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Store Hours
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Mon - Fri 9:30 - 6:00
Sat 9:30 - 5:00
Sun Noon - 5:00
Open 24/7 online at:
www.concordBookshop.com
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Upcoming Events
5/6 (Sunday) at 3pm-
Jay Atkinson returns to the Bookshop with Memoirs of a Rugby-Playing Man
5/9 (Wednesday) 7pm-
We welcome Christopher Tilghman with his most recent novel, The Right-Hand Shore
5/13 (Sunday) 3pm-
A special Mother's Day event! Meg Mitchell Moore, author of The Arrivals, presents her most recent novel, So Far Away
5/20 (Sunday) at 3pm-
Local author Andrew Goldstein presents The Bookie's Son
6/3 (Sunday) at 3pm-
Join us as Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot presents Exit: The Endings That Set Us Free
6/10 (Sunday) at 3pm-
We welcome Nichole Bernier with The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D
6/17 (Sunday) at 3pm-
Special Father's Day event - Jerry Pallotta presents F Is for Fenway, an alphabet book for Red Sox fans of all ages
6/24 (Sunday) at 3pm-
James Geary presents a slideshow and talk about I Is An Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the World
7/8 (Sunday) at 3pm-
Local humorist and author Eric Kester presents That Book about Harvard
9/9 (Sunday) at 3pm-
Local novelist Ilie Ruby returns to the bookshop with her latest work, The Salt God's Daughter
9/16 (Sunday) at 3pm-
We welcome novelist Erika Robuck with Hemingway's Girl
Lee Woodruff presents Those We Love Most, a novel
9/30 (Sunday) at 3pm-
Maryanne O'Hara presents Cascade
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Greetings!
Our next event is Sunday, May 6 at 3pm when author and sportsman Jay Atkinson visits with Memoirs of a Rugby-Playing Man, which looks at his journey as a writer and as an athlete.
On Wednesday, May 9 at 7pm, Christopher Tilghman will read from, take questions, and sign his hot-off-the-presses novel, The Right-Hand Shore.
The left sidebar of this note contains our complete events calendar; you can also check details on our website and/or rsvp on our Facebook page.
If you're unable to attend an event, but would like a signed copy of the book, simply call us to pre-order. We'll ask the author to inscribe it to your specifications, then hold it for pick up or arrange to have it shipped.
Do you see those colored "buttons" over in the left sidebar? The F will take you to our Facebook page and T will connect you with our twitter feed. The newest button is a P for Pinterest; follow our 'boards' here to see what's new in bookcases we covet, jaw-dropping personal libraries, favorite quotes, and more. We'll soon be adding staff picks to the line-up; what else would you like to see?
Scroll down to learn about two additions to our signed books gallery and this week's book picks, which include a new novel from one of The New Yorkers "20 under 40" young authors, narrative nonfiction, two memoirs, an original paperback novel based on true tales of WWII spies, and an addition to our "thrills and chills" line-up from a local-area author.
We look forward to chatting with you in the Bookshop! When you come in to take a closer look at an item mentioned here, please tell us "I saw it in the newsletter!"
Comments are always welcome via email to
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Our next event:
Sunday, May 6 at 3pm
Memoirs of a Rugby-Playing Man by Jay Atkinson
Please join us on Sunday, May 6 at 3pm, as Jay Atkinson reads from, takes questions, and signs Memoirs of a Rugby-Playing Man: Guts, Glory, and Blood in the World's Greatest Game.
"... the author's passion translates easily to the page, providing a reflective look at his entrance into what he dubs the 'blood fraternity' ... A testosterone-laden tale deserving of an audience well beyond the locker room."
--Kirkus
If all sports are really about war, then rugby is a heart thumping epic of bayonet charges and hand-to-hand fighting. In Memoirs of a Rugby-Playing Man, Jay Atkinson describes his thirty year odyssey in the sport: from his hell raising days at the University of Florida, through the intrigue of various foreign tours, club championships, and all star selections, up to his current stint with the freewheeling Vandals Rugby Club out of Los Angeles. This book also heralds the arrival of rugby as a mainstream sport, as it will be added to the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2016.
A Boston-area native, Atkinson has played in more than 500 rugby matches, for which he's suffered through broken ribs, a detached retina, and other injuries.
He's also taken his share of hard knocks as a writer - for his opinions, his style, and his subject matter. Over the years, Atkinson has also carved out a reputation as a prolific and talented writer, author of seven narrative books (including Legends of Winter Hill, Ice Time, and Caveman Politics), and a tough-minded literary critic and journalist. He teaches journalism at Boston University.
Memoirs of a Rugby-Playing Man explains why it was all worth it - the sum total of his violent adventures, and the valuable insight he has gained from them.
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Upcoming event:
Wednesday, May 9 at 7pm
The Right-Hand Shore by Christopher Tilghman
Please join us on Wednesday, May 9 at 7pm, as Christopher Tilghman visits the Bookshop to read from, discuss, and sign The Right-Hand Shore.
This is a masterful novel that confronts the dilemmas of race, family, and forbidden love in the wake of America's Civil War, returning readers to the Mason family and the Chesapeake Bay that we met in Mason's Retreat.
It is 1920, and Edward Mason is making a call upon Miss Mary Bayly, the current owner of the legendary Mason family estate, the Retreat. Miss Mary is dying. She plans to give the Retreat to the closest direct descendant of the original immigrant owner that she can find. Edward believes he can charm the old lady, secure the estate and be back in Baltimore by lunchtime.
Instead, over the course of a long day, he hears the stories that will forever bind him and his family to the land. He hears of Miss Mary's grandfather brutally selling all his slaves in 1857 in order to avoid the reprisals he believes will come with Emancipation. He hears of the doomed efforts by Wyatt Bayly, Miss Mary's father, to turn the Retreat into a vast peach orchard, and of Miss Mary and her brother growing up in a fractured and warring household. He learns of Abel Terrell, son of free blacks who becomes head orchardist, and whose family becomes intimately connected to the Baylys and to the Mason legacy.
The drama in this richly textured novel proceeds through vivid set pieces: on rural nineteenth-century industry; on a boyhood on the Eastern Shore of Maryland; on the unbreakable divisions of race and class; and, finally, on two families attempting to save a son and a daughter from the dangers of their own innocent love. The result is a radiant work of deep insight and peerless imagination about the central dilemma of American history.
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New in Our Signed Books Gallery
Lunch Lady and the Mutant Mathletes by Jarrett J. Krosoczka
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New novel with "soulful depths" from award-winning author
The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger
"The Newlyweds is a luscious and intelligent novel that will stick with you."
-- NPR's Fresh Air
A powerful, funny, richly observed tour de force by one of America's most acclaimed young writers: a story of love and marriage, secrets and betrayals, that takes us from the backyards of America to the back alleys and villages of Bangladesh.
In The Newlyweds, we follow the story of Amina Mazid, who at age twenty-four moves from Bangladesh to Rochester, New York, for love. A hundred years ago, Amina would have been called a mail-order bride. But this is an arranged marriage for the twenty-first century: Amina is wooed by - and woos - George Stillman online.
For Amina, George offers a chance for a new life and a different kind of happiness than she might find back home. For George, Amina is a woman who doesn't play games. But each of them is hiding something: someone from the past they thought they could leave behind. It is only when they put an ocean between them - and Amina returns to Bangladesh - that she and George find out if their secrets will tear them apart, or if they can build a future together.
The Newlyweds is a surprising, suspenseful story about the exhilarations - and real-life complications - of getting, and staying, married. It stretches across continents, generations, and plains of emotion. What has always set Nell Freudenberger apart is the sly, gimlet eye she turns on collisions of all kinds - sexual, cultural, familial. With The Newlyweds, she has found her perfect subject for that vision, and characters to match. She reveals Amina's heart and mind, capturing both her new American reality and the home she cannot forget, with seamless authenticity, empathy, and grace.
Nell Freudenberger is the author of the novel The Dissident and the story collection Lucky Girls, winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; both books were New York Times Book Review Notables. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library, she was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists and one of The New Yorker's 20 Under 40.
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Paperback original novel blends true story of WWII spy mission with compelling fiction
Trapeze by Simon Mawer
"A fascinating WWII novel based in fact...Coming-of-age story meets old-fashioned tale of adventure."
--Publishers Weekly
Barely out of school and doing her bit for the British war effort, Marian Sutro has one quality that makes her stand out-she is a native French speaker. It is this that attracts the attention of the SOE, the Special Operations Executive, which trains agents to operate in occupied Europe. Drawn into this strange, secret world at the age of nineteen, she finds herself undergoing commando training, attending a "school for spies," and ultimately, one autumn night, parachuting into France from an RAF bomber to join the WORDSMITH resistance network.
But there's more to Marian's mission than meets the eye of her SOE controllers; her mission has been hijacked by another secret organization that wants her to go to Paris and persuade a friend - a research physicist - to join the Allied war effort. The outcome could affect the whole course of the war.
A fascinating blend of fact and fiction, Trapeze is both an old-fashioned adventure story and a modern exploration of a young woman's growth into adulthood. There is violence, and there is love. There is death and betrayal, deception and revelation. But above all there is Marian Sutro, an ordinary young woman who, like her real-life counterparts in the SOE, did the most extraordinary things at a time when the ordinary was not enough.
Simon Mawer is the author of the New York Times best-selling novel The Glass Room, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. His previous novels include The Fall (winner of the Boardman Tasker Prize), The Gospel of Judas, and Mendel's Dwarf (long-listed for the Man Booker Prize).
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Erik Larson's most recent book - set in Hitler's Germany - now in paperback
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson
"By far his best and most enthralling work of novelistic history ... Powerful, poignant ... a transportingly true story."
--The New York Times
Erik Larson has been widely acclaimed as a master of narrative non-fiction, and in his most recent book, the bestselling author turns his hand to a remarkable story set during Hitler's rise to power.
The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.
A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the "New Germany," she has one affair after another, including with the suprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance-and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler's true character and ruthless ambition.
Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre Göring and the expectedly charming -- yet wholly sinister -- Goebbels, In the Garden of Beasts lends a stunning, eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively readable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe, were awash in blood and terror.
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Memoirs from stars of stage and screen - now in paperback
Then Again by Diane Keaton
Named one of the "Ten Best Books fo the Year" by Janet Maslin (The New York Times), People, and Vogue, Diane Keaton's memoir is not a celebrity tell-all.
More than the autobiography of a legendary actress, Then Again is a book about a very American family with very American dreams. Diane will remind you of yourself, and her bonds with her family will remind you of your own relationships with those you love the most.
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In Spite of Myself by Christopher Plummer
"A staggering parade of theater-world luminaries struts, swaggers, and yes, occasionally staggers through this compulsively readable memoir. . . . [Plummer] has a tasty anecdote about onstage, backstage, or drinking-hole doings about every single one of them."
--The New York Times
A vibrant, exuberant self-portrait of one of today's greatest living actors.
Christopher Plummer's magnificent book recounts the wild adventure that is his life, stretching from a privileged childhood in Canada to the glorious, star-studded New York of the fifties to a sensational career in film appearing in some of our most beloved classics. Here are his late nights out with Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, Paddy Chayefsky, and Arthur Miller; his affairs and marriages; his collaborations with famed producers; and his memorable roles alongside fellow young and talented actors, each also destined for stardom: Judi Dench, Vanessa Redgrave, Peter O'Toole, Natalie Wood, and countless others. Plummer weaves delicious anecdotes of a life spent on stages and film sets across the world - from Peter Hall's Royal Shakespeare Theatre to The Sound of Music (affectionately dubbed "S&M") - into a boisterous narrative filled with humor and irresistible charm.
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Local-area author pens memoir of expedition to the highest mountain in the Americas
Up One Side and Down the Other by Jeff Arle, MD, PhD
Aconcagua is located in the Andes mountain range in Argentina. At almost 23,000 feet, it is the highest mountain in the world outside the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges.
This is the story of one typical expedition from a fairly average climber who was successful. It also serves as a description of what such expeditions are like, and may encourage those who are aspiring to climb the seven summits or other high peaks with guided groups.
Jeff Arle, MD, PhD is a neurosurgeon and sometime hiker who has also climbed Mt. Rainier, Mt. Elbrus, Denali, Kilimanjaro, and occasionally goes for a day hike in the white mountains of New Hampshire. While taking on some of the higher mountains in the world, including several of the so-called 'seven summits', he has little time to train and is happily married with three small children at home. Despite these potential limitations, he tells the story of one such experience climbing Aconcagua showing that, while not easy, these expeditions are both accessible and rewarding.
Up One Side and Down the Other can be found on our "Thrills and Chills" shelves, with other books of outdoor adventures.
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In our window
The Nature Connection - "Bringing Nature, Animals & the Arts to People" presents Patty Larkin in concert.
The Nature Connection (formerly known as Animals As Intermediaries, AAI) brings animal and nature programs to people with limited access to the natural world. Founded over 25 years ago, we connect individuals with nature's capacity to heal and to teach.
Patty Larkin will appear in benefit concert on Saturday June 9, at 8pm at the Emerson Umbrella Center for the Arts in concord.
Patty Larkin is part of the urban-folk/pop music phenomenon that spun off of the singer/songwriter explosion of the seventies, reinterpreting traditional folk melodies, rock, pop, bossa nova, drawing on anything from Dylan (Bob) to Dylan (Thomas). A self described "guitar driven songwriter," Larkin has wound her way through soundscapes of evocative vocals, inventive guitar wizardry, and imaginative lyrics. Her songs run from impressionistic poetry to witty wordplay.
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