Fiction
Absolution by Alice McDermott
Recommended by Jan Weismiller, co-owner of Prairie Lights
"Set in both 1963 and 60 years later, Absolution revolves around Tricia and Charlene. The two met in Saigon when both were young and newly married to military men. Sixty years later, Charlene has died and her daughter reaches out to Tricia and learns of long-buried aspects of their life in Saigon. This is a masterful novel surrounding history, politics and class. Tricia and Charlene are from very different backgrounds and have much to learn from each other as they navigate the foreign and complex landscape of 1963 Vietnam." Read more about this book from NPR.
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Baumgartner by Paul Auster
Recommended by Jan Weismiller
"Paul Auster’s new novel is narrated by a septuagenarian philosophy professor who is mourning the loss of his wife — recently killed in a tragic accident — and who was unreservedly the love of his life. The novel unfolds in spirals of memory as he revisits their relationship, which began when they were students in 1968. The relationship was always passionate, and in her absence, Baumgartner must attempt to rediscover himself. The saga of that struggle takes him back to his childhood and a subsequent reassessment of worldview. Written with Auster’s keen eye for transience and beauty, one of the haunting questions this novel raises is why we forget some things and remember others luminously."
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Day by Michael Cunningham
Recommended by Jan Weismiller
"Michael Cunningham’s first novel in a decade consists of three sections which each takes place on the same day, April 5, in three consecutive years: 2019, 2020 and 2021. It is therefore a pandemic novel told through the eyes of a family in Brooklyn. Dan and Isabel are the parents of Nathan and Violet, ages 10 and 5. Their marriage is facing strains before the pandemic, which of course expand in lockdown. Nathan and Violet have very different reactions to that lockdown, and all four are emotionally tied to Isobel’s brother, Robbie. I found it to be his strongest novel since The Hours. Cunningham’s prose is seductive and clear and his take on this strange time we all have had to live through is unforgettable." Read more from NPR about this book.
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Hello Stranger by Katherine Center
Recommended by Linzi Murray, owner of Reading in Public in West Des Moines
"All of [Katherine's] books I've ended up reading and then immediately rereading because they're just so good. Sadie is a portrait artist who has just learned that she is a finalist in the North American portrait society competition. On that same day, she's in an accident where she is told at the hospital that she has developed face blindness where she can no longer identify faces in any capacity. She just sees fragmented pieces of faces but can't see the whole, so of course that's problematic. Then, there's the romance aspect where she meets these two guys, but she starts these relationships where she can't even see the person's face, so she's kind of having this crisis internally."
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Never Whistle at Night by Shane Hawk (ed.), Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. (ed.)
Recommended by Linzi Murray
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North Woods by Daniel Mason
Recommended by Linzi Murray
"This beautiful, beautiful book takes place on one plot of land in New England. It follows this land and this house throughout the centuries and the inhabitants. We start out with the discovery of this plot by two people who have run away because they're in love and they want to be together. And after that there's a young woman with a baby. They end up having an altercation with these three men. These men end up dead at the end of that and one of them had eaten an apple, and then that apple becomes an apple tree, and then the next inhabitant is an orchardist. And so it continues on like that. And you just get to see these different inhabitants throughout history and recollected by future inhabitants." Read more from NPR about this book.
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Starling House by Alix E. Harrow
Recommended by Tim Budd, buyer at Prairie Lights in Iowa City
This dark fantasy set in the coal-mining town of Eden, Kentucky gives us Opal, a young woman trying to earn extra cash to send her younger brother away to school. But when she's hired as a house cleaner for the creepy old mansion that is the site of the town's whispers of curses and bad luck, Opal finds herself drawn into something else entirely. Read more from NPR about this book.
"An excellent example of the Southern Gothic novel, and I loved Opal's feisty and sharp approach to all she encounters. You can't help but root for her."
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Starter Villain by John Scalzi
Recommended by Tim Budd
Charlie Fitzer is a divorced substitute teacher who learns that he is the sole beneficiary of his billionaire uncle Jake's evil empire (complete with island volcano lair) and his membership in an alliance of super-villains.
"I love anything written by John Scalzi — his novels are clever, witty, unpredictable and filled with heart. And his take on the world of James Bond from Spectre's point of view is a hilarious thrill-ride of a book."
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The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
Recommended by Tim Budd
Set in 1936 in the rundown Chicken Hill neighborhood in Pottstown, Penn., Mr. McBride's latest novel chronicles the lives of the African Americans and Jewish immigrants who live there side by side. When the state comes looking for a young Black deaf boy claiming he must be institutionalized, the community rallies to save the child. Read more from NPR about this book.
"If you only read one novel this winter, read this one: McBride is a consummate storyteller and his uncanny ability to draw parallels between 1936 and 2023 is amazing. This book is a masterpiece. Highly recommended!"
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The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods
Recommended by Linzi Murray
"There's this woman who owns a bookshop and she kind of just stumbles upon owning it. It's just kind of this miscellaneous shop until she infuses all of her love for literature in it. Then, in modern day, there's Martha and Henry and they are searching for this elusive bookshop that is essentially just a legend at this point where they're not even quite sure if it existed. And so they are setting out and going to archives and everything to try to find this bookshop. There's an aspect of magical realism where the bookshop only appears to those who are worthy to come upon it. Henry has stumbled upon it before and is just trying to find his way back."
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The Night House by Jo Nesbo
Recommended by Tim Budd
Best known for his thrillers, The Night House is Mr. Nesbo's first horror novel — and it is very creepy and unsettling. Told in three shape-shifting parts, each one turns the reader's understanding upside down, uncertain about what's real and what's not.
"I found this novel to have an almost perfect structure: three acts that ended right where I started, as if I was caught in a loop as disorienting as the main character's journey. This book was an experience."
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The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger
Recommended by Tim Budd
On Memorial Day, 1958, in the small town of Jewel, Minn., the body of the wealthiest (and most unpopular) farmer is found in the river. Solving this mystery falls to Sheriff Dern, as the townspeople point the blame on Noah Bluestone, a Native American war veteran who has returned from Korea with a Japanese wife.
"Mr. Krueger somehow crafts compelling mysteries with an underlying ache and tenderness that makes his books such satisfying reads — time well spent!"
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The September House by Carissa Orlando
Recommended by Linzi Murray
"It is this really humorous, outrageous take on a haunted house story that I just was belly laughing the entire time I was reading it. This woman, Margaret, she finds her dream home and even though the realtor is like, 'Oh, I need to tell you that there have been some deaths in this house,' she's so enamored with this house that she doesn't care. Every September, the walls start to bleed and... screaming and... children who point down to the basement saying ,'He's out there,' and she thinks, 'Well, I can manage all of this to live in my dream house.' So you just need to create rules by pushing aside those children and just cleaning up the bleeding walls when it starts overflowing down the stairs and as long as you are committed to these rules, everything's fine."
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The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez
Recommended by Jan Weismiller
"Sigrid Nunez, author of the National Book Award-winning novel, The Friend, has also written a pandemic novel. The Vulnerables features a woman staying with friends who have vacated the city in order to take care of their parrot, Eureka. As her relationship with the parrot becomes central in her attempt to navigate the pandemic, a young man appears to share the space with the two of them. Because he is the son of family friends, the owners of the apartment are hesitant to ask him to leave. He disrupts the narrator's peaceable life with the parrot but expands her worldview to include that of his own." Read more from NPR about this book.
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Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
Recommended by Jan Weismiller
"It came out late in the summer and it's also a pandemic novel. It's fun. It's narrated by a woman who has three daughters in their 20s who have all come home to the cherry orchard that she and her husband own to quarantine. The narrator, when she was young, was an actress briefly. She was in Our Town and then in summerstock — and she was in summerstock with someone who became very famous and who she had a relationship with. The daughters know this, and one of them thinks that she might even be the child of this famous actor, and she's always refused to speak to them about it. And so over the course of Tom Lake, she slowly tells them the story of this brief time when she was an actress and had this affair with this man who did go on to become very, very famous. And she is very happy with the choices that she's made in her life. And so she's very well able to tell this story, finally, to her daughters and maybe to reassess it a little bit but it's not like second guessing whether it would have been a better life at all. It's a really good book." Read more from NPR about this book and listen to this conversation with Ann Patchett on IPR's Talk of Iowa.
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Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas
Recommended by Linzi Murray
"It's really perfect as a gift because it blends romance and historical fiction, so there's something for everybody. It's set during the Mexican American War in Texas, and the vampire aspect speaks about colonialism and America who just takes and takes and takes in this context. At the center of the story are these childhood sweethearts who are separated by a tragedy early in their lives and they are thrust back together nine years later, and they come together to save the ranch of this young woman. And so then it gets into more of the paranormal aspect with vampires, but not in the kind of sense that we're used to, not the stereotypical vampire story. It's this beautifully written, multi-genred novel." Read more from NPR about this book.
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Wednesday’s Child: Stories by YiYun Li
Recommended by Jan Weismiller
"YiYun Li came to Iowa City from China in her 20s to study science and was seduced by writing. Her first collection of stories: A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, — much of which she says was written in the Prairie Lights Cafe — put her immediately on the literary map and she has subsequently garnered many awards, including a MacArthur Genius Award. Since her debut she has published six novels and some critical pieces. Wednesday’s Child is her second collection. Written over a ten year period, these are strong and eerie stories that condense Li’s obsessions with the metaphysical, the funny and the horrifying. This is one of the best books I have read this year." Read more from NPR about this book.
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Nonfiction
A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew H. Knoll
Recommended by Tim Budd
This slim paperback, written by a professor of natural history at Harvard, looks at the birth and youth of our planet from different eras of Earth's timeline: chemical, biological, animal, etc, in easy-to-understand language that will appeal to the young scientist as well as adults who simply want to know more about our world.
"An interesting and informative telling of Earth's history that leaves the reader marveling at the miracle of our home."
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A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Recommended by Linzi Murray
"It's [Nguyen's] new memoir, where he talks about how he can't really separate his own story from his parents, who are refugees from Vietnam. He is the author of The Sympathizer, The Committed and the short story collection, The Refugees. In this memoir, he talks about a lot of the experiences of his parents as refugees, and how we hear about soldiers and when we think about war, but also there is a cost to civilians, which is a very relevant message right now. In an interview he had said, 'Civilian stories are war stories, too.' He has a passage where his parents are shot, so this is just a very complex memoir that is told in small vignettes in poetic verses as well. It's this really compelling story that shows the love he has for his parents and their story and how it is such a part of him as well." Read more from NPR about this book.
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All the Living and the Dead by Hayley Campbell
Recommended by Linzi Murray
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How to Dad: An Illustrated Instruction Manual for First Time Fathers by T M Detwiler
Recommended by Linzi Murray
"It is this graphic novel that lays out everything a new father would need to know through the first early days of pregnancy, including how to give a good foot massage and what are all the different baby gear things that you need to know about, and it's entertaining. It's humorous, it's a very clear — and anytime my husband doesn't know what he's doing, I hand him the book."
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I Must Be Dreaming by Roz Chast
Recommended by Jan Weismiller
"This graphic memoir by the beloved cartoonist, Roz Chast, illustrates her own dream world with the help of insights from poets, philosophers and psychoanalysts. Alison Bechdel calls I Must Be Dreaming: “Roz Chast at her Chastiest.” If ever we needed a moment to laugh, it is now." Read more from NPR about this book.
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Madonna: A Rebel Life by Mary Gabriel
Recommended by Jan Weismiller
"Mary Gabriel is the award-winning author of the acclaimed books Ninth Street Women, which chronicles the lives of the abstract women expression painters and Love and Capital, an examination of the marriage of Karl and Jenny Marx. It seemed a slight deviation that she would take Madonna as a subject. But in reading the book it becomes clear how central Madonna is to not just popular culture but all of the arts. Mary Gabriel is always eloquent and able to zero in on world-historical figures in a thrillingly vivid way. One feels, reading her, how inevitable it is that we are individually changed by these figures." Read more from NPR about this book.
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Necessary Trouble: Growing up at Midcentury by Drew Gilpin Faust
Recommended by Jan Weismiller
"Drew Gilpin Faust is an award-winning historian and professor at Harvard, where she was president from 2007-2018. She has been given many prizes for her works of history and this is her first memoir. It is the coming-of-age saga of an intelligent strong-willed young woman who grew up in a conservative family of privilege in rural Virginia horse country. Her growing awareness of the inhibiting conventions of gender awakens her to the inequities of race. Her personal story is interwoven with a professional historian’s insights into politics, race and class. This is a moving and riveting read." Listen to this author interview about the book.
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Stamped From the Beginning: A Graphic History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi, Joel Christian Gill
Recommended by Linzi Murray
"It's great for history lovers, but ones who aren't necessarily wanting to commit to a big tome that's dense. It's quite sassy. The illustrations are wonderful and just stunning to look at. It takes this big, historic story and makes it digestible."
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The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel
Recommended by Tim Budd
A spellbinding tale of one of the most successful art thieves in history — Stephane Breitweiser, who (along with his girlfriend) stole more than 300 pieces of art worth an estimated $2 billion.
"I was completely drawn in by this thrilling case study of a truly obsessive personality and his addictive need to steal. A great read!"
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The Football 100: The Story of the Greatest Players in NFL History by Mike Sando, Dan Pompei and The Athletic NFL Staff
Recommended by Tim Budd
The sports writers at The Athletic have compiled profiles of the 100 greatest players in NFL history, featuring interviews with players and coaches along with biographical backgrounds and statistics.
"I'm a big fan of reference books, and this one allows you to read up on all those sports legends you've heard of but didn't actually know why or what made them legendary."
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The Palace: From the Tudors to the Windsors, 500 Years of British History at Hampton Court by Gareth Russell
Recommended by Tim Budd
This is the story of English royalty and their gorgeous residence, from Henry VIII to Queen Elizabeth II, but told from the point of view of artisans, servants, courtiers and distinguished guests.
"I loved this richly detailed and fascinating history — 'If these walls could talk...' and in this book, they do."
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To Free the Captives by Tracy K. Smith
Recommended by Linzi Murray
"This memoir is a contemplative, spiritual exploration of [Smith] and her family history and the soul of the United States. She argues that to bridge the present vitriolic divide that we are experiencing, we first must be honest that the country is composed of the free and the freed, and just being honest about the whole ecosystem of our country is necessary to heal and to then come together."
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What an Owl Knows by Jennifer Ackerman
Recommended by Jan Weismiller
"Jennifer Ackerman is the author of the bestselling books The Genius of Birds and The Bird Way. Her deep dive into this enchanting bird is spellbinding. Owls are cryptic, camouflaged and mostly active only at night and have therefore been difficult to study. Now with the help of new tools, researchers are revealing the secrets of these birds and Jennifer Ackerman’s vivid style is just the one to deliver these secrets to us."
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Poetry
Information Desk by Robyn Schiff
Recommended by Jan Weismiller
"Information Desk is referring to the information desk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art... ...And she's an intricate poet. Her work is somewhat influenced by Marianne Moore and I would say you don't have to read this in one sitting. You can even open it and read from middle on, but it is one long poem."
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The Thomas Salto by Timmy Straw
Recommended by Jan Weismiller
"The Thomas Salto was a gymnastic movement that is very complicated and dangerous, but the book only has one poem really about that, it's not an epic. It's individual poems, and they are stunning."
