Catherine Chidgey

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Washington

A new novel from the Women's Prize for Fiction longlisted and Dublin Literary Award shortlisted author of Remote Sympathy, Catherine Chidgey. Like every other girl in her class, twelve-year-old Justine is drawn to her glamorous, charismatic new teacher and longs to be her pet. However, when a thief begins to target the school, Justine's sense that something isn't quite right grows ever stronger. With each twist of the plot, this gripping story of deception and the corrosive power of guilt takes a yet darker turn. Young as she is, Justine must decide where her loyalties lie. Set in New Zealand in the 1980s and probing themes of racism, misogyny and the oppressive reaches of Catholicism, Pet will take a rightful place next to other classic portraits of childhood betrayal: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Go-Between, Heavenly Creatures and Au Revoir Les Enfants among them. "Refreshing, compelling and surprising."--Ann Morgan, author of Beside Myself and Reading the World

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Viola Di Grado

Jamie Richards

Shortlisted for the Polari Book Award 2024

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

An electrifying descent from loneliness and grief into obsessive, all-consuming love, by an Italian literary star. 'When Xu bites me, when she has me in her teeth, naked and bad on top of me, everything is good.' In a skyscraper apartment overlooking Shanghai's blue-tinged, pulsating nightlife and filled with rotting food, two women swallow little yellow pills that will make all things dangerous feel safe. They're both running from a turbulent past. In abandoned factories and dilapidated slaughterhouses, Xu pushes Ruben to extremes of pleasure and pain that she has never experienced before, to a place where language breaks down and passion becomes consumption. Blue Hungerasks how we create our identities and how we escape them; it is a fever-dream of a novel, visionary and uncanny, that demolishes all taboos and wisely explores, in a wildly imaginative language, the twisted peaks of loss and desire.

Blue Hunger

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Kostya Tsolakis

Shortlisted for the literary Polari Prize this year, 2024. 

Greekling

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Munroe Bergdorf

Shortlisted for the Polari Book Award for first novel. A book about how transitioning is a human act and transitioning in life and not just an act about gender transition. 

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

In One Way or Another, We All Transition

In this thought-provoking, timely book, model and activist Munroe Bergdorf reflects on individuality, evolution, and the ever-changing nature of identity, revealing how they have shaped her own lived experience and how society shapes--and is shaped by--each. "Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, I ask myself this question: what if I'd just done nothing?" When Munroe Bergdorf began to transition in 2009, her only goal was blending in. She wanted nothing more than to "pass"--to be perceived as the gender by which she identified. "I was of the mindset that in order to transition successfully I needed to change other people's perception of who I was." More than a decade later, Bergdorf has reconsidered that thinking. "We do not all of a sudden become a whole different person upon the realization of our transness. . . . As time goes on, we all develop as people. And it struck me that none of us ever becomes someone else entirely--regardless of how we identify--but nor do we stay the same forever, either." For Bergdorf, transitioning is an ingrained part of the human experience, not just a process that only trans people go through. It's universal. Everyone changes. Part memoir, part big idea book, Transitional explores the nature of transition, its significance in Bergdorf's life, how it impacts--and is considered and influenced by--society, and what it means for our own experiences. Bergdorf explains how she came to revise her outlook and examines how society views change in six vital areas of human experience--adolescence, sexuality, gender, relationships, identity, and race. Using an intersectional approach, she deconstructs the stigma, bias, and prejudice within ourselves and one another, and redefines what it means to be "transitional." Ultimately, Bergdorf seeks to bring us closer to a shared consciousness. Transitional reminds us that our unique differences give us power and shows how these differences can be harnessed as a tool to heal, build community, inspire personal growth, and forge a path for progress forward together.

Transitional

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Tommy Orange

There There is considered a Prequel to Tommy Orange’s new novel, Wandering Stars. I did read them back to back and recommend the combo read. Wandering Stars was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024, as well as currently longlisted for the Aspen book awards. 

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

A Novel

The eagerly awaited follow-up to Pulitzer Prize finalist Tommy Orange’s breakout best seller There There—winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the John Leonard Prize, the American Book Award, and one of the New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year—Wandering Stars traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians through to the shattering aftermath of Orvil Redfeather’s shooting in There There. Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion Prison Castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodline. Oakland, 2018. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield is barely holding her family together after the shooting that nearly took the life of her nephew Orvil. From the moment he awakens in his hospital bed, Orvil begins compulsively googling school shootings on YouTube. He also becomes emotionally reliant on the prescription medications meant to ease his physical trauma. His younger brother Lony, suffering from PTSD, is struggling to make sense of the carnage he witnessed at the shooting by secretly cutting himself and enacting blood rituals which he hopes will connect him to his Cheyenne heritage. Opal is equally adrift, experimenting with Ceremony and peyote, searching for a way to heal her wounded family. Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange once again delivers a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous, a book piercing in its poetry, sorrow, and rage—a masterful follow-up to his already—classic first novel, and a devastating indictment of America’s war on its own people.

Wandering Stars and There There Bundle

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Joshua Jones

Short stories about fitting in, mental health, autism, and small towns. 

Local Fires

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Deepa Rajagopalan

Stories

Peacocks of Instagram is a fresh and intimate debut collection of short stories suffused with the dilemmas, heartbreaks, and joys of diasporic Indians. In these brilliant and witty stories, Deepa Rajagopalan centres a cast of Indian women who are flawed, enterprising, and filled with desire. In the award-winning title story, an underappreciated server in a coffee shop attracts tens of thousands of followers on social media with her peacock accessories. A hotel housekeeper up against a world of gender and class inequality quietly gets revenge on her chauvinist boss. A young woman navigates the landscape of loneliness after abruptly leaving her home in India by learning to drive over it. An eight-year-old finds her entire life uprooted when her mother needs a new kidney. A fiercely independent engineer does not decamp to the sidelines of an affair but takes up space, living her life as variously as possible. Peacocks of Instagram deftly questions what it means to be safe, to survive, and to call a place home. With an intense awareness of privilege and the lack of it, these fourteen subtle and affecting stories explore and indulge in the imperfection of the human condition.

Peacocks of Instagram

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Neel Mukherjee

An ingenious, devastating, explosive novel about the ramifications of choice from "one of the most original and talented authors working today" (NPR).

Choice

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Margaret Atwood

Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 To 2021

In this brilliant selection of essays, the award-winning, best-selling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments offers her funny, erudite, endlessly curious, and uncannily prescient take on everything from whether or not The Handmaid's Tale is a dystopia to the importance of how to define granola--and seeks answers to Burning Questions such as...

* Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories? Including thoughts on the writing of The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments, Oryx & Crake, and her other beloved works.
* How much of yourself can you give away without evaporating?
* How can we live on our planet?
* Is it true? And is it fair?
* What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism?

In more than fifty pieces, Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humor at the world, and reports back to us on what she finds. This roller-coaster period brought the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump, and a pandemic. From when to dispense advice to the young (answer: only when asked) to Atwood's views on the climate crisis, we have no better guide to the many and varied mysteries of our universe.

Burning Questions

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Scholastique Mukasonga

Mark Polizzotti

Shortlisted for the Cercador Prize in 2024  recognizing works of literature in translation as selected by a committee of independent booksellers based across the United States.



A sharp and playful critique of colonialism from the leading voice of French-Rwandan literature, animated by memories, archival specters, and powerful women “In sentences of great beauty and restraint, Mukasonga rescues a million souls from the collective noun ‘genocide,’ returning them to us as individual human beings.” — Zadie Smith In a 4-part narrative brimming with historical asides, alluring anecdotes, and murky questions left in the margins of colonial records, Sister Deborah heralds “a life that is more alive” as it explores the tensions and myths of Rwanda’s past. When time-worn ancestral remedies fail to heal young Ikirezi’s maladies, she’s rushed to the Rwandan hillsides. From her termite perch under the coral tree, health blooms under Sister Deborah’s hands. Women bear their breasts to the rising sun as men under thatched roofs stand, “stunned and impotent before this female fury.” Now grown, Ikirezi unearths the truth of Sister Deborah’s passage from America to 1930s Rwanda and the mystery surrounding her sudden departure. In colonial records, Sister Deborah is a “pathogen,” an “incident.” Who is the keeper of truth, Ikirezi impels us to ask, Who stands at the threshold of memory? Did we dance? Did she heal? Did we look to the sky with wonder? Ikirezi writes on, pulling Sister Deborah out from the archive, inscribing her with breath. A beautiful novel that works in the slippages of history, Sister Deborah at its core is a story of what happens when women — black women and girls — seek the truth by any means.

Sister Deborah

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Fiston Mwanza Mujila

Roland Glasser

Shortlisted for the National Book award 2024 in translated works. 

Following the international success of his debut novel Tram 83, Fiston Mwanza Mujila is back with his highly anticipated second novel, which follows a remarkable series of characters during the Mobutu regime. The Democratic Republic of Congo, otherwise known as Congo-Kinshasa or DRCongo, has had a series of names since its founding. The name of Zaire best corresponds to the experience of the novel's characters. The years of Mobutu's regime were filled with utopias, dreams, fantasies and other uncontrolled desires for social redemption, the quest for easy enrichment and the desecration of places of power. Among these events: Zairians' immigration to Angola during the civil war boycotting the borders inherited from colonization, as if the country did not have its own diamonds, and the occupation of public places by children from outside. The author creates the atmosphere of the time through a roundup of characters: the diviner Tshiamuena, also known as Madonna of the Cafunfo mines, prides herself of being God with whoever is willing to listen to her. Franz Baumgartner, an apprentice writer originally from Austria and rumba lover, goes around the bars in search of material for his novel. Sanza, Le Blanc and other street children share information to the intelligence services when they are not living off begging and robbery. Djibril, taxi driver, only lives for reggae music. As soon as night falls, each character dances and plays his own role in a country mined by dictatorship.

The Villain's Dance

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“Leslie Garrett was a writer of wit, intelligence, and tremendous talent who overcame long odds to produce an acclaimed body of work. Poet and scholar Calvin Hernton called his novel, The Beasts, “Enthralling, magical, painful, delicate, subtle… a masterpiece.” 

Les became acquainted with Alan Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, James Jones, James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni and, of course, Knoxville’s own Cormac McCarthy.

Both had just won awards for their first novel when they met in Europe. Cormac would later serve as best man at Les’s wedding, and they would keep in touch all the years. 

Leslie Garrett passed away in 1993, publishing only 2 novels, one of them this novel. 
Published by Charles Scribner’s Sons-New York on 1966

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

The Beasts 

Carys Davies

A stunning, exquisite novel from an award-winning writer about a minister dispatched to a remote island off of Scotland to “clear” the last remaining inhabitant, who has no intention of leaving—an unforgettable tale of resilience, change, and hope. John, an impoverished Scottish minister, has accepted a job evicting the lone remaining occupant of an island north of Scotland—Ivar, who has been living alone for decades, with only the animals and the sea for company. Though his wife, Mary, has serious misgivings about the errand, he decides to go anyway, setting in motion a chain of events that neither he nor Mary could have predicted. Shortly after John reaches the island, he falls down a cliff and is found, unconscious and badly injured, by Ivar who takes him home and tends to his wounds. The two men do not speak a common language, but as John builds a dictionary of Ivar’s world, they learn to communicate and, as Ivar sees himself for the first time in decades reflected through the eyes of another person, they build a fragile, unusual connection. Unfolding in the 1840s in the final stages of the infamous Scottish Clearances—which saw whole communities of the rural poor driven off the land in a relentless program of forced evictions—this singular, beautiful, deeply surprising novel explores the differences and connections between us, the way history shapes our deepest convictions, and how the human spirit can survive despite all odds. Moving and unpredictable, sensitive and spellbinding, Clear is a profound and pleasurable read.

Clear

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Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

This was a withdrawn hardback copy from the library. Early publication. See photos for more information on classification of “good” quality ranking. 

The Life of Martha Ballard Based O

Martha Ballard was a midwife and medical practitioner. Her diary recounts the sensational events of her neighborhood--whether it be the ex-minister's wife charging a local judge with rape or the mass murder of a family--and catches the small movements that characterized life and death in an 18th-century town. Illustrated.

A Midwife's Tale

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Claire Messud

Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize and the 2024 Giller Prize.  UK cover.

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024

This Strange Eventful History

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Colin. Barrett

**One of the Observer's Debut Novels of 2024** A small-town feud. A madcap kidnapping. A wild weekend to change everybody's lives... 'Strange and beautiful... A book to live inside' SALLY ROONEY, author of Normal People 'A gift of true storytelling... Barrett's talent burns up the page' ANNE ENRIGHT, author of The Wren, The Wren 'A wonder... A tale for the ages' JON MCGREGOR, author of Reservoir 13 As Ballina prepares for its biggest weekend of the year, the simmering feud between small-time drug-dealer, Cillian English, and County Mayo's enforcers, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, spills over into violence and an ugly ultimatum. When the reclusive Dev answers his door on Friday night he finds Doll - Cillian's teenage brother - in the clutches of Gabe and Sketch. Jostled by his nefarious cousins and goaded by his dead mother's dog, Dev is drawn headlong into the Ferdias' revenge fantasy. Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old Nicky can't shake the feeling something bad has happened to her boyfriend Doll. Hungover, reeling from a fractious Friday night and plagued by ghosts of her own, Nicky sets out on a feverish mission to save Doll, even as she questions her future in Ballina.

Wild Houses

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Jokha Alharthi

Marilyn Booth

An extraordinary novel from a Man Booker International Prize-winning author that follows one young Omani woman as she builds a life for herself in Britain and reflects on the relationships that have made her from a "remarkable" writer who has "constructed her own novelistic form" (James Wood, The New Yorker).

From Man Booker International Prize-winning author Jokha Alharthi, Bitter Orange Tree is a profound exploration of social status, wealth, desire, and female agency. It presents a mosaic portrait of one young woman's attempt to understand the roots she has grown from, and to envisage an adulthood in which her own power and happiness might find the freedom necessary to bear fruit and flourish.
 
Zuhour, an Omani student at a British university, is caught between the past and the present. As she attempts to form friendships and assimilate in Britain, she can't help but ruminate on the relationships that have been central to her life. Most prominent is her strong emotional bond with Bint Amir, a woman she always thought of as her grandmother, who passed away just after Zuhour left the Arabian Peninsula.
 
As the historical narrative of Bint Amir's challenged circumstances unfurls in captivating fragments, so too does Zuhour's isolated and unfulfilled present, one narrative segueing into another as time slips and dreams mingle with memories.

Bitter Orange Tree

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Tiya Miles

The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • A renowned historian traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft an extraordinary testament to people who are left out of the archives. “Deeply layered and insightful . . . [a] bold reflection on American history, African American resilience, and the human capacity for love and perseverance in the face of soul-crushing madness.”—The Washington Post “A history told with brilliance and tenderness and fearlessness.”—Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis, the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few precious items as a token of love and to try to ensure Ashley’s survival. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the bag in spare yet haunting language—including Rose’s wish that “It be filled with my Love always.” Ruth’s sewn words, the reason we remember Ashley’s sack today, evoke a sweeping family story of loss and of love passed down through generations. Now, in this illuminating, deeply moving book inspired by Rose’s gift to Ashley, historian Tiya Miles carefully unearths these women’s faint presence in archival records to follow the paths of their lives—and the lives of so many women like them—to write a singular and revelatory history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States. The search to uncover this history is part of the story itself. For where the historical record falls short of capturing Rose’s, Ashley’s, and Ruth’s full lives, Miles turns to objects and to art as equally important sources, assembling a chorus of women’s and families’ stories and critiquing the scant archives that for decades have overlooked so many. The contents of Ashley’s sack—a tattered dress, handfuls of pecans, a braid of hair, “my Love always”—are eloquent evidence of the lives these women lived. As she follows Ashley’s journey, Miles metaphorically unpacks the bag, deepening its emotional resonance and exploring the meanings and significance of everything it contained. All That She Carried is a poignant story of resilience and of love passed down through generations of women against steep odds. It honors the creativity and fierce resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties even when official systems refused to do so, and it serves as a visionary illustration of how to reconstruct and recount their stories today.

All That She Carried

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Frank McCourt

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

A Memoir

The author recounts his childhood in Depression-era Brooklyn as the child of Irish immigrants who decide to return to worse poverty in Ireland when his infant sister dies

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