Pip Williams

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Virginia

A Novel

"Originally published in Australia by Affirm Press in 2020"--Title page verso.

The Dictionary of Lost Words

e64713e8-6e59-4dac-9814-cca068eab7ce-1

Jhumpa Lahiri

Exploring the secrets and complexities lying at the heart of family life and relationships, a collection of eight stories includes the title work, about a young mother in a new city whose father tends her garden while hiding a secret love affair, as well as "Hema and Kaushik," "Only Goodness," and "A Choice of Accommodations," among others. 300,000 first printing.

Unaccustomed Earth

7c07abca-5a33-4656-ab5e-5d925c41f50b-1

Peter Ackroyd

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors

"An extraordinary book . . . Peter Ackroyd is arguably the most talented and prolific writer working in Britain today." --Daily Express (UK)

In Foundation, acclaimed historian Peter Ackroyd tells the epic story of England itself. He takes us from the primeval forests of England's prehistory to the death, in 1509, of the first Tudor king, Henry VII. He guides us from the building of Stonehenge to the founding of the two great glories of medieval England: common law and the cathedrals. He describes the successive waves of invaders who made England English, despite being themselves Roman, Viking, Saxon, or Norman French.

With his extraordinary skill for evoking time and place and his acute eye for the telling detail, Ackroyd recounts the story of warring kings, of civil strife, and foreign wars. But he also gives us a vivid sense of how England's early people lived: the homes they built, the clothes they wore, the food they ate, even the jokes they told. All are brought to life in this history of England through the narrative mastery of one of Britain's finest writers.

Foundation

86a4960c-362d-415a-95e8-9fcf9197fd40-1

Robin Coste Lewis

And Other Poems

This National Book Award-winning debut poetry collection is a "powerfully evocative" (The New York Review of Books) meditation on the black female figure through time. Robin Coste Lewis's electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems meditating on the roles desire and race play in the construction of the self. In the center of the collection is the title poem, "Voyage of the Sable Venus," an amazing narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present—titles that feature or in some way comment on the black female figure in Western art. Bracketed by Lewis's own autobiographical poems, "Voyage" is a tender and shocking meditation on the fragmentary mysteries of stereotype, juxtaposing our names for things with what we actually see and know. A new understanding of biography and the self, this collection questions just where, historically, do ideas about the black female figure truly begin—five hundred years ago, five thousand, or even longer? And what role did art play in this ancient, often heinous story? Here we meet a poet who adores her culture and the beauty to be found within it. Yet she is also a cultural critic alert to the nuances of race and desire—how they define us all, including her own sometimes painful history. Lewis's book is a thrilling aesthetic anthem to the complexity of race—a full embrace of its pleasure and horror, in equal parts.

Voyage of the Sable Venus

c1fbdf98-8bc3-4a33-bfd9-645bd8e8b402-1

Elif Batuman

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction • Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction “Easily the funniest book I’ve read this year.” —GQ “Masterly funny debut novel . . . Erudite but never pretentious, The Idiot will make you crave more books by Batuman.” —Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself. The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings. At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer. With superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. Her prose is a rare and inimitable combination of tenderness and wisdom; its logic as natural and inscrutable as that of memory itself. The Idiot is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. Batuman's fiction is unguarded against both life's affronts and its beauty--and has at its command the complete range of thinking and feeling which they entail. Named one the best books of the year by Refinery29 • Mashable One • Elle Magazine • The New York Times • Bookpage • Vogue • NPR • Buzzfeed •The Millions

The Idiot

87356cd0-136b-40e2-9596-a6877224407f-1

Natalie Diaz

Poems

WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY Natalie Diaz’s highly anticipated follow-up to When My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of an American Book Award Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: “I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.” Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—in it, a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.

Postcolonial Love Poem

5c491951-7efa-4994-8992-1b22b31d65e7-1

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Richard Pevear

Larissa Volokhonsky

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

A man must endure relentless physical and metal punishments as retribution for his act of murder

Crime and Punishment

4f90ef1a-f405-4997-914b-ff7bad1b9b37-1

Margaret Owen

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

"Gorgeous prose, delicious magic." - V.E. Schwab

YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults Selection
Kids' Indie Next Pick
Amazon Best Book

A scrappy maid must outsmart both palace nobles and Low Gods in a new YA fantasy by Margaret Owen, author of the Merciful Crow series.

Once upon a time, there was a horrible girl...

Vanja Schmidt knows that no gift is freely given, not even a mother's love--and she's on the hook for one hell of a debt. Vanja, the adopted goddaughter of Death and Fortune, was Princess Gisele's dutiful servant up until a year ago. That was when Vanja's otherworldly mothers demanded a terrible price for their care, and Vanja decided to steal her future back... by stealing Gisele's life for herself.

The real Gisele is left a penniless nobody while Vanja uses an enchanted string of pearls to take her place. Now, Vanja leads a lonely but lucrative double life as princess and jewel thief, charming nobility while emptying their coffers to fund her great escape. Then, one heist away from freedom, Vanja crosses the wrong god and is cursed to an untimely end: turning into jewels, stone by stone, for her greed.

Vanja has just two weeks to figure out how to break her curse and make her getaway. And with a feral guardian half-god, Gisele's sinister fiancé, and an overeager junior detective on Vanja's tail, she'll have to pull the biggest grift yet to save her own life.

Margaret Owen, author of The Merciful Crow series, crafts a delightfully irreverent retelling of "The Goose Girl" about stolen lives, thorny truths, and the wicked girls at the heart of both.

Little Thieves

de6277c5-de7d-4c89-b956-af062da31b3f-1

Ann Patchett

The New York Times bestselling author of State of Wonder, Run, and Bel Canto creates a resonant portrait of a life in this collection of writings on love, friendship, work, and art. "The tricky thing about being a writer, or about being any kind of artist, is that in addition to making art you also have to make a living." So begins This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, an examination of the things Ann Patchett is fully committed to—the art and craft of writing, the depths of friendship, an elderly dog, and one spectacular nun. Writing nonfiction, which started off as a means of keeping her insufficiently lucrative fiction afloat, evolved over time to be its own kind of art, the art of telling the truth as opposed to the art of making things up. Bringing her narrative gifts to bear on her own life, Patchett uses insight and compassion to turn very personal experiences into stories that will resonate with every reader. These essays twine to create both a portrait of life and a philosophy of life. Obstacles that at first appear insurmountable—scaling a six-foot wall in order to join the Los Angeles Police Department, opening an independent bookstore, and sitting down to write a novel—are eventually mastered with quiet tenacity and sheer force of will. The actual happy marriage, which was the one thing she felt she wasn't capable of, ultimately proves to be a metaphor as well as a fact: Patchett has devoted her life to the people and ideals she loves the most. An irresistible blend of literature and memoir, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage is a unique examination of the heart, mind, and soul of one of our most revered and gifted writers.

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

b16cbda2-0cad-4ad0-85c7-d88b5eb1db9a

Tracy Borman

Some wear and tear on cover; otherwise in good condition 

Frances Gorges Historical Trilogy, Book I

The first in a trilogy of historical novels set at the dramatic endpoint of the Tudor reign and the dangerous start of the Stuart era

The King's Witch

101e795a-a89e-46bd-bcad-6a79bb4875d1-1

Marie Tourell Soderberg

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

The Danish Art of Happiness

In Autumn 2016, everyone will be talking about 'hygge'. This Danish concept has no English translation but is all about focusing on the little things in life that bring you warmth and happiness, whether it's spending quality time with loved ones or creating a 'hyggelig' atmosphere in your home.

But hygge isn't a cliche about knitted jumpers and sitting around a fire. It's much more than that, and it has the power to change your life.

In this beautiful gift book, find out what hygge really means and how you can bring it into every aspect of your life. Fully illustrated throughout, the book will reveal how you can be more hygge through delicious recipes, easy tweaks to your home interiors, and by making time for 'hygge moments' in a busy life.

Hygge

d2606a93-2557-4a12-910e-4328f8279a69-1

Sarah Perry

A Kirkus Review Best Book of 2017 and a Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction. Winner of the British Book Awards Fiction Book of the Year and overall Book of the Year, selected as the Waterstones Book of the Year, and a Costa Book Award Finalist "A novel of almost insolent ambition--lush and fantastical, a wild Eden behind a garden gate...it's part ghost story and part natural history lesson, part romance and part feminist parable. I found it so transporting that 48 hours after completing it, I was still resentful to be back home." -New York Times “An irresistible new novel…the most delightful heroine since Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice…By the end, The Essex Serpent identifies a mystery far greater than some creature ‘from the illuminated margins of a manuscript’: friendship.” -Washington Post "Richly enjoyable... Ms. Perry writes beautifully and sometimes agreeably sharply... The Essex Serpent is a wonderfully satisfying novel. Ford Madox Ford thought the glory of the novel was its ability to make the reader think and feel at the same time. This one does just that." -Wall Street Journal An exquisitely talented young British author makes her American debut with this rapturously acclaimed historical novel, set in late nineteenth-century England, about an intellectually minded young widow, a pious vicar, and a rumored mythical serpent that explores questions about science and religion, skepticism, and faith, independence and love. When Cora Seaborne’s brilliant, domineering husband dies, she steps into her new life as a widow with as much relief as sadness: her marriage was not a happy one. Wed at nineteen, this woman of exceptional intelligence and curiosity was ill-suited for the role of society wife. Seeking refuge in fresh air and open space in the wake of the funeral, Cora leaves London for a visit to coastal Essex, accompanied by her inquisitive and obsessive eleven-year old son, Francis, and the boy’s nanny, Martha, her fiercely protective friend. While admiring the sites, Cora learns of an intriguing rumor that has arisen further up the estuary, of a fearsome creature said to roam the marshes claiming human lives. After nearly 300 years, the mythical Essex Serpent is said to have returned, taking the life of a young man on New Year’s Eve. A keen amateur naturalist with no patience for religion or superstition, Cora is immediately enthralled, and certain that what the local people think is a magical sea beast may be a previously undiscovered species. Eager to investigate, she is introduced to local vicar William Ransome. Will, too, is suspicious of the rumors. But unlike Cora, this man of faith is convinced the rumors are caused by moral panic, a flight from true belief. These seeming opposites who agree on nothing soon find themselves inexorably drawn together and torn apart—an intense relationship that will change both of their lives in ways entirely unexpected. Hailed by Sarah Waters as "a work of great intelligence and charm, by a hugely talented author," The Essex Serpent is "irresistible . . . you can feel the influences of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and Hilary Mantel channeled by Perry in some sort of Victorian séance. This is the best new novel I’ve read in years" (Daily Telegraph).

The Essex Serpent

385e96c1-6ef1-41f1-834c-0f448ba76b24-1

Salman Rushdie

Gibreel Farishta, a legendary Indian movie star, and Saladin Chamcha, the man of a thousand voices, fall earthward from a bombed jet toward the sea, singing rival verses in an eternal wrestling match between good and evil. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

The Satanic Verses

cc6501cb-d995-4b38-958d-1ee6488e433e-1

Caroline De Maigret

Sophie Mas

From the Authors of How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are

From the bestselling authors of How to be Parisian—”a book to read late at night in one go and then buy for your girlfriends” (Vogue UK) about what smart, savvy, fabulous women think, feel, and advise about growing older. Older, but Better, but Older has the playful wit, self deprecation and worldly advice we have come to expect from these bestselling authors, but now that advice is focused on the French woman's mindset as she hurtles towards forty. Caroline de Maigret and Sophie Mas are back to amuse you with how they find they are modifying their favorite bad-girl behavior as they address beauty, love, seduction as well as lifestyle, family, work, and living alone. They are still bohemian iconoclasts saying what you don't expect to hear. They will tell you things aren't what they used to be--when a thirty-year-old guy arrives at a party and does not even glance at you; when you wake up feeling great and everyone tells you how tired you look; you know you're an adult when you're excited just to go home. Neuroses vs. confidence, resistance vs. acceptance, passion vs. serenity, de Maigret and Mas through spirited short stories capture the different stages of ageing--as nostalgic but modern Parisian women. From the privately absurd to the strangely universal, this book captures moments of everyday life that will make the reader nod, cringe, and laugh out loud.

Sarah Tok

@vellumvixen

Books Listed

Following

Followers

Pip Williams

The Dictionary of Lost Words

Jhumpa Lahiri

Unaccustomed Earth

Peter Ackroyd

Foundation

Robin Coste Lewis

Voyage of the Sable Venus

Elif Batuman

The Idiot

Natalie Diaz

Postcolonial Love Poem

Fyodor Dostoevsky; Richard Pevear; Larissa Volokhonsky

Crime and Punishment

Margaret Owen

Little Thieves

Ann Patchett

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

Tracy Borman

The King's Witch

Marie Tourell Soderberg

Hygge

Sarah Perry

The Essex Serpent

Salman Rushdie

The Satanic Verses

Caroline De Maigret; Sophie Mas

Older, but Better, but Older

Get The App

Browse by categories

Pip Williams

The Dictionary of Lost Words

Jhumpa Lahiri

Unaccustomed Earth

Peter Ackroyd

Foundation

Robin Coste Lewis

Voyage of the Sable Venus

Elif Batuman

The Idiot

Natalie Diaz

Postcolonial Love Poem

Fyodor Dostoevsky; Richard Pevear; Larissa Volokhonsky

Crime and Punishment

Margaret Owen

Little Thieves

Ann Patchett

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

Tracy Borman

The King's Witch

Marie Tourell Soderberg

Hygge

Sarah Perry

The Essex Serpent

Salman Rushdie

The Satanic Verses

Caroline De Maigret; Sophie Mas

Older, but Better, but Older

Get The App