven years, and still think of myself in many ways, almost as a spot-news novelist. So, I’m still drawn to write stories as they’re happening.
It was very easy at first for me to inhabit this character, Rhys, and then fill him with the rant that I find myself perpetrating in my own head all the time. And then, as always happens with fictional characters, the political becomes personal, and you start knowing much more about this cranky old guy who has moved up to the woods and spent the last seven years doing nothing but reading books and writing an incredibly ambitious book called The Atlas of Wisdom that he thinks is going to be the thing that people remember him by.
― Jess Walter, Interview, Lithub.com
What booksellers are saying about So Far Gone
About Jess Walter
Jess Walter is the author of seven previous novels, including the bestsellers The Cold Millions and Beautiful Ruins, the National Book Award Finalist The Zero, and Citizen Vince, winner of the Edgar Award for best novel. His short fiction, collected in The Angel of Rome and We Live in Water, has won the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize and appeared three times in Best American Short Stories. He lives in his hometown of Spokane, Washington.
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Shteyngart is one of the funniest living novelists, so much so that he once (gently) insulted me at a book signing over a decade ago, and I took it as a compliment. In Vera, he twists words to his will with (if you’ll pardon the obvious, Russian immigré cliché, especially in a book named after the man’s wife) Nabakovian genius. With a neurotic, precocious ten year old protagonist as the vehicle through which we view the unfolding of a dystopian near-future; a manic, pants-dropping younger brother for comic relief (“the family psychiatrist had to periodically check Dylan for ADHD as if for lice”), and a father and step-mother combo keeping things on track (until they don’t), Shteyngart does what he does best: identifying and skewering the signifiers of liberal, middle-class comfort (a class to which he himself undoubtedly belongs). Thus copies of The Power Broker are faced out to impress guests, the tension between wanting your kids’ grades not to matter whilst, of course, desperately wanting them to get straight A’s is ever-present, and empathy for those trying to deny our existence is a must. All of which makes this slim novel sound heavy and imposing, when in fact it reads like a breeze; funny, touching, educational, and filled with sly linguistic and cultural winks – all the things us liberal, middle-class intelligentsia love!
Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart, (List Price: $28, Random House, 9780593595091, July 2025)
Reviewed by Doron Klemer, Octavia Books in New Orleans, Louisiana
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I love the creativity behind the café in this story—a place where people come together to talk and be heard. But even more compelling is the journey of Jean, the main character, who leaves Taiwan for California and builds a life she never expected—two marriages, motherhood, unexpected wealth, deeply felt loss, and ultimately, the fulfillment of her dream in opening a café. A beautifully woven novel about friendship, connection, and purpose.
The Satisfaction Café by Kathy Wang, (List Price: $28.99, Scribner, 9781668068922, July 2025)
Reviewed by Beth Seufer Buss, Bookmarks in Winston-Salem, North Carolina
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Cue the lit match and the cool walk-away. This heist novel centers on Jada Williams, a Black woman whose student loans are literally following her–and a bunch of other Black folks–in the form of LA’s debt police, a new unit of cops decked out in turquoise who keep running their mouths about crystals. Author and unparalleled wit Kashana Cauley zeroes in on what it feels like to be stalked by debt in a capitalist system in this knock-out novel. This book made me mad in all the right ways.
The Payback by Kashana Cauley, (List Price: $27.99, Atria Books, 9781668075531, July 2025)
Reviewed by Julia Paganelli Marin, Pearl’s Books in Fayetteville, Arkansas
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There’s a part in the novel when [the protagonist] Corby says he thinks that women are just stronger than men because it’s women who come and visit the prisoners. Whether they are grandmothers who are taking care of the kids and wearing their convalescent home pinafores, girlfriends, or so forth—it’s women who show up. That was my experience when I would go to visit our son. Often, I’d be one of the few men who went into the visiting room; usually, it was another father. And sometimes I would be the only guy in the visiting room. I don’t think it’s because men are necessarily cold. They don’t necessarily detach from loved ones who are male. I think so many of men’s problems come down to fear. It’s not that women don’t live with fear, but that they can more easily voice that fear.
― Wally Lamb, Interview, Oprah Daily
What booksellers are saying about The River is Waiting
About Wally Lamb
Wally Lamb is the author of six New York Times bestselling novels: I’ll Take You There, We Are Water, Wishin’ and Hopin’, The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much Is True, and She’s Come Undone. Lamb also edited Couldn’t Keep It to Myself and I’ll Fly Away, two volumes of essays from students in his writing workshop at York Correctional Institution, a women’s prison in Connecticut, where he was a volunteer facilitator for twenty years. Lamb lives in Connecticut with his wife, Christine, and they have three sons..
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As a retired archivist, the questions at the heart of this story: whose stories get told, privacy rights, the always incompleteness of memories–along with skilled writing made this a fascinating and thought-provoking read. There is magic in the story and in the reading of it.
The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King, (List Price: $28.99, William Morrow, 9780063446236, June 2025)
Reviewed by Jan Blodgett, Main Street Books in Davidson, North Carolina
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”Hazel says no” is the title, but also the simple act that causes so much craziness in this small town. A book that is told in different perspectives and shows how one event can affect people in different ways. It is a book that is very timely and at the same time feels like a story we all know way too well.
Hazel Says No by Gross Jessica Berger, (List Price: $28.99, Berger Gross, Jessica, 9781335015129, June 2025)
Reviewed by Brianna Lloyd, Epilogue: Books Chocolate Brews in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
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A roiling and intense debut featuring an untamable traveling freak show and the small, narrow-minded Scottish town it invades. What follows are unpredictable celebrations of freakishness, intoxicating forays into carnivals unknown, and the flickering flames of brutality. A furious mob is looming. Which side will you be on?
Freakslaw by Jane Flett, (List Price: $28, Zando, 9781638932666, April 2025)
Reviewed by Joshua Lambie, Underground Books in Carrollton, Georgia
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Notes on Infinity brings together the intensity of two college students coming into their adult selves as they navigate the unknown scientific world. A shared love of science and discovery between Zoe and Jack parallels a less definitive personal relationship. Zoe focuses on the practical while keeping Jack, a true devotee to science, on track physically and emotionally as they grow their literally life-changing project into a full-blown business. The day-to-day of student life will appeal to even those who have long left those days behind, when the future was wide open and limited only by the energy you put into it.
Notes on Infinity by Austin Taylor, (List Price: $29.99, Celadon Books, 9781250376107, June 2025)
Reviewed by Doloris Vest, Book No Further in Roanoke, Virginia
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