Independent Bookstore Day 2025: In the Books

Great Big Beautiful Life

What begins as a charming if standard rom-com evolves into a hauntingly beautiful meditation on what makes a life well lived in the latest showstopper from Henry (Funny Story). Thirty-something entertainment journalist Alice Scott jumps at the chance to interview an octogenarian claiming to be the infamous Margaret Ives, descendant of American media royalty and a “Tabloid Princess” of yore. Alice heads to Little Crescent Island, a small coastal Georgia town, with dreams of Margaret’s biography being her big break. She’s not the only one vying for the job, though: Pulitzer winner Hayden Anderson is also in the running. They have a month to each separately interview Margaret then pitch their proposals. But Margaret’s stories don’t quite add up, leading Hayden and Alice toward each other as they search for answers. Flashbacks to Margaret’s glamorous past are threaded throughout the contemporary narrative, offering a candid glimpse into loves and lives lost and serving as a poignant counterpoint to the romance between Hayden and Alice. There’s also plenty of Henry’s trademark wit and even a hint of mystery as the sparring hearts probe the veracity of Margaret’s tales. This is a stunner. Agent: Taylor Haggerty, Root Literary. (Apr.)

Sunrise on the Reaping (A Hunger Games Novel)

Set 40 years after the events of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, this heart-wrenching novel from Collins centers a 16-year-old Haymitch Abernathy and his role in the climactic 50th Hunger Games. Though readers will know him as Katniss and Peeta’s ill-tempered, alcohol-dependent mentor during the 74th games, young Haymitch is a sweet-natured, responsible teen working hard to support his widowed mother and younger brother. In his free time, he attends to his sweetheart, Lenore Dove, a singer with a rebellious streak, who is one of the Covey, a group of formerly itinerant musicians. Then Haymitch is selected to compete in the second-ever Quarter Quell. His mother’s parting words—“Don’t let them paint their posters with your blood”—become his North Star as he balances the necessity of performing for the Games with maintaining his integrity and morality. As the Quarter Quell commences, Collins utilizes searing, precise language to vividly depict what each party—the tributes, the Capitol, and the districts at large—stands to lose and how these Games’ aftermath will come to shape the events of the original trilogy. Excerpts from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”—peppered throughout Haymitch’s first-person narration—heighten the story’s emotional resonance. It’s a brutal tale of compassion and rage, and a frank examination of propaganda and tragedy, that will satisfy longtime series fans and newcomers alike. Ages 12–up. (Mar.)

Correction: The text of this review has been updated for clarity.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

NBCC Award–winning artist Krug (Belonging) adapts Snyder’s 2017 bestseller into a graphic edition, with intricate, eerie collages that interpret historically informed “lessons” offered in response to the implicit “What can I do?” that followed the 2016 presidential election. Looking at Europe in the years leading up to and after the world wars, and the rise of Russian oligarchy in the 1990s, Snyder notes that “both fascism and communism were responses to globalization.” His advice occasionally reads as wishfully simplistic (do things you enjoy because it’s part of creating a civil society), but his analysis is prescient (“We are seduced by the notion of hidden realities and dark conspiracies that explain everything”). Krug manipulates photos, postcards, and commercial artwork to create an uncanny-valley effect alongside elegant pencil and watercolor work. To Snyder’s point that lazy media coverage removes context, a picture of a kitten is cut from a circus background and pasted on a postcard of a bleeding, dead deer. Snyder effectively argues that tyrannical regimes exploit fear and relies on complacency—with updated references to Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Among the concluding images are photos of the Statue of Liberty under construction: large and delicate, built and maintained only by collective work. Cautioning against the “politics of inevitability,” this gorgeously illuminated edition is as hopeful as it is ominous. (Oct.)

Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

YA author Green (The Anthropocene Reviewed) takes another turn toward nonfiction in this congenial history of the world’s “oldest contagious disease.” Green writes that he became “obsessed” with tuberculosis after a chance meeting at a Sierra Leone hospital with a charming young patient, Henry Reider, who was sick with drug-resistant TB. Green weaves Henry’s moving story of illness and recovery together with a social history of the disease, explaining that tuberculosis once killed rich and poor indiscriminately, but after the late-19th-century advent of germ theory, it became a “disease of the poor and marginalized.” Green contends that, today, injustice—lack of access to adequate food, housing, and healthcare—is the “root cause” of all tuberculosis, and urges that since “we are the cause... we must also be the cure.” Adhering to form, Green peppers his account with quirky-fun facts (the hatmaker who designed the Stetson, famously worn by cowboys, had moved to the West in search of a dry-air cure for his consumption) and YA-style philosophizing (“The world we share is a product of all the worlds we used to share”; “We live in between what we choose and what is chosen for us”). He also offers personal reflections on how his journey into tuberculosis philanthropy was fueled by his OCD and how the disease reminded him of his YouTuber brother Hank Green’s run-in with cancer. Green’s fans will be pleased by this window into his latest obsession. (Mar.)

Parable of the Sower

Hugo and Nebula Award-winner Butler's first novel since 1989's Imago offers an uncommonly sensitive rendering of a very common SF scenario: by 2025, global warming, pollution, racial and ethnic tensions and other ills have precipitated a worldwide decline. In the Los Angeles area, small beleaguered communities of the still-employed hide behind makeshift walls from hordes of desperate homeless scavengers and violent pyromaniac addicts known as ``paints'' who, with water and work growing scarcer, have become increasingly aggressive. Lauren Olamina, a young black woman, flees when the paints overrun her community, heading north with thousands of other refugees seeking a better life. Lauren suffers from `hyperempathy,'' a genetic condition that causes her to experience the pain of others as viscerally as her own--a heavy liability in this future world of cruelty and hunger. But she dreams of a better world, and with her philosophy/religion, Earthseed, she hopes to found an enclave which will weather the tough times and which may one day help carry humans to the stars. Butler tells her story with unusual warmth, sensitivity, honesty and grace; though science fiction readers will recognize this future Earth, Lauren Olamina and her vision make this novel stand out like a tree amid saplings. (Dec.)