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Paperback Fiction

The Mighty Red

- Louise Erdrich

Trade paperback $25.99
Reader Reward Price: $23.39

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER o A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK o A FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR FICTION

"[A] sweeping, tender-hearted epic." --Harper's Bazaar

In this stunning novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich tells a story of love, natural forces, spiritual yearnings, and the tragic impact of uncontrollable circumstances on ordinary people's lives.

History is a flood. The mighty red . . .

In Argus, North Dakota, a collection of people revolve around a fraught wedding. 

Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed Goth who can't read her future but seems to resolve his. 

Hugo, a gentle red-haired, home-schooled giant, is also in love with Kismet. He's determined to steal her and is eager to be a home wrecker.  

Kismet's mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary's family, and on her nightly runs, tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future, her daughter's and her own.

Human time, deep time, Red River time, the half-life of herbicides and pesticides, and the elegance of time represented in fracking core samples from unimaginable depths, is set against the speed of climate change, the depletion of natural resources, and the sudden economic meltdown of 2008-2009. How much does a dress cost? A used car? A package of cinnamon rolls? Can you see the shape of your soul in the everchanging clouds? Your personal salvation in the giant expanse of sky? These are the questions the people of the Red River Valley of the North wrestle with every day.

The Mighty Red is a novel of tender humor, disturbance, and hallucinatory mourning. It is about on-the-job pains and immeasurable satisfactions, a turbulent landscape, and eating the native weeds growing in your backyard. It is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. It is about a starkly beautiful prairie community whose members must cope with devastating consequences as powerful forces upend them. As with every book this great modern master writes, The Mighty Red is about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.

A new novel by Louise Erdrich is a major literary event; gorgeous and heartrending, The Mighty Red is a triumph.

Once Lands

- GMB Chomichuk , James Gillespie

Trade paperback $20.00
Reader Reward Price: $18.00

Sinister tales sword and sorcery in a Shared World A patchwork of interconnected stories by Writer and Illustrator GMB Chomichuk with Co-Creator James Gillespie.  In the Once Lands a lineage of sorcerous wayfinders work to keep godlike monstrosities locked behind the crumbling walls of cursded cities by allowing the vengeful ghosts of forest gods who inhabit their living flesh.  GMB Chomichuk is a writer, illustrator and creator of novels, kids books, film, tv, theatre, story games, comics and graphic novels.  His work ranges across genres, from fantasy to horror, and across emotional landscapes, from the heartwarming to the bloodcurdling. James Gillespie is an award-winning graphic designer and art director for Canada's History Society. He spends most of his time behind the scenes working with creatives from across Canada to bring our past to life. He is very excited to continue his collaboration with GMB Chomichuk to tell stories both fantastic and horrifying in the Shared World.

The Dark Wives (Vera #11)

- Ann Cleeves

Trade paperback $25.99
Reader Reward Price: $23.39

New York Times bestselling author of the Two Rivers and Shetland series, Ann Cleeves, returns with the eleventh Vera Stanhope novel following The Rising Tide.

A local myth. A deadly threat.

A man's body is found in the early morning light by a local dog walker on the common outside Rosebank, a care home for troubled teens. The victim is Josh, a staff member who was due to work the previous night but never showed up for his shift.

DI Vera Stanhope is called out to investigate. Her only clue is the disappearance of one of the home's residents, fourteen year-old Chloe Spence. Vera can't bring herself to believe that a teenager could be responsible for the murder, but even she can't dismiss the possibility.

Vera, Joe, and new team member Rosie are soon embroiled in the case. But when a second body, connected to Josh, is found near the Three Dark Wives standing stones in the wilds of the Northumbrian countryside, superstition and folklore collide with fact.

Vera knows she has to find Chloe to get to the truth, but it seems that the dark secrets in their community may be far more dangerous that she could ever have believed possible.

Tell Me Everything

- Elizabeth Strout

Trade paperback $26.00
Reader Reward Price: $23.40

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER o OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK o From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout comes a "stunner" (People) of a novel about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world.

"Tell Me Everything hits like a bucolic fable. . . . A novel of moods, how they govern our personal lives and public spaces, reflected in Strout's shimmering technique."--The Washington Post

A TIME AND NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

With her remarkable insight into the human condition and silences that contain multitudes, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters--Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess, and more--as they deal with a shocking crime in their midst, fall in love and yet choose to be apart, and grapple with the question, as Lucy Barton puts it, "What does anyone's life mean?"

It's autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive's apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known--"unrecorded lives," Olive calls them--reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.

Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, "Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love."

The Briar Club

- Kate Quinn

Trade paperback - discounted $20.79
Reader Reward Price: $18.71

"Quinn evocatively balances the outward cheerfulness of the 1950s with historical observations exploring racism, misogyny, homophobia and political persecution in this sharply drawn, gripping novel." - People Magazine
The New York Times bestselling author of The Diamond Eye and The Rose Code returns with a haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, DC, boardinghouse during the McCarthy era.

Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation's capital where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss, whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; policeman's daughter Nora, who finds herself entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Beatrice, whose career has come to an end along with the women's baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy's Red Scare.

Grace's weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears the house apart, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: who is the true enemy in their midst?

Capturing the paranoia of the McCarthy era and evoking the changing roles for women in postwar America, The Briar Club is an intimate and thrilling novel of secrets and loyalty put to the test.

A beautiful, foil cover, first edition.

These are our current bestselling Paperback Fiction titles in Winnipeg.