July 2019
March 15th, 2021
Come visit us!
We have appointments available for personal shopping every day of the week.

Our Booksellers have some great reads to recommend to you.

The Highly Anticipated Sequel to
The Sympathizer is here


"You wouldn’t think Viet Thanh Nguyen could match the brilliance of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer, but his latest book The Committed is a dazzling follow-up and a glorious novel in its own right. Our nameless protagonist is now in Paris, wandering amid its metropolitan delights even as he can’t escape his tortured past. Ngyuen contrasts high-minded interior monologues against gritty immigrant Paris, making The Committed both a virtuosic philosophical novel and a racing story of revenge and betrayal. I can’t think of a novel that has so deftly blended literary style and emotional heft since Midnight’s Children."
--David Enyeart (Manager)
"What the immigrant, the ghost, the spy and the war have in common is that they are all gothic subjects, both haunted and haunter, notoriously difficult to contain. It is to his eternal misery (and many a reader’s delight) that the narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s extraordinary 2015 novel “The Sympathizer” happens to be all four.

Born to a Vietnamese mother and a French father, our narrator is a Communist mole, embedded among the South Vietnamese forces throughout war and beyond. A “spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces,” he betrays his way from Saigon to Los Angeles and back — only to end up imprisoned in Vietnam, confessing all his sins during his “re-education.” Equal parts Ellison’s Invisible Man and Chang-rae Lee’s Henry Park, Nguyen’s nameless narrator is a singular literary creation, a complete original.

Fortunately for us, this tormented double agent is back for another serving of ghostcolonial discontent in Nguyen’s showstopper sequel, “The Committed.” How fitting: After all, isn’t it the nature of the immigrant, the spy, the ghost and the war to return? (Nota bene: You need not have read “The Sympathizer” to enjoy “The Committed,” but why deny yourself the delirious, hair-raising pleasure?)"


-- New York Times (Read the full NYT Review)


Upcoming virtual book events
Discover and new books from the comfort of your own home

Laura Munson discusses Willa's Grove--Wednesday, March 17, 2021, 7:00pm
 
Three women, from coast to coast and in between, open their mailboxes to the same intriguing invitation. Although leading entirely different lives, each has found herself at a similar, jarring crossroads. Right when these women thought they'd be comfortably settling into middle age, their carefully curated futures have turned out to be dead ends.
 
The sender of the invitation is Willa Silvester, who is reeling from the untimely death of her beloved husband and the reality that she must say goodbye to the small mountain town they founded together. Yet as Willa mourns her losses, an impossible question keeps staring her in the face: So now what?
 
Struggling to find the answer alone, fiercely independent Willa eventually calls a childhood friend who happens to be in her own world of hurt-and that's where the idea sparks. They decide to host a weeklong interlude from life, and invite two other friends facing their own quandaries. Soon the four women converge at Willa's Montana homestead, a place where they can learn from nature and one another as they contemplate their second acts together in the rugged wilderness of big sky country.

The Oak Papers By James Canton--Thursday, March 18, 2021 - 6:00pm
 
Thrown into turmoil by the end of his long-term relationship, Professor James Canton spent two years meditating [PA1]beneath the welcoming shelter of the massive 800-year-old Honywood Oak tree in North Essex, England. While considering the direction of his own life, he began to contemplate the existence of this colossus tree. Standing in England for centuries, the oak would have been a sapling when the Magna Carta was signed in 1215.
In this beautiful, transportive book, Canton tells the story of this tree in its ecological, spiritual, literary, and historical contexts, using it as a prism to see his own life and human history. The Oak Papers is a reflection on change and transformation, and the role nature has played in sustaining and redeeming us. 

Next Chapter Book Club discusses Amnesty, by Aravind Adiga Sunday, March 28, 2021 - 4:00pm to 5:00pm

Danny—formerly Dhananjaya Rajaratnam—is an illegal immigrant in Sydney, Australia, denied refugee status after he fled from Sri Lanka. Working as a cleaner, living out of a grocery storeroom, for three years he’s been trying to create a new identity for himself. And now, with his beloved vegan girlfriend, Sonja, with his hidden accent and highlights in his hair, he is as close as he has ever come to living a normal life.

“Searing and inventive,” Amnesty is a timeless and universal story that succeeds at “illuminating the courage of displaced peoples and the cruelties of those who conspire against them” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis).

Outside the Margins: The Speculative Fiction Book Club discusses Vanished Birds--Tuesday, April 6, 2021 - 6:00pm

A mysterious child lands in the care of a solitary woman, changing both of their lives forever.  

I expected many things from this trip. I did not expect a family.

A ship captain, unfettered from time. A mute child, burdened with unimaginable power. A millennia-old woman, haunted by lifetimes of mistakes. In this captivating debut of connection across space and time, these outsiders will find in each other the things they lack: a place of love and belonging. A safe haven. A new beginning.

But the past hungers for them, and when it catches up, it threatens to tear this makeshift family apart.  

All the Children Are Home: A Novel By Patry Francis--Monday, April 19, 2021 - 7:00pm

Set in the late 1950s through 1960s in a small town in Massachusetts, All the Children Are Home follows the Moscatelli family—Dahlia and Louie, foster parents, and their long-term foster children Jimmy, Zaidie, and Jon—and the irrevocable changes in their lives when a six-year-old indigenous girl, Agnes, comes to live with them.

When Dahlia decided to become a foster mother, she had a few caveats: no howling newborns, no delinquents, and above all, no girls. A harrowing incident years before left her a virtual prisoner in her own home, forever wary of the heartbreak and limitation of a girl’s life.

Eleven years after they began fostering, Dahlia and Louie consider their family complete, but when the social worker begs them to take a young girl who has been horrifically abused and neglected, they can’t say no.

Body of Stars: A Novel By Laura Maylene Walter--Tuesday, April 20, 2021 - 7:00pm

Celeste Morton has eagerly awaited her passage to adulthood. Like every girl, she was born with a set of childhood markings—the freckles, moles, and birthmarks on her body that foretell her future and that of those around her—and with puberty will come a new set of predictions that will solidify her fate. The possibilities are tantalizing enough to outweigh the worry that the future she dreams of won't be the one she's fated to have and the fear of her “changeling period”: the time when women are nearly irresistible to men and the risk of abduction is rife.
 
Celeste's beloved brother, Miles, is equally anticipating her transition to adulthood. As a skilled interpreter of the future, a field that typically excludes men, Miles considers Celeste his practice ground—and the only clue to what his own future will bring. But when Celeste changes, she learns a devastating secret about Miles's fate: a secret that could destroy her family, a secret she will do anything to keep. Yet Celeste isn't the only one keeping secrets, and when the lies of brother and sister collide, it leads to a tragedy that will irrevocably change Celeste's fate, set her on a path to fight against the inherent misogyny of fortune-telling, and urge her to create a future that is truly her own.

Save the date!
Independent Bookstore Day is back
April 24th
Independent Bookstore Day is fast upon us and after this past year, we are thrilled to be continuing to put books in the hands of readers.

From audiobook deals from Libro.fm, to exclusive merchandise, as well as the return of the Independent Bookstore Roadmap Passport, stay tuned to see what we have in store for our 2021 celebration.
Thanks for reading
all the way to the end.

We've got lots more great books in the store. We hope you'll talk to us soon for a recommendation. Follow us on social media for the latest news. We’re Next Chapter Booksellers on Facebook; we’re @nextchapterbooksellers on Instagram; and we’re @NextChapterMN on Twitter.


--all of us at Next Chapter Booksellers