Our next event

Without Tess by Marcella Pixley

Please join us on Friday, October 14 at 4pm for the launch of Marcella Pixley's newest book for young adults, Without Tess.

"Tess and Lizzie are sisters, sisters as close as can be, who share a secret world filled with selkies, flying horses, and a girl who can transform into a wolf  in the middle of the night. But when Lizzie is ready to grow up, Tess clings to their fantasies. 

As Tess sinks deeper and deeper into her delusions, she decides that she can't live in the real world any longer and leaves Lizzie and her family forever. Now, years later, Lizzie is in high school and struggling to understand what happened to her sister; Lizzie searches for a way to finally let Tess go."

Kirkus Reviews says "Pixley once again plumbs the emotional depths of a tough subject with sensitivity and insight into the complexities of human nature and sibling bonds."

Marcella Pixley is a middle school Language Arts teacher in Carlisle. Her poetry has been published in various literary journals, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her first book, Freak, received four starred reviews.

Upcoming event

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Please join us on Sunday, October 16 at 3pm as we welcome Erin Morgenstern with The Night Circus, a rich, atmospheric tale of magic, love, and a fierce competition with very high stakes. Le Cirque des Rêves travels around the world, and visits Concord in the pages of the novel.

"The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night.

 

But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway - a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love - a deep,

Jill and Carolyn with author Erin Morgenstern (center) at a pre-publication event in Concord

magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands.

 

True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of everyone involved, from the cast of extraordinary circus performers to the patrons, hang in the balance, suspended as precariously as the daring acrobats overhead."

 

The Boston Globe calls the novel "A Romeo and Juliet tale drenched in magic realism, The Night Circus defies both genres and expectations. In short, it's a showstopper."

New in our signed books gallery

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Scroll down for more about this latest novel from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

We are delighted to offer signed first editions of The Marriage Plot!

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The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje

" . . . Told in short bursts of exposition so beautiful one actually feels the urge to slow the reading down, the novel shows us how the boy assembles the man."
-Boston Globe 

Last week's newsletter featured this newest novel from Man Booker Prize (The English Patient) winner Michael Ondaatje. 

The Concord Bookshop has signed first editions of The Cat's Table. 

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Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - The Definitive Life

by Tim Riley

Tim Riley presented his Lennon biography to a standing room only crowd.

This work explores the "enormous, seductive, and confounding personality that made Lennon a cultural touchstone."

Riley generously signed additional copies of his book, a wonderful gift for the music lover or student of pop culture.

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The Pig Scramble

written by Jessica Kinney

illustrated by Sarah Brannen

We had a fun afternoon when illustrator Sarah Brannen visited with The Pig Scramble, a story that embraces the tradition of the country fair.  

Brannen discussed how she prepared for illustrating the book by observing real pigs and piglets, some of the details she included (frolicking piglets on practically every page!), and the way she added her creative touch yet still followed the guidance of the author's text.

Signed editions of The Pig Scramble are on our shelves!

New fiction from a Pulitzer prize winner

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides 

"... remind[s] us with uncommon understanding what it is to be young and idealistic, in pursuit of true love and in love with books and ideas."  

It's the early 1980s-the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels.

As Madeleine tries to understand the fall of the device in contemporary novels, real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead - charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy - suddenly turns up in a seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old "friend" Mitchell Grammaticus - who's been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange - resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.

Over the next year, as the members of the triangle graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine can't escape the secret responsible for Leonard's seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.

Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.

We have signed first editions of The Marriage Plot on our shelves!

A favorite on the 2011 

Man Booker Prize shortlist

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes 

"Barnes's story is a meditation on the unreliability and falsity of memory. . . . Such a slyly subversive book." 
-London Evening Standard

The winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction will be announced on Tuesday, October 18. Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending is a favorite of the six on the shortlist.

This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about - until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he'd left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he'd understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.    

Short fiction - "NYT 10 Best Books"

The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie 

and 

Selected Stories by William Trevor

In Our Window

Concord Piecemakers 

The Concord Piecemakers will present at the "Basket of Quilts" Quilt Show at St. Matthews Church, Central Street, Acton.

The Quilt Show runs Friday, October 21 10am - 8pm, and Saturday, October 22 10am - 4pm.

Their window display is stunning, and includes beautiful piecework, quilt blocks, and an appliqued wall hanging.

For more information about the Concord Piecemakers, visit their website.