The co-op bookstore for avid readers

Belletrist X Tertulia

20242023202220212020201920182017

December 2019

Salt Slow

Salt Slow
Julia Armfield
December 2019BuyFrom White Review Short Story Prize winner Armfield, a brilliant, provocative debut story collection for fans of Carmen Maria Machado and Kelly Link. "Reading this collection is the only thing you need to do right now. Armfield is an enormous, gut-wrenching talent.

Salt Slow
Julia Armfield
December 2019

Wild Game: My Mother, Her Secret, and Me
Adrienne Brodeur
November 2019BuyA NATIONAL BESTSELLER. A daughter's tale of living in the thrall of her magnetic, complicated mother, and the chilling consequences of her complicity.

NAMED A BEST FALL BOOK BY People * Refinery29 * Entertainment Weekly * BuzzFeed * NPR's On Point * Town & Country * Real Simple * New York Post * Palm Beach Post * Toronto Star * Orange Country Register * Bustle * Bookish * BookPage * Kirkus* BBC Culture* Debutiful

On a hot July night on Cape Cod when Adrienne was fourteen, her mother, Malabar, woke her at midnight with five simple words that would set the course of both of their lives for years to come: Ben Souther just kissed me.

Adrienne instantly became her mother's confidante and helpmate, blossoming in the sudden light of her attention, and from then on, Malabar came to rely on her daughter to help orchestrate what would become an epic affair with her husband's closest friend. The affair would have calamitous consequences for everyone involved, impacting Adrienne's life in profound ways, driving her into a precarious marriage of her own, and then into a deep depression. Only years later will she find the strength to embrace her life--and her mother--on her own terms.

Wild Game is a brilliant, timeless memoir about how the people close to us can break our hearts simply because they have access to them, and the lies we tell in order to justify the choices we make. It's a remarkable story of resilience, a reminder that we need not be the parents our parents were to us.

"Exquisite and harrowing." --New York Times Book Review

"This electrifying, gorgeously written memoir will hold you captive until the last word." --People

Wild Game: My Mother, Her Secret, and Me
Adrienne Brodeur
November 2019

October 2019

Red at the Bone

Red at the Bone
Jacqueline Woodson
October 2019BuyA NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

A spectacular novel that only this legend can pull off. -Ibram X. Kendi, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST, in The Atlantic

An exquisite tale of family legacy....The power and poetry of Woodson's writing conjures up Toni Morrison. - People

In less than 200 sparsely filled pages, this book manages to encompass issues of class, education, ambition, racial prejudice, sexual desire and orientation, identity, mother-daughter relationships, parenthood and loss....With Red at the Bone, Jacqueline Woodson has indeed risen -- even further into the ranks of great literature. - NPR

This poignant tale of choices and their aftermath, history and legacy, will resonate with mothers and daughters. -Tayari Jones, bestselling author of AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE, in O Magazine

An unexpected teenage pregnancy pulls together two families from different social classes and explores their histories - reaching back to the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 -- and exposes the private hopes, disappointments, and longings that can bind or divide us from each other, from the New York Times-bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of Another Brooklyn and Brown Girl Dreaming.


Moving forward and backward in time, Jacqueline Woodson's taut and powerful new novel uncovers the role that history and community have played in the experiences, decisions, and relationships of these families, and in the life of the new child.

As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier, that very dress was measured and sewn for a different wearer: Melody's mother, for her own ceremony-- a celebration that ultimately never took place.

Unfurling the history of Melody's family - reaching back to the Tulsa race massacre in 1921 -- to show how they all arrived at this moment, Woodson considers not just their ambitions and successes but also the costs, the tolls they've paid for striving to overcome expectations and escape the pull of history. As it explores sexual desire and identity, ambition, gentrification, education, class and status, and the life-altering facts of parenthood, Red at the Bone most strikingly looks at the ways in which young people must so often make long-lasting decisions about their lives--even before they have begun to figure out who they are and what they want to be

Red at the Bone
Jacqueline Woodson
October 2019

September 2019

What Red Was

What Red Was
Rosie Price
September 2019Buy

A sophisticated and conversation-starting novel of modern love, sexual violence, and toxic inheritance from a brilliant new literary voice

When Kate Quaile meets Max Rippon in the first week of university, so begins a life-changing friendship.

Over the next four years, the two become inseparable. For him, she breaks her solitude; for her, he leaves his busy circles behind. But knowing Max means knowing his family: the wealthy Rippons, all generosity, social ease, and quiet repression. Theirs is a very different world from Kate's own upbringing, and yet she finds herself quickly drawn into their gilded lives, and the secrets that lie beneath. Until one evening, at the Rippons home, just after graduation, her life is shattered apart in a bedroom while a party goes on downstairs.

What Red Was is an incisive and mesmerizing novel about power, privilege, and consent--one that fearlessly explores the effects of trauma on the mind and body of a young woman, the tyrannies of memory, the sacrifices involved in staying silent, and the courage in speaking out. And when Kate does, it raises this urgent question: Whose story is it now?

What Red Was
Rosie Price
September 2019

Marilou Is Everywhere
Sarah Elaine Smith
August 2019BuyFinalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction

One of NPR's Favorite Books of 2019

A SKIMM READS PICK

A BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB PICK

This novel reads like a miracle. --NPR

Consumed by the longing for a different life, a teenager flees her family and carefully slips into another -- replacing a girl whose own sudden disappearance still haunts the town.

Fourteen-year-old Cindy and her two older brothers live in rural Pennsylvania, in a house with occasional electricity, two fierce dogs, one book, and a mother who comes and goes for months at a time. Deprived of adult supervision, the siblings rely on one another for nourishment of all kinds. As Cindy's brothers take on new responsibilities for her care, the shadow of danger looms larger and the status quo no longer seems tolerable.

So when a glamorous teen from a more affluent, cultured home goes missing, Cindy escapes her own family's poverty and slips into the missing teen's life. As Jude Vanderjohn, Cindy is suddenly surrounded by books and art, by new foods and traditions, and most important, by a startling sense of possibility. In her borrowed life she also finds herself accepting the confused love of a mother who is constitutionally incapable of grasping what has happened to her real daughter. As Cindy experiences overwhelming maternal love for the first time, she must reckon with her own deceits and, in the process, learn what it means to be a daughter, a sister, and a neighbor.

Marilou Is Everywhere is a powerful, propulsive portrait of an overlooked girl who finds for the first time that her choices matter

Marilou Is Everywhere
Sarah Elaine Smith
August 2019

August 2019

Family of Origin

Family of Origin
Cj Hauser
August 2019BuyA novel by the author of the viral essay sensation The Crane Wife: When Nolan Grey receives news that his father, a once-prominent biologist, has drowned off Leap's Island, he calls on Elsa, his estranged older half-sister, to help.

This, despite the fact that it was he and Elsa who broke the family in the first place. Elsa and Nolan travel to their father's field station off the Gulf Coast, where a group called the Reversalists obsessively study the undowny bufflehead, a rare duck whose loss of waterproof feathers proves, they say, that evolution is running in reverse.

On an island that is always looking backward, it's impossible for the siblings to ignore their past, and years of family secrecy threaten to ruin them all over again. Yet, despite themselves, the Greys urgently trek the island to find the so-called Paradise Duck, their father's final obsession, all the while grappling with questions of nature and nurture, intimacy and betrayal, progress and forgiveness.

Family of Origin
Cj Hauser
August 2019

July 2019

Three Women

Three Women
Lisa Taddeo
July 2019BuySOON TO BE A SERIES ON STARZ STARRING SHAILENE WOODLEY * BETTY GILPIN * DeWANDA WISE * GABRIELLE CREEVY * with BLAIR UNDERWOOD

"Staggeringly intimate...Groundbreaking." --Entertainment Weekly
"A breathtaking and important book." --Cheryl Strayed
"Extraordinary...A nonfiction literary masterpiece." --Elizabeth Gilbert

#1 New York Times Bestseller and a Best Book of the Year by: The Washington Post * NPR * The Atlantic * New York Public Library * Vanity Fair * PBS * Time * Economist * Entertainment Weekly * Financial Times * Shelf Awareness * Guardian * Sunday Times * BBC * Esquire * Good Housekeeping * Elle * Real Simple * And more

A riveting true story about the sex lives of three real American women "who are carnal, brave, and beautifully flawed" (People, Book of the Week), based on nearly a decade of reporting.

Lina, a young mother in suburban Indiana whose marriage has lost its passion, reconnects with an old flame through social media and embarks on an affair that quickly becomes all-consuming. Maggie, a seventeen-year-old high school student in North Dakota, allegedly engages in a relationship with her married English teacher; the ensuing criminal trial turns their quiet community upside down. Sloane, a successful restaurant owner in an exclusive enclave of the Northeast, is happily married to a man who likes to watch her have sex with other men and women.

Hailed as "a dazzling achievement" (Los Angeles Times) and "a riveting page-turner that explores desire, heartbreak, and infatuation in all its messy, complicated nuance" (The Washington Post), Lisa Taddeo's Three Women has captivated readers, booksellers, and critics--and topped bestseller lists--worldwide. Based on eight years of immersive research, it is "an astonishing work of literary reportage" (The Atlantic) that introduces us to three unforgettable women--and one remarkable writer--whose experiences remind us that we are not alone.

Three Women
Lisa Taddeo
July 2019

Searching for Sylvie Lee
Jean Kwok
June 2019Buy

An Instant New York Times Bestseller!

A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick & Emma Roberts Belletrist Book Club Pick!

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK BY New York Times - Time - Marie Claire - Elle - Buzzfeed - Huffington Post - Good Housekeeping - The Week - Goodreads - New York Post - and many more!

"Powerful . . . A twisting tale of love, loss, and dark family secrets." -- Paula Hawkins, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Girl on the Train and Into the Water

A poignant and suspenseful drama that untangles the complicated ties binding three women--two sisters and their mother--in one Chinese immigrant family and explores what happens when the eldest daughter disappears, and a series of family secrets emerge, from the New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Translation

It begins with a mystery. Sylvie, the beautiful, brilliant, successful older daughter of the Lee family, flies to the Netherlands for one final visit with her dying grandmother--and then vanishes.

Amy, the sheltered baby of the Lee family, is too young to remember a time when her parents were newly immigrated and too poor to keep Sylvie. Seven years older, Sylvie was raised by a distant relative in a faraway, foreign place, and didn't rejoin her family in America until age nine. Timid and shy, Amy has always looked up to her sister, the fierce and fearless protector who showered her with unconditional love.

But what happened to Sylvie? Amy and her parents are distraught and desperate for answers. Sylvie has always looked out for them. Now, it's Amy's turn to help. Terrified yet determined, Amy retraces her sister's movements, flying to the last place Sylvie was seen. But instead of simple answers, she discovers something much more valuable: the truth. Sylvie, the golden girl, kept painful secrets . . . secrets that will reveal more about Amy's complicated family--and herself--than she ever could have imagined.

A deeply moving story of family, secrets, identity, and longing, Searching for Sylvie Lee is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive portrait of an immigrant family. It is a profound exploration of the many ways culture and language can divide us and the impossibility of ever truly knowing someone--especially those we love.

"This is a true beach read! You can't put it down!" - Jenna Bush Hager, Today Show Book Club Pick

Searching for Sylvie Lee
Jean Kwok
June 2019

May 2019

The Farm

The Farm
Joanne Ramos
May 2019Buy

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - Life is a lucrative business, as long as you play by the rules.

Skimm Reads Pick - People Book of the Week - Belletrist Book Pick - ""[Joanne] Ramos's debut novel couldn't be more relevant or timely.""--O: The Oprah Magazine

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time - Glamour - Real Simple - Good Housekeeping - Marie Claire - Town & Country

Nestled in New York's Hudson Valley is a luxury retreat boasting every amenity: organic meals, personal fitness trainers, daily massages--and all of it for free. In fact, you're paid big money to stay here--more than you've ever dreamed of. The catch? For nine months, you cannot leave the grounds, your movements are monitored, and you are cut off from your former life while you dedicate yourself to the task of producing the perfect baby. For someone else.

Jane, an immigrant from the Philippines, is in desperate search of a better future when she commits to being a ""Host"" at Golden Oaks--or the Farm, as residents call it. But now pregnant, fragile, consumed with worry for her family, Jane is determined to reconnect with her life outside. Yet she cannot leave the Farm or she will lose the life-changing fee she'll receive on the delivery of her child.

Gripping, provocative, heartbreaking, The Farm pushes to the extremes our thinking on motherhood, money, and merit and raises crucial questions about the trade-offs women will make to fortify their futures and the futures of those they love.

The Farm
Joanne Ramos
May 2019

April 2019

The Ash Family

The Ash Family
Molly Dektar
April 2019Buy

When a young woman leaves her family to join a secret off-the-grid community headed by an enigmatic leader, she discovers that belonging comes with a deadly cost, in this "stunning debut," (The New Yorker) "perfect for fans of Philip Roth's American Pastoral and the film Martha Marcy May Marlene" (Booklist, starred review).

At nineteen, Berie encounters a seductive and mysterious man at a bus station near her home in North Carolina. Shut off from the people around her, she finds herself compelled by his promise of a new life. He ferries her into a place of order and chaos: the Ash Family farm. There, she joins a community living off the fertile land of the mountains, bound together by high ideals and through relationships she can't untangle. Berie--now renamed Harmony--renounces her old life and settles into her new one on the farm. She begins to make friends. And then they start to disappear.

"An excellent debut, Molly Dektar probes life in a cult with a masterful hand, excavating the troubled mind of a young woman," (Publishers Weekly). The Ash Family explores what we will sacrifice in the search for happiness, and the beautiful and grotesque power of the human spirit as it seeks its ultimate place of belonging. "A captivating and haunting tale" (New York Journal of Books).

The Ash Family
Molly Dektar
April 2019

March 2019

Gingerbread

Gingerbread
Helen Oyeyemi
March 2019Buy

"Exhilarating...A wildly imagined, head-spinning, deeply intelligent novel." - The New York Times Book Review

"[W]ildly inventive...[Helen Oyeyemi's] prose is not without its playful bite." -Vogue

The prize-winning, bestselling author of Boy Snow Bird, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, and Peaces returns with a bewitching and imaginative novel
.

Influenced by the mysterious place gingerbread holds in classic children's stories, beloved novelist Helen Oyeyemi invites readers into a delightful tale of a surprising family legacy, in which the inheritance is a recipe.

Perdita Lee may appear to be your average British schoolgirl; Harriet Lee may seem just a working mother trying to penetrate the school social hierarchy; but there are signs that they might not be as normal as they think they are. For one thing, they share a gold-painted, seventh-floor walk-up apartment with some surprisingly verbal vegetation. And then there's the gingerbread they make. Londoners may find themselves able to take or leave it, but it's very popular in Druhástrana, the far-away (or, according to many sources, non-existent) land of Harriet Lee's early youth. The world's truest lover of the Lee family gingerbread, however, is Harriet's charismatic childhood friend Gretel Kercheval --a figure who seems to have had a hand in everything (good or bad) that has happened to Harriet since they met.

Decades later, when teenaged Perdita sets out to find her mother's long-lost friend, it prompts a new telling of Harriet's story. As the book follows the Lees through encounters with jealousy, ambition, family grudges, work, wealth, and real estate, gingerbread seems to be the one thing that reliably holds a constant value. Endlessly surprising and satisfying, written with Helen Oyeyemi's inimitable style and imagination, it is a true feast for the reader.

Gingerbread
Helen Oyeyemi
March 2019

Joy Enough: A Memoir
Sarah McColl
February 2019Buy

From a bracingly beautiful new voice comes this life-affirming memoir of a daughter making and remaking her life in her mother's image. Sifting gingerly through memories of her late mother

Joy Enough: A Memoir
Sarah McColl
February 2019

January 2019

The Dreamers

The Dreamers
Karen Thompson Walker
January 2019BuyNEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE - An ordinary town is transformed by a mysterious illness that triggers perpetual sleep in this mesmerizing novel from the bestselling author of The Age of Miracles.

"Stunning."--Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven - "A startling, beautiful portrait of a community in peril."--Entertainment Weekly

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Glamour - Real Simple - Good Housekeeping

One night in an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a first-year student stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep--and doesn't wake up. She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. When a second girl falls asleep, and then a third, Mei finds herself thrust together with an eccentric classmate as panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town. A young couple tries to protect their newborn baby as the once-quiet streets descend into chaos. Two sisters turn to each other for comfort as their survivalist father prepares for disaster.

Those affected by the illness, doctors discover, are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, higher than has ever been recorded before. They are dreaming heightened dreams--but of what?

Written in luminous prose, The Dreamers is a breathtaking and beautiful novel, startling and provocative, about the possibilities contained within a human life--if only we are awakened to them.

Praise for The Dreamers

"Walker's roving fictive eye by turns probes characters' innermost feelings and zooms out to coolly parse topics like reality versus delusion. . . . [It has] the perfect ambiguous frame for a tense and layered plot."--O: The Oprah Magazine

"[Walker's] gripping, provocative novel should come with a warning: may cause insomnia."--People (Book of the Week)

"Powerful and moving . . . written with symphonic sweep."--The New York Times Book Review

"2019's first must-read novel . . . Alternately terrifying and moving . . . The Dreamers is overflowing with humanity."--Jezebel

"This is an exquisite work of intimacy. Walker's sentences are smooth, emotionally arresting--of a true, ethereal beauty. . . . This book achieves [a] dazzling, aching humanity."--Entertainment Weekly

The Dreamers
Karen Thompson Walker
January 2019