November 2022
Happy Stick Season!

What a glorious few weeks of foliage we had here in southern Vermont. The hills were on fire; gold leaves descended, framing the roads. I couldn’t help but think of Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Then it was just the beeches. And now it looks like we’re into stick season. But it was just sublime there for a moment, and I was lucky to be here for it. In fact, Robert Frost might be a little too spot on–just this morning I noticed a small stone wall of mine in need of mending.

The fall also brings some of the most exciting books of the year. BookTok sensation Coleen Hoover’s latest It Starts With Us is flying off the shelves. Cormac McCarthy, quite possibly the last of the “great white male American novelists” has surprised us all with the first of two new books this season–The Passenger which bookseller Alden Graves calls a “startlingly original novel…[which] leads the reader into the bleak forest of one man’s soul.”  Look for the second Stella Maris in December. Reading them has inspired me to put re-reading Blood Meridian, his 1985 classic, on my To Be Read list–right after I finish Victor Lavalle’s amazing novel Lone Women (coming in March) & underneath the book I’m maybe most excited for this year Emma Smith’s Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers. I had the pleasure of hosting the Oxford Professor for her book This Is Shakespeare in my favorite virtual event to date (you can watch the recording here). Speaking of events, I’m particularly looking forward this month to our virtual event with Colm Tóibín, the virtual event with Anthony Horowitz, and our in person with beloved author-illustrator Matt Tavares whom I had the pleasure of hosting in 2019 for the gorgeous Dasher.

I hope you join me in starting to think about the coming months–for the last several years we’ve been pinched during the holiday season by “supply chain” issues. Shop Early is the slogan we’ve been adding to Shop Local. And finally like Aesop’s ant start preparing for winter with me by putting away a robust To Be Read pile.

Keep reading,
Dafydd Wood, Northshire Bookstore
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Featured Release

The long-awaited new book from the best-selling and beloved author of The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook and Smitten Kitchen Every Day—a collection of essential recipes for meals you'll want to prepare again and again, from Cozy Chicken and Dumplings to Fettuccine with White Ragú, and from Chocolate Peanut Butter Cup Cookies to Strawberry Summer Stack Cake.

Deb Perelman is the author of two best-selling cookbooks; one of the internet's most successful food bloggers; the creator of a homegrown brand with more than a million Instagram followers; and the self-taught cook with the tiny kitchen who obsessively tests her recipes to make sure that no bowls are wasted and that the results are always worth the effort.

Here, in her third book, Smitten Kitchen Keepers: New Classics for Your Forever Files, Perelman gives us 100 recipes (including a few favorites from her site) that aim to make shopping easier, preparation more practical and enjoyable, and food more reliably delicious for the home cook.

Pre-order Highlight

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache returns in the eighteenth book in #1 New York Times bestseller Louise Penny's beloved series.

As the villagers prepare for a special celebration, Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir find themselves increasingly worried. A young man and woman have reappeared in the Sûreté du Québec investigators’ lives after many years. The two were young children when their troubled mother was murdered, leaving them damaged, shattered. Now they’ve arrived in the village of Three Pines. But to what end?

Gamache and Beauvoir’s memories of that tragic case, the one that first brought them together, come rushing back. Did their mother’s murder hurt them beyond repair? Have those terrible wounds, buried for decades, festered and are now about to erupt?

As Chief Inspector Gamache works to uncover answers, his alarm grows when a letter written by a long dead stone mason is discovered. In it the man describes his terror when bricking up an attic room somewhere in the village. Every word of the 160-year-old letter is filled with dread. When the room is found, the villagers decide to open it up.

As the bricks are removed, Gamache, Beauvoir and the villagers discover a world of curiosities. But the head of homicide soon realizes there’s more in that room than meets the eye. There are puzzles within puzzles, and hidden messages warning of mayhem and revenge.

In unsealing that room, an old enemy is released into their world. Into their lives. And into the very heart of Armand Gamache’s home.

New Fiction on our Shelves
New Nonfiction on our Shelves
New Paperbacks on our Shelves
New Releases from our Children's Department
Order online at www.northshire.com


Manchester Center, VT
open to the public and for curbside delivery

4869 Main Street
Manchester Center, VT 05255


Saratoga Springs, NY
open to the public, for curbside pickup,
and for home delivery with 9 Miles East

424 Broadway
Saratoga Springs, NY 12866
Both stores are open daily from 10 am - 7 pm with the following exceptions:

Wednesday, November 23rd: 10 am to 4 pm
Thursday, November 24th: Closed
December 19th to 23rd: 10 am to 8 pm
Saturday, December 24: 10 am to 4 pm
Sunday, December 25th: Closed
Saturday, December 31st: 10 am to 4 pm

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