This week, we have summaries of every book on the newly-announced Booker Shortlist, pics from our recent Drag Story Time, three new author events for books in a variety of genres, a fresh translation by Emily Wilson of Odyssey fame, the return of nonfiction masters Michael Wolff and Michael Lewis, and other new releases recommended by Jean, Milan, and me...

Of the six books chosen, we have three in stock at time of writing, including If I Survive You by U of M grad Jonathan Escoffery. Of the other three, Western Lane and Study for Obedience are available for order (and we plan to have in stock soon), while Paul Lynch's Prophet Song comes out in December and can be preordered now. See all six titles at once on our website here.

If I Survive You — Jonathan Escoffery

In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya fled to Miami as violence consumed their native Kingston. Now their son Trelawny struggles to find a place for himself amid financial disaster, racism, and flat-out bad luck, clawing his way out of homelessness through a series of hilarious odd jobs. Meanwhile, his brother attempts a disastrous cash grab to get his kids back, and his cousin looks for a father who doesn’t want to be found. As each searches for a foothold, they face the danger of climbing without a safety net. Pulsing with lyricism, style, commentary and contagious laughter, Escoffery’s debut unravels what it means to be in between homes and cultures in a world at the mercy of capitalism and whiteness.

This Other Eden — Paul Harding

In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, Matthew Diamond comes to the island, an idealistic but prejudiced schoolteacher-turned-missionary who disrupts the community’s fragile balance through his efforts to educate its children. His presence attracts the attention of authorities on the mainland, who decide to institutionalize the island's residents and develop it as a vacation destination. In prose of breathtaking beauty and power, and through an unforgettable cast, Harding tells a spellbinding story of resistance and survival, an enduring testament to the struggle to preserve human dignity in the face of intolerance and injustice.

The Bee Sting — Paul Murray

Dickie’s car business is going under—but he's spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse bunker. His wife Imelda is selling her jewelry on eBay and dodging the attention of a fast-talking cattle farmer, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, is binge drinking her way through her final exams, and twelve-year-old PJ is on the brink of running away. If you wanted to change this story, how far back would you have to go? To the bee sting that ruined Imelda’s wedding day? Or to Dickie at ten, standing in the summer garden with his father, learning how to be a real man? The Bee Sting is a tour de force: a portrait of post-crash Ireland, a tragicomic family saga, and a dazzling story about the struggle to be good at the end of the world.

Study For Obedience — Sarah Bernstein

For readers of Shirley Jackson, Iain Reid, and Claire-Louise Bennett, a haunting, compressed masterwork from an extraordinary new voice in Canadian fiction. A young woman moves to the remote north to be housekeeper to her newly-divorced brother. Soon after her arrival, a series of inexplicable events occurs - collective bovine hysteria; a local dog's phantom pregnancy; a potato blight. The local suspicions seem to be directed at her, and as she feels the hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother's property, she wonders what might happen, what one might be capable of doing. With a sharp, lyrical voice, Sarah Bernstein powerfully explores questions of complicity and power, displacement and inheritance.

Western Lane — Chetna Maroo

Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the game becomes her world. Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters. Her life is reduced to the sport: the serve, the volley, the drive. But on the court, she is not alone. She is with her pa. She is with Ged, a thirteen-year-old boy with his own formidable talent. She is with the players who have come before her. She is in awe. An indelible coming-of-age story, Chetna Maroo’s first novel captures the ordinary and annihilates it with beauty. Western Lane is a valentine to innocence, to the closeness of sisterhood, to the strange ways we come to know ourselves and each other.

Prophet Song — Paul Lynch

On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find two officers from Ireland's newly formed secret police on her step. They have arrived to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart, caught in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny. As the life she knows and the ones she loves disappear before her eyes, Eilish must contend with the dystopian logic of her new, unraveling country. How far will she go to save her family? And what--or who--is she willing to leave behind? Exhilarating, terrifying and surprisingly intimate, Prophet Song offers a shocking vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother's fight to hold her family together.

Our weekly First Chapter Story Time on Saturday benefitted from a special guest reader: fabulous local drag queen Miz Diagnosis! In a gloriously colorful homemade faux-fur jacket, she read two of her favorite books to a rapt audience of tots and parents: Julián Is a Mermaid by Jessica Love, and Flower Girl by Amy Bloom and Jameela Wahlgren. Miz Diagnosis also stuck around after the reading to talk to attendees. This was our best-attended story time yet, and we plan to follow it with more guest readers in the future! Thanks to everyone who came out!

Democracy Awakening — Heather Cox Richardson

Richardson crafts a compelling narrative explaining how a small group of wealthy people have promoted false history to lead us into authoritarianism -- and how remembering the elements of the nation’s true history upheld by marginalized Americans can offer a roadmap for the nation’s future. Richardson wrangles our meandering, confusing news feed into a coherent story, finds precedents, and envisions possible paths that lie ahead. In her trademark calm prose, she is optimistic about the future of democracy. Democracy Awakening explains how we got to this perilous point, what our history really tells us about ourselves, and what the future of democracy can be.

Homer's Iliad — tr. Emily Wilson

Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of The Odyssey forever changed how Homer is read in English. Now Wilson returns with an equally revelatory translation of Homer’s other epic. The Iliad roars with the boasts of victors, the fury of loss, and the cries of the dying. It sings, too, of the fierce beauty of nature and the gods’ grand schemes beyond the ken of mortals. In Wilson’s hands, The Illiad gallops at a pace befitting its legendary battle scenes, in crisp but resonant language that evokes the poem’s pathos and reveals palpably real characters both human and divine. The culmination of a decade of engagement with antiquity’s most beautiful and emotionally complex poet, Wilson’s Iliad now gives us a complete Homer for our generation.

Wellness — Nathan Hill

I Will To Avenge My People: The Nobel Lecture — Annie Ernaux

It was as a young woman that Annie Ernaux first wrote these words in her diary, giving a name to her purpose in life as a writer. She returns to them in her stirring defense of literature and of political writing in her Nobel Lecture, delivered in Stockholm on December 7, 2022. To write of her own life, she asserts, is to “shatter the loneliness of experiences endured and repressed;” to mine individual experience is to find collective emancipation. Ernaux’s speech is a bold assertion of the capacity of writing to give people a sense of their own worth, and of one writer’s commitment to bearing witness to life, its joys and its injustices.

Land of Milk and Honey — C Pam Zhang

A smog has spread. Crops are disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony, where the sky is clear again, and rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body. In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef’s boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate. Sensuous and bitingly sharp, Land of Milk and Honey lays provocatively bare the ethics of seeking pleasure in a dying world.

The Fall: The End of Fox News and The Murdoch Dynasty — Michael Wolff

Just as Fox News has pushed America apart, now it too is coming apart, as is the dynasty behind it. Here is Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old billionaire—concerned about his legacy but more so about profits. Here are his contentious progeny. Here is star anchor Tucker Carlson, considering a run for the presidency; Sean Hannity, planning to put Trump back in office; Laura Ingraham, just trying to survive in the last man’s man’s world. Empires fall. Kingdoms end. As lawsuits pummel the financial bedrock and reputation of the network, Michael Wolff documents, in riveting real time, the final days of Fox News.

The Wild Robot Protects — Peter Brown

Life for Roz and the animals on their island is perfect. But when mysterious, dangerous waters surround the island, the animals are forced inland to fight over dwindling resources. So the wild robot sets out across the ocean, determined to stop the poison tide. During her journey, Roz encounters amazing geological formations and incredible creatures, and she sees the devastation caused by the toxic waters. Can the wild robot save the ocean and her island and everything she loves? This thrilling third installment of the Wild Robot series takes readers on a new adventure through the ocean and to the frigid northern waters where Roz may have to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Something, Someday — Amanda Gorman & Christian Robinson

Presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman and Caldecott winner Christian Robinson team up to create a timeless message of hope! Sometimes the world feels broken. And problems seem too big to fix. But we all have the power to make a difference. With a little faith, and maybe the help of a friend, together we can find beauty and create change. With intimate and inspiring text and powerfully stunning illustrations, Something, Someday reveals how the smallest gesture can have a lasting impact.

The MANIAC — Benjamin Labatut

If you enjoyed When We Cease To Understand The World, you'll be glad to hear this is an expansion of the same premise: recasting (and very lightly fictionalizing) the lives of 20th Century scientists as stories of Gothic horror . Most of the book concerns John von Neumann -- math prodigy, godfather of the computer, architect of mutually assured destruction -- as related by his teachers, colleagues, lovers, and haters. He remains a figure of mystery throughout, but Labatut's paranoiac vision of the 1900s finds novel, fascinating conceptual links everywhere he looks. Following von Neumann's story is that of Lee Sedol, the Go master whose 2016 match against von Neumann's distant AI progeny, AlphaGo, is a sort of Kasparov-Deep Blue for a new generation, written with the quiet, breathless intensity of The Queen's Gambit. A heady, eccentric depiction of self-destructive intelligence, pernicious madness, and the era when they became indistinguishable.

Death Valley — Melissa Broder

Death Valley connects with the complicated stages of grief in an environment just as inscrutable -- the desert. Broder's writing is candid and bleakly hilarious. These characters confess what you're afraid to admit.

Going Infinite — Michael Lewis

Sam Bankman-Fried was the world’s youngest billionaire and crypto’s Gatsby. CEOs, celebrities, and leaders of small countries all vied for his time and cash after he catapulted, practically overnight, onto the Forbes billionaire list. Who was this rumpled guy in cargo shorts and limp white socks, whose eyes twitched across Zoom meetings as he played video games on the side? In Going Infinite, Lewis takes readers into the mind of Bankman-Fried, whose rise and fall offers an education in high-frequency trading, cryptocurrencies, philanthropy, bankruptcy, and the justice system. This is Michael Lewis at the top of his game, tracing the trajectory of a character who never liked the rules and was allowed to live by his own—until it all came undone.

Abraham Verghese came in last Friday to sign a truly Herculean number of books for us! We have signed copies of Covenant of Water (as well as his earlier books) for the foreseeable future. Mona Susan Power also swung by Sunday to sign A Council of Dolls, which just made the Longlist for the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction! So wonderful to see a local author repping St. Paul among this selection of incredible authors. We only have four signed copies, so nab one now!

This limited edition of Cain's Jawbone is unbound, allowing you to easily rearrange the pages (and, if you'd like, pin them up on the wall with strings connecting them every which way). Famed cruciverbalist Torquemada published Cain's Jawbone in 1934. Only three people have been known to solve it -- you could be the fourth!

Check out our Banned Books display for all the texts that certain state governments would rather you don't read! Titles will be rotating throughout the month. And give our handmade banned book earrings a look at checkout!

AVAILABLE OCT. 3rd: PREORDER NOW

AVAILABLE OCT. 3rd: PREORDER NOW

As always, our newsletter can't fit everything, so check out the other new arrivals and recent bestsellers on our website!

William Kent Krueger (The River We Remember)

and Benjamin Percy (The Sky Vault)

On Memorial Day 1958, in Jewel, Minnesota, the body of wealthy landowner Jimmy Quinn is found in the Alabaster River. Investigation falls to Sheriff Dern, a decorated war hero who still carries the scars of his service. Vicious rumors point to Noah Bluestone, a Native American veteran recently returned to Jewel. Caught up in the torrent of anger are a war widow, the publisher of the local newspaper, an aging deputy, and a crusading female lawyer, all of whom harbor secrets that Quinn’s death threatens to expose. As the town teeters on the edge of further violence, Dern struggles to find the truth of Quinn’s murder and put to rest the demons of his own past. William Kent Krueger is the bestselling author of This Tender Land, Ordinary Grace, and the nineteen acclaimed books of the Cork O’Connor mystery series. He lives in the Twin Cities with his family.

The comet came from beyond our solar system, containing elements unknown. Now, in the third book of Percy’s acclaimed Comet Cycle, a plane begins its descent toward Fairbanks, where interstellar dust seeds the atmosphere, and vanishes, but only for a minute. The passengers include Chuck Bridges, who is later reported dead after claiming that something in the clouds was speaking to him. Now his son Theo is looking for answers, putting him at odds with Sophie Chen, agent of a shadowy employer, and Rolf Wagner, a sheriff investigating a series of strange reports. The answer to the comet’s origin will be unveiled, and its impact will be more treacherous and sublime than humanity could imagine. Benjamin Percy is the author of The Ninth Metal, The Unfamiliar Garden, The Dark Net, and other novels, as well as the essay collection Thrill Me. He also writes Wolverine and X-Force for Marvel Comics. He lives in Minnesota with his family.

Debbie Russell (Crossing Fifty-One)

Debbie suffers a crisis of identity when her father is accepted into hospice, and her investigation into her paternal lineage reveals family secrets, igniting her mother’s volatile outbursts. It's the grandfather Debbie never knew who saves her, and she collaborates with her dying father one last time to make her biggest dream come true. Crossing Fifty-One pulls back the curtain on the internal struggles of midlife and provides a blueprint for redefining one’s self beyond the constraints of addiction and familial dysfunction.

Debbie Russell spent 25 years as an Assistant County Attorney in Minneapolis, prosecuting high-profile cases and fighting off nervous breakdowns. At age fifty-five, Debbie took early retirement; she now spends her time writing, restoring her property to prairie and wetlands, and training her retrievers. Debbie’s first published article appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2001. She resumed creative writing in 2014, beginning with her storytelling blog. Michael Kleber-Diggs (he / him / his) is a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in Literature, a poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things, was a finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award. His poems and essays appear in numerous journals and anthologies, including A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars. He is currently writing a memoir about his complicated history with lap swimming called My Weight in Water.

Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl (The Essential Dear Dara)

For 25 years, Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl has been a fixture of Twin Cities life, telling the stories of our people, places, and (sometimes delicious) things. The Essential Dear Dara is a must-read for anyone who wants to meet the people in that neighborhood of four million souls who call the land in and around the upper Mississippi home. Together these works capture the art of this essential columnist, food writer, and voice of the Twin Cities.

Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl is one of the most awarded magazine writers in the country. After coming to Minnesota from New York to attend Carleton College, she became City Pages' restaurant critic in 1997. Since then she has worked as a staff writer, columnist, and critic at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Minnesota Monthly, Food & Wine, Bon Appétit, and more. For eight years she hosted a radio show on WCCO called "Off the Menu," and is a regular guest on Minnesota Public Radio. She lives in south Minneapolis. Pilar Gerasimo is an award-winning health journalist, and founding editor-in-chief of Experience Life magazine. Gerasimo previously served as the top editor of Healthy Living for Huffington Post. She co-hosts The Living Experiment podcast and is currently serving as Chief Creative Officer for the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. She splits her time between New York City and her family's organic farm in western Wisconsin.

Christy Prahl (We Are Reckless) With

In Christy Prahl's debut collection, her largely narrative-driven poems occupy the fissures of American life, whether exploring self, relationships, or the natural world. Stirring, sensitive, and sincere, We Are Reckless helps lighten the weight of all we carry by breaking rules, stepping across boundaries, and risking pain for greater purpose.

Christy Prahl's past and future publications include the Penn Review, Salt Hill Journal, Eastern Iowa Review, and others. She has held residencies at both Ragdale and the Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow and is the founder of the PenRF reading series. She splits her time between Chicago and rural Michigan. J. Bailey Hutchinson is from Memphis. She earned her MFA from the University of Arkansas. She is an associate editor at Milkweed Editions, and her work can be found in Muzzle Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, Ninth Letter, and others. Her book is Gut: Poems. She lives in Minneapolis. Moheb Soliman (HOMES) is an interdisciplinary poet from Egypt and the Midwest. He has presented writing, performance, installation, and video work all around the US and Canada. Moheb has degrees from The New School and the University of Toronto and lives in Minneapolis, where he was program director for the Arab American literary journal and arts organization Mizna. Timothy Otte is a poet, critic, and sometimes playwright. His first chapbook is Rebound, Restart, Renew, Rebuild, Rejoice. His first play is The Sometimes Grace of Saint Simon of the Water. Say his last name like body.​

C. M. Alongi — Citadel

Citadel is the only human city on the planet Edalide. Outside its walls stalk demons, manifestations of divine punishment for a long-ago rebellion. To save their souls and return to their former glory, the humans must kill every single one... or so they believe. During a scientific expedition, Olivia, a nonverbal autistic woman, encounters proof that the demons are sentient. Driven by the need for answers, Olivia embarks on a dangerous journey, on which she must face alien monsters, zealous warriors, and the demons of her own past. C. M. Alongi is a sci-fi/fantasy writer and content creator from the Twin Cities. She is best known for her CaFae Latte TikTok series about a cafe run by fairies.

See the calendar on our website for more!

Book club titles are 15% off through the date of the meeting!

Manga Club: Witches

Come to NCB at 5pm the second Saturday of every month to talk manga with other otaku! Hosted by our resident manga experts Emily B. and Graham (yours truly), the Manga Club provides complimentary Pocky and a forum to discuss a new title every month. For our Spooktober meeting, (as well as our one-year anniversary) we'll be talking about Daisuke Igarashi's Witches, one of my favorite manga of all time! Witches is a collection of stories about magic, power, and death. In my review, I described it as "not Disney magic -- this is cunning magic, chthonic magic, magic that connects and fills all things, as beautiful, terrible, and inscrutable as the universe itself. These seven stories take us from the Amazon to the Alps to rural Japan, and though many are grounded in (loosely interpreted) real-world spiritual traditions, Igarashi never loses focus on the witch as bridge between the human and the cosmic."

Enemies To Readers: Red, White & Royal Blue

Whether or not you are already in love with romance novels, or are seeking a new relationship with the genre, Enemies to Readers invites you to join us every last Thursday at 5pm to discuss the latest read, as well as our continuing passion for tropes and spicy reads. At our second meeting, in September, we'll discuss Casey McQuiston's Red, White & Royal Blue (and its new film adaptation!) Handsome and charismatic President's son Alex is the American equivalent of a young royal, and he can't stand the actual prince, Henry, across the pond. When U.S./British relations suffer, heads of family and state devise a plan to stage a truce between the two rivals. But what at begins as a fake friendship grows deeper, and Alex finds himself in a secret romance with the surprisingly unstuffy Henry that could upend both nations... True love isn't always diplomatic.

Sci-Fi Fantasy Club: An Unkindness of Ghosts

There's no final frontier for the Sci-Fi Fantasy Club! Join us the last Friday of every month as we uncover and rediscover forgotten classics, titles that blur genres, small press stunners, and all the books you missed because they don't have Brandon Sanderson's marketing budget. For our September meeting, we'll discuss An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon. Aster lives in the lowdeck slums of the spaceship HSS Matilda. For generations, Matilda has been carrying the last of humanity to a Promised Land. On its way, the ship's leaders have imposed harsh restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer, Aster learns there may be a way to improve her lot--if she's willing to sow the seeds of civil war.

“Literary Bridges has the honor of kicking off Cracked Walnut’s month-long Literary Festival,” says host/curator, Stan Kusunoki. “It promises to be a diverse and memorable reading with over 24 writers whose work was included in the new Cracked Walnut Anthology.”

The roster includes Sharon Chmielarz, Patrick Cabello Hansel, Wendy Brown-Baez, Barry MacDonald, Emilio DeGrazia, Laura Kozy Lanik, Jeanne Lutz, Micah Ruelle, Yara Omer, Janna Knittel, Marilyn Weber Gonrowski, Mary Kay Rummel, Jennifer Hernandez, Carol Masters, Mike Bemis, Robert Hale, Brittany Jaekel, C N Buchholz, Nick Theisen, Annette Gagliardi, Morgan Grace Willow, Claudia Hampston Daly, Mary Stadick, Dawn Loeffler, Charlie Curry and Michael Kiesow Moore. Check out the Cracked Walnut website for all the other readings in this month-long festival.

Roaming — Jillian & Mariko Tamaki

The long-anticipated reunion of my favorite duo in comics, Roaming is a tour of young adulthood, changing relationships, and New York City, and it absolutely sings. 2000s NYC comes alive through enrapturing splashes, overheard dialogue, and strange background characters. As with This One Summer and Skim, the book is an aesthetic joy, and beneath that, a beautifully understated story of personal and interpersonal growth.

The obscura made pictures like the ones in Aint Melusine's book. Ainy's meema gave it to her, and her meema gave it to her, and her meema gave it to her, and so on, all the way back to the Great Lifehouse. One picture per generation, that was the rule, no more, because the device only had so much juju. You got to document. That's what our work is, as womenfolk, memorating any way we can. Do you count yourself among us? Aster batted the water in the tub violently, her way of saying yes. That's what I thought, said Ainy. You never know when a memory's gonna save your life.

An Unkindness of Ghosts

2. Order online or over the phone (at 651-225-8989) for in-store pickup. We'll let you know when your books are ready, then you can swing by and pick them up at your leisure.

Best Lentil Soup Recipe, From My Mom, From Memory

1 Tbsp olive oil

2 large or 3 small carrots, grated

2 large or 3 small yellow onions, diced

3/4 tsp dried marjoram

3/4 tsp dried thyme

1.5 cups dried lentils (rinsed and picked over, but I never do that; I recommend 1 cup green lentils and 1/2 cup red lentils)

28 oz can diced tomatoes

7 cups vegetable broth

1/3 cup chopped parsley (about 1 bunch)

3/4 cup white wine (about one 187 mL bottle -- these come in convenient four-packs)

1/2 tsp salt, or to taste

1/2 tsp pepper, or to taste (freshly ground makes quite a difference here)