Ask a Bookseller

• Ask a Bookseller: ‘Mona’s Eyes’ by Thomas Schlesser

  On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.It’s that time of year when readers start to catalogue their favorite books of 2025, and for bookseller Kelly Evert, that book is “Mona’s Eyes” by Thomas Schlesser. Evert works at Village Books and Paper Dreams, with locations in Bellingham and Lynden, Washington. When a young girl named Mona, living in Paris, learns she’s going to go blind, her grandfather determines to show her as much visual art as he can while she can still see. Once a week, over the course of a year, he takes her to the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay and other French galleries, where they focus on a piece of art each time. Evert appreciated both the art discussions and the relationship between Mona and her grandfather. “It’s just very beautiful and loving,” says Evert, who added that the dust jacket of the hardcover book includes images of all the featured artwork. Art lovers will immediately recognize that the famed eyes on the cover belong to Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” not the Mona Lisa, though Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece is one of the 52 works of art featured in the book.

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• Ask a Bookseller: ‘Poppy State’ by Myriam Gurba

  On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.Mary Williams of Skylight Books in Los Angeles, Calif., recommends a nonfiction book that will appeal to readers who find joy in the natural world, including the plants growing on their window sills. It’s called “Poppy State: A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings” by Myriam Gurba. It’s a book that’s deeply rooted in the author’s California home and landscape. “It's a perfect example of how a great writer can make even a subject you wouldn't naturally gravitate towards be fascinating," said Williams. She said the book was beautifully written, with an inventive format: "[Gurba’s] combining memoir, botany, little bits of history from California and Mexico, family history, photos, and little bits of newspaper articles, and putting together all these puzzle pieces. She’s basically telling a story about our relationship to nature — and how we cultivate plants and land — can, in turn, heal us. “The author talks about how she's been healing from some past traumatic experiences and some previous violent relationships. She doesn't get in too much into those stories — they've been covered in prior books — but [she’s] talking about how creating the sort of jungle of plants, including literally growing corn in her apartment, allowed her to reconnect with nature and kind of reconnect with her soul.” Williams says she found herself surprised and delighted, as well as entertained, by the comparisons the author drew with her observations of the world.

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• Ask a Bookseller: ‘The Red Notebook’ by Antoine Laurain

  On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.What would the contents of your purse or backpack say about you? Bev Newton of Innisfree Bookshop in Meredith, N.H., recommends a novel about a Parisian bookseller who is so taken by the contents of an abandoned purse, he sets off on a quest to find its owner. Newton calls it “the biggest little book you’ll read this year — a delightful little book." Laurent Letellier discovers the purse, stripped by a mugger of all its valuable or identifying objects. Inside, he discovers a red notebook along with a key chain, a hieroglyph and perfume. Newton says the notebook is full of fragmented “memories and wishes and fears,” adding that readers who wish they kept journals will take comfort in how much can be conveyed in dashed-off remarks. Laurent, with help from his daughter, sets off on a quest to return the purse. But how to find a faceless, nameless woman in all of Paris?  The novel has been available in Europe for years, but it was recently translated and made available to the American market. 

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• Ask a Bookseller: ‘Burner: And Other Stories’ by Katrina Denza

  On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.Feeling too busy lately to finish a book? Kimberly Daniels of The Country Bookshop in Southern Pines, North Carolina, would like to make an argument for reading short story collections. Specifically, Katrina Denza’s new collection "Burner: And Other Stories.” Daniels raves about these tightly crafted contemporary short stories, in which she says a single paragraph conveys the weight of a chapter, and a short story contains a fully realized fictional world. “The economy of being completely transformed and having your mind blown for such little time — [the time it takes to read a short story] — and to be so affected and to return to your life changed — [that’s] a pretty good value for your time.” These are stories that explore aging, technology and the gap between what people do outwardly and what they express inwardly. In one story, a woman gets an AI hologram so she can continue to speak with her husband, who took his life due to depression. “This is a beautiful, hopeful story. I just love how brilliant it is, because it takes what might be the obvious thing, which is fantasy-versus-reality and technology-versus-humanity, and then flips the switch. “It's like, no, is the fantasy that you can love someone out of a depression? And I'm not giving anything away, because the joy of reading the story is so rich. Every story is like that: just taking it up a notch.”

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• Ask a Bookseller: ‘I See You’ve Called in Dead’ by John Kenney

  Christina Tabereaux of The Snail on the Wall, a bookstore in Huntsville, Ala., recommends the novel “I See You’ve Called in Dead” by John Kenney. The book's dark humor evokes Richard Russo’s “Straight Man” or Fredrik Backman’s “A Man Called Ove,” and Tabereaux says the story, with its well-developed characters, drew her to both laughter and tears. Bud writes obituaries for a living. With his own life down-in-the-dumps, personally and professionally, he drinks too much one night and writes — and publishes — his own obituary. It’s a rather dramatic description of his imagined feats, and its publication earns him a suspension from his job.  In that moment, Tabereaux says, Bud faces the ultimate question: “He has to decide, is he going to continue numbly walking through life, or is he going to truly embrace and live life? “Bud's friend Tim, who is just a wonderful, wonderful character, starts taking Bud to wakes and funerals of complete strangers. And so, he starts evaluating: what's the legacy these people have left? Bud really starts thinking about what his own legacy is going to be. “It's my favorite kind of book, because it includes just fantastically developed characters who are facing the obstacles of life but doing so in a way that is realistic. “It's not tied up super neatly in a bow. There's still grief, and there's still loss, and there's heartache; but Bud ultimately realizes that life is better because he embraces the community of people around him." Listen to Kenney’s interview with NPR’s Scott Simon here: John Kenney on his new novel, 'I See You've Called In Dead' : NPR 

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