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Store Hours
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Mon - Wed 9:30 - 6:00
Thursday 9:30 - 9:00
Friday 9:30 - 6:00
Sat 9:30 - 5:00
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Greetings! A few action-packed weeks of author events on our calendar, new books to satisfy every taste, and eye-catching displays in the windows and on our tables!
Our next event is Thursday, January 31, when award-winning author Jennifer Haigh visits the Bookshop with her collection of short fiction, which is receiving high praise from both our staff and national reviewers. Monday's New York Times said of the characters that pepper Bakerton PA, a coal-mining town in decline, "It is Ms. Haigh's great gift to make all of these people come alive and to make readers really care how their destinies unfold."
Stay-tuned for Sunday, February 3, when Leslie Maitland presents Crossing the Borders of Time, a true life love story that stood the test of time and the ravages of war.
As with all our events, if you can't visit us in person to purchase a signed copy of the featured book, you're welcome to call or email before the event - we'll ask the author to personally inscribe the book to your specifications, and will arrange to ship the book or hold it for pick up.
Book picks this week include a new look at Jane Austen and the brand-new installment of Flavia de Luce's adventures. In paperback, we feature Anne Tyler's most recent novel, an exploration of the power of introverts, and Helen MacInnes - "the queen of spy writers" is back in print!
Scroll down to see what's new in our Signed Books Gallery; one of our fun Valentine's display tables; and take a peek in the community window, which highlights the upcoming Summer Camp Fair, to be held February 11 at CCHS - details below.
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" and let us know what you're reading now.
Comments are always welcome via email to
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Our next event: Short fiction collection from best-selling novelist
News from Heaven: The Bakerton Stories by Jennifer Haigh
"Jennifer Haigh has accomplished what James Joyce did in Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio: render a place with such exactitude the landscape, character, and fate are inextricably linked. One of America's finest novelists, Haigh is now one of our finest short story writers as well."
-- Bestselling author Ron Rash
Please help us welcome Jennifer Haigh on Thursday, January 31st at 7 pm, reading from her collection of short stories, News From Heaven.
Long before she wrote such New York Times bestselling novels as Faith and The Condition, Jennifer Haigh was a passionate student and teacher, reader and writer, of the short story. Though widely published in magazines -- from The Atlantic Monthly and Granta to The Saturday Evening Post - her stories have never before appeared in book form.
News from Heaven is a collection of ten new stories set in and around the fictionalized mining town of Bakerton, Pennsylvania - a world familiar to readers of Baker Towers, Haigh's award-winning second novel, beloved by readers and critics alike. This is an honest and anguished portrait of a company town on an unsettling journey from boom to bust, where intimate secrets and public events collide with unexpected consequences.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Jennifer Haigh has been published in The Best American Short Stories 2012,won both the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction and the PEN/Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England writer. Her books have been published in sixteen languages.
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Upcoming event: Crossing the Borders of Time with Leslie Maitland
Sunday, February 3 at 3pm
"This is a fascinating story of thwarted love, longing, and the travails of one woman and one family within the broader context of war and persecution."
-- Booklist (starred review)
Please join us on Sunday, February 3 at 3pm, as we welcome Leslie Maitland, reading from Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed. This is a personal and historical true story of her mother's love and loss during WWII - it is as compelling as a novel, and has been embraced by book discussion groups.
On a pier in Marseille in 1942, with desperate refugees pressing to board one of the last ships to escape France before the Nazis choked off its ports, an 18-year-old German Jewish girl was pried from the arms of the Catholic Frenchman she loved and promised to marry.
Five years later - her fierce desire to reunite with Roland first obstructed by war and then, in secret, by her father and brother - Janine would build a new life in New York with a dynamic American husband.
Investigative reporter Leslie Maitland grew up enthralled by her mother's accounts of forbidden romance and harrowing flight from the Nazis. Her book is both a journalist's vivid depiction of a world at war and a daughter's pursuit of a haunting question: what had become of the handsome Frenchman whose picture her mother continued to treasure almost fifty years after they parted? It is a tale of memory that reporting made real and a story of undying love that crosses the borders of time.
Leslie Maitland is an award-winning former NewYork Times investigative reporter and national correspondent who covered the Justice Department. She appears regularly on the Diane Rehm Show on NPR to discuss literature.
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Upcoming event: The Lady and Her Monsters with Roseanne Montillo
Thursday, February 7 at 7pm
The macabre meets art in this startling blend of grotesque nineteenth-century science and fascinating literary creation that examines the actual Victor Frankensteins and the real-life horrors behind Mary Shelley's gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein.
Please join us at the Bookshop on Thursday, February 7th at 7 pm as we welcome Roseanne Montillo, discussing and signing her latest book, The Lady and Her Monsters: A Tale of Dissections, Real-Life Dr. Frankensteins, and the Creation of Mary Shelley's Masterpiece.
A highly entertaining blend of literary analysis, lore, and scientific history, told with the verve and ghoulish fun of a Tim Burton film, The Lady and Her Monsters traces the origins of the greatest horror story of all time - Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - using the novel as a centerpiece from which to explore the frightful milieu in which it was written.
Roseanne Montillo recounts how Shelley's Victor Frankenstein mirrored actual scientists of the period - curious and daring iconoclasts, influenced by their predecessors in the scientific age, who were obsessed with the inner workings of the human body and how it could be reanimated after death.
Montillo reveals how Shelley and her contemporaries were products of their time - intellectually curious artists, writers, poets, philosophers, and others intrigued by the occultists and daring scientists appearing across Europe who risked their reputations and their immortal souls to advance our understanding of human anatomy and medicine.
The result is a unique, rich, and revealing look into the creation of a classic.
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A new look at Jane Austen
The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things by Paula Byrne
Acclaimed literary biographer Paula Byrne takes a highly original approach in this landmark biography, providing the most intimate and revealing portrait yet of the distinguished and beloved novelist.
Coinciding with the 200th anniversary of the original publication of Austen's classic Pride and Prejudice, Paula Byrnes's The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things offers a startlingly original look at the revered writer through a variety of key moments, scenes, and objects in her life and work. Going beyond previous traditional biographies, Byrne's portrait explores the lives of Austen's extended family, friends, and acquaintances. Through their absorbing stories we view Austen on a much wider stage and discover unexpected aspects of her life and character.
Byrne transports us to different worlds - the East Indies and revolutionary Paris - and different events - from a high society scandal to a petty case of shoplifting. She follows Austen on her extensive travels, setting her in contexts both global and English, urban and rural, political and historical, social and domestic - wider perspectives of vital and still under-estimated importance to her creative life.
As Byrne reveals, small things in the writer's world - a scrap of paper, a simple gold chain, an ivory miniature, a bathing machine - hold significance in her emotional and artistic development. The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things introduces us to a woman deeply immersed in the world around her, yet far ahead of her time in her independence and ambition; to an author who was an astute commentator on human nature and the foibles of her own age. Rich and compelling, it is a fresh, insightful, and often surprising portrait of an artist and a vivid evocation of the complex world that shaped her.
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Flavia de Luce is back!
Speaking from Among the Bones by Alan Bradley
In the fifth book of the New York Times bestselling series, Alan Bradley pens his most tantalizing mystery yet, a potent mixture of "Downton Abbey" and "Murder, She Wrote," and introduces a new character into the mix whose actions will have lasting consequences on Bishop's Lacey, the de Luce family...and Flavia.
We love Flavia de Luce, the precocious amateur sleuth and accomplished young chemist, heroine of Alan Bradley's mystery series set in Bishop's Lacey!
When the tomb of St. Tancred is opened at a village church in Bishop's Lacey, its shocking contents lead to another case for Flavia de Luce. Greed, pride, and murder result in old secrets coming to light - along with a forgotten flower that hasn't been seen for half a thousand years.
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Pulitzer Prize-winning author's latest novel - now in paperback
The Beginner's Goodbye by Anne Tyler
" ... A dazzling meditation on marriage, community, and redemption."
-- Boston Globe
Anne Tyler gives us a wise, haunting, and deeply moving novel in which she explores how a middle-aged man, ripped apart by the death of his wife, is gradually restored by her frequent appearances - in their house, on the roadway, in the market.
Gradually he discovers, as he works in the family's vanity-publishing business, turning out titles that presume to guide beginners through the trials of life, that maybe for this beginner there is a way of saying goodbye.
A beautiful, subtle exploration of loss and recovery, pierced throughout with Anne Tyler's humor, wisdom, and always penetrating look at human foibles.
Author Anne Tyler has published eighteen previous novels; her eleventh, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
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Best-selling book on the power of introverts - now in paperback
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking: by Susan Cain
Quiet was on dozens of "best seller" and "best of 2012" lists last year -- for good reason! It's now available in paperback; a good choice for a book group discussion, or to read on your own to better understand yourself and those around you.
This is a paradigm-shifting book that shows how dramatically our culture has come to misunderstand and undervalue introverts and gives introverts the tools to take full advantage of their strengths.
At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking, reading to partying and who favor working on their own over brainstorming in teams. Although they are often labeled "quiet," it is to introverts that we owe many of the great contributions to society - from van Gogh's sunflowers to the invention of the personal computer.
Passionately argued, superbly researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet has the power to permanently change how we see introverts and, equally important, how they see themselves. Author Susan Cain charts the rise of "the extrovert ideal" throughout the 20th century and shows how it has come to permeate our culture. She explores cutting-edge research on the biology and psychology of temperament and outlines practical skills that can benefit nearly all of us, including how to network if you hate small talk, how to modulate your personality according to circumstance, and how to empower introverted children.
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"The queen of spy writers" is back in print!
Helen MacInnes (1907-1985) was the Scottish-born American author of 21 spy novels. Dubbed "the queen of spy writers", her books have sold more than 25 million copies in the United States alone and have been translated into over 22 languages. Several of her books have been adapted into films, such as Above Suspicion (1943), with Joan Crawford, and The Salzburg Connection (1972).
Her books have been out of print for a while; we're happy to have new paperback reissues, beginning with:
 Above Suspicion:
Richard and Frances Myles are preparing for their annual European summer vacation in 1939 when they are visited at their Oxford college by old friend Peter Galt, who has a seemingly simple job for them. But in the heightened atmosphere of pre-war Europe, nobody is above suspicion, in fact the husband and wife are being carefully monitored by shadowy figures.
Above Suspicion was MacInnes' breakthrough book, a bestseller published in 1941 and released as a movie in 1943, directed by Richard Thorpe and starring Joan Crawford and Fred MacMurray.
 Pray for a Brave Heart:
It was 1953, and nothing could shake William Denning's resolve to leave the army and return to the States. Nothing, except one of the largest diamond hauls ever - which, in the wrong hands, on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, was a potentially lethal force.
In a small village in the Swiss mountains, Denning discovered that there was not only a jewellery robbery at stake. In the ruthless world of espionage and international conspiracy his adversaries were the most unlikely people - and the most dangerous.
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New in our Signed Books Gallery
When Doctors Don't Listen: How to Avoid Misdiagnoses and Unnecessary Tests by Dr. Leana Wen and Dr. Joshua Kosowsky
 We had a lively and informative conversation with Dr. Leana Wen and Joshua Kosowsky, as they shared some of their observations as ER doctors, and the need they saw for patients to partner with their doctors and advocate for their health.
When Doctors Don't Listen educates the patient (or caregiver) with "8 Pillars to a Better Diagnosis," suggestions for clear communication and expectations. These are do-able, actionable items accessible to everyone.
Signed copies are on our shelves!
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Love is in the air!
We've got "lovely" books for everyone on your list - kids to adults ... a great selection of Valentine cards, too!
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In our window
2013 Summer Camp Fair for Grades K-12
Come to the 31st annual Summer Camp Fair (formerly known as the Summer Opportunities Fair) from 5:30 to 8:00 p.m. Monday, February 11, (snow date is February 12) at the Concord-Carlisle High School.
This event provides parents and students from K-12 the means to explore alternatives to the usual summer activities, and brings together representatives from approximately 90 organizations to present summer opportunities held locally, nationally and abroad.
Exhibitors will be present to display information on wilderness adventures, educational and enrichment opportunities, foreign language and student exchange programs and volunteer opportunities, as well as traditional, sports and special-needs camps.
This event is sponsored by the Concord-Carlisle High School Parents' Association. Admission is free.
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