The Staff Shelf: Tattered Cover

When we walk into a bookstore, the first place we go is the staff recommendation shelves—it’s how you get a quick sense of the personality of the store. The very best bookstores are merely a reflection of the eclectic, deeply felt opinions of the book-lovers who work there. As part of our Interview with a Bookstore, we asked the staff at Tattered Cover in Denver what’s on their shelves.

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SLIDESHOW: Tattered Cover Staff Shelf

: LYNN FARQUHAR (BOOKSELLER) RECOMMENDS: This simple, beautiful children’s picturebook written and illustrated by Carson Ellis is all about homes for various human, mythological and historical types, fairyfolk, and animals… and even one for a mysterious mansion-dweller on an unnamed planet.

: CATHY LANGER (LEAD BUYER) RECOMMENDS: This powerful debut literary thriller looks at the conflict between the hoped for American Dream and the social isolation that was the reality of a mixed Caucasian Chinese American family in 1970’s Ohio. Every book club should put this on their reading list. And everyone else should read it, too.

: HEATHER DUNCAN (DIRECTOR OF MARKETING) RECOMMENDS: Station Eleven was my favorite book of 2014, and probably one of my favorite’s of all time. It is an epic adventure spanning several decades, a story of people whose lives all intersect through their connections to one man. This beautiful, captivating, heartbreaking, and hopeful novel lives up to the Star Trek Voyager quote at the heart of the story: “Because survival is insufficient.”

: KATE BRASCH (CHILDREN’S BACKLIST BUYER) RECOMMENDS: Once there was a small boy who loved to look out of his bedroom window. He had a very large imagination and he loved words and his mother even wrote down some of his first poems. He grew up, went to college, went to World War I, and then came home. All along he marveled at the world’s beauty and he wrote and published poems.

: JACKIE BLEM (TC LoDo COFFEE SHOP MANAGER) RECOMMENDS: This is a rollercoaster of a book, and I never thought I’d ever call a “literary thriller” anything like that. But it’s true. What seems grim just makes the amazing end of the book that much better!