This month’s book column comes to you from Book Passage in northern California, the quintessential independent bookstore of the new millennium. Here, books are clearly placed front and centre: from old-fashioned book selling to great customer service, reading groups, author events, writers’ workshops and a cosy cafe. Looking around at the customers, you just know that if you’re here you love books!
Here are some of the new titles for April at Book Passage:
The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout
The author of Olive Kitteridge is back with a novel about the strength and tension of sibling relationships. Two brothers, who left their hometown haunted by the accident that killed their father, return years later when their sister’s lonely teenage son needs help to get out of serious trouble.
Vegetable Literacy by Deborah Madison
This groundbreaking new cookbook − with more than 300 classic and exquisitely simple recipes − explores the fascinating relationships between vegetables, edible flowers, herbs and familiar wild plants within the same botanical families. Destined to become the new standard reference for cooking vegetables, Vegetable Literacy shows cooks that, because of their shared characteristics, vegetables within the same family can be used interchangeably in cooking.
The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma
This is the story of a young man’s quest to become a writer and the misadventures in life and love that take him around the globe. It’s a debut novel that will take you by surprise: both in terms of the story exploring the nature of truth and storytelling, as well as the writing style, which allows the characters to explore the blurred lines between fact and fiction.
Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg
Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, has spent years observing women around her as they make their way up the corporate ladder − or around the Jungle Gym, as she prefers to call it. The book examines why women’s progress in achieving leadership roles has stalled, explains the root causes, and offers compelling, commonsense solutions that can empower women to achieve their full potential.
Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach
Join Mary Roach for a closer look at the human digestive system, from the mouth on down. “It’s right up my alley,” Roach says. “It’s a little bit taboo. It has to do with the human body. It’s bizarre. The human body is an alien planet that I love to come back to again and again, and the gastrointestinal tract and the mouth are really fascinatingly bizarre and kind of marvellous.”
Wave – A Memoir of Life after the Tsunami by Sonali Deraniyagala
The author loses her parents, her husband and her two children in the 2004 Tsunami and has to come to terms with what life is and can be after such an unimaginable tragedy. Her book deals with learning the difficult balance between the almost unbearable reminders of her loss and the need to keep her family, somehow, still alive with her.
Isabella Mousavizadeh Smith is the owner of Books & Company, an English language book shop in Hellerup that prides itself on providing an interesting and diverse range of books, an excellent cup of coffee, and a warm and welcoming atmosphere. For more about Books & Company, please visit www.booksandcompany.dk, facebook.com/booksandcompany or the shop at Sofievej 1.
