What To Read: January & February 2020

A collection of recent books particularly recommended by Chris Hall. Look for our in-store What To Read display tables.

Unquiet by Linn Ullmann. Softcover. $21.95. RRC Price $19.76. He is a Swedish filmmaker and she is his daughter. Now that she's grown up and he's in his late eighties, he envisions a book about old age. Growing old is hard work, he says. They will write it together. She will ask the questions. He will answer them. Unquiet follows the narrator as she unearths these taped conversations seven years later. Swept into memory, she reimagines the story of a father, a mother, and a girl — a child who can't wait to grow up and parents who would rather be children. (January)

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss. Softcover. $22.00. RRC Price $19.80. In England Silvie and her family are living as ancient Britons, surviving by the knowledge of the Iron Age. For her father’s two-week vacation, they join an anthropology course reenacting life in simpler times. They are surrounded by forests, making stew from roots and hunted rabbit. Silvie's father has raised her on stories of early man, recounting their rituals and beliefs — particularly their sacrifices to the bog. But Silvie begins to imagine another kind of life. Ghost Wall urges us to wonder how far we have come from the "primitive minds" of our ancestors. (January)

See more What To Read picks after the jump...

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Your 2019 Bestsellers

Another year is in the books, and we would like to take this opportunity to look back and celebrate some of the finest books to come out of the Prairies in 2019.

After the jump you will find our annual bestsellers lists for 2019 featuring books by Manitoban and Saskatchewan authors, separated into categories for Fiction, Nonfiction, and Kids & Teen.

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The Bookseller: January & February 2020

Take a look back on 2019 with our annual lists of Manitoba and Saskatchewan bestsellers, and then find out all about this new decade's newest and most exciting books in our January & February edition of The Bookseller.

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January's Author of the Month: ISABEL ALLENDE

Isabel Allende — novelist, feminist and philanthropist — is one of the most widely-read authors in the world, having sold more than 74 million books. Born in Peru and raised in Chile, Allende won worldwide acclaim in 1982 with the publication of her first novel, The House of the Spirits, which began as a letter to her dying grandfather. Since then, she has authored more than twenty-three bestselling and critically acclaimed books, including Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, Daughter of Fortune, Island Beneath the Sea, Paula, The Japanese Lover and In the Midst of Winter. Translated into more than forty-two languages, Allende’s works entertain and educate readers by interweaving imaginative stories with significant historical events. She now lives in California.

A Long Petal of the Sea, Allende's newest novel, is set in the late 1930s when civil war gripped Spain. Hundreds of thousands are forced to flee in a treacherous journey to the French border. Among them is Roser, a pregnant young widow, who finds her life irreversibly intertwined with that of Victor, an army doctor and the brother of her deceased love. In order to survive, the two must unite in a marriage neither of them wants, and together are sponsored by poet Pablo Neruda to embark on the SS Winnipeg to Chile, along with 2,200 other refugees in search of a new life.

Starting over on a new continent, their trials are just beginning. Through it all, it is the hope of being reunited with their home that keeps them going. And in the end, they will find that home might have been closer than they thought all along.