Indie Finds

Know why I love indie bookstores? Because while you’ll still find all the latest bestsellers you can also find books that may get overlooked at the big box stores. Books that definitely sound interesting and should get a bit of share in the spotlight don’t you think?

At our latest bookstore outing these are the books that I added to my list:

• The Impostor by Damon Galgut. From Publisher’s Weekly: In this bleak and thrilling novel, the fifth from Booker Prize-nominee Galgut, the author creates an antipastoral, postapartheid noir that centers around Adam Napier, a depressed poet who retreats to a rural South African town to write.
• Family Sold Separately by Kate Long. From the book: On the eve of her eighteenth birthday, Katherine wants only three things: a smidge of social grace, the body of Courteney Cox, and two parents. What she has instead is an almost complete lack of friends, a pudgy figure, and one extremely eccentric, nearly blind grandmother named Poll.
• If the Heart Is Lean by Margaret Luongo. A collection of sixteen stories about people in odd and sometimes surreal situations who thus have the opportunity to view their lives from a unique perspective.
• The End of an Error by Mameve Medwed. I’ve enjoyed some of her books so I had to add this one to my list which is the story of Lee Emery an empty nester, contentedly married to a man she has known forever and hunkering down in the house where she grew up. She believes she is happy occupying such a familiar emotional and physical space. But questions of the path not taken start to haunt her after she publishes a memoir of her deliciously eccentric grandmother with whom she traipsed through Europe at eighteen.
• The Empanada Brotherhood by John Nichols. Ok, so I added this one because of the title. I love empanadas. And, I love the idea of a zany cast of characters all coming together at an empanada stand.
• The Staff Room by Markus Orths. From the back: A grotesque, absurd satire which is also extremely funny. Kranich is a newly-qualified teacher about to take up his first job. After he arrives at the school, he is plunged into a Kafkaesque environment which has all the worst features of a totalitarian state.

Okay, so some of these aren’t quite independent finds as they are from major publishers but I thought they sounded good and maybe a bit quirky. Have you read any of these?

I hope you all have a great weekend filled with some good reads!