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In-Store Reading: Maya Sonenberg
 One last reminder that UW writing professor Maya Sonenberg will be appearing at the store this Friday, August 19, at 7 pm to celebrate the release of her new book of short stories, Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters. Come join us!
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New Book of the Week
The Last White Man
by Mohsin Hamid
“One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.”
Kafkaesque from its opening line, Hamid's novel feels simultaneously fantastical and familiar. In this world, everyone's white skin turns to dark, inevitably, though not all at once, and people react accordingly: confusion, denial, anxiety, conspiracy, violence. This beautiful book feels incredibly timely, with parallels to pandemic life and our nation's continued reckoning with the injustices of systemic racism. Through Anders and Oona, Hamid shows us, intimately, and with rather hypnotic prose, how people are transformed by experience, made different by context, not only as they transition from white to black but as their lives change in other, perhaps more predictable, ways. —Anika
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New Book of the Week
Our Wives Under the Sea
by Julia Armfield
Think: Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, but sapphic and romantic. Leah returns home to her wife, Miri, from a deep-sea research mission that was only supposed to last three weeks. But after six agonizing months of absence, the Leah who has returned is as mysterious to Miri as the circumstances that kept her away. Foreboding and beautifully written, answers are divulged like slow drips of water from a leaking faucet. —Anika
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Old Book of the Week
Winter Love
by Han Suyin
In her long and well-traveled life, Han Suyin, the physician daughter of a Chinese father and a Belgian mother, wrote mostly about Asia, but in 1955 she published this very British gem of a novel, telling, with exquisite precision, the story of a love affair between two medical students in wartime London. Mara, already married, is glamorous amid the drab rationing; Bettina, known as "Red," the narrator, is "mousy" by her own description, but driven and attractive in her own way. The writing is breathtaking in its exactness and in its sudden revelations of beauty and doom, in an affair brutally corralled not only by the social enforcement of who could love each other, but by one character's inability to love at all. —Tom
[My enjoyment of the audiobook—available from our partners at Libro.fm—was heightened by the equally precise narration by Lucy Scholes, who, wonderfully, is also the editor at McNally Editions who has done so much to bring neglected women writers back into print.]
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Kids' Book of the Week
Phinney by Post Kids Book #80
What Feelings Do When No One's Looking
by Tina Oziewicz, illustrated by Aleksandra Zajac, translated by Jennifer Croft
"Courage," "Hate," "Longing," "Trust": I don't whether these feelings translate exactly from their Polish equivalents, but, judging from the irrepressible and distinctive personalities of Aleksandra Zajac's drawings and Tina Oziewicz's concise and evocative descriptions—"Calm pets a dog," "Nostalgia sniffs a scarf"—you and your small readers will likely recognize them in yourself and all around you. (Ages 1 to 5) —Tom
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Link of the Week
Lucy Scholes's Re-Covered
For more of Lucy Scholes's rediscoveries (see the note in my review of Winter Love above), you can scroll through her monthly Re-Covered column at the Paris Review, where she celebrates just the sorts of neglected books we love to celebrate here, including some books that (thanks in some cases to her efforts) are, like Winter Love, getting reissued this season, like Rosemary Tonks's The Bloater, Virginia Cowles's Looking for Trouble, and Emeric Pressburger's The Glass Pearls, and some we have been bringing in from the UK, like Alethea Hayter's A Sultry Month and F. Tennyson Jesse's A Pin to See the Peepshow. She sure can pick 'em!
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Cover Crop Quiz #242
From the 1997 first American edition of this translated novel.
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Last Week's Answer
Quite a few of your reading memories stretched back to 1994 for this American first edition of Carol Shields's Pulitzer-winning novel, The Stone Diaries.
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New to Our 100 Club
Deep River
by Karl Marlantes
(117 weeks to reach 100)
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New to Our 100 Club
RIver of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey
by Candice Millard
(827 weeks to reach 100)
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New to Our 100 Club
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith
(1018 weeks to reach 100)
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Phinney Books
7405 Greenwood Ave. N
Seattle, WA 98103
206.297.2665
www.phinneybooks.com
info@phinneybooks.com
Facebook page
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And speaking of in-person events, we were very intrigued by a new item that just appeared on the fall schedule at Town Hall Seattle: their 
