Librarying

January 2023

“To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June.”

― Jean-Paul Sartre

New Book Spotlight

Lush, sensuous, and deeply romantic, The Book of Everlasting Things is the story of two lovers and two nations, split apart by forces beyond their control, yet bound by love and memory. The beautiful love story is set against the backdrop of the struggle for Indian independence gathers force, their beloved city is ravaged by Partition. Filled with exquisite descriptions of perfume and calligraphy, spanning continents and generations, Aanchal Malhotra’s debut novel is a feast for the senses and the heart.

Inspired by a real-life female spy, The Lipstick Bureau is a WWII-set novel about a woman challenging convention and boundaries to help win a war, no matter the cost.

1944, Rome. Newlywed Niki Novotná is recruited by a new American spy agency to establish a secret branch in Italy's capital. Despite limited resources, Niki and a scrappy team of artists, forgers and others—now nicknamed The Lipstick Bureau—find success, forming a bond amid the cobblestoned streets and storied villas of the newly liberated city. But her work is also a way to escape devastating truths about the family she left behind in Czechoslovakia and a future with her controlling American husband.

For readers who like their espionage mixed with a little slapstick and for fans of Slow Horses on Apple+, we present the collected Slough House spy novellas, including the never-before-published Christmas interlude Standing by the Wall.

From the troubled recruitment of a new MI5 informant to a botched information transfer, Mick Herron’s novellas capture the drama, humor, and high stakes of everyday life in the world of spycraft, a world rife with both legends and secrets, where thrill-seeking and loneliness are ubiquitous and deadly, and where the lines between friends, enemies, and lovers are perpetually blurred by circumstance and subterfuge.