Shelf Talkers #5: What Booksellers Are Recommending
I was scrolling through my archive the other day and realized it’s been two years since I’ve put together a Shelf Talkers newsletter. I love reading shelf talkers, whether in a bookstore or online (I never tire of hearing what booksellers are recommending) so I’m reviving this series starting today! And the bookseller recs I’m sharing below highlight what the very best booksellers do so well—talk about books in ways that make me (and hopefully you) say, I must read this book.
As a reminder, shelf talkers are small (often handwritten) signs in front of books that are used to grab our attention and tell us why a bookseller enjoyed that book. The best shelf talkers, in just a few words, let us know what kind of book it is, why they loved it, and who would love this type of book. I can never, ever, resist a good shelf talker.
Today we’re heading to the eastern part of the US and I’m bringing you shelf talkers from booksellers at Longfellow Books in Portland, Maine, Mitchell’s Book Corner in Nantucket, MA and East City Bookshop in Washington, DC. My tbr has certainly expanded because I want to read all of these!
The Heavens by Sandra Newman - New York, late summer, 2000. A party in a spacious Manhattan apartment, hosted by a wealthy young activist. Dozens of idealistic twenty-somethings have impassioned conversations over takeout dumplings and champagne. The evening shines with the heady optimism of a progressive new millennium. A young man, Ben, meets a young woman, Kate--and they begin to fall in love. What follows is a powerful reminder of the consequences of our actions, a poignant testament to how the people we love are destined to change, and a masterful exploration of the power of dreams.
In The Heavens, there are two women who are really one woman, in a lot of the ways that count. Both are burdened with a type of greatness. Kate lives in the present, or we should say, a present, becoming the warm center of every gathering, the nucleus everyone else wants to get close to. When Kate sleeps, she dreams she’s Emilia, an extremely minor noble on the outskirts of the Elizabethan court, and is alive with the knowledge that only she can save mankind.
Newman’s unique depiction of time travel is a feat in itself by virtue of its uniqueness, but also in how delicately she infuses the book with the experience of being a time traveler. Fearful, alone, exhilarated, invigorated by the clarity of having a quest, charged with meaning, Kate/Emilia knows that one little life, or even two, doesn’t really rate against the fate of humanity, but she struggles with it anyway, and no amount of glorious purpose will make up for the (unbridgeable?) chasm that yawns between her and these earthbound mortals, stuck in the one timeline, that she adores despite herself. I didn’t so much devour this book as be devoured. Sarah, Longfellow Books
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
A mixed-race family lives in a college town outside of Boston – Howard, the white English father, an art history professor at the local university; Kiki, the black Floridian mother, a hospital administrator, struggling with her husband’s infidelity; Jerome, the oldest, a student at Brown questioning which are his convictions and which are his father’s; Zora, the middle child, studying at her father’s university and in the top three percent of students, but crushingly uncreative; and Levi, the youngest at sixteen and negotiating his blackness in this upper-crust town, affecting a Brooklyn accent and telling folks he lives in Roxbury to validate his “street cred”, falling in with a group of street vendors from Haiti and Africa.
How to describe this book? It is an ever-changing portrait of a family in flux, a family struggling with themselves, with their desires, with the lot they’ve been given. Zadie Smith is endlessly talented at demystifying academia, turning a New England college and town into a battle ground for two (genuinely pathetic) middle-aged men, as well as using this stage to raise issues of blackness and identity – Howard’s rival is a Caribbean academic whose cultural conservatism eschews affirmative action, while Levi hides his white father’s identity from his friends. A crushingly human narrative with many different storylines, On Beauty is a tender ode to familial messiness and love, with the heart of the novel residing (as in so many families) with Kiki Belsey, trying to figure out her next step forward. Grace, Longfellow Books
The All of It by Jeannette Haien - Irish literature that relates the seemingly simple tale of a parishioner confiding in her priest, but the tangled confession brings secrets to light that provoke a moral quandary for not only the clergyman, but the reader as well. Perfect for readers of Claire Keegan.
**I LOVE a moral quandary, that immediately caught my eye
A sleeper that shouldn't be! A simple story that reads like a myth. Makes one contemplate the way we judge - Suzanne from Nantucket Books
Heather by Caitlin Mullen - 1990. In the myth-riddled woods of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, sixteen-year-old Annabelle Riley's twin sister, Sabrina, has been having an affair with a mysterious older man, and Annabelle is determined to uncover what's going on. Then, inexplicably, both sisters disappear.
In this same town years later, newly instated police chief Callie Hauser makes an arrest that unexpectedly resurrects details from a heartbreaking cold case. As she digs deeper, the past and the present collide, challenging everything Callie believes about right and wrong, who she is, and the town she's always called home.
** This is getting some really good buzz!
This propulsive, visceral, and thrilling novel is a must read for fans of Liz Moore and Amity Gaige. - Kathy, East City Bookshop
Did any of these catch your eye?
What books have you bought or read because a shelf talker sold you on it?
