We can’t believe it’s April already! Time flies when you’re reading. We hope you enjoyed some great books last month. Here’s a selection of books our booksellers recommend from March.
A richly detailed, brilliantly woven debut about the life and lore of one Black American family, told in thirteen distinct snapshots of their family gatherings
The children of the four Collins sisters – Cassandra, Lela, Suzette and Felice – have a complicated inheritance. It includes unbreakable rules for navigating society, contested stories about their grandparents’ early lives, capacious musical talents, and an opal necklace of uncertain origin. In this sparkling debut, Shannon Sanders brings us into the company of this majestically complicated multigenerational family as they meet, bicker, celebrate, worry, keep and reveal secrets, build lives and careers, and endure.
With deceptive ease, Sanders captures the nuanced performances of the most intimate and most estranged family relationships. From a pair of brothers reuniting to oust a deadbeat boyfriend from their mother’s home to a quartet of nieces roped into attending a party in their aunt’s honour, from unexpected visitors to ghostly presences and unwelcome memories, each gathering in this collection is filled with buoyancy and affection, with solemnity and sadness.
The family stories that comprise Company lead to a deeper, more compelling truth about the rules by which we live – those that we inherit, and those that we make for ourselves.
John Niven’s little brother Gary was fearless, popular, stubborn, handsome, hilarious and sometimes terrifying. In 2010, after years of chaotic struggle against the world, he took his own life at the age of 42.
Hoping for the best while often witnessing the worst, John, his younger sister Linda and their mother, Jeanette, saw the darkest fears they had for Gary played out in drug deals, prison and bankruptcy. While his life spiralled downward and the love the Nivens shared was tested to its limit, John drifted into his own trouble in the music industry, a world where excess was often a marker of success.
Tracking the lives of two brothers in changing times – from illicit cans of lager in 70s sitting rooms to ecstasy in 90s raves – O Brother is a tender, affecting and often uproariously funny story. It is about the bonds of family and how we try to keep the finest of those we lose alive. It is about black sheep and what it takes to break the ties that bind. Fundamentally it is about how families survive suicide, ‘that last cry, from the saddest outpost.’
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Horror hides behind an attractive face in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s tale of a notorious Victorian libertine and his life of evil excesses. Though Dorian’s hedonistic indulgences leave no blemish on his ageless features, the painted portrait imbued with his soul proves a living catalogue of corruption, revealing in its every new line and lesion the manifold sins he has committed. Desperate to hide the physical evidence of his unregenerate spirit, Dorian will stop at nothing—not even murder—to keep his picture’s existence a secret.
A scandalous story when it was first published in 1890, The Picture of Dorian Gray is acknowledged as a landmark of literature today and a tale emblematic of its time. This volume is one of Barnes & Noble’s Collectible Editions classics. Each volume features authoritative texts by the world’s greatest authors in an exquisitely designed foil-stamped binding, with distinctive colored edging and an attractive ribbon bookmark. Decorative, durable, and collectible, these books offer hours of pleasure to readers young and old and are an indispensable cornerstone for any home library.
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Australian outback.
She doesn’t believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.
But disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations.
First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signalling a new battle against the rising infestation.
Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who disappeared decades before, presumed murdered.
And finally, a troubling visitor plunges the narrator further back into her past.
Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket.
When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the game becomes her world.
Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters. Her life is reduced to the sport, guided by its rhythms: the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot and its echo.
But on the court, she is not alone. She is with her pa. She is with Ged, a thirteen-year-old boy with his own formidable talent. She is with the players who have come before her. She is in awe.
An indelible coming-of-age story, Chetna Maroo’s first novel captures the ordinary and annihilates it with beauty.
Western Lane is a valentine to innocence, to the closeness of sisterhood, to the strange ways we come to know ourselves and each other.
The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative business is going under – but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman.
His wife Imelda is selling off her jewellery on eBay while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way to her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.
Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favour to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil?
Can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written – is there still time to find a happy ending?
Meet Ava: rule-abiding lawyer who has ticked all of life’s boxes. She’s married to a successful surgeon and has just taken an indefinite career break to raise her adorable toddler. A picture-perfect life.
Meet Winnie: Ava’s old college roommate. Once awkward, quiet and apparently academically challenged, she left Stanford in a shroud of scandal. But now, she is charismatic, wealthy and has returned to town dripping in designer accessories. An actual perfect life.
When the two women bump into one another at a local coffee shop, it seems like fate has intervened: Winnie’s new-found success is courtesy of a shady business and she needs a favour; Ava is realising she is not built for the stay-at-home life. But what starts as one favour turns into two, then three, and soon Ava is in far deeper than she ever imagined.
Now Ava has to make the ultimate decision: cut and run, or risk it all?
The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft
Eight translators arrive at a house in a forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the writer Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Grey Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace.
The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient, wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime moulds and lichens and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets — and deceptions — of Irena Rey’s that they are utterly unprepared for. Forced to face their differences as they grow increasingly paranoid in this fever dream of isolation and obsession, soon the translators are tangled up in a web of rivalries and desire, threatening not only their work but the fate of their beloved author herself.
This hilarious, thought-provoking second outing by award-winning translator and author Jennifer Croft is a brilliant examination of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language. It is an unforgettable, unputdownable adventure with a small but global cast of characters shaken by the shocks of love, destruction, and creation in one of Europe’s last great wildernesses.
Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy
In one of the most acclaimed novels of the year, her first in over a decade, Claire Kilroy takes us deep into the mind of her unforgettable heroine.
Exploring the clash of fierce love for a new life with a seismic change in identity, she vividly realises the tumultuous emotions of a new mother.
As her marriage strains and she struggles with questions of love, autonomy creativity and the passing of time, an old friend makes a welcome return – but can he really offer a lifeline to the woman she used to be?