Indie Bookstore Recommendations

The award-winning, bestselling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Bold and prescient, and a testament to tenderness in the face of violence, Time Is a Mother is a return and a forging forth all at once.

A memoir as gripping as it is moving, Solito provides an immediate and intimate account not only of a treacherous and near-impossible journey but also of the miraculous kindness and love delivered at the most unexpected moments. Solito is Javier Zamora’s story, but it’s also the story of millions of others who had no choice but to leave home.

A dazzling novel about a young Black woman who walks the streets of Oakland and stumbles headlong into the failure of its justice system. This debut of a blazingly original voice “bursts at the seams of every page and swallows you whole” (Tommy Orange, author of There There).

In one of the most anticipated books of 2022, a spellbinding debut novel traces three generations of a Southern Black family and one daughter’s discovery that she has the power to change her family’s legacy.

The “best short-story writer in English” (Time) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose — wickedly funny, unsentimental, and exquisitely tuned — Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: Here is a collection of prismatic, resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality.

Our Missing Hearts is an old story made new, of the ways supposedly civilized communities can ignore the most searing injustice. It’s a story about the power — and limitations — of art to create change, the lessons and legacies we pass on to our children, and how any of us can survive a broken world with our hearts intact. Discover the inspiring new novel about a mother’s unbreakable love in a world consumed by fear.

This enchanting tale of a cursed mythical creature and the lonely fisherman who falls in love with her is “a daring, mesmerizing novel …  single-handedly bringing magic realism up-to-date (Maggie O’Farrell, best-selling author of Hamnet).

A rollicking feminist tale set in 1950s America where thousands of women have spontaneously transformed into dragons, exploding notions of a woman’s place in the world and expanding minds about accepting others for who they really are.

The author of Hamnet — New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner — brings the world of Renaissance Italy to jewel-bright life in this unforgettable fictional portrait of the captivating young duchess Lucrezia de’ Medici as she makes her way in a troubled court.

A Taiwanese American woman’s coming-of-consciousness ignites eye-opening revelations and chaos on a college campus in this outrageously hilarious and startingly tender debut novel.

Benson and Mike are two young guys who live together in Houston, but they’re not sure why they’re still a couple. When Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his mother, Mitsuko, arrives for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye. Back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together in an absurd domestic situation that ends up meaning more to each of them than they ever could have predicted. Both men will change in ways that will either make them stronger together or fracture everything they’ve ever known.

On a summer night in 1985, three teenagers have been drinking. One of them gets behind the wheel of a car, and, in an instant, everything changes. In Dani Shapiro’s first work of fiction in fifteen years, she returns to the form that launched her career, with a riveting, deeply felt novel that examines the ties that bind families together — and the secrets that can break them apart. Signal Fires is a work of haunting beauty by a masterly storyteller.

An epic, mesmerizing debut novel set against a rapidly changing post–Cultural Revolution China, A Map for the Missing reckons with the costs of pursuing one’s dreams and the lives we leave behind.

From the author of The Love Hypothesis comes a new STEMinist rom-com in which a scientist is forced to work on a project with her nemesis — with explosive results.

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth, all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, Trust engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.

A mythic love story set in Trinidad, Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s radiant debut is a masterwork of lush imagination and exuberant storytelling–a spellbinding and hopeful novel about inheritance, loss, and love’s seismic power to heal.

The epic tale of a brilliant woman who must reinvent herself to survive, moving from Mussolini’s Italy to 1940s Los Angeles — a timeless story of love, deceit, and sacrifice from the award-winning author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.