Staff Picks
Want to know what our booksellers read? Here are some of our handpicked recommendations for adults and older teens.
Sin Eater
-
Trade paperback
$25.00 - Add to Cart
Reader Reward Price: $22.50
"For fans of The Handmaid's Tale...a debut novel with a dark setting and an unforgettable heroine...is a riveting depiction of hard-won female empowerment" (The Washington Post).
The Sin Eater walks among us, unseen, unheard
Sins of our flesh become sins of Hers
Following Her to the grave, unseen, unheard
The Sin Eater Walks Among Us.
For the crime of stealing bread, fourteen-year-old May receives a life sentence: she must become a Sin Eater--a shunned woman, brutally marked, whose fate is to hear the final confessions of the dying, eat ritual foods symbolizing their sins as a funeral rite, and thereby shoulder their transgressions to grant their souls access to heaven.
Orphaned and friendless, apprenticed to an older Sin Eater who cannot speak to her, May must make her way in a dangerous and cruel world she barely understands. When a deer heart appears on the coffin of a royal governess who did not confess to the dreadful sin it represents, the older Sin Eater refuses to eat it. She is taken to prison, tortured, and killed. To avenge her death, May must find out who placed the deer heart on the coffin and why.
"Very much reminiscent of The Handmaid's Tale...it transcends its historical roots to give us a modern heroine" (Kirkus Reviews). "A novel as strange as it is captivating" (BuzzFeed), The Sin Eater "is a treat for fans of feminist speculative fiction" (Publishers Weekly) and "exactly what historical fiction lovers have unknowingly craved" (New York Journal of Books).
Sign Here
-
Hardcover
$37.00 - Add to Cart
Reader Reward Price: $33.30
A darkly humorous, surprisingly poignant, and utterly gripping debut novel about a guy who works in Hell (literally) and is on the cusp of a big promotion if only he can get one more member of the wealthy Harrison family to sell their soul.
Peyote Trip has a pretty good gig in the deals department on the fifth floor of Hell. Sure, none of the pens work, the coffee machine has been out of order for a century, and the only drink on offer is Jägermeister, but Pey has a plan--and all he needs is one last member of the Harrison family to sell their soul.
When the Harrisons retreat to the family lake house for the summer, with their daughter Mickey's precocious new friend, Ruth, in tow, the opportunity Pey has waited a millennium for might finally be in his grasp. And with the help of his charismatic coworker Calamity, he sets a plan in motion.
But things aren't always as they seem, on Earth or in Hell. And as old secrets and new dangers scrape away at the Harrisons' shiny surface, revealing the darkness beneath, everyone must face the consequences of their choices.
Bunny
- Mona Awad 
Trade paperback
$21.00 - Add to Cart
Reader Reward Price: $18.90
The Vegetarian meets Heathers in this darkly funny, seductively strange novel from the acclaimed author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more different from the other members of her master's program at New England's elite Warren University. A self-conscious scholarship student who prefers the company of her imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and are often found entangled in a group hug so tight it seems their bodies might become permanently fused.
But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' exclusive monthly "Smut Salon," and finds herself drawn as if by magic to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, an audacious art school dropout, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into Bunny world, and starts to take part in the off-campus "Workshop" where they devise their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur, and her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies are brought into deadly collision.
A spellbinding, down-the-rabbit-hole tale about loneliness and belonging, creativity and agency, and female friendship and desire, Bunny is the dazzlingly original second book from an author with tremendous "insight into the often-baffling complexities of being a woman" (The Atlantic).
Binge
- Douglas Coupland
Trade paperback
$22.00 - Add to Cart
Reader Reward Price: $19.80
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
The first new work of fiction since 2013 from one of Canada's most successful, idiosyncratic and world-defining writers, Douglas Coupland. He's called it Binge because it's impossible to read just one.
Imagine feeling 100% alive every moment of every minute of the day! Maybe that's how animals live. Or trees, even. I sometimes stare at the plastic bag tree visible from my apartment window and marvel that both it and I are equally alive and that there's no sliding scale of life. You're either alive, or you're not. Or you're dead or you're not.
Thirty years after Douglas Coupland broke the fiction mould and defined a generation with Generation X, he is back with Binge, 60 stories laced with his observational profundity about the way we live and his existential worry about how we should be living: the very things that have made him such an influential and bestselling writer. Not to mention that he can also be really funny.
Here the narrators vary from story to story as Doug catches what he calls "the voice of the people," inspired by the way we write about ourselves and our experiences in online forums. The characters, of course, are Doug's own: crackpots, cranks and sweetie-pies, dad dancers and perpetrators of carbecues. People in the grip of unconscionable urges; lonely people; dying people; silly people. If you love Doug's fiction, this collection is like rain on the desert.
These Violent Delights
-
Young adult hardcover
$24.99 - Add to Cart
Reader Reward Price: $22.49
An Instant New York Times Bestseller!
A BuzzFeed Best Young Adult Book of 2020
Perfect for fans of The Last Magician and Serpent & Dove, this heart-stopping debut is an imaginative Romeo and Juliet retelling set in 1920s Shanghai, with rival gangs and a monster in the depths of the Huangpu River.
The year is 1926, and Shanghai hums to the tune of debauchery.
A blood feud between two gangs runs the streets red, leaving the city helpless in the grip of chaos. At the heart of it all is eighteen-year-old Juliette Cai, a former flapper who has returned to assume her role as the proud heir of the Scarlet Gang--a network of criminals far above the law. Their only rivals in power are the White Flowers, who have fought the Scarlets for generations. And behind every move is their heir, Roma Montagov, Juliette's first love...and first betrayal.
But when gangsters on both sides show signs of instability culminating in clawing their own throats out, the people start to whisper. Of a contagion, a madness. Of a monster in the shadows. As the deaths stack up, Juliette and Roma must set their guns--and grudges--aside and work together, for if they can't stop this mayhem, then there will be no city left for either to rule.
The Chosen and the Beautiful
-
Trade paperback
$23.99 - Add to Cart
Reader Reward Price: $21.59
An Instant National Bestseller!
An Indie Next Pick!
A B&N Reads April Pick!
A Most Anticipated in 2021 Pick for Oprah Magazine | USA Today | Buzzfeed | Greatist | BookPage | PopSugar | Bustle | The Nerd Daily | Goodreads | Literary Hub | Ms. Magazine | Library Journal | Culturess | Book Riot | Parade Magazine | Kirkus | The Week | Book Bub | OverDrive | The Portalist | Publishers Weekly
A Best of Summer Pick for TIME Magazine | CNN | NBC News | CBS News | Book Riot | The Daily Beast | Lambda Literary | The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | Goodreads | Bustle | Veranda Magazine | The Week | Bookish | St. Louis Post-Dispatch | Den of Geek | LGBTQ Reads | Pittsburgh City Paper | Bookstr | Tatler HK
A Best Fantasy Novel from the Last 10 Years for Book Riot
A Best of 2021 Pick for NPR
"A vibrant and queer reinvention of F. Scott Fitzgerald's jazz age classic. . . . I was captivated from the first sentence."--NPR
"Nghi Vo is one of the most original writers we have today."--Taylor Jenkins Reid on Siren Queen
"A sumptuous, decadent read."--The New York Times
"Vo has crafted a retelling that, in many ways, surpasses the original."--Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Immigrant. Socialite. Magician.
Jordan Baker grows up in the most rarefied circles of 1920s American society--she has money, education, a killer golf handicap, and invitations to some of the most exclusive parties of the Jazz Age. She's also queer and Asian, a Vietnamese adoptee treated as an exotic attraction by her peers, while the most important doors remain closed to her.
But the world is full of wonders: infernal pacts and dazzling illusions, lost ghosts and elemental mysteries. In all paper is fire, and Jordan can burn the cut paper heart out of a man. She just has to learn how.
Nghi Vo's debut novel, The Chosen and the Beautiful, reinvents this classic of the American canon as a coming-of-age story full of magic, mystery, and glittering excess, and introduces a major new literary voice.
Bad Cree
- Jessica Johns
Trade paperback
$24.99 - Add to Cart
Reader Reward Price: $22.49
A haunting debut novel where dreams, family and spirits collide
Mackenzie, a Cree millennial, wakes up in her one-bedroom Vancouver apartment clutching a pine bough she had been holding in her dream just moments earlier. When she blinks, it disappears. But she can still smell the sharp pine scent in the air, the nearest pine tree a thousand kilometres away in the far reaches of Treaty 8.
Mackenzie continues to accidentally bring back items from her dreams, dreams that are eerily similar to real memories of her older sister and Kokum before their untimely deaths. As Mackenzie's life spirals into a living nightmare--crows are following her around and she's getting texts from her dead sister on the other side--it becomes clear that these dreams have terrifying, real-life consequences. Desperate for help, Mackenzie returns to her mother, sister, cousin, and aunties in her small Alberta hometown. Together, they try to uncover what is haunting Mackenzie before something irrevocable happens to anyone else around her.
Haunting, fierce, an ode to female relations and the strength found in kinship, Bad Cree is a gripping, arresting debut by an unforgettable voice.
Gideon the Ninth
-
Trade paperback
$24.50 - Add to Cart
Reader Reward Price: $22.05
15+ pages of new, original content, including a glossary of terms, in-universe writings, and more!
A USA Today Best-Selling Novel, and one of the Best Books of 2019 according to NPR, the New York Public Library, Amazon, BookPage, Shelf Awareness, BookRiot, and Bustle!
WINNER of the 2020 Crawford Award
Finalist for the 2020 Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards
"Unlike anything I've ever read. " --V.E. Schwab
"Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!" --Charles Stross
"Brilliantly original, messy and weird straight through." --NPR
The Emperor needs necromancers.
The Ninth Necromancer needs a swordswoman.
Gideon has a sword, some dirty magazines, and no more time for undead nonsense.
Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth, first in The Locked Tomb Trilogy, unveils a solar system of swordplay, cut-throat politics, and lesbian necromancers. Her characters leap off the page, as skillfully animated as arcane revenants. The result is a heart-pounding epic science fantasy.
Brought up by unfriendly, ossifying nuns, ancient retainers, and countless skeletons, Gideon is ready to abandon a life of servitude and an afterlife as a reanimated corpse. She packs up her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and prepares to launch her daring escape. But her childhood nemesis won't set her free without a service.
Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House and bone witch extraordinaire, has been summoned into action. The Emperor has invited the heirs to each of his loyal Houses to a deadly trial of wits and skill. If Harrowhark succeeds she will be become an immortal, all-powerful servant of the Resurrection, but no necromancer can ascend without their cavalier. Without Gideon's sword, Harrow will fail, and the Ninth House will die.
Of course, some things are better left dead.
THE LOCKED TOMB SERIES
BOOK 1: Gideon the Ninth
BOOK 2: Harrow the Ninth
BOOK 3: Nona the Ninth
BOOK 4: Alecto the Ninth
American Gods
-
Trade paperback
$24.99 - Add to Cart
Reader Reward Price: $22.49
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman, a contemporary masterpiece combing mythology, adventure, and illusion-one of ten classic Gaiman works repackaged with elegant original watercolor art by acclaimed artist Henry Sene Yee
Released from prison, Shadow finds his world turned upside down. His wife has been killed; a stranger offers him a job and Shadow, with nothing to lose, accepts. But a storm is coming. Beneath the placid surface of everyday life, a war is being fought - and the prize is the very soul of America. An inspired combination of mythology, adventure, and illusion, American Gods is a dark and kaleidoscopic journey deep into myth and across an America at once eerily familiar and utterly alien. It is, quite simply, a contemporary masterpiece.
"Piercingly observed, jaggedly poetic, ruthlessly cutting a path through graveyards of dead stars and dead money and dead feelings, this novel is the map back to dawn." -- Steve Erickson
"American Gods manages to reinvent, and reassert, the enduring importance of fantastic literature itself in this late age of the world. Dark fun, and nourishing to the soul." -- Michael Chabon
The Milky Way
-
Hardcover
$34.00 - Add to Cart
Reader Reward Price: $30.60
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2022 BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AND SCIENCENET
NAMED A BEST AUDIOBOOK OF 2022 BY BOOKPAGE
Astrophysicist and folklorist Dr. Moiya McTier channels The Milky Way in this approachable and utterly fascinating autobiography of the titular galaxy, detailing what humans have discovered about everything from its formation to its eventual death, and what more there is to learn about this galaxy we call home.
After a few billion years of bearing witness to life on Earth, of watching one hundred billion humans go about their day-to-day lives, of feeling unbelievably lonely, and of hearing its own story told by others, The Milky Way would like a chance to speak for itself. All one hundred billion stars and fifty undecillion tons of gas of it.
It all began some thirteen billion years ago, when clouds of gas scattered through the universe's primordial plasma just could not keep their metaphorical hands off each other. They succumbed to their gravitational attraction, and the galaxy we know as the Milky Way was born. Since then, the galaxy has watched as dark energy pushed away its first friends, as humans mythologized its name and purpose, and as galactic archaeologists have worked to determine its true age (rude). The Milky Way has absorbed supermassive (an actual technical term) black holes, made enemies of a few galactic neighbors, and mourned the deaths of countless stars. Our home galaxy has even fallen in love.
After all this time, the Milky Way finally feels that it's amassed enough experience for the juicy tell-all we've all been waiting for. Its fascinating autobiography recounts the history and future of the universe in accessible but scientific detail, presenting a summary of human astronomical knowledge thus far that is unquestionably out of this world.
Ten Steps to Nanette
-
Hardcover
$37.00 - Add to Cart
Reader Reward Price: $33.30
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER o Multi-award-winning Hannah Gadsby broke comedy with their show Nanette when they declared that they were quitting stand-up. Now they take us through the defining moments in their life that led to the creation of Nanette and their powerful decision to tell the truth--no matter the cost.
"Hannah is a Promethean force, a revolutionary talent. This hilarious, touching, and sometimes tragic book is all about where their fires were lit."--Emma Thompson
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: PopSugar, Vulture
"There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself," Hannah Gadsby declared in their show Nanette, a scorching critique of the way society conducts public debates about marginalized communities. When it premiered on Netflix, it left audiences captivated by their blistering honesty and their singular ability to take viewers from rolling laughter to devastated silence. Ten Steps to Nanette continues Gadsby's tradition of confounding expectations and norms, properly introducing us to one of the most explosive, formative voices of our time.
Gadsby grew up as the youngest of five children in an isolated town in Tasmania, where homosexuality was illegal until 1997. They perceived their childhood as safe and "normal," but as they gained an awareness of their burgeoning queerness, the outside world began to undermine the "vulnerably thin veneer" of their existence. After moving to mainland Australia and receiving a degree in art history, Gadsby found themselves adrift, working itinerant jobs and enduring years of isolation punctuated by homophobic and sexual violence. At age twenty-seven, without a home or the ability to imagine their own future, they were urged by a friend to enter a stand-up competition. They won, and so began their career in comedy.
Gadsby became well known for their self-deprecating, autobiographical humor that made them the butt of their own jokes. But in 2015, as Australia debated the legality of same-sex marriage, Gadsby started to question this mode of storytelling, beginning work on a show that would become "the most-talked-about, written-about, shared-about comedy act in years" (The New York Times).
Harrowing and hilarious, Ten Steps to Nanette traces Gadsby's growth as a queer person, to their ever-evolving relationship with comedy, and their struggle with late-in-life diagnoses of autism and ADHD, finally arriving at the backbone of Nanette: the renouncement of self-deprecation, the rejection of misogyny, and the moral significance of truth-telling.
If You Could See the Sun
-
Young adult hardcover
$23.99 - Add to Cart
Reader Reward Price: $21.59
"Utterly unique, thought-provoking, and wonderfully written... a thrilling ride that hooked me from start to finish." --Gloria Chao, author of American Panda and Rent a Boyfriend
In this genre-bending , speculative YA debut, a Chinese American girl monetizes her strange new invisibility powers by discovering and selling her wealthy classmates' most scandalous secrets.
Alice Sun has always felt invisible at her elite Beijing international boarding school, where she's the only scholarship student among China's most rich and influential teens. But then she starts uncontrollably turning invisible--actually invisible.
When her parents drop the news that they can no longer afford her tuition, even with the scholarship, Alice hatches a plan to monetize her strange new power--she'll discover the scandalous secrets her classmates want to know, for a price.
But as the tasks escalate from petty scandals to actual crimes, Alice must decide if it's worth losing her conscience--or even her life.
Queen of the Tiles
-
Young adult hardcover
$23.99 - Add to Cart
Reader Reward Price: $21.59
They Wish They Were Us meets The Queen's Gambit in this "stunning...unforgettable" (Publishers Weekly) thriller set in the world of competitive Scrabble, where a teen girl is forced to investigate the mysterious death of her best friend when her Instagram comes back to life with cryptic posts and messages.
CATALYST
13 points
noun: a substance that speeds up a reaction without itself changing
When Najwa Bakri walks into her first Scrabble competition since her best friend's death, it's with the intention to heal and move on with her life. Perhaps it wasn't the best idea to choose the very same competition where said best friend, Trina Low, died. It seems that even though Najwa is trying to change, she's not ready to give up Trina just yet.
But the same can't be said for all the other competitors. With Trina, the Scrabble Queen herself, gone, the throne is empty, and her friends are eager to be the next reigning champion. All's fair in love and Scrabble, but all bets are off when Trina's formerly inactive Instagram starts posting again, with cryptic messages suggesting that maybe Trina's death wasn't as straightforward as everyone thought. And maybe someone at the competition had something to do with it.
As secrets are revealed and the true colors of her friends are shown, it's up to Najwa to find out who's behind these mysterious posts--not just to save Trina's memory, but to save herself.
The Seas
-
Trade paperback
$21.95 - Add to Cart
Reader Reward Price: $19.76
National Bestseller
Moored in a coastal fishing town so far north that the highways only run south, the unnamed narrator of The Seas is a misfit. She's often the subject of cruel local gossip. Her father, a sailor, walked into the ocean eleven years earlier and never returned, leaving his wife and daughter to keep a forlorn vigil. Surrounded by water and beckoned by the sea, she clings to what her father once told her: that she is a mermaid.
True to myth, she finds herself in hard love with a land-bound man, an Iraq War veteran thirteen years her senior.The mesmerizing, fevered coming-of-age tale that follows will land her in jail. Her otherworldly escape will become the stuff of legend.
With the inventive brilliance and psychological insight that have earned her international acclaim, Samantha Hunt pulls readers into an undertow of impossible love and intoxication, blurring the lines between reality and fairy tale, hope and delusion, sanity and madness.
At the Existentialist Caf
-
Trade paperback
$22.00 - Add to Cart
Reader Reward Price: $19.80
Great philosophy meets powerful biography in this entertaining and immensely readable portrait of mid-20th century Paris and the fascinating characters of Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, and their circle, who loved and hated, drank and debated with each other--and forever changed the way we think about thinking.
At the Existentialist Café is a thrilling look at the famous group of post-war thinkers who became known as the Existentialists: Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Heidegger, and their circle. Starting with Paris after the devastation of the Second World War, Sarah Bakewell (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for her previous book) takes us inside the passionate debates and equally passionate lives of these brilliant, if flawed, characters. Here is a wonderful, vibrant look at the social, artistic and political currents that shaped the existentialist movement--a mode of thinking and being that, as Bakewell vividly shows, deeply affects us today.
Never has the story of this influential group, and especially that of the legendary relationship between Sartre and de Beauvoir, been told with such verve and sweep, weaving personal life with social upheaval and the universal quest for understanding.
