This heart-breaking novel is storytelling at its best! It follows Rachel, a young Hawaiian girl whose dreams are shattered the day she is taken from her family and sent to Kalaupapa, the quarantined settlement for lepers on the island of Moloka’i. Rich in history and characters, this special story will stay with you forever. And now after …
From my first encounter with Sharma Shields’ work, I was awed by her gifts with character, plot, mythology, and the most meaningful expressions of the human condition. From her Autumn House Award winning collection of stories, Favorite Monster, to the psychological devastation of the inner life revealed in The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac, and now to …
This engaging biographical novel brings the larger-than-life character of Josephine Baker to the forefront of the reader’s imagination. Although the singer/dancer/activist wrote memoirs of her own, restrictions of the era and a Hollywood agenda prevented them from being honest. This book reveals what the others did not, including her early years of poverty and abuse …
Christy Carlyle is one of the amazing group of Romance writers who call the Pacific Northwest home. Her new series, The Duke’s Den, began publishing in November 2018 with book two coming in April 2019. She took some time away from working on book three to answer a few questions from nwbooklovers columnist and Third …
Washington Black is a novel about a boy of precarious visibilities: he is all too visible to those who would demean his humanity; he is all too invisible to those who might recognize his gifts and value his very real potential to make great contributions to the world. Born an eleven-year old field slave in …
I was born in Seattle, at Swedish First Hill, but my family moved away when I was a baby. My parents had grown up in Queen Anne and Ballard, attended Seattle Pacific University, and pastored their first church in Renton. So every summer, my family made the long drive from our home in San Diego …
Based on the true story of 17th century painter Artemisia Gentileschi, this beautiful novel is vivid, heartwrenching, and undeniably gorgeous. Alternating between Artemisia’s time told in stunning verse and the tales of ancient heroines Judith and Susanna, Blood Water Paint is the truly magnificent tale of a young woman battling to be heard in a …
The Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, a trade association of independent booksellers, publishers, authors, and librarians, announced the 2019 Northwest Book Awards Shortlist, selected by a committee of independent booksellers from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska. From more than 400 nominations, the committee chose the following 12 finalists, written or illustrated by creators from the …
The Prix Goncourt is France’s highest award for fiction, and the most recent recipient was Éric Vuillard for The Order of the Day. It’s an interesting choice for at least three reasons. First, it’s really good, like prize-winning good, written in crystalline sentences ably translated by Mark Polizzotti. Second, it’s not a bog-standard war story about generals and …
About a year ago, I read The Dragontail Buttonhole, the first book in a trilogy by Peter Curtis, in which he details his family’s flight from Prague after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939. That story read like the best spy fiction of that period of infamy. Peter has followed that story with Cafe Budapest. After an unbelievable trek …
