Passing Strange by Ellen Klages is a remarkably restful piece of quiet fantasy that I can’t recommend enough. Set in the queer quarters of 1940 San Francisco, we follow the budding romance between two women: an artist for the pulps and a singer newly arrived trying to find a place to belong. That’s it. And …
Bookstores are filled with the best of stories, but this bookshop is even better — it hides mysteries within its walls and beneath its floors — secrets that can change a life. Readers will love Natalie, who inherits an historic (but also dilapidated) bookshop after a heartbreaking tragedy. Never afraid but often uncertain, she plunges …
I loved this smart, funny peek inside the high stakes world of San Francisco private schools. It has everything: social satire, family drama, friendship, a lot of laughs, a touch of romance, and lots to think about after. If you’ve been looking for that Where’d You Go, Bernadette feeling, try this. Bonus: The co-authors live in …
When an advance copy of Home Baked arrived at the store, I took it home hoping merely to escape into the iconic 1970s San Francisco setting. I never anticipated that this memoir would give me an in-depth education on both the history of the era and the politics surrounding marijuana. Home Baked tells the story of the underground, …
It’s a subject ripe for satire: a young literary woman leaves publishing to try out tech in San Francisco and gets drawn into the money and ambition of Silicon Valley. But Wiener’s memoir, sharp-tongued as it sometimes is—of the photos on a first date’s Instagram feed, she writes, “They were, I had to admit, very …
Michelle Ruiz Keil’s All of Us With Wings is a magical realist ode to punk rock magic. Set in a San Francisco that looks a lot like ours, All of Us With Wings follows Xochi, a struggling runaway who eagerly joins an interesting family as the governess to the family’s headstrong daughter. Naturally, things get …
Brian Doyle was an unusually gifted storyteller, and it is very bittersweet and perfect that his last book is, at its core, all about the gift of storytelling. This is Doyle’s take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s planned-but-unwritten novel about the great Scottish author’s time in 1880s San Francisco. Stevenson was living in a boarding house …
