Our September Author of the Month: COLSON WHITEHEAD

Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad, which in 2016 won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the National Book Award and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020 for The Nickel Boys, and is also the author of The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and The Colossus of New York. He is a recipient of the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships.

Whitehead’s new novel, Harlem Shuffle, is a gloriously entertaining novel of heists, shakedowns, and rip-offs set in Harlem in the 1960s. "Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked…" To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver’s Row don’t approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it’s still home. Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time. Harlem Shuffle’s ingenious story plays out in a beautifully recreated New York City of the early 1960s. It’s a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem.

• Please join us for Colson Whitehead #IndieEventsWith on September 29 at 7:00 pm (virtual via Zoom).

Introducing The Bookseller Box

We are pleased to announce we have just launched The Bookseller Box — our monthly subscription program of hand-selected books and gifts for readers of all ages!

Each month we'll send you the new releases our booksellers are most excited about, along with a few other goodies to enhance your reading experience. Tell us what genres and topics you’re interested in, how long you’d like to subscribe for, where you're located, and we’ll take care of the rest.

The price of the subscription varies depending on which plan you choose and how many months you sign up for (longer subscriptions get a discount!), and it's a flat-rate fee of $5 per month for shipping to anywhere in Canada. Reader Reward Card holders also receive their regular 10% discount on any of our subscription plans.

For all of the details and to see our subscription plan options, please visit this page.

Bookseller Boxes also make fantastic personalized gifts! Just make sure to specify the recipient’s name and interests when signing up on their behalf.

Our August Author of the Month: ZOE WHITTALL

Zoe Whittall’s first novel, Bottle Rocket Hearts, was named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and one of the top ten essential Canadian novels of the decade by CBC’s Canada Reads. Holding Still For As Long As Possible, Whittall’s second novel, has been optioned for film, and was shortlisted for the 2010 ReLit Award, as well as winning a Lambda Literary Award. Her third novel, The Best Kind of People was shortlisted for The Scotiabank Giller Prize, and a best book of the year by Walrus Magazine, The Globe & Mail, Toronto Life, and The National Post and is currently being adapted for limited series by director Sarah Polley. Her poetry books include The Best Ten Minutes of Your Life, The Emily Valentine Poems, and Precordial Thump. Whittall has worked as a TV writer on the Emmy-Award winning comedy show Schitt’s Creek, and The Baroness Von Sketch Show, for which she won a 2018 Canadian Screen Award for Best Writing, Variety or Sketch Comedy, and was nominated again in 2019. She was born on a sheep farm in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, and has called Toronto home since 1997.

It’s taboo to regret motherhood. But what would happen if you did? Shifting perspectives and time periods, Whittall’s new novel The Spectacular is a multi-generational story exploring sexuality, gender and the weight of reproductive freedoms. By turns sharp and provocative, she captures three generations of very different women who struggle to build an authentic life in the absence of traditional familial and marital structures. Definitions of family, romance, gender and love will radically change as they seek out lives that are nothing less than spectacular.

• Zoe Whittall IndieBookFest Virtual Event. Tuesday, September 14, 2021. 6 PM CT (SASK) / 7 PM CDT (MB).

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The Booker Prize 2021 longlist

The 2021 Booker Prize longlist has been announced, and we are pleased to see two great Canadians made the list: Rachel Cusk for her novel Second Place and Mary Lawson for her novel A Town Called Solace.

The longlist includes:

• A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam (Granta Books, Granta Publications)
• Second Place, Rachel Cusk, (Faber)
• The Promise, Damon Galgut, (Chatto & Windus, Vintage, PRH)
• The Sweetness of Water, Nathan Harris (Tinder Press, Headline, Hachette Book Group)
• Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber)
• An Island, Karen Jennings (Holland House Books)
• A Town Called Solace, Mary Lawson (Chatto & Windus, Vintage, PRH)
• No One is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood (Bloomsbury Circus, Bloomsbury Publishing)
• The Fortune Men, Nadifa Mohamed (Viking, Penguin General, PRH)
• Bewilderment, Richard Powers (Hutchinson Heinemann, PRH)
• China Room, Sunjeev Sahota (Harvill Secker, Vintage, PRH)
• Great Circle, Maggie Shipstead (Doubleday, Transworld Publishers, PRH)
• Light Perpetual, Francis Spufford (Faber)

Congratulations to everyone who made the list!

The finalists will be announced September 14, 2021, and then the winner will be revealed November 3.