Shelf Talkers: What the Booksellers Are Reading at Point Reyes Books

Shelf Talkers is a series at Lit Hub where booksellers from independent bookstores around the country share their favorite reads of the moment. Here are recommendations from the staff at Point Reyes Books in Point Reyes, CA.

*

Elspeth Barker, O Caledonia

O Caledonia is a blackly funny coming-of-age novel that Ali Smith calls “one of the best least-known novels of the 20th century.” It presents a vivid depiction of misunderstood adolescence (raise your hand if you’ve been there) set against a misty northern landscape that is part Poe, part Djuna Barnes (read Nightwood!), and part Bronte sisters. Originally published in 1991, it’s the most memorable novel I’ve read in 2022.  –Stephen

Kathryn Scanlan, Kick the Latch

Reading this marvelous little book is like sitting down for a drink (I’m thinking whiskey) with a mysterious stranger and then realizing that this person is a bottomless well of surprising, strange, and beautiful true stories about racing horses. In other words, it’s pure delight.  –Molly

Namwali Serpell, The Furrows

Yes, grief is painful. But The Furrows, a fascinating novel about the death of a young boy whose body is never found, is just as interested in grief’s unsettling, twisty, utter strangeness and the way we obsess over the dead—and the way the dead follow us wherever we go.  –Sam

Daisy Hildyard, Emergency

Despite its attention-grabbing title, Emergency is a quiet novel that explores with remarkable subtlety the deep and fraying interconnectedness of life on earth. Hildyard writes with the precision and associative leaps of a poet (there are moments here that remind me of Alice Oswald, one of our great contemporary poets) about childhood in a small Yorkshire village, managing simultaneously to spin out from that specific place and time into something much more profound—a reckoning with the climate emergency. It’s something new that will linger long after you’ve finished reading.  –Stephen

Julie Phillips, Baby on the Fire Escape

“Creativity, motherhood, and the mind-baby problem”; those words, together, immediately resonated deeply, being a person whose creative mind has been forever altered (largely in good ways) by becoming a mother. The feeling remained throughout these essays about artists and writers and their varying relationships to motherhood—like Alice Neel, Ursula Le Guin, Audre Lorde, and Angela Carter, to name a few. The Baby on the Fire Escape is a profound and honest reflection of the great paradox of parenthood: how it changes you completely, yet you remain exactly who you are.  –Molly

Sasha Fletcher, Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World

This book blew me away! Ecstatically angry, furiously joyful and often hilarious, it’s the most radical book you’ll ever read about two people who just really, totally love each other (while reviewing some of history’s darker moments, hoping they aren’t blackbagged by the secret police, and wondering if/when the angels are coming).  –Sam

Ross Gay, Inciting Joy

I don’t often pick up books that explicitly have joy at their center, but as Ross Gay artfully demonstrates in these beautiful, vulnerable, haunting essays, joy is at the center of more than we think. This book revels in the joy to be found in some of our darkest and most despairing moments, as well as in its more obvious expressions, like dancing and kinship and growing food. I devoured it, and then went looking for more joy, which is a pretty great thing for a book to do.  –Molly

Nuar Alsadir, Animal Joy

Nuar Alsadir’s Animal Joy is a dazzlingly intelligent and associative essay on the value of spontaneity and laughter. Alsadir, who is a practicing psychoanalyst and a poet, writes with graceful exactitude, piling up breathtaking revelations throughout this marvelous book. I think of it as a sort of spiritual cousin to Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, though it’s as unique as they come. I love it, which I assure you is something I never thought I’d feel for a book that opens in clown school.  –Stephen