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Annie Bloom’s Books, Broadway Books, Literary Arts and Powell’s City of Books told us what their No. 1-selling books were for the month of October. Here’s what Portland is reading:
Annie Bloom’s Books
Western Terminus by Michael Keefe
This collection includes a novella and several shorts featuring characters in the limbo between self-discovery and self-destruction. Characters include a young boy witnessing the disintegration of his parents’ marriage, a woman following a poet into Tijuana in pursuit of a rumored under-border tunnel, and a heartbroken woman who’s become obsessed with a lion that’s escaped from a Portland zoo.
Broadway Books
Six Seasons of Pasta by Joshua McFadden
Joshua McFadden—a farmer, chef and restaurant developer known for launching Portland’s Ava Gene and Tusk—made a big splash in the cookbook world with the 2017 publication of Six Seasons: A New Way With Vegetables, which made seasonal, farm-to-table cooking accessible and even fun. Home cooks across Portland are already clamoring for McFadden’s latest, which was published at the end of September and promises to help you elevate pasta night.
Literary Arts
What Can We Know by Ian McEwan
Tying with Joshua McFadden’s pasta primer, Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know follows a pair of scholars in the year 2120 traveling across the ruins of England in search of a long-lost poem. “It’s a piece of late-career showmanship (McEwan is 77) from an old master,” New York Times reviewer Dwight Garner writes. Despite its dark vision of the future, Garner adds, “It gave me so much pleasure I sometimes felt like laughing.”
Powell’s City of Books
Alchemised by SenLinYu
This dark fantasy debut by Portland author SenLinYu follows a woman with missing memories as she fights to survive a war-torn world of necromancy and alchemy. The book, which began life as a massively popular Harry Potter-Hermione Granger fanfic, has been praised by The Daily Mail as “a work of staggering ambition” whose claustrophobia “wraps the reader in its dark embrace.”
