Explore Booksellers suggests titles spanning time travel to poetry

Each week as part of SunLit — The Sun’s literature section — we feature staff recommendations from book stores across Colorado. This week, the staff from Explore Booksellers in Aspen recommends a novel of fate and free will, an Irish bestseller and a devastating book of poetry.

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From the publisher: Sixteen-year-old Odile is an awkward, quiet girl vying for a coveted seat on the Conseil. If she earns the position, she’ll decide who may cross her town’s heavily guarded borders. On the other side, it’s the same valley, the same town. Except to the east, the town is 20 years ahead in time. To the west, it’s 20 years behind. The towns repeat in an endless sequence across the wilderness.

A breathlessly moving “unique take on the intersection of fate and free will” (Nikki Erlick, author of “The Measure”), “The Other Valley” is “a stellar debut, full of heartbreak and hope wrapped up in gorgeous prose” (Christina Dalcher, author of “Vox”).

From Kamebry Wagner, staff: I fell into this beautiful piece of speculative fiction just like I was swept away by “Sea of Tranquility” by Emily St. John Mandel. “The Other Valley” is a quiet dystopian story about time travel, love, hope and loss and I found it equally refreshing and moving. I would highly recommend this book to those looking to immerse themselves in a thought-provoking premise and an eerily-familiar world.

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From the publisher: It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas’ house, she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this new household—where everything is so well tended to—and this summer must soon come to an end.

Winner of the prestigious Davy Byrnes Award and published in an abridged version in the New Yorker, this internationally bestselling contemporary classic is now available for the first time in the U.S. in a full, standalone edition. A story of astonishing emotional depth, Foster showcases Claire Keegan’s great talent and secures her reputation as one of our most important storytellers.

From Mo Kirk, membership coordinator: Like the film made from it, Claire Keegan’s “Foster” left me in tears. This novella unfolds with a quiet intensity, filling your senses with the Irish countryside, the simplicity of everyday life, and the weight of unspoken emotions, creating a tension that permeates every word by the end. It is a story of loss and longing told with remarkable clarity and grace.

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From the publisher: In “All Souls,” Saskia Hamilton transforms compassion, fear, expectation, and memory into art of the highest order. Judgment is suspended as the poems and lyric fragments make an inventory of truths that carry us through night’s reckoning with mortal hope into daylight. But even daylight can’t appease the crisis of survival at the heart of this collection. Marked with a new openness and freedom—a new way of saying that is itself a study of what can and can’t be said—the poems give way to Hamilton’s mind, and her unerring descriptions of everyday life: “the asphalt velvety in the rain.”

From Clare Pearson, book buyer: April is poetry month. This beautiful collection of poems is both delicate and powerful. Together, the poems and fragments capture and transcend mortality while offering clear-eyed observations of life. Short, but devastating.

Type of Story: Review

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