Explore Books explores themes of nature, mystery and family

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 Books in Aspen recommends a tale of a child gone missing, interlocking fables and a multi-century mystery.

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From the publisher: Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any 13-year-old: She’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished 14 years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.

From Annika White, bookseller: Don’t be intimidated by the size of this book; I flew through it! This is the perfect summer mystery read featuring a wide web of characters and lore. This book asks: “What are we willing to do for our family and what are we not?” With an ending that keeps you  guessing until the last page, you won’t want to put it down.

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From the publisher: “The Overstory,” winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of — and paean to — the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s 12th novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late 20th-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours — vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

From Elizabeth Sills, bookseller: A beautifully interwoven story of people and trees, and the intricacies that connect all of us to the natural world. For anyone who loves imperfect characters and stunning imagery.

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From the publisher: 2014: At a dinner for close friends and colleagues, renowned poet Francis Blundy honors his wife’s birthday by reading aloud a new poem dedicated to her, “A Corona for Vivien.” Much wine is drunk as the guests listen, and a delicious meal is consumed. Little does anyone gathered around the candlelit table know that for generations to come, people will speculate about the message of this poem, the only copy of  which goes missing, leading to an enduring mystery.

2119: Just over 100 years in the future, much of the planet has been submerged by rising seas following a catastrophic nuclear accident. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. In the waterlogged south of what used to be England, Thomas Metcalfe, a lonely scholar and researcher, longs for the early 21st century as he chases the ghost of one poem, “A Corona for Vivien.” How wild and full of risk their lives were, thinks Thomas, as he pores over the archives of that distant period, captivated by the vivid romances, politics, and betrayals of the era. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the elusive poem’s location, a story is revealed of entangled loves, long-kept secrets, and a brutal crime that destroys his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately.

“What We Can Know” is a masterpiece: a fictional tour de force, a love story about both people and the words they leave behind, and a literary detective story that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.

From Tony Alacantra, bookseller: Reading this book is like reading a great poem: Somewhere along the way you realize that, in addition to the great beauty, things are happening on more levels than you at first suspected. There is nothing magical in this book, nothing surreal or supernatural, yet what a stunning achievement by the author. When you finish, you might just want to read it again, to find how the rabbit got in the hat.

Type of Story: Review

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