Greetings from Three Lives & Company!

There is always an informal guessing game at Three Lives as the holidays approach: what book will become the book of the season? Sometimes the answer has already been clear for months. (A new Patti Smith memoir or Amor Towles novel can be the ringer.) And other years, like this one, it’s all up in the air. Will it be Maira Kalman’s Still Life with Remorse (of which we have signed copies!) or Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo, which has earned the adulation of half our staff? Or one of the new books from an author long-beloved by Three Lives, like Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings or Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls or Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain?

Occasionally it’s the neighborhood mood that drives our hot books of the holidays. Readers looking for solace might pick up Ina Garten’s memoir Be Ready When the Luck Happens or Stanley Tucci’s What I Ate in One Year. For distraction? Great Bars of New York City or one of Susan Kaufman’s New York photo books. To keep occupied? A whole range of new cookbooks (which you can read about in Troy’s Cookbook Corner below) have just been published, including new titles from Yotam Ottolenghi, Tieghan Gerard, Christina Tosi, and Anna Jones. And there will be those who reach for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message or Timothy Snyder’s On Freedom, seeking understanding, or at least an explanation, of the new world around us.

Others will be reading this newsletter just to find their next great book, period. We have plenty of suggestions for you in our write-ups this month – books we have recently read and others that have stuck with us throughout the year. You’ll also find a new edition of Miriam’s column on the best recent children’s books – it’s no easy task to winnow down all the great new titles for the little ones in your circle, especially at gift-giving time.

As always, if we don’t carry a specific book that you are looking for, we are happy to special order a copy for you. Just get your requests in early, if possible – while our orders and shipping have been smooth so far, there can be delays as we get closer to the end of the month. With Christmas and the start of Hanukkah on the same date this year, there is sure to be an even bigger crush of last-minute shoppers than usual. (And if you look up and suddenly it’s December 24 and there’s no book under the tree for the reader in your life, remember that we offer gift certificates as well!)

~ Recent Staff Favorites and Year-End Roundups ~

As someone whose favorite book of the year is often just the most recent book I read, writing year-end wrap-ups is never easy, but I’m happy to say that the books that stuck with me this year put up a fight to stay on top. 

My number one book of the year is There’s Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House). Abdurraqib is a generational talent, and there is nothing by him I haven’t loved, but it has been a long time since a piece of literature has permeated my everyday life like this. Which is to say I’ve started watching basketball – though it is not a prerequisite for enjoying the book. (Go Knicks!) I’m looking forward to Abdurraqib’s upcoming poetry collection I’m Always Looking Up and You’re Jumping.

Speaking of poetry, my aim every year is to read more of it. While I didn’t quite meet my goal of five poetry collections in 2024, I’m glad I took the time to read A Poetry Handbook and Rules for the Dance by Mary Oliver (both Ecco). They were helpful companions to Diane J. Rayor’s new translation of Sappho’s complete works (Cambridge University Press) and A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib (Tin House).

Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas (Overlook) was the first book I read this year and I have not stopped thinking about the friendship at the heart of this novel. It truly belongs in the category of Elena and Lila from My Brilliant Friend, and it is a stunning portrait of the all-consuming friendships of adolescents. As someone who spent my formative years trying to make sense of the world and myself via the internet, I was equally surprised and charmed by how the forums and website names may change, but the experience is all the same.

As I’m writing this I’m nearing the end of Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet (Soft Skull). This blend of speculative and historical fiction follows a librarian caught in the orbit of the three scientists who invented the atomic bomb – Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and Enrico Fermi – after they mysteriously reappear in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2003. Admittedly, as a fan of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, this book feels designed to appeal to me personally. Still, I think there’s a lot to love and admire in Millet’s characterization of these historical figures as they attempt to make sense of the legacy of their work. It might sound risky to recommend a book before I’ve finished it, but I trust Millet will stick the landing. – Marlowe

When László Krasznahorkai’s latest novel landed at the shop, colleagues turned to me and asked if I was going to read it. Written in a single sentence, Herscht 07769 (New Directions, translated by Ottilie Mulzet) is right up my alley (hello Ducks, Newburyport!).  Once again, I was enthralled by a novel without periods, paragraph breaks, quotation marks – the devices one typically relies on to maintain order and rhythm while reading. Set in a small village in eastern Germany where a chain of disturbing and destabilizing events occurs, the story, and its style – that single sentence! – create a charged, live-wire reading experience.

From one of my favorite writers, Lily Tuck, The Rest Is Memory (Liveright), her fictionalized story of a real adolescent Polish girl murdered at Auschwitz (that’s her concentration camp photo on the front cover), is an affecting reminder of the consequences of an authoritarian leader, fanatical followers, and a compliant, willing citizenry. Creating and blaming an Other to scapegoat, ostracize, demonize, hate, and kill is a history lesson to be reminded of again and again. And again...

Looking back at 2024, two books of the many I enjoyed stand out. Waterlog (Tin House), Roger Deakin’s memoir/travelogue of swimming in the rivers, estuaries, bays, lochs, and seas of the United Kingdom is simply a joy: time spent with a nimble, humble, erudite, funny raconteur. I feel fortunate to have been in his presence through this glorious book. And, if I may, Waterlog would make a wonderful holiday gift for any outdoor enthusiast or armchair traveler.

My other highlight from 2024 had a small but significant impact on my life, changing the way I have started my day since I read the book in late March. Josephine Johnson writes in The Inland Island (Scribner) of sitting on her Ohio farm in the late sixties taking in the nature around her, once spending hours in the rain hoping to catch a glimpse of an elusive muskrat. When I closed the book I thought that I, too, could try sitting and looking, not on a Midwestern farm but in a Brooklyn backyard. So, now, before I turn on the radio, check my phone, catch up on email, or read the newspaper, I take my coffee outside and just look and listen: robins in a birdbath; trees swaying in a breeze; the Big Dipper wheeling in a pre-dawn sky; crows cawing atop the cross on the old church across the way. Yes, there’s the constant hum of the BQE, the airplanes on approach into LaGuardia, and garbage trucks huffing and puffing around the neighborhood, but there is still much to exalt in an urban greenway. – Toby

Here’s a book I read this year that I would recommend to almost anyone: The Birds (Penguin Classics, translated by Torbjørn Støverud and Michael Barnes), Tarjei Vesaas’s 1957 novel about a brother and sister scraping out a living in rural Norway. Mattis, the brother, is one of twentieth-century literature’s great observers, and Vesaas dazzles with his strange, turbulent voice. Another short book filled with glorious description is Border Districts by Gerald Murnane (Picador): a sure bet for fans of W.G. Sebald.

In Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), as in Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night (Hogarth, translated by Megan McDowell), the pleasure comes not only from the plot – for Rooney, young people trading grief for love in modern-day Dublin; for Enriquez, a demonic cult performing human sacrifices in Dirty War-era Argentina – but also from the good, old-fashioned fiction of it all: characters whose lives we come to believe in, worlds that refuse to disappear once we close the cover.

And I love a good mystery. Two standouts from my reading year are Patrick Modiano’s Missing Person (translated by Daniel Weissbort, available from Verba Mundi in April), in which an amnesiac detective tries to solve the case of his own forgotten past, and Martin Amis’s Night Train (Vintage), a murder plot told in furious retrograde. In Amis’s hands, a locked-room whodunit becomes a startling exploration of the morbid void at the center of the whole genre. 

S.J. Naudé’s Fathers and Fugitives (Europa, translated by Michiel Heyns) really stuck with me: a tale of two estranged cousins struggling to create a life worth living in the endless grasslands of central South Africa. I’ve also been haunted by the dystopian near-future of Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s American Abductions (Dalkey Archive) – a world of ubiquitous surveillance and mass deportations, presented in a dizzying cascade of interviews and dreams. These novels offer two fragmented, disturbing visions of family life in the age of imperial decline.

Other books provide solace, shelter, even inspiration in troubled times. Books on craft, art, nature – the best of these help us to conceive of a more just world. Some titles I think fit the bill (and would make excellent gifts): Nigel Slater’s A Cook’s Book (Ten Speed); Hannah Kirshner’s Water, Wood, and Wild Things (Penguin), a meditative travelogue through traditional Japanese handicrafts; Christopher Neve’s Immortal Thoughts (Thames & Hudson), a lyrical celebration of “late style” in the work of some of Europe’s greatest painters; and Charlie Porter’s Bring No Clothes (Penguin), a fascinating history of the Bloomsbury group, told through the material of its members’ clothing.

I should end this list of recommendations with Paul Yamazaki’s Reading the Room (Ode Books). Paul has been the book buyer at City Lights in San Francisco for more than a half-century, and this slim paperback – really a series of interviews – is filled with the knowledge, humor, music, and memories of a life spent at a worthy vocation. The ultimate “stocking-stuffer” for a real book-lover (which, if you’ve read this far, you certainly are!). – Lucas

I can’t say literature wowed me this year, and whether I’m to blame (likely) or the recent crop of fiction is to blame (less likely), I’m chalking up 2024 as a lost year in books. But! I’m unwilling to concede total defeat as I did discover an author this year who is going to be keeping me company for some time to come: Isabel Colegate. Thanks to multiple customers pressing her works in my hands, I devoured her only two novels in print in the U.S. (publishers, get on this!): the middle-age sibling drama Winter Journey and The Shooting Party (both Counterpoint), a sharp dissection of the pre-World War I British class system. These works are small (clocking in at under 200 pages) and mighty – clean, elegant prose (of the kind that often prompts the comment “Why don’t people write like this anymore?!”), impeccable character delineation and depiction of interpersonal relationships, engaging plots and occasional surprising twists. My new comfort read, and couldn’t we all use that in the months to come? So while I scour used bookshops for her out-of-print novels and import the rest from the U.K., make haste and read the two that are available here. Your holidays will be all the brighter. – Miriam

Three books have made a big impression on me this year. First, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing (W.W. Norton). What a marvelous journey – and I won’t give anything away, but Laing ends with “There’s no point looking for Eden on a map. It’s a dream that is carried in the heart: a fertile garden, time and space enough for all of us… Sometimes it hibernates, preserved in a bank of words. There is a line I love, from the fourteenth century English Psalter of Richard Rolle. This boke is cald garthen closed, wel enseled, paradyse ful of all appils. But this book is a garden opened and spilling over.” Bravo, Olivia! 

Nothing prepared me for how enthralling Harriet Baker’s Rural Hours (Allen Lane) would be. It is about the country lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rosamond Lehmann – three women who sought out life in the countryside as a place for healing, inspiration, and above all freedom. In 1917 Virginia Woolf, following years of illness, wasn’t yet ready to engage in politics, but she did begin to write again in her Asheham diary. After reading the entries Baker writes “How does one continue living in the midst of horror but by focusing one’s attention on nearer things: the garden, dogs, things noticed in Lewes or Firle? Her news is of a local kind. Ordinary life is reassuring and quietly compelling. She tightened the focus of her looking. The guns were sounding from France, but she reported there was no yeast for baking bread, no sugar for jam.” Waiting, watching, looking.

Focusing one’s attention on the present and on ordinary moments is what Nigel Slater is most known for, whether in the kitchen, the garden, or out in the world. Slater’s newest book A Thousand Feasts (4th Estate) is a memoir of sorts, from his notebooks of curiosities and happenings, fleeting moments well worth remembering. No memory is more than two pages, and each ends with a brief, poetic evocation. I never read more than two at a time – they are to savor, to think about, instead of gobbling up. “A train ride through Sweden. Vast silver skies, green-black forests. A tiny orange marzipan cake in my tuckbox.” – Troy

This year I tried to put less emphasis on what to read and followed my heart to a very strange assortment of books! My favorites include a few old ones I’d been meaning to get to: the philosophical sci-fi epic The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (Harper), which reminded me that now I have to read everything Le Guin has ever written; the original rom-com, Emma by Jane Austen; and the World War II queer romance by Mary Renault, The Charioteer (Vintage).

I made some wonderful discoveries in used bookshops, including a tiny hilarious novel about wealthy New Orleanians called The Lives of the Saints by Nancy Lemann (Louisiana State University Press). It contains one of the most endearing and comprehensively nutty casts of characters and makes you feel like you’re in a rumpled white linen suit on a balmy summer night, sitting on the lawn getting drunk as a trombone plays mournfully in the background. It made me sob as well!

I also found my way to a loosely nonfictional collection called This Is Not Miami (New Directions, translated by Sophie Hughes), haunting anecdotal histories of Veracruz, Mexico from a powerhouse of an author, Fernanda Melchor. Another collection that stood out, this one short stories, was Honored Guest by Joy Williams (Vintage), which was like reading little concentrated doses of chaos. And finally, The Repeat Room by Jesse Ball (Catapult) is one that has stuck in my head ever since I read it – one half is about a dystopian judicial system of moral responsibility and the other a tale of horrifying family cruelty. 

Thank you for reading and shopping with us this year – onto the next! – Elaine

This was an unusually fiction-centric year for me. I always alternate my reading between fiction and non-, but for 2024 it was the novels that stood out more: Richard Powers’s Playground (W.W. Norton) and Percival Everett’s James (Doubleday), both new this year, and two older books, Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke (Picador) and Paul Theroux’s Kowloon Tong (Mariner). I also sped through Haruki Murakami’s latest, The City and Its Uncertain Walls (Knopf, translated by Philip Gabriel), and can attest that the long and leisurely middle section – Murakami fans know what I’m talking about here – is a perfect winter read: it’s set in a snowy mountain village and is filled with tea, jazz and the Platonic ideal of a wood-burning stove.

My book of the year? It has to be Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (Hogarth, translated by Deborah Smith). It’s a punch in the face, and I can’t wait to read more of Han’s work.

Of course, there are a few nonfiction titles that I have to mention, and my very first book of the year kicks off that list: Patricia Evangelista’s Some People Need Killing (Random House), a brutal chronicle of fear and fanaticism in the Philippines during the Duterte drug war years. And a book for a very different mood: Fuchsia Dunlop’s Invitation to a Banquet (W.W. Norton), an exuberant, elegant ode to Chinese cuisine and culinary history.

I also want to highlight a series that I have somehow never mentioned in this newsletter, though I’ve liked and learned from several of its entries: Columbia Global Reports, a collection of brief (often 100-150 pages) nonfiction titles that tackle thorny and sometimes quirky issues of foreign policy, technology, economics and other topics. The one I read this year, Why Flying Is Miserable: And How to Fix It by Ganesh Sitaraman, is emblematic of the sort of thing they cover, and in the past I’ve also enjoyed High-Speed Empire (Will Doig), about China’s Belt and Road program, and New Kings of the World (Fatima Bhutto), a treatise on pop culture in India, Turkey and South Korea. – Ryan

I first bought David Wojnarowicz’s memoir Close to the Knives (Vintage) in 2018. This book, with its heart-stopping cover of buffalo diving off a cliff, felt almost hot in my hand. I knew it was a book that would shift things inside of me once I’d read it. Like many books that feel this important, it sat on my shelf for an embarrassingly long time, waiting for me to be ready for it. This past spring I finally pulled it from my shelf and gave it my full attention. No one writes like Wojnarowicz: he is vulgar, and beautiful, and full of rage in the most satisfying of ways. The criticism he throws at the U.S. government in these pages still holds now more than ever. I read this book on the train back from protests on college campuses. I read this book during another infuriating election cycle. I found solace not just in David’s anger but in the way he activated it. He activated a fight for beauty, for art, for living shamelessly in the face of a government’s constant attempts to stifle your life. He wasn’t scared to piss people off, to call out politicians by name. His cries for anger were equal to his cries for softness, for reaching out to each other: “bottom line, each and every gesture carries a reverberation that is meaningful in its diversity; bottom line we have to find our own forms of gesture and community.” Tenderness and explosive grit: a stunning balance that Wojnarowicz not only carries through this book but also carried through his life. Close to the Knives is, yes, my favorite book of the year. But more than that, it is a book capable of shifts. It is a book of force. 

As for recent reads, I’ve found myself back in the poetry section thanks to Adrienne Rich. Her book What Is Found There (W.W. Norton) reflects on poetry’s position in and reaction to political movements. It is one of those books that has turned me on to other books and poets – the best kind of book in my opinion! Since reading it I have picked up collections by June Jordan, Muriel Rukeyser, and Judy Grahn. It has caused me to fall in love with poetry again, for which I am immensely grateful. – Sarah

~ Small & Mighty with Miriam ~

Another fall full of original, beautiful children’s books – perfect for holiday gifting or just for spoiling the tiny humans in your life! See my particular animal-themed favorites below, but since I can’t write up everything that caught my eye this season, special mentions also should go to these early reader stories: Beti and the Little Round House by Atinuke (Candlewick, illustrated by Emily Hughes), A Day with Mousse by Claire Lebourg (Transit, translated by Sophie Lewis), and Mishka by Edward van de Vendel and Anoush Elman (Levine Querido, illustrated by Annet Schaap and translated by Nancy Forest-Flier).

The Most Beautiful Winter by Cristina Sitja Rubio (Eerdmans, translated by Vineet Lal)

Sometimes a badger just doesn’t feel like hibernating. But what happens when all of his other animal friends are sleeping through the winter? Why, he must make some new friends, of course! A fun exploration of animals who slumber through the coldest months and those who are out and about, The Most Beautiful Winter is, true to its name, a beautiful book, enlivened with vibrant, saturated, more free-form illustrations that will be a cozy companion for the chillier days ahead.

Miss Leoparda by Natalia Shaloshvili (Enchanted Lion, translated by Lena Traer)

I love the art in this picture book; I love the message; I love the story. Miss Leoparda, about a bus-driving leopard who loses her sleeping tree and her customer base when all the other animals decide to start driving cars instead of taking the bus, is the whole package. What an absolutely lovely and endearing vehicle (pun intended?) to talk to kids about climate change, modes of transit, the importance of community, leadership, and new ideas. May we all be – and teach our children to be – Miss Leopardas!

Little Shrew by Akiko Miyakoshi (Kids Can Press)

This young reader book, broken up into three illustrated stories, has taken Three Lives by storm. Detailed, evocative drawings both in black-and-white and color bring to life Little Shrew’s daily routine – breakfast, commute, work, food shopping – and his moments of joy and surprise: solving a Rubik’s Cube, learning of a tropical island he one day hopes to see, an annual winter visit from dear friends. This book is almost unbearably charming, remarkably touching in its simplicity and earnestness.

~ Troy’s Cookbook Corner ~

A few days after the election, I was home thinking about what to have for dinner. Sure, it would have been easy to call a local spot and pick it up, or just slide something frozen into the oven, but a part of me felt hurt, deeply saddened, in shock, and I needed comfort. With Kamala’s words fresh in my head – “Don’t ever give up. Don’t ever give up. Don’t ever stop trying to make the world a better place. You have power!” – I opened the new Anna Jones cookbook Easy Wins (4th Estate) and began to assemble her Puy lentil and tomato dish: lentils, a tomato, a little garlic, fresh thyme, chopped onion, a good glug of olive oil and after some simmering, right before my eyes, a meal came together. Sam and I sat at our table, comforted by something we had made. We had not resigned ourselves, we had made something, and it felt like a small personal triumph. The simple act of making dinner allowed me to know and believe: it is going to be okay, and it’s in my power to make it so.

Anna Jones put it perfectly in her newsletter: “If there was ever a week for comfort food, this seems like it. I am very sure I am not alone in craving comfort but also craving hope.” And she goes on to suggest her lemony bright beans as “the food equivalent of those feelings.” Easy Wins could be your go-to cookbook for weekday meals, organized around twelve ingredients that Jones guarantees will make our food more flavorful: lemons, olive oil, vinegar, mustard, tomatoes, capers, chili, tahini, garlic, onions, miso, and peanuts. Nothing exotic there, just pantry staples. Mixed in with those chapters are essays on cooking advice and Jones’s invaluable “golden rules for easy wins.” No. 10: “Make it your own. This is your dinner. Make it taste good to you. Your taste buds are unique, so this food should reflect that - that could mean more dill, more capers, less lemon, more crispy breadcrumbs. It should be a plate of food you are proud of and want to eat.” Now, that’s a rule to live by!

Yotam Ottolenghi has a timely new cookbook called Ottolenghi Comfort (Ten Speed), written with Helen Goh, Verena Lochmuller, and Tara Wigley. The first important question is: Do you need yet another Ottolenghi cookbook? YES! Comfort sets off on a collective journey to define what “comfort food” is, and it is fitting that this newest book is written by four authors with their own stories, flavors, and dishes that bring comfort to them and their families. So much deliberation goes into the “why” of the book, and the introduction on the meaning of “comfort” is real food for thought. “It’s about our journeys and all the stories contained in them. This book is a celebration of that: of movement, of immigration, of family, of home – of people.” I chose their linguine with miso butter, shiitake, shallots, and spinach, with a big squeeze of lime – and it was flavorful in an unexpected way, and oh so comforting. Utterly delicious.

I’ve had my eye on the calendar for when Sonoko Sakai’s new cookbook would arrive, and finally, it is here in all its beauty, originality, and inspired design: Wafu Cooking (Knopf). What is wafu, you ask? It means “Japanese style.” It’s food from any culture or cuisine that is tweaked in presentation, technique, or ingredients to give it a Japanese flair. For example, Sonoko’s mother would make a Bolognese sauce and add miso – her way of “wafu-ing” the sauce. In her conversation with Francis Lam on The Splendid Table, Sonoko puts it so well: “We are becoming very open, and celebrating this kind of fusion, because I stand firmly in a place where I respect the fundamental authentic ingredients of any cuisine, but the little tweaking is just part of our evolution.” I’ve been “wafu-ed,” and I will be making Sonoko’s miso apple pie.

Is there anything more comforting than a potato? Potato Total was written by Stefan Ekengren (Gestalten), a chef out of Stockholm who has long loved potatoes and, in his restaurant, never creates dishes in which the potato is only “on the side.” Shouldn’t every home have this on its shelves? A go-to for all things potatoes. I’ll be pickling jars of potatoes this winter. Who knew?! And I’ll be making Stefan’s “Pommes Anna” – thinly sliced potatoes tossed with melted butter, garlic, herbs, and salt before being baked straight in a mold. Heaven. 

What could be better than a plate of cookies warm from the oven? Well, Ben Mims has written an instant classic on cookies from all over the world: Crumbs (Phaidon). As soon as I saw this cookbook, I put it on my Christmas wish list. What fun to have a book that takes its baker all over the world – Senegal, Italy, Vietnam, Iceland, Austria, Poland, Mexico, Germany, India, the U.S., and beyond. When I think about the power of a homemade cookie, I remember a recent quote from the wise Ina Garten: “You can be miserable before you eat a cookie and you can be miserable afterwards, but never while you’re eating a cookie.”

A big shout-out to Christina Tosi and her new book Bake Club (Knopf), with a cover designed by Chip Kidd (!!) and full of “welcoming, disarming, unpretentious, yet show stoppingly impressive and insanely delicious” recipes. (Bugle Bars!) Matt Rodbard on the Taste podcast (in its 500th episode!) interviews Tosi and calls it her best cookbook yet. For optimistic company in the kitchen, have a listen at tastecooking.com. A love letter to the East Village, Murakami, muffins, and the joy of baking.

I look forward to seeing you all at the cookbook case, overflowing as it always is with many fabulous cookbooks just waiting for a good home.

~ Staff Favorites Now in Paperback ~

Baumgartner by Paul Auster (Grove)

One Woman Show by Christine Coulson (Avid Reader)

Absolution by Alice McDermott (Picador)

Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park (Random House)

~ Signed Editions ~

Fiction

Entitlement by Rumaan Alam (Riverhead)

The Woods at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury)

One Woman Show by Christine Coulson (Avid Reader)

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The Blue Hour by Paula Hawkins (Mariner)

The Goodbye Process by Mary Jones (Zibby Books)

Foster by Claire Keegan (Grove)

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Grove)

So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan (Grove)

Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan (Grove)

Lies and Weddings by Kevin Kwan (Doubleday)

The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead)

There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak (Knopf)

The Fraud by Zadie Smith (Penguin)

Swing Time by Zadie Smith (Penguin)

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (Viking)

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles (Viking)

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles (Viking)

Table for Two by Amor Towles (Viking)

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (Ecco)

Rental House by Weike Wang (Riverhead)

Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga (Tin House)

Nonfiction

Talkin’ Greenwich Village by David Browne (Hachette)

The Believer by David Coggins (Scribner)

The Optimist by David Coggins (Scribner)

Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The Bookshop by Evan Friss (Viking)

Girls Standing on Lawns by Maira Kalman (Museum of Modern Art)

Still Life with Remorse by Maira Kalman (Harper)

Women Holding Things by Maira Kalman (Harper)

Walk With Me: Hamptons by Susan Kaufman (Abrams)

Walk With Me: New York by Susan Kaufman (Abrams)

Going Infinite by Michael Lewis (W.W. Norton)

Ottolenghi Comfort by Yotam Ottolenghi et al. (Ten Speed)

Intimations by Zadie Smith (Penguin)

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall (Metropolitan)

~ The Three Lives & Company Bestseller List ~

1. The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami (Knopf, translated by Philip Gabriel)

2. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

3. Still Life with Remorse by Maira Kalman (Harper)

4. Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Grove)

5. An Almanac of New York City for the Year 2025 edited by Susan Gail Johnson (Abbeville)

6. The Vegetarian by Han Kang (Hogarth, translated by Deborah Smith)

7. The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey (Random House)

8. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper)

9. Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst (Random House)

10.Typhoid Mary by Anthony Bourdain (Bloomsbury)

11.Butter by Asako Yuzuki (Ecco, translated by Polly Barton)

12.The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (Picador)

13.Walk With Me: New York by Susan Kaufman (Abrams)

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SPECIAL ORDERS:

A reminder that we specialize in special orders. In our small shop it’s always a challenge to find room for all the new, notable, and exciting books; if you’d like a book that we don’t have on hand, we are always happy to order it for you. We place orders almost daily and the usual turnaround time for a special order is two business days. For some books it may take longer, but we’ll be sure to discuss the particulars with you before we place an order. Additionally, we can ship books to you anywhere within the United States. Give us a call, send us an email, or stop in any time.

PREORDERS:

We are happy to take preorders for forthcoming titles, and we will let you know as soon as the book arrives. We are all too familiar with the fervid desire to possess a new book at the first possible moment, and we will do everything in our power to make sure the book lands in your hands hot off the presses.

GIFT CERTIFICATES:

We offer gift certificates, which you may purchase in any amount.  

Three Lives & Company, Booksellers

154 W. 10th St.

New York  NY 10014

212.741.2069

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