September 25, 2021
We are thrilled to celebrate the Fall 2021 literary season with Anthony Doerr’s new novel below, set partly in Constantinople. Then we travel to Antarctica by way of an English writer, Kyoto from a French writer, Mexico by way of Peru, and Canada from a Trinidadian writer. Come along!
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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Cloud Cuckoo Land
By ANTHONY DOERR
Published by SCRIBNER
This extraordinary epic has just landed on the National Book Award Longlist. Following his Pulitzer Prize-winning WWII masterpiece, All the Light We Cannot See, Doerr now takes us on an imaginative trip from the fifteenth century to the future. His story hinges on a book about Aethon found in a library by an orphan in Turkey. The story spins wider to include an army youngster, an eighty-year-old theater director in an Idaho library who keeps Aethon’s story alive, a youthful disillusioned terrorist and a girl from another planet. Aethon’s story is the thread that stitches their lives together. Just the sort of immersive, rewarding reading experience you’ve been craving.
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Lean Fall Stand
By JON McGREGOR
Published by CATAPULT
Ever since Reservoir 13, I have loved the work of Jon McGregor and the way he probes so profoundly into the minds and hearts of his characters, often in extreme circumstances. Here, at an Antarctica survey station, a catastrophic weather event occurs and three men find themselves suddenly put in jeopardy. But only one of them has the key to what actually happened that day. The story is slowly revealed, with a calmness of prose, and an exploration of the unpredictability of nature—human and natural. This novel will grab both your attention and your spirit.
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A Single Rose
By MURIEL BARBERY
Published by EUROPA EDITIONS
Translated by Alison Anderson
The charming The Elegance of the Hedgehog is one of the easiest books for a bookseller to hand-sell to a customer. Barberry has now written an appealing novel about a woman who has traveled to Kyoto for the reading of her father’s will. Paul, her late father’s assistant, is there to help her. Their story and the illuminations Rose discovers about her father and herself, amid the beauty of the Japanese gardens, are elegant indeed. And her next book, with adorable illustrations and narrated by one of the author’s four cats, will be published this November!
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Last Words on Earth
By JAVIER SERENA
Translated by Katie Whittemore
Serena was born in Pamplona, Spain and this novel is his second about other writers (Atila is forthcoming). He says, “In both cases, my characters…share a tragic trajectory and a romantic spirit, with a rather peripheral position in the world: people who do not fit their time.” Here he uses the life of the late great Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño to fashion a powerful (and tragic) fiction about a Peruvian writer exiled to Mexico. Another terrific reading suggestion for Hispanic Heritage Month—Bolaño fans and many more will devour this.
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Saga Boy
By ANTONIO MICHAEL DOWNING
Published by MILKWEED EDITIONS
Musician, writer and activist Downing’s memoir is a superb example of how to tell the story of displacement and reinvention. He learned to read by studying the Bible with his grandmother in the Trinidadian jungle, then came of age as he was transplanted to rural, frigid Canada. He eventually created himself anew (several times) when music became the defining principle of his life, and found himself slipping into a dangerous pattern of bad boy behavior (labeled a ‘saga boy’ in Trinidad). Downing writes of these experiences with visceral passion, and now, as ‘John Orpheus’, has flourished in life, work and art—gracing us with his fascinating story.