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Our Recommendations

Gods without Men
Hari Kunzru

This gorgeously layered novel revolves around a group of rocks, somewhere in the Mojave. Gods Without Men is a California-based novel, with missionaries, indigenous peoples, dreamers, aliens, and shadowy entrepreneurs, centered on a young New York couple and their autistic son. All are seeking something beyond their reach. Be it simple family happiness or visitors from the stars. Though tethered to a place, the novel dances through time. Hari Kunzru’s writing is unsparing, comic, in turns lucid then dreamlike; bringing the reader tantalizingly close to life’s and the desert’s shimmering mirages. This is a novel that plays marvelous tricks on your brain, much like a desert landscape.

~Susan
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Through Black Spruce
Joseph Boyden

Through Black Spruce is a wonderful novel. Take a few minutes to read the first chapter. (It’s only four pages). Winner of Canada’s Ceiller Prize, Through Black Spruce follows the Bird family: Uncle Will into the bush and Niece Annie into the high life in Toronto and New York. Highly recommended!

~Susan
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The Quality of Mercy
Barry Unsworth

Historical fiction at its very best! Remember “Sacred Hunger?” We think this return to the Irish fiddler’s story deserves another Booker Prize. Unsworth is one of the very best writers in England today. Must read!

~Frayda
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By Myself: An Autobiography
David Trinidad & D.A. Powell

As the old saying goes—one person’s trash is another one’s treasure. By Myself takes sentences from a range of celebrity autobiographies (we admit, some are a bit trashy), and transforms them into a poignant, poetic, and hilarious “treasure” of a book.

~Marion
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Gypsy Boy
Mikey Walsh

A biography from Britain for fans of Augustine Burroughs and Irvine Welch’s “Trainspotting.” The world of Romany Gypsies is a centuries old culture that is closed, secretive, vibrant and suspicious of outsiders. Mickey Walsh (a pseudonym) was born in 1980 to a family that had long carried the gypsy crown for bare-knuckle fighting, and is dead-set on winning it back. Frank, Mickey’s father is himself forced to fight grown men and his own brothers from a young age.

“Hit ‘em so they’ll never get back up. One. Good. Hit. Put out your man like a candle,” yells Grandfather. That is the lesson Frank will try to teach Mickey. Mickey is secretly being sexually abused by his uncle just as he is becoming aware of his own homosexuality.
A harrowing account of a travelers' boyhood in modern England that is not for the faint of heart.

There are moments of insight and humor along a truly rough road.

~AM
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