Petaluma Readers Embrace Author’s New Novel “Evelyn Hugo”
The best-selling titles at Copperfield’s Books, in Petaluma, for the week of August 29 to September 4, 2022
Book #1 on Petaluma Copperfield’s Top 10 Fiction and Non-Fiction Titles list is a page-turning drama in the world of championship tennis. In Taylor Jenkins Reid’s “Carrie Soto is Back” (“Malibu Rising,” “Daisy Jones & the Six”), a 37-year-old retired player with 20 Grand Slam titles to her name returns to the court when a newcomer comes dangerously close to breaking her record.
Reid is perhaps best known for her 2017 novel “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo,” which was Petaluma’s #3 bestseller as of March 2022. Beginning her career in film production in Hollywood before landing a literary agent at the age of 24, she later co-wrote the TV show “Resident Advisors” for Hulu, and will see her 2019 rock ‘n roll novel “Daisy Jones & the Six” become a ten-part TV series. on Amazon Prime later this year or early next. The series will feature Riley Keough, the granddaughter of Elvis Presley, an exciting cast for a show about a 70s rock band’s romantic entanglements.
Meanwhile, on the local children’s and young adult books list, the No. 1 title this week is Varian Johnson’s 2018 “The Parker Inheritance,” a gripping mystery/treasure hunt novel with a clever historical foundation. Candice Miller is a 12-year-old black girl who summers at her late grandmother’s house in Lambert, South Carolina. When she discovers a letter with clues to a hidden fortune, she teams up with her neighbor Brandon to find the treasure, gradually uncovering a story of racial tension from the 1950s that Candice’s grandmother grew up in.
Author Johnson (“My Life as a Rhombus”) is a prolific writer whose books have won numerous awards. He is a member of The Brown Bookshelf, an organization of authors founded to bring attention to the multiple black authors who write and illustrate books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry for children and young adults.
Here are the top 10 books on Copperfield’s fiction and nonfiction list, plus the full list for children and young adults.
FICTION REALITY
1.’Carrie Soto is back‘, by Taylor Jenkins Reid – From the author of ‘Malibu Rising’ and ‘Daisy Jones & the Six,’ this new novel follows a retired tennis champion who returns to the sport to defend her legacy of 20 singles titles from the Grand Slam of an up-and-coming player determined to break Carrie’s record.
2.’Annihilation‘, by Jeff Vandermeer – Chilling 2014 bestseller about an all-female team of scientists exploring X-Zone and a forbidden section of the US coast where something alien has landed and is gradually transforming everything it encounters.
3.’Down,’ by Mary Roach – In her latest nonfiction exploration of uncommon book topics, the author of ‘Stiff’ (a book about corpses) and ‘Gulp’ (all about the digestive system and its many startling realities) takes us brings a book about why animals sometimes attack humans, and what some of those humans do about it.
4. ‘Harlem mix,’ by Colin Whitehead – The author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novels ‘The Underground Railroad’ and ‘The Nickel Boys’ returns with a rowdy crime novel set in Harlem in the 1920s.
5.’state of terror,’ by Hilary Clinton and Louise Penny – A political thriller about a US Secretary of State trying to stop a group of nuclear terrorists, written by a best-selling political thriller author teaming up with a former Secretary of State.
6. ‘The Bone Shard Daughter,’ by Andrea Stewart – An epic fantasy about a kingdom continuing through the practice of bone shard magic, and the Emperor’s daughter, who desperately seeks to master the art and reclaim her place as heiress to the throne.
seven. ‘Where the Crawdads sing,‘ by Delia Owens – The bestselling novel about a young girl named Kya, who lives in a Louisiana swamp, abandoned by everyone in her life until she learns to survive by watching the bugs and swamp animals around from her. Oh, and there’s a murder mystery.
8.’The liminal zone,’ by Junji Ito – A graphic novel featuring four short stories of terror and suspense.
9.’Wrong telescope end,’ by Rabih Alameddine – A disturbing but gripping novel about a surgeon, once rejected by her Lebanese family because she was trans, who volunteers in a Greek refugee camp, where the people she meets change her life.
ten. ‘The personal librarian,’ by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray – Based on the true story of Belle da Costa Greene, the librarian hired by financier JP Morgan in 1905 to tend to his growing collection of rare books and paintings, unaware that she is black. A remarkable story of determination and self-confidence.
