Two recent favorites are now in paperback… and if that wasn’t enough to celebrate, they’re BOTH this April’s Monthly Staff Pick because how could we choose just one!
Our first selection this month comes from one of America’s most treasured living writers, who, after 2019’s Pulitzer Prize finalist ‘The Dutch House’, returns to fiction with ‘Tom Lake’. Perhaps Ann Patchett at the culmination of her literary powers, this thoughtfully quiet novel explores family, love, and life in ways only Patchett can set amidst the backdrop of the unraveling of the Spring of 2020.
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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK
In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America's finest writers.
"Patchett leads us to a truth that feels like life rather than literature." --The Guardian
In the spring of 2020, Lara's three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.
The second selection this month comes after three long years in hardcover (a small eternity in the world of books) as Bonnie Garmus’s debut ‘Lessons in Chemistry’ has finally arrived in paperback! This zippy, fish out of water, 1960s Southern California story that follows Elizabeth Zott as she traverses the worlds of chemistry labs and television cooking sets is a feminist tale of the past with a message that echoes strongly in the present.
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#1 GLOBAL BESTSELLER WITH MORE THAN 8 MILLION COPIES SOLD - Meet Elizabeth Zott: "a gifted research chemist, absurdly self-assured and immune to social convention" (The Washington Post) in 1960s California whose career takes a detour when she becomes the unlikely star of a beloved TV cooking show. - STREAM ON APPLE TV+
This novel is "irresistible, satisfying and full of fuel" (The New York Times Book Review) and "witty, sometimes hilarious...the Catch-22 of early feminism" (Stephen King, via Twitter).
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Oprah Daily, Entertainment Weekly, NewsweekChemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. But it's the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant, Nobel-prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with--of all things--her mind. True chemistry results.
But like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America's most beloved cooking show Supper at Six. Elizabeth's unusual approach to cooking ("combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride") proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn't just teaching women to cook. She's daring them to change the status quo.
Laugh-out-loud funny, shrewdly observant, and studded with a dazzling cast of supporting characters, Lessons in Chemistry is as original and vibrant as its protagonist.
Visit us this month for 20% off of both ‘Tom Lake’ & ‘Lessons in Chemistry’, while supplies last!
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