What To Read: March & April 2020

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

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips. Softcover. $22.95. RRC Price $20.65. One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula of Russia, two young sisters go missing. In the ensuing months, the investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across the community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women. Taking us through a year, this novel enters this community, its citizens all connected by the crime. We are transported into a region as complex as it is alluring, where social and ethnic tensions have long simmered, and where outsiders are often the first to be accused. (Vintage. April)

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe. Softcover. $22.95. RRC Price $20.65. Keefe's book on the conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath details a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only the populace but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders. Say Nothing conjures a world of passion, betrayal, vengeance, and anguish. (Anchor. March)

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March's Author of the Month: REBECCA SOLNIT

American writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books. Solnit has worked on environmental and human rights campaigns since the 1980s. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications in print and online, including The Guardian newspaper and Harper's Magazine.

In 2003, she wrote River of Shadows about motion picture pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award. In 2014, she published Men Explain Things to Me, a collection of short essays written about instances of "mansplaining." Solnit has been credited with paving the way for the coining of the term, though she didn’t actually use it in the original essay. Last year, Solnit rewrote a new version of Cinderella, called Cinderella Liberator. In this feminist revision, Solnit reclaims Ella from the cinders and gives both the prince and Ella new futures that involve thinking for themselves, acting out of free will, starting businesses, and becoming friends rather than dependent lovers.

In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher; of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself; of how punk rock gave form and voice to her own fury and explosive energy. (Hardcover. $35.00. RRC Price $31.50. Viking. March)

The Bookseller: March & April 2020

Time to thaw out with a breath of fresh literature! New books from Hilary Mantel, Erik Larson, Anne Enright, Rebecca Solnit, Marie Kondo, and many other big names, plus a slew of new poetry collections just in time for Poetry Month in April — find out about it all in our March & April 2020 edition of The Bookseller.

Read it online now >>>

February's Author of the Month: CAROLINE MOOREHEAD

Caroline Moorehead is the New York Times bestselling author of Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France; A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France; and Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. An acclaimed biographer, Moorehead has also written for the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, the Times, and the Independent. She lives in London and Italy.

A House in the Mountains, Moorehead's latest offering, is the extraordinary story of four courageous women who helped form the Italian Resistance against the Nazis and the Fascists during the Second World War.

In the late summer of 1943, when Italy changed sides in WWII and the Germans, now their enemies, occupied the north of the country, an Italian Resistance was born. Ada, Frida, Silvia and Bianca were four young Piedmontese women who joined the Resistance, living secretively in the mountains surrounding Turin. Between 1943 and 1945, as the Allies battled their way north, thousands of men and women throughout occupied Italy rose up and fought to liberate their country from the German invaders and their Fascist collaborators. What made the partisan war all the more extraordinary was the number of women in its ranks.

The bloody civil war that ensued across the country pitted neighbour against neighbour, and brought out the best and worst in Italian society. The courage shown by the partisans was exemplary, and eventually bound them together as a coherent fighting force. And the women’s contribution was invaluable. They would prove, to themselves and to the world, what resolve, tenacity and above all exceptional courage could achieve.