Whether you’ve got a gift card burning a hole in your pocket or you just can’t stand to leave your cozy reading fort for the cold world outside, it’s probably time for a new novel or three in your life. If you’re in Nashville, please stop by the shop to say hello and have a browse! If not — or if you really can’t leave your blankets — we’re happy to suggest a few masterful works of fiction here. Just click the titles below to order online, and you’ll only have to shuffle as far as your front door.
Late in the Day
Our First Editions Club is kicking off 2019 with this gripping story of what happens when a tight-knit quartet of friends suffers a crushing loss. Alex, Christine, Zach, and Lydia met and bonded in their twenties, and it’s thirty years later when Alex and Christine get the call from Lydia that something has happened to Zach. Sometimes loss brings people closer together, but in this case it also dredges up old pain and threatens to fracture friendships beyond repair. Hadley lives in the UK, but an ocean won’t stop us from getting signed first editions to you. So if you’d like an autographed copy of this novel to add to your home library, now’s the perfect time to join the club.
The Dreamers
Book lovers may remember Walker’s first novel, 2012’s The Age of Miracles, a coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of planetary disaster. She returns to that thematic territory in The Dreamers, where once again families, friendships, and the intimate realities of everyday lives are upended by a mysterious crisis; but this time, the apocalyptic event is a strange illness that’s causing people to drop into deep sleep. Speaking of sleep: don’t expect to get any until you finish this riveting novel, on shelves now. Several Parnassus staffers loved it, as did independent booksellers across the country — it made the January IndieNext list!
The Weight of a Piano
If music has played any part in your personal history, you’ll enjoy immersing yourself in this expansive story of how one instrument changes lives over a half-century and two continents. Cander weaves multiple narratives together, starting in the 1960s Soviet Union, where a girl named Katya discovers her talent as a pianist after receiving a Blüthner upright piano as a gift from an elderly neighbor. Another storyline takes us to California in 2012, where Clara, a young auto mechanic, considers selling the piano she inherited — but never learned to play — to a man who is interested in it for reasons of his own. The book comes out January 22, and you’re invited to join us for a reading, discussion, and signing with Cander right here in the store on Friday, February 1, 2019.
Now get back to hibernating, readers.
Musing 