September was a busy reading month for our booksellers, and as usual, we read a wide range of different books. Here are some of our favourites that we hope you will love too. We are always happy to help you find your next read, so do pop in and see us at the shop.
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
…is a work of raw and prophetic power that tells the story of America in miniature, through one girl at a hinge point in history, to ask how -and if – we can adapt quickly enough to save ourselves.
A servant girl escapes from a settlement.
A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness.
She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that
burns hot within her.
What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits
of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own
civilization has taught her.
A profound and explosive novel about a spirited girl alone in the wilderness, trying to survive.
The comedians first novel is a funny-peculiar first novel about a woman lurching through life that will challenge your preconceptions.
Deep in Essex and her own thoughts, Sophie had a feeling something was going to happen and then it did. Chris has entered the pub and re-entered her life after Sophie had finally stopped thinking about him and regretting what she’d done.
Sophie has a chance at creating a new ending and paying off her emotional debts (if not her financial ones).
All she has to do is act exactly like a normal, well-adjusted person and not say any of her inner monologue out loud. If she can suppress her light paranoia, pornographic visualisations and pathological lying maybe she’ll even end up getting the guy she wants?
Then she could dump her boyfriend Ian and try to enjoy Christmas.
So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan
The new short story by the author of Small Things Like These finds an unsatisfied man on his bus journey home reflect on the love that got away.
After an uneventful Friday at the Dublin office, Cathal faces into the long weekend and takes the bus home.
There, his mind agitates over a woman named Sabine with whom he could have spent his life, had he acted differently.
All evening, with only the television and a bottle of champagne for company, thoughts of this woman and others intrude – and the true significance of this particular date is revealed.
From one of the finest writers working today, Keegan’s new story asks if a lack of generosity might ruin what could be between men and women. Is it possible to love without sharing?
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
…is a luminous feat of imagination from the acclaimed author of All the Light We Cannot See, Cloud Cuckoo Land traces five unforgettable characters through three distinct time periods, all connected by a prized copy of a mysterious ancient text.
Cloud Cuckoo Land follows three storylines: Anna and Omeir, on opposite sides of the formidable city wall during the 1453 siege of Constantinople; teenage idealist Seymour and gentle octogenarian Zeno, in an attack on a public library in present day Idaho; and Konstance, on an interstellar ship bound for a distant exoplanet, decades from now.
A single copy of an ancient text – the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to the paradise of Cloud Cuckoo Land – provides solace, mystery, and the most profound human connection to these five unforgettable characters.
Like Marie-Laure and Werner in All the Light We Cannot See, Anna, Omeir, Zeno, Seymour, and Konstance are dreamers and misfits, on the cusp of adulthood, struggling to survive and finding resourcefulness and hope in the midst of peril.
A Dangerous Business by Jane Smiley
From the brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling author comes a rollicking murder mystery set in Gold Rush California, as two young prostitutes follow a trail of missing girls.
Monterey, 1851. Ever since her husband was killed in a bar fight, Eliza Ripple has been working in a brothel. It seems like a better life, at least at first. The madam, Mrs. Parks, is kind, the men are (relatively) well behaved, and Eliza has attained what few women have: financial security. But when the dead bodies of young women start appearing outside of town, a darkness descends that she can’t resist confronting. Side by side with her friend Jean, and inspired by her reading, especially by Edgar Allan Poe’s detective Dupin, Eliza pieces together an array of clues to try to catch the killer, all the while juggling clients who begin to seem more and more suspicious.
Eliza and Jean are determined not just to survive, but to find their way in a lawless town on the fringes of the Wild West – a bewitching combination of beauty and danger – as what will become the Civil War looms on the horizon.
As Mrs. Parks says, ‘Everyone knows that this is a dangerous business, but between you and me, being a woman is a dangerous business, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise . . .’
… is a work of breath-taking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step.
Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.
Ireland is falling apart.
The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling.
How far will she go to save her family? And what – or who – is she willing to leave behind?
A Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
From the author of Cutting for Stone comes a novel imbued with humour, deep emotion and the essence of life, it is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.
Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water follows a family in southern India that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning – and in Kerala, water is everywhere.
At the turn of the century a twelve-year-old girl, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this poignant beginning, the young girl and future matriarch – known as Big Ammachi – will witness unthinkable changes at home and at large over the span of her extraordinary life, full of the joys and trials of love and the struggles of hardship. A shimmering evocation of a lost India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today.
Dead Man’s Creek by Chris Hammer
If you like a darkly simmering mystery then this one is for you.
Newly-minted homicide detective Nell Buchanan returns to her hometown, annoyed at being assigned a decades-old murder – a ‘file and forget’.
But this is no ordinary cold case, her arrival provoking an unwelcome and threatening response from the small-town community. As more bodies are discovered, and she begins to question how well she truly knows those closest to her, Nell realises that finding the truth could prove more difficult – and dangerous – than she’d ever expected.
The nearer Nell comes to uncovering the secrets of the past, the more treacherous her path becomes. Can she survive to root out the truth, and what price will she have to pay for it?