42 books recommended by our favorite booksellers

Featuring unputdownable thrillers, heartfelt poetry, groundbreaking memoirs, magical fiction, and more — this list of 42 books recommended by indie booksellers really has something for everyone.

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Credit: Courtesy of Jan Blankenship / Random House

“There are moments when the world we take for granted instantaneously changes,” Jon Mooallem writes in the opening pages of his 2020 book, This Is Chance!, “when reality is abruptly upended and the unimaginable overwhelms real life. We don’t walk around thinking about that instability, but we know it’s always there: at random and without warning, a kind of terrible magic can switch on and scramble our lives.”

Mooallem is talking about the Great Alaskan earthquake — a 9.2 magnitude quake that struck on March 27, 1964, decimated Anchorage, led to over 100 deaths, and remains the most powerful earthquake in US history — but when I read the book for the first time last March, the scene felt uncomfortably familiar. At the time, I was beginning to suspect we were on the brink of our own catastrophe. My husband and I had, fortuitously, just moved to a new apartment so we no longer had to share a bedroom with our 6-month-old son, but after just three days of figuring out my new commute we were told we should probably work from home. Out on walks to explore our new neighborhood, neighbors were starting to wear masks; stores were starting to close. Soon those daily walks ended, too. But it was early enough that I believed in the brevity of this newly named pandemic’s effects. We’d all stay at home for a couple of weeks, maybe a month or two, until we got a handle on the spread.

But then my husband’s salary was cut; soon after, mine was, too. We said goodbye to our nanny. We tried to find toilet paper. I sat on the floor of the shower and sobbed. You know how this story goes; you were there, too. We, like those at the epicenter of the 1964 quake, would soon find ourselves in a “jumbled and ruthlessly unpredictable world they did not recognize.”

I’ve returned to This Is Chance! a few times since last March. I interviewed Mooallem over text message, joking about the parallels between the book and our current bewildering reality, not yet realizing how far the destruction would reach. I wrote about the book for both our best of spring and end of year lists. For a while, I wouldn’t shut up about it to friends and acquaintances who, like me, were slowly losing the ability and will to read.

And now, suddenly, it’s March of 2021. I’m putting together a list of new paperbacks, and there it is. I remember what it was like to read it for the first time, and I think, God, was I ever so young?

For your reading list

Credit: papexbookshop

The Transit in Venus by Shirley Hazzard

On the surface, the plot of Shirley Hazzard's recently reissued The Transit Of Venus is relatively simple. Two beautiful sisters, Caroline and Grace, are orphaned in Australia, fall in love in post-War England, then live into middle age. But from there, the plot departs into something darker, stranger, funnier, more romantic — you feel that the characters are real, but living inside a fated story you and they are at the mercy of.

"I've thought there may be more collisions of the kind in life than in books," one character, the sincere and overlooked Ted Tice tells Caroline when they're young. "Maybe the elements of coincidence is played down in literature because it seems like cheating or can't be made believable. Whereas life itself doesn't have to be fair, or convincing."

That's the operating premise of this book: coincidence, fate, the unfair nature of life. Think British novelists Graham Greene or Ian McEwan: a current of menace, some romance, some deep thoughts about love and power. But Hazzard was Australian, not English, and a woman; this is no British novel, it's something totally unique. If any of this kind of thing appeals to you, you've gotta read The Transit of Venus — I'm already thinking about when I can read it again. Get your copy. —Katherine Miller

Virtual book events we highly recommend: March 29–April 4

⭐️ = a BuzzFeed Books favorite

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