Phinney Books in Seattle shared excitement about some spring titles in a recent newsletter.
February 26
The Border
by Don Winslow
The arrival of this final volume is making it clear that Winslow’s epic trilogy about the drug wars on the US-Mexico border is one of the central fictional dramas of our time, closing in a storm of chaos and corruption straight out of the day’s headlines.
March 5
Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family
by Mitchell Jackson
The author of the award-winning novel The Residue Years recounts growing up black in one of the whitest cities in America, Portland, Oregon, in a wide-ranging portrait of how the black men in his family and community get by, and don’t.
March 5
King of Joy
by Richard Chiem
I’ve been looking forward to King of Joy ever since Richard Chiem read from his novel at our Process reading series last fall, and ever since, I’ve seen it collect praise from Melissa Broder, Kristin Arnett, Alissa Nutting, Nylon, the Stranger, and the Millions. Clearly I’m not the only one!
March 5
The Wall
by John Lanchester
Lanchester has gone from the financial realism of his last novel, Capital, to dystopic science fiction with a novel whose title could not be more timely (though his imagined world sounds closer to post-Brexit Britain than our own attempts at isolation).
March 5
Deaf Republic: Poems
by Ilya Kaminsky
In a book-length poetic parable, the murder of a deaf boy causes a whole country to lose its hearing and drives resistance into sign language.
March 5
Madame Fourcade’s Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France’s Largest Spy Network Against Hitler
by Lynne Olson
Olson, a store favorite for her accounts of London during the war, crosses the Channel for a promisingly dramatic story of a French spy who called herself the Hedgehog.
March 12
The Bird King
by G. Willow Wilson
The author of Alif the Unseen turns for her second novel to the last outpost of Muslim-controlled Spain, with the story of a concubine in the royal court of Granada during the Inquisition.
March 19
Horizon
by Barry Lopez
For old-school Northwest and nature readers the return of Lopez, with his first book of nonfiction in over two decades—a world-spanning recollection of his encounters with the natural world and the people who work to understand it—is a major event.
March 19
Lot: Stories
by Bryan Washington
When this season’s Indies Introduce winners—debut authors chosen by a committee of my fellow booksellers—read from their work at Winter Institute last month, Washington stole the show with an excerpt from this story collection, which maps the less-celebrated neighborhoods of his hometown of Houston.
March 19
The White Card: A Play
by Claudia Rankine
The ground-changing success of Rankine’s genre-bending poetry collection, Citizen, makes her next book, her first play, about a pair of uncomfortable but necessary conversations, a must-read.
March 19
Doing Justice: A Prosecutor’s Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law
by Preet Bharara
I’m not sure when prosecutors became cool, but Bharara, the Trump-fired-U.S.-attorney-turned-podcaster, is one of the coolest, and his first book steers away from a strictly anti-Trump rant to a broader argument for the rule of law.
Phinney Books created a pre-order gallery for these titles and more. Remember your local indies are happy to preorder titles for you so they can be waiting for you on the release day.