Madeleine Thien

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Virginia

An extraordinary novel set in China before, during and after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989--the breakout book we've been waiting for from a bestselling, Amazon.ca First Novel Award winner. Madeleine Thien's new novel is breathtaking in scope and ambition even as it is hauntingly intimate. With the ease and skill of a master storyteller, Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations--those who lived through Mao's Cultural Revolution in the mid-twentieth century; and the children of the survivors, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square in 1989, in one of the most important political moments of the past century. With exquisite writing sharpened by a surprising vein of wit and sly humour, Thien has crafted unforgettable characters who are by turns flinty and headstrong, dreamy and tender, foolish and wise. At the centre of this epic tale, as capacious and mysterious as life itself, are enigmatic Sparrow, a genius composer who wishes desperately to create music yet can find truth only in silence; his mother and aunt, Big Mother Knife and Swirl, survivors with captivating singing voices and an unbreakable bond; Sparrow's ethereal cousin Zhuli, daughter of Swirl and storyteller Wen the Dreamer, who as a child witnesses the denunciation of her parents and as a young woman becomes the target of denunciations herself; and headstrong, talented Kai, best friend of Sparrow and Zhuli, and a determinedly successful musician who is a virtuoso at masking his true self until the day he can hide no longer. Here, too, is Kai's daughter, the ever-questioning mathematician Marie, who pieces together the tale of her fractured family in present-day Vancouver, seeking a fragile meaning in the layers of their collective story. With maturity and sophistication, humour and beauty, a huge heart and impressive understanding, Thien has crafted a novel that is at once beautifully intimate and grandly political, rooted in the details of daily life inside China, yet transcendent in its universality.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing

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Deborah Levy

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Colorado

Longlisted for the Booker Prize
A New York Times Editor's Choice

Named a Best Book of the Year By:
The New York Times Book Review (Notable Books of the Year) * The New York Public Library * The Washington Post * Time.com * The New York Times Critics' (Parul Seghal's Top Books of the Year) * St. Louis Post Dispatch * Apple * A Publisher's Weekly's Top Ten Books of the Year
An electrifying novel about beauty, envy, and carelessness from Deborah Levy, author of the Booker Prize finalists Hot Milk and Swimming Home.

It is 1988 and Saul Adler, a narcissistic young historian, has been invited to Communist East Berlin to do research; in exchange, he must publish a favorable essay about the German Democratic Republic. As a gift for his translator's sister, a Beatles fanatic who will be his host, Saul's girlfriend will shoot a photograph of him standing in the crosswalk on Abbey Road, an homage to the famous album cover. As he waits for her to arrive, he is grazed by an oncoming car, which changes the trajectory of his life.

The Man Who Saw Everything is about the difficulty of seeing ourselves and others clearly. It greets the specters that come back to haunt old and new love, previous and current incarnations of Europe, conscious and unconscious transgressions, and real and imagined betrayals, while investigating the cyclic nature of history and its reinvention by people in power. Here, Levy traverses the vast reaches of the human imagination while artfully blurring sexual and political binaries--feminine and masculine, East and West, past and present--to reveal the full spectrum of our world.

The Man Who Saw Everything

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Hardcover with jacket. Jacket has a bend on the inside front cover.

Missouri

In this captivating story about loss, love, and changing your ways, National Book Award­-winning author Pete Hautman imbues the classic road trip novel with clever wit and heartfelt musings about life and death.

Steven Gerald Gabel--a.k.a. Stiggy--needs to get out of Minnesota. His father recently took his own life, his mother is a shell of the person she used to be, and his sort-of-girlfriend ghosted him and skipped town. What does he have left to stick around for? Armed with his mom's credit card and a tourist map of Great River Road, Stiggy sets off in his dad's car.

The only problem is, life on his own isn't exactly what he expected and, soon enough, he finds himself at a crossroads: keep running from his demons, or let them hitch a ride back home with him.

Road Tripped

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#paperback #stories #western #clairevayewatkins #awardwinning

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Texas

Stories

The extraordinary debut collection from the Guggenheim Award-winning author of the forthcoming Gold Fame Citrus Winner of the 2012 Story Prize Recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2013 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award Named one of the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" fiction writers of 2012 Winner of New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award NPR Best Short Story Collections of 2012 A Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and Time Out New York Best Book of the year, and more . . . Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it. Her characters orbit around the region's vast spaces, winning redemption despite - and often because of - the hardship and violence they endure. The arrival of a foreigner transforms the exchange of eroticism and emotion at a prostitution ranch. A prospecting hermit discovers the limits of his rugged individualism when he tries to rescue an abused teenager. Decades after she led her best friend into a degrading encounter in a Vegas hotel room, a woman feels the aftershock. Most bravely of all, Watkins takes on – and reinvents – her own troubled legacy in a story that emerges from the mayhem and destruction of Helter Skelter. Arcing from the sweeping and sublime to the minute and personal, from Gold Rush to ghost town to desert to brothel, the collection echoes not only in its title but also in its fierce, undefeated spirit the motto of her home state.

Battleborn

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Very minimal damage, pages in excellent condition. Hardcover with jacket on. Unique stories compiled into this book. 

New Hampshire

House of Heroes, an extraordinary first collection of short stories by award-winning author Mary La Chapelle, is set in the Great Lakes region, where fish frys and church bazaars color an emotional landscape of superstition and challenged faith. Her bittersweet, resonant, and often humorous tales celebrate a vanishing small-town way of life and the silent strength of people facing great odds. La Chapelle populates her keenly crafted tales with heroes great and small. They are outsiders and inmates, disenchanted and quietly triumphant. Anna, a giant, and her cousein Jane, a mime, confront hostility and grapple with social conformity in a small town. Homer, an aging and crippled widower, is reawakened when he falls in love with a college girl. A young girl teetering on the edge of sanity crashes a wedding and is befriended by Peg, a psychologist, who learns more from the girl about the fragile nature of sanity than she ever learned from patients. Then there is the story of Lakeund, a dairy farmer and cheese maker, who gets a taste of longing and can't bear it, and who tries to slip back to simplicity, to that unconscious time before we are aware of the world as outside ourselves. In the title piece a night counselor's experiment with three schizophrenic boys, who are valiantly trying to make their way in a world they cannot master and that does not want them, forces her to reexamine her ideas about heroes. It is the characters' humanity and thier inevitable choice of bravery in the midst of personal conflict that mark these stories. These tales leave the reader, like the characters themselves, feeling a little rocked and sore, lost and then found.

House of Heroes and Other Stories

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New Jersey

Chronicles the story of an ambitious wizard who, in his fortress in the ancient forest, creates a young warrior and sends him to the new kingdom to renew a long-forgotten war

Fortress in the Eye of Time

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#hardcover #minneapolis #heartbreaking #awardwinning #sisters #hamlinewritingprogram

Minnesota

Where No Gods Came, the 2003 winner of the Michigan Literary Fiction Award for original novel, is a candid portrait of the unlikely faces of good and evil, and how an innocent must learn to recognize them to endure


Where No Gods Came

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Adam Johnson

New York

A Novel

The son of a singer mother whose career forcibly separated her from her family and an influential father who runs an orphan work camp, Pak Jun Do rises to prominence using instinctive talents and eventually becomes a professional kidnapper and romantic rival to Kim Jong Il. By the author of Parasites Like Us.

The Orphan Master's Son

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Louisiana's Way Home

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Michigan

I have been in love with Titus Oates for quite a while now--which is ridiculous, since he's been dead for ninety years. But look at it this way. In ninety years I'll be dead, too, and the age difference won't matter.

Sym is not your average teenage girl. She is obsessed with the Antarctic and the brave, romantic figure of Captain Oates from Scott's doomed expedition to the South Pole. In fact, Oates is the secret confidant to whom she spills all her hopes and fears.

But Sym's uncle Victor is even more obsessed--and when he takes her on a dream trip into the bleak Antarctic wilderness, it turns into a nightmarish struggle for survival that will challenge everything she knows and loves.

In her first contemporary young adult novel, Carnegie Medalist and three-time Whitbread Award winner Geraldine McCaughrean delivers a spellbinding journey into the frozen heart of darkness.

The White Darkness

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"More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another over-filled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives in their homelands. And only one has made the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who has the good fortune to fall into the hands not of the officials but of Vänna: a teenage girl, native to the island, who lives inside her own sense of homelessness in a place and among people she has come to disdain. And though she and the boy are complete strangers, though they don't speak a common language, she determines to do whatever it takes to save him. In alternating chapters, we learn the story of the boy's life and of how he came to be on the boat; and we follow the girl and boy as they make their way toward a vision of safety. But as the novel unfurls we begin to understand that this is not merely the story of two children finding their way through a hostile world, it is the story of our collective moment in this time: of empathy and indifference, of hope and despair--and of the way each of those things can blind us to reality, or guide us to a better one"--

What Strange Paradise

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#hardcover #youngadult #yafiction #awardwinning #morrisaward #realisticfiction #contemporary #romance 

A fifteen-year-old Australian girl gets her first job and first crush on her unattainable university-aged co-worker, as both search for meaning in their lives.

Love and Other Perishable Items

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Oklahoma

Trapped in the ruins of a Haitian hospital after a devastating earthquake, young Shorty is terrified by the bodies of victims and dwindling supplies before finding inspiration to rescue himself through the example of revolutionary leader Toussaint L'Ouverture.

In Darkness

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#librarybinding #YA #roadtrip #alcoholism #awardwinning #coming-of-age #women #womanauthor 

Hired by Madeline Gladstone, the president of a shoe company, to help her prevent a corporate takeover, 16-year-old Jenna Boller embarks on an eye-opening adventure that teaches both of them the rules of the road-and the rules of life.

Rules of the Road

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Jacqueline West

Winner of the Schneider Family Book Award

Maryland

2019 Schneider Family Book Award Honor Book

"Original, brave, and addictive."--Adam Gidwitz, bestselling author of the Newbery Honor Book The Inquisitor's Tale

Fast-paced, witty, and riveting, this contemporary fantasy adventure has magic woven through every page. The Collectors begins an enchanting two-book series from Jacqueline West, the New York Times-bestselling author of The Books of Elsewhere series. For fans of Serafina and the Black Cloak, The Isle of the Lost, and The Secret Keepers. 

Van has always been an outsider. He's hard of hearing, collects trinkets, and lives with his single mother--an opera singer with a huge personality. Then one day, Van notices a girl stealing pennies from a fountain, and everything changes. He follows the girl, Pebble, and uncovers an underground society full of wishes and the people who collect them. Not all wishes are good and even good wishes often have unintended consequences, and the Collectors have made it their duty to protect us. But they aren't the only ones who have their eyes on the world's wishes--and they may not be the good guys, after all. 

 Jacqueline West spins a story about friendship, magic, and the gray area between good and evil. The Collectors is for fans of Cassie Beasley's Circus Mirandus and Jonathan Auxier's The Night Gardener. Booklist calls it, "A brilliant fantasy adventure exploring the consequences of getting what you wish for."

The Collectors

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Uzodinma Iweala

In this stunning debut novel, Agu, a young boy in an unnamed West African nation, is recruited into a unit of guerrilla fighters as civil war engulfs his country. Haunted by his father's own death at the hands of militants, Agu is vulnerable to the dangerous yet paternal nature of his new commander. While the war rages on, Agu becomes increasingly divorced from the life he had known before the conflict started—a life of school friends, church services, and time with his family still intact. In a powerful, strikingly original voice that vividly captures Agu's youth and confusion, Uzodinma Iweala has produced a harrowing, inventive, and deeply affecting novel.

Beasts of No Nation

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Iowa

Monster

#hardcover #kincaid #awardwinning #awardwinner #travel #memoir #Nepal #botany #rareplants

A Walk in the Himalaya

A combination memoir and travel journal details an adventure through the mountains of Nepal in search of native flowers and plants that could grow in Vermont, encountering guerrillas, Sherpas, yaks, and spectacular landscapes on the way.

Among Flowers

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Walter Dean Myers

Oregon

FADE IN: INTERIOR: Early morning in CELL BLOCK D, MANHATTAN DETENTION CENTER. Steve (Voice-Over) Sometimes I feel like I have walked into the middle of a movie. Maybe I can make my own movie. The film will be the story of my life. No, not my life, but of this experience. I'll call it what the lady prosecutor called me ... Monster.

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North Carolina

Ruth, a young woman living in a rural Illinois town, looks back on the people who have shaped her life, including her runaway father, shrewish mother, and crazy husband

The Book of Ruth

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There is a slight tear in the dust jacket (pictured) and some light scuff marks, but otherwise in great condition! #hardcover #juvenilefiction #fiction #youngadult #teen #franceshardinge #awardwinning 

On an island off the south coast of Victorian England, fourteen-year-old Faith investigates the mysterious death of her father, who was involved in a scandal, and discovers a tree that feeds upon lies and gives those who eat its fruit visions of truth.

The Lie Tree

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Lauren Groff

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER FINALIST FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION “A relentless exhibition of Groff’s freakish talent. In just over 250 pages, she gives us a character study to rival Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell .” – USA Today “An electric reimagining . . . feminist, sensual . . . unforgettable.” – O, The Oprah Magazine “Thrilling and heartbreaking.” –Time Magazine “[A] page-by-page pleasure as we soar with her.” –New York Times One of our best American writers, Lauren Groff returns with her exhilarating first new novel since the groundbreaking Fates and Furies. Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease. At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. Marie, born the last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, is determined to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. But in a world that is shifting and corroding in frightening ways, one that can never reconcile itself with her existence, will the sheer force of Marie’s vision be bulwark enough? Equally alive to the sacred and the profane, Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in a mesmerizing portrait of consuming passion, aberrant faith, and a woman that history moves both through and around. Lauren Groff’s new novel, her first since Fates and Furies, is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world.

Matrix

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Colum McCann

A little crinkling on the back but book is new and never read

Wisconsin

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A quite extraordinary novel. Colum McCann has found the form and voice to tell the most complex of stories, with an unexpected friendship between two men at its powerfully beating heart.”—Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire FINALIST FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Independent • The New York Public Library • Library Journal From the National Book Award–winning and bestselling author of Let the Great World Spin comes an epic novel rooted in the unlikely real-life friendship between two fathers. Bassam Aramin is Palestinian. Rami Elhanan is Israeli. They inhabit a world of conflict that colors every aspect of their lives, from the roads they are allowed to drive on to the schools their children attend to the checkpoints, both physical and emotional, they must negotiate. But their lives, however circumscribed, are upended one after the other: first, Rami’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Smadar, becomes the victim of suicide bombers; a decade later, Bassam’s ten-year-old daughter, Abir, is killed by a rubber bullet. Rami and Bassam had been raised to hate one another. And yet, when they learn of each other’s stories, they recognize the loss that connects them. Together they attempt to use their grief as a weapon for peace—and with their one small act, start to permeate what has for generations seemed an impermeable conflict. This extraordinary novel is the fruit of a seed planted when the novelist Colum McCann met the real Bassam and Rami on a trip with the non-profit organization Narrative 4. McCann was moved by their willingness to share their stories with the world, by their hope that if they could see themselves in one another, perhaps others could too. With their blessing, and unprecedented access to their families, lives, and personal recollections, McCann began to craft Apeirogon, which uses their real-life stories to begin another—one that crosses centuries and continents, stitching together time, art, history, nature, and politics in a tale both heartbreaking and hopeful. The result is an ambitious novel, crafted out of a universe of fictional and nonfictional material, with these fathers’ moving story at its heart.

Apeirogon: a Novel

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#hardcover #southafrica #family #postapartheid #Awardwinning #international #modern #multilayered #Johannesburg

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

This is the story of the four inhabitants of 127 Martha Street in the poor white suburb of Triomf. Living on the ruins of old Sophiatown, the freehold township razed to the ground as a so-called 'black spot', they await with trepidation their country's first democratic elections. It is a date that coincides fatefully with the fortieth birthday of Lambert, the oversexed misfit son of the house. There is also Treppie, master of misrule and family metaphysician; Pop, the angel of peace teetering on the brink of the grave; and Mol, the materfamilias in her eternal housecoat. Pestered on a daily basis by nosy neighbors, National Party canvassers and Jehovah's Witnesses, defenseless against the big city towering over them like a vengeful dinosaur, they often resort to quoting to each other the only consolation that they know; we still have each other and a roof over our heads. Triomf relentlessly probes Afrikaner history and politics, revealing the bizarre and tragic effect that apartheid had on exactly the white underclass who were most supposed to benefit. It is also a seriously funny investigation of the human endeavor to make sense of life even under the most abject of circumstances.

Save this search

Madeleine Thien

Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Deborah Levy

The Man Who Saw Everything

Pete Hautman

Road Tripped

Claire Vaye Watkins

Battleborn

Mary La Chapelle

House of Heroes and Other Stories

C. J. Cherryh

Fortress in the Eye of Time

Sheila O'Connor

Where No Gods Came

Adam Johnson

The Orphan Master's Son

Kate DiCamillo

Louisiana's Way Home

Geraldine McCaughrean

The White Darkness

Omar El Akkad

What Strange Paradise

Laura Buzo

Love and Other Perishable Items

Nick Lake

In Darkness

Joan Bauer

Rules of the Road

Jacqueline West

The Collectors

Uzodinma Iweala

Beasts of No Nation

Walter Dean Myers

Monster

Jamaica Kincaid

Among Flowers

Walter Dean Myers

Monster

Jane Hamilton

The Book of Ruth

Frances Hardinge

The Lie Tree

Lauren Groff

Matrix

Colum McCann

Apeirogon: a Novel

Marlene van Niekerk

Triomf