Book Category: Featured

The Light Pirate

Florida is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels wreak gradual havoc on the state’s infrastructure, a powerful hurricane approaches a small town on the southeastern coast. Kirby Lowe, an electrical line worker, his pregnant wife, Frida, and their two sons, Flip and Lucas, prepare for the worst. When the boys go missing just before the hurricane hits, Kirby heads out into the high winds in search of his children. Left alone, Frida goes into premature labor and gives birth to an unusual child, Wanda, whom she names after the catastrophic storm that ushers her into a society closer to collapse than ever before.

As Florida continues to unravel, Wanda grows. Moving from childhood to adulthood, adapting not only to the changing landscape, but also to the people who stayed behind in a place abandoned by civilization, Wanda loses family, gains community, and ultimately, seeks adventure, love, and purpose in a place remade by nature.

Told in four parts—power, water, light, and time—The Light Pirate mirrors the rhythms of the elements and the sometimes quick, sometimes slow dissolution of the world as we know it. It is a meditation on the changes we would rather not see, the future we would rather not greet, and a call back to the beauty and violence of an untamable wilderness.

Old Babes in the Woods: Stories

The two intrepid sisters of the title story grapple with loss and memory on a perfect summer evening; “Impatient Griselda” explores alienation and miscommunication with a fresh twist on a folkloric classic; and “My Evil Mother” touches on the fantastical, examining a mother-daughter relationship in which the mother purports to be a witch. At the heart of the collection are seven extraordinary stories that follow a married couple across the decades, the moments big and small that make up a long life of uncommon love—and what comes after.

Returning to short fiction for the first time since her 2014 collection Stone Mattress, Atwood showcases both her creativity and her humanity in these remarkable tales which by turns delight, illuminate, and quietly devastate.

Unlikely Animals

Natural-born healer Emma Starling once had big plans for her life, but she’s lost her way. A medical school dropout, she’s come back to small-town Everton, New Hampshire, to care for her father, who is dying from a mysterious brain disease. Clive Starling has been hallucinating small animals, as well as having visions of the ghost of a long-dead naturalist, Ernest Harold Baynes, once known for letting wild animals live in his house. This ghost has been giving Clive some ideas on how to spend his final days.

Set against the backdrop of a small town in the throes of a very real opioid crisis, Unlikely Animals is a tragicomic novel from the acclaimed author of Rabbit Cake about familial expectations, imperfect friendships, and the possibility of resurrecting that which had been thought irrevocably lost.

True Biz

True biz? The students at the River Valley School for the Deaf just want to hook up, pass their history finals, and have politicians, doctors, and their parents stop telling them what to do with their bodies. This revelatory novel plunges readers into the halls of a residential school for the deaf, where they’ll meet Charlie, a rebellious transfer student who’s never met another deaf person before; Austin, the school’s golden boy, whose world is rocked when his baby sister is born hearing; and February, the hearing headmistress, a CODA (child of deaf adult(s)) who is fighting to keep her school open and her marriage intact, but might not be able to do both. As a series of crises both personal and political threaten to unravel each of them, Charlie, Austin, and February find their lives inextricable from one another—and changed forever.

New York Times bestseller and Reese’s Book Club pick, this is a tender, beautiful and radiantly outraged novel.

Hot Dog (2023 Caldecott Medal Winner)

New York Times bestseller, and winner of the  2023 Caldecott Medal, this glowing and playful picture book features an overheated—and overwhelmed—pup who finds his calm with some sea, sand, and fresh air. Destined to become a classic!

Glory

Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, NoViolet Bulawayo’s bold novel follows the fall of the Old Horse, the long-serving leader of a fictional country, and the drama that follows for a rumbustious nation of animals on the path to true liberation. Inspired by the unexpected fall by coup in November 2017 of Robert G. Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president of nearly four decades, Glory shows a country’s imploding, narrated by a chorus of animal voices that unveil the ruthlessness required to uphold the illusion of absolute power and the imagination and bulletproof optimism to overthrow it completely. By immersing readers in the daily lives of a population in upheaval, Bulawayo reveals the dazzling life force and irresistible wit that lie barely concealed beneath the surface of seemingly bleak circumstances.

French Braid

The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever leave home, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband, Robin. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily, could not have less in common. Their youngest, David, is already intent on escaping his family’s orbit, for reasons none of them understand. Yet, as these lives advance across decades, the Garretts’ influences on one another ripple ineffably but unmistakably through each generation.

Full of heartbreak and hilarity, French Braid is classic Anne Tyler: a stirring, uncannily insightful novel of tremendous warmth and humor that illuminates the kindnesses and cruelties of our daily lives, the impossibility of breaking free from those who love us, and how close—yet how unknowable—every family is to itself.

Anaximander: And the Birth of Science

Over two millennia ago, the prescient insights of Anaximander paved the way for cosmology, physics, geography, meteorology, and biology, setting in motion a new way of seeing the world. His legacy includes the revolutionary ideas that the Earth floats in a void, that animals evolved, that the world can be understood in natural rather than supernatural terms, and that universal laws govern all phenomena. He introduced a new mode of rational thinking with an openness to uncertainty and the progress of knowledge.

In this elegant work, the renowned theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli brings to light the importance of Anaximander’s overlooked influence on modern science. He examines Anaximander not from the point of view of a historian or as an expert in Greek philosophy, but as a scientist interested in the deep nature of scientific thinking, which Rovelli locates in the critical and rebellious ability to reimagine the world again and again. Anaximander celebrates the radical lack of certainty that defines the scientific quest for knowledge.

The Climate Book

In The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg has gathered the wisdom of over one hundred experts – geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists; engineers, economists and mathematicians; historians, philosophers and indigenous leaders – to equip us all with the knowledge we need to combat climate disaster. Throughout, illuminating and often shocking grayscale charts, graphs, diagrams, photographs, and illustrations underscore their research and their arguments. Alongside them, she shares her own stories of demonstrating and uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing how much we have been kept in the dark. This is one of our biggest challenges, she shows, but also our greatest source of hope. Once we are given the full picture, how can we not act? And if a schoolchild’s strike could ignite a global protest, what could we do collectively if we tried?

Sundial

Rob’s childhood was not normal. It’s taken her years to carefully construct and curate a facade of normalcy, which she uses to protect
her children in ways she never was. But you can’t protect your
children from themselves. Her daughter Callie whispers to things
that aren’t there, collects bones, and hurts her little sister with
calculated apathy. In Callie, Rob sees the echoes of all the things she
has worked so hard to leave behind.

In an effort to avoid history repeating itself, Rob takes Callie to Sundial, her abandoned childhood home in the Mojave Desert. As Callie learns more about her mother, and the literal and figurative skeletons that are buried at Sundial, she can’t help but wonder if the true threat has always been Rob.

Ward writes with the pace and insight of Stephen King, and the emotional depth and intelligence of Sally Rooney. A terrifying read
you won’t be able to put down. – Skye & Liv

Ruby Spencer’s Whisky Year

Ruby Spencer is spending one year living in a small cottage in a tiny town in the Scottish Highlands for three reasons: to write a bestselling cookbook, to drink a barrelful of whisky, and to figure out what comes next. It’s hard to know what to expect after an impulse decision based on a map of Scotland in her Manhattan apartment—but she knows it’s high time she had an adventure.

She doesn’t expect to fall in love with the highlands, and starts to see a future that stretches beyond her year of adventure. It doesn’t hurt that Brochan, the ruggedly handsome local handyman, keeps coming around to repair things at her cottage. As Ruby grows closer to Brochan and the tightly held traditions of the charming village, she discovers secret plans to turn her beloved pub into an American chain restaurant. Faced with an impossible choice, Ruby must decide between love, loyalty, and the Highlands way of life.

Still Life

It’s 1944, somewhere in the Italian countryside, when Evelyn Skinner and Ulysses Temper first meet. He’s a 24 year-old soldier and she’s a 64 year-old art historian who is in Italy to help salvage works of art damaged during the war. Evelyn tells Ulysses that he must visit Florence before he leaves Italy, and it is that visit that will change the course of his life. Moving back and forth from Florence to London. Still Life is the story of the creation of a family of friends. It’s a celebration of beauty and art in all its forms. Wise, witty, and told with such a huge heart, this is a book to fall absolutely in love with! – Diana

Cafe

After shopping, enjoy organic coffee, food, beer and wine upstairs at Bloomsbury Blends.

Bloomsbury Blends Coffeehouse

Order / Check Stock

Interested in ordering a book or checking our stock?
Give us a call during store hours at 541-488-0029 or use the link below.

Audiobooks

Access Audiobooks while still supporting your local bookstore by using Libro.fm!

Libro.fm audiobooks
HOURS: Mon-Sat 9am-8pm • Sun 10am-6pm

290 E. Main Street
Ashland, OR 97520
541-488-0029

SUBSCRIBE
Join our email list for latest news and upcoming events delivered to your inbox!

© Bloomsbury Books. All rights reserved. Site developed and hosted by Rogue Web Works.