Gayle's Picks (page 1)

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Gayle GAYLE
When she's not working in her garden, Gayle is usually reading or watching reruns of West Wing and ER. She loves contemporary fiction, mysteries and memoirs.  Occasionally you'll find her reading essays by people like Malcolm Gladwell, Paco Underhill, Daniel Pink or John McPhee.
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Soldier Sailor: A Novel By Claire Kilroy Cover Image
$26.99
ISBN: 9781668051801
Availability: Coming Soon - Available for Pre-Order Now
Published: Scribner - June 4th, 2024

OMG. My son is now 40 but Claire Kilroy's book sucked me into a time-travel vacuum and brought me back to his childhood and my endless daily traumas trying to be a mother, a bookseller, a wife, and have a few minutes each day to make plans for how to navigate the untenable, unrelenting demands of caring for an infant, a toddler and a marriage. She is a brilliant writer and had me weeping by page ten; cursing the world that doesn't prepare us for 16-hour days with no breaks, and the realization that childhood never really ends--strong bonds and obligations incurred in childhood follow us throughout our lives as women. The book is such a powerful description of what it takes to be a mother and if anyone is on the fence about being a mother read Soldier Sailor so that you walk into motherhood aware of the ways your life will change— forever.


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American Mother By Colum McCann, Diane Foley Cover Image
$25.99
ISBN: 9798985882452
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Etruscan Press - March 5th, 2024

In August 2014 journalist Jim Foley was brutally killed by members of ISIS. Colum McCann, one of my favorite writers has written, along with Foley's mother, Diane, Jim's story.  It's the story of a family waiting and praying for a captive's release  It's an account of Jim's work as a journalist covering human suffering and the injustices suffered by those caught up in the agonies of war, and it's also about the aftermath of his murder and his mother's meeting with his killer who as part of a plea agreement, consented to talk to the victim's families.  The story becomes not just a memoir but a mystery, a thriller, a family's history of waiting for news of their abducted son and our country's less-than-stellar work to free him, and ultimately what you are left with is a beautiful story of grace, resilience, resistance, and empathy.  Sting said, "American Mother is a book that will shake your soul out." My soul is shaken to its core.  


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Hard by a Great Forest: A Novel By Leo Vardiashvili Cover Image
$29.00
ISBN: 9780593545034
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Riverhead Books - January 30th, 2024

When escaping refugees finally find a modicum of security, I imagine they must feel like life can begin again in some new form. But, as the characters in this brilliant debut novel learn, safety is transitory especially when family members have been left behind and then disappear. Clandestine clues, created by a missing older brother for a younger brother to follow are the only source to finding the missing family members in this saga. And those clues are lines of poetry, bits from fairytales, plays, proverbs. The story is part fairytale, part mystery, part harrowing adventure taking me into a part of Russia that I knew nothing about. Danger lurks around every tree in every forest and there are ghosts and witches! A web of disappointment is occasionally replaced by hope; love presages guilt and there is humor amidst heartbreak, and always the story races ahead and won't let you stop reading.


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Long Island (Eilis Lacey Series) By Colm Toibin Cover Image
$28.00
ISBN: 9781476785110
Availability: Coming Soon - Available for Pre-Order Now
Published: Scribner - May 7th, 2024

A new novel by Colm Toibin is always a celebration but who could have guessed that my old friend Eilis Lacy from Brooklyn would return to my life and reconnect me to her family and her old lover when she returns to Ireland? The life-changing visitor who disrupts her world and sends her across the ocean starts a new period in Eilis' life. As she wrestles with her obligation to family, her unrequited passion, and her internal struggles to find happiness, we get to go along for the ride and it's a bumpy one. Writing like Toibin's is not to be missed nor is the story of a woman twenty years older than when we first met her and still searching to put her life together in a way that makes sense to her. 


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I Cheerfully Refuse By Leif Enger Cover Image
$28.00
ISBN: 9780802162939
Availability: Coming Soon - Available for Pre-Order Now
Published: Grove Press - April 2nd, 2024

Storytelling works when the characters, the plot, the setting, and the writing gel. This is literary writing extraordinaire: lyrical, read-aloud sentences that take your breath away, seemingly effortless word choices that leave you wondering how Leif Enger does it, paragraph after paragraph. The story starts slowly, a happily married couple, she a bookseller, he a bass guitar player, take into their home a young stranger whose past catches up with him and turns the worlds of all whom he encounters upside down.  Lake Superior and a small sailboat become the escape and the home for most of the story and where you meet the characters whose lives intersect. Books play a big part in this novel and reflect the importance of story and adventure and when you add in a main character who is compassionate, intelligent, and attempts to make sense of an upside-down world, you have a novel that leaves you changed for the better.


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The Fox Wife: A Novel By Yangsze Choo Cover Image
$27.99
ISBN: 9781250266019
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Henry Holt and Co. - February 13th, 2024

Yangsze Choo grew up exposed to Chinese, Japanese and Korean folk tales, all of which she weaves expertly into this mystery with romantic touches and a smidgen of magical realism. The heros of those ancient tales were always men, but not in The Fox Wife. It's such an engaging reading experience, so hard to put down, that you could call it a binge read.


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The Road to Dalton By Shannon Bowring Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9781609459260
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Europa Editions - June 6th, 2023

This is a quiet but powerful novel. Dalton is a small town in northern Maine; not much going on when you compare it to a big city but the lives of the inhabitants of Dalton are full and complex and filled with the joys and sorrows of daily life. Bowring's insights are extraordinary. She gets deep inside the psyches of the town cop, his post-depression suffering wife and the community that sees them every day and is struggling to help. Houses set at the end of roads, a diner with nosy patrons, domestic violence in a small mobile home, a library filled with books and a married librarian carrying on a secret life with a woman, make up a very satisfying story packed with emotional depth and human connection. It reminded me of novels by Elizabeth Strout, Marilyn Robinson, and Margot Livesay.


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Our Strangers: Stories By Lydia Davis Cover Image
$26.00
ISBN: 9798987717103
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Bookshop Editions - October 3rd, 2023

Lydia Davis is in that rare arena of master short story writers--think William Trevor, Alice Munro, Claire Keegan, George Saunders, Shirley Jackson.  She manages in a few pages to bring everyday issues to life in curious quirky ways. She celebrates language, and there is never an extra unnecessary word, just perfect sentences, unexpected images, and stories that make you laugh and cry and stay with you forever. 


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A Bakery in Paris: A Novel By Aimie K. Runyan Cover Image
$18.99
ISBN: 9780063247710
Availability: Not Available In-Store - Usually Ships from Warehouse in 1-5 Days
Published: William Morrow Paperbacks - August 1st, 2023

My grandparents and parents owned a bakery where I grew up eating cupcakes and delicious bread, so reading this historical fiction tale of a bakery in Paris handed down to family members over multiple generations was delightful.  Not great literature, just a lovely story set in two historical timeframes--1870s Paris and post-WW11 Paris--neither easy times for residents.  Lots of drama, interesting characters devoted to feeding the hungry and bringing joy into dreary lives, lots of Paris history woven in, love stories, and delicious recipes scattered throughout—a good book for reading on the beach or on vacation.


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At the Edge of the Woods By Kathryn Bromwich Cover Image
$26.00
ISBN: 9781953387318
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Two Dollar Radio - June 6th, 2023

This might be the best novel I read at the beach this year. It certainly moved me in a way that I wasn't expecting. And drove me to look up reviews and discover an amazing essay that the author wrote about her personal vulnerabilities and recovery from long Covid.  It is set near the French-Italian border on the outskirts of a small conservative village inhabited by villagers who don't take kindly to outsiders, especially a single woman who arrives unannounced with little luggage and a decision to seclude herself in the woods.  It's a novel about the aftermath of trauma; a woman turning to the natural world for solace and healing. It reminds me of other novels where nature plays one of the main characters and human beings become just one more piece of the untamed world, not the determiner of it. That said, humans with their prejudices, superstitions, and intolerance can interfere and undermine that consoling presence and carry violence and disruption into a carefully crafted safe space.Lyrical writing takes a quiet but determined look at issues of wildness, feminity, class, fertility, patriarchy, and illness.


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The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: A Novel By James McBride Cover Image
$28.00
ISBN: 9780593422946
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Riverhead Books - August 8th, 2023

I loved Deacon King Kong and wasn't sure McBride could write another novel quite as good. To my surprise, he did! The characters, primarily Black and Jewish, are exquisitely penned and have lodged themselves into my family of unforgettable fictional personalities. Being Jewish or Black in 1930s Pottstown, Pennsylvania, was a constant struggle. Chicken Hill was surrounded by a white community that wished they didn't exist, and did everything it could to make life miserable for them. Using his gifts for witty dialogue, heart, and humor, and his abilities as a master storyteller, McBride brings his characters to life and allows the reader to experience Depression-era racism and antisemitism, but also the kindness and compassion of a caring community that bands together to help one another. Surprisingly, it gave me hope for a new vision of communities coming together to change and repair the world. 


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North Woods: A Novel By Daniel Mason Cover Image
$28.00
ISBN: 9780593597033
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Random House - September 19th, 2023

A house always carries the mysteries and stories of its inhabitants within its walls and in its environs. Who were the people who first came to the land, built the house, plowed the fields, and planted gardens? And when they died or moved on, who replaced them and what remained of the ancestors and their descendants or new owners? A house in the north woods of Western Massachusetts, built in the early 17th century, becomes one of the main characters in Daniel Mason's remarkable novel and asks and answers some of these questions. It's a beautifully written story filled with birth, death, anger and remorse, joy, nature, animals, and quirky characters, even ghosts, sharing the major roles. I was transfixed and couldn't stop reading.


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Owner of a Lonely Heart: A Memoir By Beth Nguyen Cover Image
$27.00
ISBN: 9781982196349
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Scribner - July 4th, 2023

This memoir is a beautiful exploration of motherhood in all its guises with the added layer of refugee-hood. Nguyen flees Vietnam as a baby with her father, her sister, and her father's family, leaving her mother behind. This sets the stage, but the book is mostly about loss, love, reconciliation and identity and the importance of belonging. The prose is insightful; reflective of a woman who is a daughter to two mothers and who is herself figuring out how to be a mother.


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The Vaster Wilds: A Novel By Lauren Groff Cover Image
$28.00
ISBN: 9780593418390
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Riverhead Books - September 12th, 2023

Nuanced. Layered. Creative. Visionary. Bold. Lyrical. Environmental. Feminist. Patriarchal. Historical. Emotional. Botanical. Dendrological. Isolating. Captivating. Indiginous. Elegiac. Spiritual. Compelling. A stunning novel of survival by one of our best writers today. She writes, "It is a moral failure to miss the profound beauty of the world..." and I say it would be a moral failure to miss the profound beauty of this novel.


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Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O'Connell's urgent mission to bring healing to homeless people By Tracy Kidder Cover Image
$30.00
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ISBN: 9781984801432
Published: Random House - January 17th, 2023

I love Tracy Kidder’s books and think I have read all of them. His book Mountains Beyond Mountains, the story of Paul Farmer’s work in Haiti, I’ve recommended dozens of times to our customers. This latest book about yet another hero, Jim O’Connell, will be my next favorite book to share with people because it tells us that there is hope for the unhoused, the homeless who sleep on the streets, are afraid to go into shelters, need care, not scorn and he figured out ways to help them. Tracy Kidder spent five years following Dr. O’Connell and his colleagues as they served thousands of homeless patients in Boston. In this illuminating book that reads more like a novel than non-fiction, we travel with O’Connell as he navigates the city, offering medical care, socks, soup, empathy, humor, and friendship to some of the city’s most endangered citizens. He emphasizes a style of medicine in which patients come first, joined by their providers in what he calls “a system of friends.”


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The Heart of It All By Christian Kiefer Cover Image
$19.99
ISBN: 9781685890810
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Melville House - September 12th, 2023

This wonderful novel is a deep dive into Middle America, Trump country with variations. Bowling is a BIG deal. Racism, drugs, vitriol, hard-working Americans. And also love, camaraderie, and compassion. Pakistani immigrants own a factory that employs many of the people in the town. A young Black man moves in with his aunt and they are the only two Black people and have few friends. Lives turn on minute decisions. Keifer writes, "What a confusion that each decision leads to the next, that our lives become our lives and no other. And what disappointment to be reminded, again and again, how many of those decisions are wrong." But also, many of those decisions are right and allow the characters to grow, stretch, have insights and move forward. I loved spending time with these people and learned so much from them.


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The Wind Knows My Name: A Novel By Isabel Allende, Frances Riddle (Translated by) Cover Image
By Isabel Allende, Frances Riddle (Translated by)
$28.00
ISBN: 9780593598108
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Ballantine Books - June 6th, 2023

Isabel Allende has written more than twenty books, brilliant novels and a lovely memorial tribute to her daughter, called Paula. She never disappoints me and this latest novel is powerful and moving as it brings two children's lives into focus--one five-year-old living in Vienna in the late 1930s when Jews were regularly slaughtered in the streets and in their homes, and one seven-year-old and her mother, fleeing political dangers in El Salvador just a few years ago. Allende intertwines the past and present with the stories of these two sweet children, the sacrifices their parents made to keep them safe and the ways the children, so young and so innocent, learned to cope with the situations they found themselves in.


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Mrs Queen Takes the Train: A Novel By William Kuhn Cover Image
$15.99
ISBN: 9780062208293
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Harper Perennial - October 8th, 2013

I didn't love The Crown on TV but I did love this charming book about the British Queen in her 70s. There is so much to like in this feel-good novel. The Queen decides to leave the palace's security on a whim, seeking an escape from her constituents and responsibilities. She takes a trip back in time to a place she remembers as meaningful to her and not filled with the angst that won't leave her alone. En route, she engages with interesting characters, sees the monarchy in a new light, and embraces pieces of the world that hitherto were alien to her cloistered life. Great writing, complex characters, and a look at the world as it changes in front of our eyes.