Weekly Words About New Books in
Independent Bookstores
March 3, 2024
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New Paperback Fiction - A Literary Environmental Thriller and a Slow-Burn Love Story from a Rom Com Queen | |
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. The Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries returns with an ecologically themed thriller involving a collective of guerilla gardeners. The authors weaves social issues like cultural appropriation, wealth inequality, and environmental idealism throughout her page-turning plot. It's a great read for book groups to check out now that the paperback edition is arriving - with a much more appealing cover than the somber black-and-white hardcover version.
Here's a description from the publisher: A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand's South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For years, the group has struggled to break even. To occupy the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last. But the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine also has an interest in the place: he has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker, or so he tells Birnam's founder, Mira, when he catches her on the property. He's intrigued by Mira, and by Birnam Wood; although they're poles apart politically, it seems Lemoine and the group might have enemies in common. But can Birnam trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust one another?
The book has received much critical praise, including from B.D. McClay writing last year in The New Yorker: "Birnam Wood’s biggest twist is not so much a particular event as the realization that this is a book in which everything that people choose to do matters, albeit not in ways they may have anticipated. Catton has a profound command of how perceptions lead to c oice, and of how choice, for most of us, is an act of self-definition ... Birnam Wood’s true turns are all carefully set up, as long as you’re focusing on the right details ... Birnam Wood, like all good books, doesn’t supply an answer."
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Happy Place by Emily Henry. Contemporary romance fiction has become one of the new category stars in bookselling over the past several years. The stories feature mostly young people (white, black, brown, straight, gay, trans - you name it) in contemporary settings, with interesting jobs, social media accounts, and modern-day angst. One of the genre's stars is Henry, whose titles include People We Met on Vacation, Beach Read, and Book Lovers. Happy Place is another hit, and you can expect the paperback version to be prominently displayed in your local bookstore.
The story focuses on three women - best friends since college - and their partners, who have gathered at a Maine cottage that has been the friend group's cherished annual getaway for a decade. This year, one of the couples has big good news (we're getting married!), which makes our main characters' big bad news (we broke up!) impossible to share. Instead, they agree to pretend they're still happy and together for the week, which - this being a rom com, after all - proves more complicated as the days progress.
In a review for Booklist, John Charles wrote, "Henry dazzles and delights by brilliantly deploying her considerable skills in comic timing and crafting characters with relatable, realistically messy lives. Effortlessly toggling between the present-day fauxmance playing out between her protagonists and the origins of their love a decade earlier, Happy Place is a romance that delivers on both style and substance."
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