Past Apple-a-Month Club Selections

November 2011

The heart of Magdelena Tulli's novel is the imaginary Polish town Stitchings. Reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's famous Macondo (in One Hundred Years of Solitude), Stitchings serves as setting for an array of darkly fantastic events: from a girl who refuses to acknowledge her death to the home of a man destined for a bullet that's circled the earth for years, Tulli's town offers the ultimate pleasure to readers: the impossible made believable. As such, we felt it was the perfect place to start our Apple-a-Month Club.

January 2012

The characters in this collection of linked stories are, as all characters are, on quests. But the quests herein take place in the smallest of spaces -- a detective's search for the inner truth of a person, the footsteps of an aging cartographer, everyone's desperate dialing in search of the click that means you're home. Emmanuel's writing, an ode to Baudelaire with echoes of Kafka and Borges, is both so precise and so vague as to attain something like universal meaning, spurring the reader into their own such reveries even as they tumble into those on the page. You're invited; you should go.

March 2012

I've been a bookseller long enough to know that this book is going to be a tough sell. As memorable and heartbreaking a novel as any I've read in recent memory, New Finnish Grammar is saddled with both a dry title and unassuming packaging. It's unlikely that either of these things are going to grab a hold of you the way the extraordinary story hidden inside of this book will; you'd be forgiven for passing the book by, as I did for months. (Finland? Grammar? I'll stick with Fifty Shades of Gray, thanks.) But, when I finally gave in to the nagging voice that insists I read a certain book, I found myself caught up in a heartbreaking story about a man with no memory, no language and no homeland. Narrated in an earnest, straightforward voice, New Finnish Grammar manages nonetheless to speak to profound questions of identity and meaning, all while remaining as compelling as The English Patient.

May 2012

Albert Cohen's The Book of My Mother defies classification, as a tribute to the complexities and depth of familial love should. Part memoir, part novel, and written originally as a collection of richly narrative and descriptive essays, the book is both the story of Cohen's relationship with and loss of his mother (who died shortly after he had left France for London to escape the Nazis during World War II) and a meditation on grief, family, exile and isolation. While you should probably keep tissues handy, there's great joy here, too -- Cohen, who once claimed that his true homeland was the French language, relays his often playful love for his mother in what seems to be a love affair with the sentence itself, each remarkably crafted and full of wit and wonder. Both a timely and timeless read for the month of Mothers Day.

July 2012

History, we all know, is written by winners. Marie Chaix's novel shows the flip-side of that well-worn axiom, offering a poignant account of a man (a fictionalized version of her father) who made a disastrously wrong choice and, as a consequence, ended up on the side of the losers. It's a novel about war, politics, and family. Even more, it's about distance: the distance between heartfelt conviction and the practical application of those convictions; the distance between members of a family; and perhaps most achingly, the insurmountable distances borne of war.

September 2012 

As you can see, this month's pitch comes from Miguel de Cervantes, the narrator of Cervantes Street: "As the creator of the immortal Don Quixotre, I (Miguel de Cervantes) deserve a suitably rich story, which I get here in Jaime Manrique's Cervantes Street, a novel full of the vibrancy, clamor, and castastrophe of the 16th century. Manrique deftly intertwines my life and adventures with those of my friend-turned-rival Luis de Lara. (Our relationship, unsurprisingly, soured over our love of the same woman.) Told in alternating chapters, so each character get his say, the novel builds layers of swashbuckling adventures and back-stabbing betrayals. A page-turner worthy of its subject." 

November 2012 

November was a lucky month: Dan Josefson, whose excellent debut novel That’s Not a Feeling was our November selection for the Apple-a-Month Club, did a reading at the store and even answered a few questions for our subscribers, who received signed copies of this one. The full interview is up on our Tumblr!

January 2013

In this novel (which was longlisted for the 2012 Man Asian Prize for literature), Uzma Aslam Khan captures the heartbreak of many kinds of love: romantic, parental, and most importantly, the complicated love for one's homeland. The first description to pull me into this story was that of the grey expanse and sweeping ocean cliffs of San Francisco's Outer Richmond district--not far from the creaky bookstore where I write this now--and her poetic language and vivid characters will pull you from the edge of one continent to the heart of another. 

March 2013

Gerbrand Bakker is a Dutch gardener who won's the world's most lucrative literary prize (IMPAC Award) for his compelling novel, The Twin, which is a Green Apple Books favorite. He had his work cut out for him writing a follow-up that would live up to that book and, luckily for us, he has succeeded by far. Ten White Geese is a slow, contemplative novel in touch with the rhythms of the earth, about an Emily Dickinson scholar who retreats to rural Wales, seeking to repair the damage inflicted on her by a bad marriage. Bakker's heroine finds solace in the lives of the animals around her and quietly works her way back to some semblance of normalcy. Told in evocative, luminous prose, Ten White Geese is an unforgettable book.