It’s time to return to our annual tradition of sharing our recommendations for our favorite books that were published this year. We’ll start with our fiction selections. While many of these were selections for our First Editions Club for Fiction, it seems like most of our booksellers had different personal favorites!

  • John Evans, bookstore owner – Varina by Charles Frazier

  • Varina is a beautifully written Civil War novel about the Confederacy’s First Lady and her relationships with her husband, her children, and her friends. Literally, Varina the character filters the aristocratic South before, during, and after the Civil War through her unique feminine perspective.

  • Kelly, book buyer and events supervisor – Fire Sermon by Jamie Quatro

  • In Fire Sermon, Quatro plumbs truths about the gratification and restraint of desire, about the intimacy and estrangement of marriage, and about the steadfastness and inconsistency of faith. In anyone else’s hands, the level of empathy might not be as strong; Quatro adeptly depicts a messy situation with flawed people in a way that connects us with our own shortcomings.

  • Austen, operations manager – The Fighter by Michael Farris Smith
  • Lisa, first editions manager – Waiting for Eden by Elliot Ackerman
  • Hillary, front desk manager – Waiting for Eden by Elliot Ackerman
  • Clara, Oz manager – Bridge of Clay by Markus Zusak
  • Abbie, fiction supervisor – Florida by Lauren Groff

  • Florida is the best short story collection I’ve read in a long time. Groff expertly crafts micro-fiction that pulls you in from the first word and refuses to let go. A great book to read between holiday festivities.

  • Guy, First Editions Club supervisor – A Shout in the Ruins by Kevin Powers
  • In  this story, Kevin Powers looks piercingly at the American South whose savage history he carefully traces. A masterful novel, A Shout in the Ruins is a timely powerhouse full of seething violence and remarkable humanity.
  • Andrew, blog supervisor – Ohio by Stephen Markley

  • Told from the perspective of four narrators returning to the misbegotten Midwestern hometown, Ohio is a story full of longing, lost innocence, national malaise, and personal regret. The characters and setting are drawn as masterfully as they come.

  • Aimee, bookseller – My Year of Rest and Relexation by Ottessa Moshfegh

  • My favorite fiction pick for the year is My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Despite a cast of unlikable characters, together they form a bizarrely relatable story. I mean, who wouldn’t want to turn off the world and hibernate for a year? It turns out strange things happen when you take the medicine that the worst psychiatrist in New York City prescribes for you.

  • Hunter, bookseller – The Stars Now Unclaimed by Drew Williams
  • The Stars Now Unclaimed is an incredibly fun space opera that doesn’t fall prey to many of the clichés that plague modern sci-fi. Readers can immerse themselves in a massive universe that intrigues and excites.
  • Trianne, bookseller – An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

  • American Marriage is, first and foremost, a story about people. Romance, injustice, family, and racism is all just the backdrop of the thoroughly contemporary story of a woman, two men, and a wrongful prison sentence.

  • Jack, bookseller – Waiting for Eden by Elliot Ackerman

  • Ackerman’s Waiting for Eden is a strong story dealing with the heaviness of indecision and human suffering. It gives the reader the opportunity to grapple with an ethical dilemma posed by a ghost narrator, and will inspire reflections on one’s own mortality and the importance of communication with those we love.

  • Pat, bookseller – Virgil Wander by Leif Enger
  • Kyle, bookseller – Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami

  • Haruki Murakami’s newest novel, Killing Commendatore, is an engulfing, meandering, and gloriously Murakamian affair. Musical allusion plays its usual role as a character in and of itself, as does the author’s favorite theme of the surreal curiously coexisting with the rest of reality. A forlorn artist seeks meaning, direction, and inner peace on the top of a mountain. With the help of a few otherworldly happenings and an extensive collection of classical records, he manages to brush against those ideas–he even gets to talk to a few of them.

  • Jamie, bookseller – Anatomy of a Miracle by Jonathan Miles

  • This was a hard one. It was a toss up between Ackerman’s Waiting for Eden and Miles’ Anatomy of a Miracle. Both books deal with the destructive nature of war by looking at individual loss, and both make us question where good begins and exists in the world. Ackerman does so with serious, slow prose while Miles’ writing is quicker and with more levity. In fact, I’ve decided to leave this blurb noncommittal. Read them both.

  • Norris, bookseller – My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
  • Julia, bookseller – Southernmost by Silas House
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