Blue Hill Books

 

 the 2023 Bestsellers

 

Tom Lake
Ann Patchett
Harper

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family’s orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.

 

Reading the Glass: A Captain’s View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships
Elliot Rappaport
Dutton

What’s in a cloud? Did you know that water vapor is invisible and actually lighter than dry air? What separates a tropical storm from a winter blizzard? And what exactly is El Niño? Elliot Rappaport, a professional captain of traditional sailing ships, has spent three decades at sea, where understanding weather is crucial to the safety of vessels and their crews. In Reading the Glass, he offers a sailor’s-eye view of the moving parts of our atmosphere and unveils the larger patterns it holds: global winds, storms, air masses, jet streams, and the longer arc of our climate.

Told through a series of tall ship voyages, Rappaport’s narrative takes readers from the icy seas of Greenland to the Roaring Forties, places where one can experience all four seasons in an hour. He navigates the turbulent waters of the Strait of Gibraltar, en route to storied port cities of the Mediterranean. In the vast tropical Pacific he crosses the equator, where heat, moisture, and unsettled winds churn out powerful squalls, and drops anchor in isolated ports of call. He explores wide swathes of ocean to explain how the trade winds have carried ships westward for centuries, and how ancient Polynesian explorers pushed back the other way, leveraging their mastery of waves and weather to achieve what may be humanity’s greatest navigational achievement.

Written in stunning prose, brimming with wisdom, curiosity, and humor, Reading the Glass brilliantly blends science and memoir to reveal how weather has shaped our oceans, our history, and ourselves.

 

Demon Copperhead
Barbar Kingsolver
Harper

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Relayed in his own unsparing voice, Demon braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.

 

Covenant of Water
Abraham Verghese
Grove Press

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning–and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala’s long-existing Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl–and future matriarch, known as Big Ammachi–will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.

A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the difficulties undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. It is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.

 

Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America
Heather Cox Richardson
Viking

In the midst of the impeachment crisis of 2019, Heather Cox Richardson launched a daily Facebook essay providing the historical background of the daily torrent of news. It soon turned into a newsletter and its readership ballooned to more than 2 million dedicated readers who rely on her plainspoken and informed take on the present and past in America.

In Democracy Awakening, Richardson crafts a compelling and original narrative, explaining how, over the decades, a small group of wealthy people have made war on American ideals. By weaponizing language and promoting false history they have led us into authoritarianism — creating a disaffected population and then promising to recreate an imagined past where those people could feel important again. She argues that taking our country back starts by remembering the elements of the nation’s true history that marginalized Americans have always upheld. Their dedication to the principles on which this nation was founded has enabled us to renew and expand our commitment to democracy in the past. Richardson sees this history as a roadmap for the nation’s future.

Richardson’s talent is to wrangle our giant, meandering, and confusing news feed into a coherent story that singles out what we should pay attention to, what the precedents are, and what possible paths lie ahead. In her trademark calm prose, she is realistic and optimistic about the future of democracy. Her command of history allows her to pivot effortlessly from the Founders to the abolitionists to Reconstruction to Goldwater to Mitch McConnell, highlighting the political legacies of the New Deal, the lingering fears of socialism, the death of the liberal consensus and birth of “movement conservatism.”

Many books tell us what has happened over the last five years. Democracy Awakening explains how we got to this perilous point, what our history really tells us about ourselves, and what the future of democracy can be.

 

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder
David Grann
Doubleday Books

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then … six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death–for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann’s recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O’Brian, his portrayal of the castaways’ desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann’s work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.

 

Blueberries for Sal Cookbook
Clarkson Potter Publishers

With over three million copies sold since its publication in 1948, Robert McCloskey’s Blueberries for Sal has established its place in the hearts of readers worldwide. Now, for the first time, you can share Little Sal’s love of blueberries with this charming cookbook of thirty family-friendly, blueberry-based recipes to enjoy. Featuring the author’s original illustrations as well as new drawings inspired by the iconic images in the book, Blueberries for Sal Cookbook invites you to imagine all the ways Little Sal enjoyed her berries after that memorable day on Blueberry Hill.

 

Our Dark and Radiant Land
Helena Lipstadt
Finishing Line Press

After the holocaust, Helena Lipstadt‘s survivor parents fled Poland vowing never to return. Decades later, after her parents’ deaths, she warily visits, then returns, again and again. Walking on the city streets where her parents played as children, Helena begins to comprehend the interwoven culture of Jews and Poles. She honors her family’s layered history as she seeks and builds connections with the Polish people she meets.

In powerful prose and poems, Lipstadt looks at a bloodstained past with her heart’s eyes. Our Dark and Radiant Land is a map to a new place of seeing, where truth and reconciliation coexist.

 

Directions to Myself: A Memoir of Four Years
Heidi Julavits
Hogarth Press

That night, in his bed, I spread my son’s palm wide and tried to read it. If the hand was a map that led to a future person, was there any changing the destination?

One summer Heidi Julavits sees her son silhouetted by the sun and notices he is at the threshold of what she calls “the end times of childhood.” When did this happen, she asks herself. Who is my son becoming–and what qualifies me to be his guide?

The next four years feel like uncharted waters. Rape allegations rock the university campus where Julavits teaches, unleashing questions of justice and accountability, as well as education and prevention. She begins to wonder how to prepare her son to be the best possible citizen of the world he’s about to enter. And what she must learn about herself to responsibly steer him.

Looking back to her childhood in Maine, where she and her family often navigated the tricky coastline in a small boat, relying on a decades-old nautical guide, Julavits takes us on an intellectual navigation of the self. Throughout, she intertwines her internal analysis with a wide-ranging exploration of what it means to raise a child in a time full of contradictions and moral complexity. Using the past and present as points of orientation, Directions to Myself examines the messy minutiae of family life alongside knottier questions of politics and gender. Through it all, Julavits discovers the beauty and the peril of telling stories as a way to locate ourselves and help others find us.

 

Sea Witch: Photographs, Poems, and Forget-Me-Nots from a Mainer Growing Up
Kristie Billings
Seapoint Books

Sea Witch, a book of photography and poetry by Maine native, Kristie Billings – images and words of the sea, nature, folk art, dolls, loss, grief, love, acceptance, rage, music, life.From punk rock to menopause to swimming with seals! A middle-aged story of a Sea Witch. Kristie Billings comes from a long line of lovers of the sea: fishermen, clamdiggers, and sardine packers. The ocean is home. She is a poet, a photographer, and a year-round swimmer. She is currently living in Ellsworth, Maine, and a native of Stonington, on Deer Isle. A great lover of music, of art, and life, Kristie is drawn to beauty, even in the most ordinary, mundane way. She is drawn to what others may pass by, unnoticed. Kristie has worn many hats over the years. She is a long time Saturday night DJ on Community Radio, WERU 89.9 FM, in Orland, Maine. From small town grocery clerk, to making tie dye t-shirts for the local import shop, sometimes working at a fish market, or selling men’s suits, she owned her own shoe store. She has been an Arts Educator at a local theater, and lobster fisher, barista, and antique seller. Kristie is married to her best friend, Ed. They share a home with their rambunctious cats, who keep them on their toes. Kristie is a collector. Of stories, of emotions, of dolls, of feelings, wigs, mannequin parts, record albums, memories, beauty, laughter, vintage clothing, scallop shells, barnacles, hermit crabs. She is an observer. She’s been writing poetry since childhood, beginning with her love of Edna St.Vincent Millay to the Beat poets, Bukowski, and beyond. As for photography, she has been taking pictures for years with an old Nikon, and has proceeded to collect more cameras since then. She is drawn with awe to the artists that may make you uncomfortable.

 

Small Things Like These
Claire Keegan
Grove Press

It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.

An international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.

 

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