Staff Pick

USA TODAY BESTSELLER!

A Good Morning America Book Club pick - #1 Indie Next pick - LibraryReads pick - Book of the Month Club selection - Marie Claire #ReadWithMC book club selection - 2022 NPR "Book We Love" - New York Times Editors' Choice

Florida is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels wreak gradual havoc on the state's infrastructure, a powerful hurricane approaches a small town on the southeastern coast. Kirby Lowe, an electrical line worker, his pregnant wife, Frida, and their two sons, Flip and Lucas, prepare for the worst. When the boys go missing just before the hurricane hits, Kirby heads out into the high winds in search of his children. Left alone, Frida goes into premature labor and gives birth to an unusual child, Wanda, whom she names after the catastrophic storm that ushers her into a society closer to collapse than ever before.

As Florida continues to unravel, Wanda grows. Moving from childhood to adulthood, adapting not only to the changing landscape, but also to the people who stayed behind in a place abandoned by civilization, Wanda loses family, gains community, and ultimately, seeks adventure, love, and purpose in a place remade by nature.

Told in four parts--power, water, light, and time--The Light Pirate mirrors the rhythms of the elements and the sometimes quick, sometimes slow dissolution of the world as we know it. It is a meditation on the changes we would rather not see, the future we would rather not greet, and a call back to the beauty and violence of an untamable wilderness.

Includes a Reading Group Guide.

What does it take to master French cooking? This is the question that drives Bill Buford to abandon his perfectly happy life in New York City and pack up and (with a wife and three-year-old twin sons in tow) move to Lyon, the so-called gastronomic capital of France. But what was meant to be six months in a new and very foreign city turns into a wild five-year digression from normal life, as Buford apprentices at Lyon's best boulangerie, studies at a legendary culinary school, and cooks at a storied Michelin-starred restaurant, where he discovers the exacting (and incomprehensibly punishing) rigueur of the professional kitchen.

With his signature humor, sense of adventure, and masterful ability to bring an exotic and unknown world to life, Buford has written the definitive insider story of a city and its great culinary culture.

Nora says: Bill Buford's book is a raucous, fun read, furthering Buford's reputation for shrewd observations and incisive writing. The book tells the story of Buford moving to France, family in tow, to talk his way into a Michelin-starred kitchen in order to learn the secret of French cuisine. Funny and sharp, and. at times, terrifying!

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

*Includes an interview with James Hollis*

"Provocative and appealing . . . Well worth your extremely limited time." --Barbara Spindel, The Wall Street Journal

There's a good reason why everyone has been talking about Oliver Burkeman's New York Times bestseller, Four Thousand Weeks. Nobody needs to be told there isn't enough time. Whether we're starting our own business, or trying to write a novel during our lunch break, or staring down a pile of deadlines as we're planning a vacation, we're obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and ceaseless struggle against distraction. We're deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient and life hacks to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and yet the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks, the average length of a human life.

Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern obsession with "getting everything done," Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing that many of the unhelpful ways we've come to think about time aren't inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we've made as individuals and as a society--and that we can do things differently.

"Terrifyingly intense and eerily spiritual ...The best book I've read this year."
--LOS ANGELES TIMES

"These pages have a midnight sort of impact many novelists would kill to smuggle into their fiction."
--NEW YORK TIMES

"With Molly, Butler has created a towering tribute to Brodak, in all her complexities, and a harrowing document of unanswerable grief."
--VANITY FAIR

"[5 stars] ... Extraordinary and raw ... the triumph of his book lies in its compassion."
--THE TELEGRAPH

"Molly is a dark, gorgeously crafted read. It contains a tremendous amount of pain, and the loss of life, loss of potential, loss of what could have been weighs heavy. That Butler makes it out the other side whole enough to tell this story is the glimmer of hope that sustains the reader in the end."
--ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

"Molly is so vital, so full of force ... [it] guts the cliché description of someone with mental illness ... [a] gorgeous, sad memoir."
--SLATE

"A powerfully sad book ... Writers are often praised as 'fearless, ' but Butler is not. In Molly, he makes fear his companion. That is the only way to write, and to live."
--THE NEW YORKER

"Shattering ... The result is a brutal yet beautiful look at the ravages of mental illness and the complexities of grief."
--PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY

"I'm not sure I've ever been so totally consumed by any book--the way I was by Molly."
--INTERVIEW

"As the story of a marriage, Molly sees that desire, like love, can be both ignited and fractured by the unknowability of the other."
--BOOKFORUM

"The most immediate feeling of life I've ever had reading a book--a life lived at the desk and out in the world, a life of openness and secrets. "Make art for me," Molly wrote to Blake. "I will read it all." I breathed along with every word."
--PATRICIA LOCKWOOD

"How to praise a book of such wounded beauty as Blake Butler's phenomenal Molly? The same way one would a life lost early: with love and sincerity and anger and wonder and lithely elegant and observant insights that remind us and inspire us, as Butler precisely does, to live and to love ourselves."
--JOHN D'AGATA

"Molly is a brilliant and brutal book. Blake Butler fearlessly takes on love and grief and the mysteries of this world and the next."
--EMMA CLINE

"A dark miracle--actual evidence that what we can never know, what we could never imagine about the one we love, is what binds us to them, beyond death."
--MICHAEL W. CLUNE

"I was gripped from the start by this memoir's urgent honesty. Blake Butler turned a story that was almost unspeakable into a narrative at once brutal and loving, broken and solid."
--CATHERINE LACEY

Blake Butler and Molly Brodak instantly connected, fell in love, married and built a life together. Both writers with deep roots in contemporary American literature, their union was an iconic joining of forces between two major and beloved talents.

Nearly three years into their marriage, grappling with mental illness and a lifetime of trauma, Molly took her own life. In the days and weeks after Molly's death, Blake discovered shocking secrets she had held back from the world, fundamentally altering his view of their relationship and who she was.

A masterpiece of autobiography, Molly is a riveting journey into the darkest and most unthinkable parts of the human heart, emerging with a hard-won, unsurpassedly beautiful understanding that expands the possibilities of language to comprehend and express true love.

Unrelentingly clear, honest and concise, Molly approaches the impossible directly, with a total empathy that has no parallel or precedent. A supremely important work that will be taught, loved, relied on and passed around for years to come, Blake Butler affirms now beyond question his position at the very top rank of writers.

Ben says: Written in the wake of his wife's suicide, Butler's memoir perfectly captures the truly infinite depth of love, despite the fact that one mind can never truly touch another. The most beautiful book I have ever read.