Greetings from Three Lives & Company!

Between the start of October and the end of November, the book world celebrates a cavalcade of literary awards and prizes, and many of this year’s honorees will be familiar to those who frequent our Staff Favorites table. First comes the Nobel Prize in Literature, recently bestowed on László Krasznahorkai, a Hungarian novelist whose flair for mischief and mystery has endeared him to several Three Lives booksellers over the years. (Ryan, Toby, and Lucas are all fans.) Next we await the Booker Prize, the shortlist for which includes new work from Katie Kitamura, Andrew Miller, and Kiran Desai – shop darlings all. And perhaps closest to our hearts: our very own Ethan Rutherford, a Three Lives alumnus, is a finalist for the National Book Award for his brilliant debut novel North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther, published by A Strange Object. The winner will be announced in late November – good luck, Ethan!

Of course, our reading tastes cannot always follow the whims of the awards committees; in our recent favorites below, you will find our usual mix of new critical triumphs and stalwart backlist gems. But before we dive into those, we have just a few announcements and reminders ahead of what’s sure to be a busy fall and holiday season at Three Lives.

First, we are pleased to offer signed editions of two fall releases that will make especially fine gifts. One is the ten-year anniversary edition of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, repackaged in a beautiful four-volume box set (complete with original artwork and with a new afterword by Neel Mukherjee). The book comes out on October 28: if you would like a signed copy, please reach out to the shop soon to place your order. 

Alison Roman will also be signing copies of her new cookbook, Something from Nothing, which will be available on November 11. As with Hanya’s book, the sooner you get in touch to pre-order your signed copy, the better. 

Every year we encourage customers to be proactive in ordering for the holidays, and this year is no exception. Shipping delays from publishers can scuttle even the best laid plans if those plans are left to the last minute. If you know what you would like to order, or if you need guidance in choosing the perfect books for everyone on your list, there is no such thing as acting too soon. We are available every day to help: just call, email, or drop by the shop.

~ Recent Staff Favorites ~

When I’m not sure what to read next, I look abroad. Recent books have taken me to an Italian beach town in Domenico Starnone’s Old Man by the Sea (Europa, translated by Oonagh Stransky), three eras of Japanese history in The Third Love by Hiromi Kawakami (Soft Skull, translated by Ted Goossen) and India’s distant, still-reverberating past in William Dalrymple’s history The Golden Road (Bloomsbury).

Starnone’s novel is the most rooted in the present. On the sand, in trendy boutiques, paddling his new kayak, Nicola watches small mysteries knot and unfold among the residents of his seaside retreat. Like Starnone, he is a writer, and like Starnone, he is in the twilight of his life, reflecting on past triumphs and the narrowing prospects of his final years.

Riko’s life in Kawakami’s novel is split into three – her waking life, with a husband of questionable fidelity and the trappings of a modern but constricted existence, and two past lives, or fantasies, that play out in dreams: in the “floating world” of nineteenth-century Edo and in an imperial court of a thousand years past, the era of Sei Shōnagon and Lady Murasaki.

The Golden Road excavates the influence of the “Indosphere” on Asia, from the time of Siddhartha Gautama – centuries before Christ – through the flowering of Indian trade and culture, which brought religious ideas, technological innovations and revolutionary changes in art to a wide swath of the world. Diminished by time (and by the British East India Company, a topic Dalrymple discusses in another terrific book, The Anarchy) and neglected by historians, India’s legacy comes vibrantly alive in Dalrymple’s telling. – Ryan

I found A Mercy by Toni Morrison (Vintage) on my shelf, and it revived me. It is a precisely woven story set in colonial New England during a smallpox epidemic, told through the eyes of each member of the fragmented household of an Anglo-Dutch slaveholder. The best novels in my opinion unfold and unfold and never stop being surprising, right up until the end. I like when characters are not conscripted to their expected roles, to the actions you think they might take or the path in the story you think will be theirs. A Mercy lingers as an atmosphere, the haze of impending death and the rot of a new nation mixing with the savagery of first love.

I mention the other book I read recently to remind you to revisit some deep backlist this fall or encourage you to read classic young-adult fantasy fiction. I decided I finally wanted to read The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (I read an old Ballantine paperback, and we carry the William Morrow edition at the shop, though any edition will do), and of course it was fantastic! Sometimes, escapism is exactly what’s needed. – Elaine

I read Patricia Lockwood’s Will There Ever Be Another You (Riverhead) as a memoiristic essay collection, though the cover bills it as a novel. Our narrator is a writer named Tricia, whose previous books include a memoir about her father (a priest) and a novel about the internet (sort of); so far, so good. But a virus has scrambled Tricia’s language, her memory: in her new book she scintillates like a raw nerve, reporting from the long 2020s with classic Lockwood élan (deliciously precise descriptions of a surgical wound on one page, a slightly batshit ode to a Florida cryptid named MANGRO on another). The book unfurls with free-associative fervor, reflecting a reality that has gone more than a little off the rails. Do you believe that Covid-19 fried your brain, or do you blame the vaccine? Follow-up question: do you believe in Bigfoot? And are these two inquiries somehow connected? I’m not saying I have any answers, but I did enjoy this book an awful lot.

The small Norwegian fishing village at the heart of Jon Fosse’s Vaim (Transit, translated by Damion Searls) couldn’t seem farther away from the contemporary America of Lockwood’s novel. Yet there is deep unease shimmering beneath Fosse’s humble, undulant prose as well. Vaim is a ghostly love story staged like a play: small cast, few settings, told in three dreamy soliloquies. Here are ill-fated shopping trips, character names that repeat and transform across time, the quiet solace of patience and prayer – Fosse’s palette may be limited, but he achieves so much with his simple materials. 

J. Malcolm Garcia’s nonfiction Alabama Village (Seven Stories) is one of the best books I’ve read this year, a harrowing portrait of a Mobile, Alabama exurb with a deliriously high murder rate. Garcia channels the voices of Alabama Village into a narrative that is both richly textured and terrifyingly mundane. It almost reads like a short story collection: in each chapter Garcia follows one town resident for a week, a day, an afternoon, letting us share in their dreams and frustrations, wince when the inevitable gunshots ring out in the distance, and pray that this time, at least, it was nobody they knew. – Lucas

This month I read two memoirs – A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews (Bloomsbury) and Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Both deconstruct the surreal state of grief, Toews having lost her father and sister to suicide and Li having lost both her sons to suicide as well. 

In both of these memoirs, time requires cold endurance. No matter the anger or confusion Toews or Li is facing, time does not slow down or speed up. It keeps its pace and promises another day will meet them, that their relationship to suffering will change even if it will never be alleviated. Time does not march ahead to heal wounds or blur memories – it continues, even in the “abyss,” as Li more than once describes her grief, an abyss in which she must now make a home. For Toews, grief is more like a truce – brokered in the act of writing about the loss again and again – a deal she has made with an everlasting pain that offers endless curiosity.

Both women make sense of their grief in such different ways, Toews often through humor and Li through a more resolute acceptance. But one thing is strikingly similar: Toews and Li continue their communication with those they’ve lost, always. The writing, the abyss, the truce, the calendared days of absence – these are an ongoing conversation with the dead. The conversation is an effort. Living is an effort. Dying is an effort. Toews’s and Li’s ability to revere those efforts makes for memoirs that are not simply “bleak” or “dark” but richly human and affirming. As a refrain in Toews’s book reminds me, “We’re all trying to get home.” – Sarah

Ancillary Justice (Orbit), the first novel in Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy, is a space opera exploring themes of personhood, gender, imperialism, and consciousness through the lens of an artificial intelligence named Breq, the last remaining ancillary (a human body controlled by a spaceship’s AI) of the starship Justice of Toren. Driven by desire for revenge against the immortal, multi-bodied emperor of Radch, Breq uncovers a conspiracy within the empire’s fractured leadership.

Breq is such a compelling protagonist, the best one I’ve encountered all year. Leckie vividly depicts her shift from a hive-mind consciousness, spread across thousands of bodies, to a single fragmented self, forced to listen to others debate the morals of her personhood while she yearns for an identity that is ethically unjustifiable. One of my favorite topics in science fiction is the relationship between language and gender, and I love that Leckie uses “she” pronouns for all characters in a gender-irrelevant society, standing out from the usual masculine default. I can’t wait to start book two! – Marlowe

Back in Marin County in mid-August, while on my way to Stinson Beach for a week, I picked up a copy of The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd (Scribner) from the Staff Recommends table at Wayfinder Bookshop in Fairfax (great and trusted booksellers to be sure) and was immediately taken by this absolute gem of nature writing. Written after the Second World War, The Living Mountain details Shepherd’s years – decades! – of wandering, exploring, studying, and extolling the Cairngorm Mountains in northern Scotland. The book has long been considered a classic of the genre, and for good reason. Back home in New York I turned to Ian McEwan’s latest, What We Can Know (Knopf), and just marveled at the assured, confident storytelling of a genuine master. As always with his novels, there is the sheer narrative drive, at times almost a thriller’s pace here, but with much lying underneath to make a reader stop mid-sentence and reflect on an observation or thought. If I may quote from Dwight Garner’s spot-on New York Times review, this is “sophisticated entertainment of a high order.” Finally, and possibly the most exhilarating piece of writing I have read this year, the title novella in David Haynes’s story collection Martha’s Daughter (McSweeney’s) was stunning, staggering. Martha’s daughter, travelling home after her mother dies, spends her drive reflecting on her relationship with the overbearing, demanding, strict Black woman who raised her. I intend to give myself the gift of rereading this novella: so much to wonder over, to unpack in these 118 pages. – Toby

On a trip to London this spring I knew I had to get Bee Wilson’s newest book, The Heart-Shaped Tin. I was not willing to wait until its U.S. publication in early November (from W.W. Norton), so I found myself a copy at a lovely bookshop I had never been to before, Primrose Hill Books. 

Wilson begins by writing, “I have long felt that kitchen objects can have a life of their own. Even so, I found this eerie.” We learn of Wilson’s encounter, just weeks after her marriage has abruptly ended, with the heart-shaped tin that she used to bake her own wedding cake. Wilson soon begins to search for others who have attached strong and even magical feelings to kitchen objects. Her journey takes her around the world, even to Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks, our longtime neighbor (now on East 2nd Street), where Wilson learns the meaning of a 1930s tomato-shaped salt shaker that once belonged to Bonnie’s mother: her “most prized kitchen possession.” In another favorite chapter, titled The Ukrainian Kitchen Cabinet, Wilson explores a cabinet that remained firmly attached to the wall of a woman’s kitchen after a bomb hit her building, blowing away her floors and ceilings. “The kitchen cabinet was a perfect symbol,” Wilson writes, “because behind its tenacity there is a truth: cooking is a more enduring activity than war.” Wilson evokes not only the constancy of food but also the calming rituals of the kitchen: after the bombing, cooks will still stack dishes “neatly in a rack to dry, restoring order.” A pasta bowl, a sieve, a tureen, a whisk – each object tells a remarkable story.

I’m certainly not alone in my excitement for Samin Nosrat’s new cookbook Good Things (Random House), whose subtitle tells us all we need to know: “recipes and rituals to share with people you love.” There are recipes, lots of recipes – and anyone who has read or watched Samin knows how she feels about recipes – but for me, it is about the writing, the spirit, the hard-won wisdom that comes through in her essays. “The beauty of cooking is that it’s a vessel for both time and attention,” Nosrat writes. “Cooking for someone, or sitting down for a meal together, is about more than nourishment – it’s a way to share what’s most valuable to you with the people you care about.” Eight years in the making, Nosrat’s cookbook is a manual for finding our own joy. – Troy

~ Staff Favorites Now in Paperback ~

Fiction

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

Fathers and Fugitives by S.J. Naudé (Europa, translated by Michiel Heyns)

Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter (Nightboat)

Playground by Richard Powers (W.W. Norton)

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Picador)

The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck (Penguin)

The Rest Is Memory by Lily Tuck (Liveright)

Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte (William Morrow)

Nonfiction

Roman Year by André Aciman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

~ Signed Editions ~

Fiction

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Hogarth)

The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy (Mariner)

Sister Creatures by Laura Venita Green (Unnamed)

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell (Picador)

Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen (Knopf)

The Wayfinder by Adam Johnson (MCD)

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (New York Review Books, translated by Sophie Hughes)

A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar (Knopf)

Ghost Fish by Stuart Pennebaker (Little, Brown)

Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter (Nightboat)

Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead)

Middle Spoon by Alejandro Varela (Viking)

The People Who Report More Stress by Alejandro Varela (Astra House)

Nonfiction

The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis (Scribner)
Working Waterfront by Bill Gerencer (Archway)

All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert (Riverhead)

Next of Kin by Gabrielle Hamilton (Random House)

Still Life with Remorse by Maira Kalman (Harper)

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

Store Front NYC by James T. Murray and Karla L. Murray (Prestel)

We Survived the Night by Julian Brave Noisecat (Knopf)

True Nature by Lance Richardson (Pantheon)

Dear New York, I Love You by Ria Sim (Countryman)

Dear New York by Brandon Stanton (St. Martin’s)

Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson (Penguin Press, signed by Thompson)

Coming to My Senses by Alice Waters (Clarkson Potter)

A School Lunch Revolution by Alice Waters (Penguin Press)

We Are What We Eat by Alice Waters (Penguin)

~ The Three Lives & Company Bestseller List ~

1. What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (Knopf)

2. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Hogarth)

3. Heart the Lover by Lily King (Grove)

4. Dear New York, I Love You by Ria Sim (Countryman)

5. I Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally (Gallery)

6. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (Transit, translated by Ros Schwartz)

7. Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon (Penguin Press)

8. Night People by Mark Ronson (Grand Central)

9. The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck (Penguin)

10. Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter (Nightboat)

11. The Best Short Stories 2025: The O. Henry Prize Winners (Vintage, edited by Edward P. Jones)

12. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Picador)

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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.