Each week we spotlight one book from the month's IndieNext List (a collection of recommendations by indie booksellers across the country). Ask for a copy of the IndieNext newsletter at our front counter or click to browse them online

The Keeper of Lost Causes

Hardcover, Dutton

Each week we like to showcase a few of the great books on our shelves. Here are just a few titles we think are special:

Fiction

Reamde

Neal Stephenson 

Hardcover,  

William Morrow

In 1972, Richard Forthrast, the black sheep of an Iowa farming clan, fled to the mountains of British Columbia to avoid the draft. A skilled hunting guide, he eventually amassed a fortune by smuggling marijuana across the border between Canada and Idaho. As the years passed, Richard went straight and returned to the States after the U.S. government granted amnesty to draft dodgers. He parlayed his wealth into an empire and developed a remote resort in which he lives. He also created T'Rain, a multibillion-dollar, massively multiplayer online role-playing game with millions of fans around the world. But T'Rain's success has also made it a target. Hackers have struck gold by unleashing REAMDE, a virus that encrypts all of a player's electronic files and holds them for ransom. They have also unwittingly triggered a deadly war beyond the boundaries of the game's virtual universe-and Richard is at ground zero....

Read more. 

Safe from the Sea  

Peter Geye  

Paperback, Unbridled   

Set against the dramatic landscape of the Minnesota north shore, an estranged father and son reconnect thirty-five years after the father survived the tragic wreck of a Great Lakes ore boat. Safe From The Sea tells the story of Olaf and Noah Torr, a father and son whose long estrangement began after Olaf survived a shipwreck on Lake Superior. More than thirty years after the wreck, Olaf believes he is dying of cancer and asks his son to come home to his isolated cabin on the lake in order to help him die. Over the course of two weeks in November, against the backdrop of the dramatic upper Midwest landscape and weather, the men reconsider each other's lives, finally summoning the courage to confess, understand and forgive.  Read more. 

Nonfiction

South with The Sun

Lynne Cox 

Hardcover, Knopf

Roald Amundsen, "the last of the Vikings," left his mark on the Heroic Era as one of the most successful polar explorers ever. A powerfully built man more than six feet tall, Amundsen's career of adventure began at the age of fifteen (he was born in Norway in 1872 to a family of merchant sea captains and rich ship owners); twenty-five years later he was the first man to reach both the North and South Poles. Lynne Cox, adventurer and swimmer, author of Swimming to Antarctica ("gripping" -Sports Illustrated) and Grayson ("wondrous, and unforgettable" -Carl Hiaasen), gives us in South with the Sun a full-scale account of the explorer's life and expeditions. We see Amundsen, in 1903-06, the first to travel the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, in his small ship Gjøa, a seventy-foot refitted former herring boat powered by sails and a thirteen-horsepower engine, making his way through the entire length of the treacherous ice bound route, between the northern Canadian mainland and Canada's Arctic islands, from Greenland across Baffin Bay, between the Canadian islands, across the top of Alaska into the Bering Strait. The dangerous journey took three years to complete, as Amundsen, his crew, and six sled dogs waited while the frozen sea around them thawed sufficiently to allow for navigation. We see him journey toward the North Pole in Fridtjof Nansen's famous Fram, until word reached his expedition party of Robert Peary's successful arrival at the North Pole. Amundsen then set out on a secret expedition to the Antarctic, and we follow him through his heroic capture of the South Pole.  Read more. 

EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want  

Frances Moore Lappe

Hardcover, Nation Books

In EcoMind, Frances Moore Lappé-a giant of the environmental movement-confronts accepted wisdom of environmentalism. Drawing on the latest research from anthropology to neuroscience and her own field experience, she argues that the biggest challenge to human survival isn't our fossil fuel dependency, melting glaciers, or other calamities. Rather, it's our faulty way of thinking about these environmental crises that robs us of power. Lappé dismantles seven common "thought traps"-from limits to growth to the failings of democracy- that belie what we now know about nature, including our own, and offers contrasting "thought leaps" that reveal our hidden power. Read more. 

For Young Readers 

Love, Mouserella

David Ezra Stein    

Hardcover, Nancy Paulsen Books  

 Mouserella misses her grandmouse, so she writes her a letter. At first she can't think of anything to say, but once she starts, the news begins to flow - she found a cat whisker at the zoo, she taught her ladybug to fetch, she made shadow puppets with Dadmouse during a blackout - and just like that, the events of the past few days come to vivid life in her letter, as does her love for Grandmouse. Read more.