A Peek at Peak Picks – April 2024

Ten new titles are joining Peak Picks in April – plus a bonus March pick!

In nonfiction, novelist Amy Tan presents a gorgeous, witty account of birding, nature, and the beauty around us that hides in plain sight with beautiful, original sketches by the author in The Backyard Bird Chronicles; Death doula Alua Arthur reframes how we think about death and how it can help us lead better, more fulfilling lives in the deeply transformative memoir Briefly Perfectly Human; Joy Sullivan debuts with a vivid and inspiring poetry collection about what’s possible when we heed our instincts and honor our intuition, allowing ourselves to strike out for new territories of love, pleasure, and peace in Instructions for Traveling West; Salman Rushdie provides a searing, deeply personal account of enduring—and surviving—an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him in Knife; Maggie Nelson delivers a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of profiles, remembrances, and critical essays that bring to life Nelson’s passion for dialogue and dissent in Like Love; and Taha Ebrahimi takes readers on a tour of existing trees throughout Seattle neighborhood and iconic parks through charming line drawings in Street Trees of Seattle.

In fiction, Leigh Bardugo returns with a historical fantasy set in Spain that follows Luzia, a kitchen servant whose ability to produce small miracles using magic launches her into a dangerous world in The Familiar; Leif Enger takes readers to a dystopian near future where Rainy, a grieving musician, sets sail on a sentient Lake Superior in search of Lark, his departed bookseller wife, in I Cheerfully Refuse; Elaine U. Cho debuts with a big-hearted Korean space opera about a disgraced space pilot struggling to find her place while fighting to protect the people she loves in Ocean’s Godori; and Ruth Reichl, former editor of Gourmet, pens a dazzling, heartfelt adventure through food, art, and fashion scenes of 1980s France in The Paris Novel. And Octavia Butler’s acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel of hope and terror, Parable of the Sower, which opens in the year 2024, is this year’s Seattle Reads selection and a Peak Pick, available now!

~posted by Frank