Our latest recommendations from Books & Books owner Mitch Kaplan include a signed love letter to Florida, a page-turning crime thriller and James McBride’s new historical saga.
FICTION
The Stolen Coast by Dwyer Murphy
Casablanca is a long way from the sleepy coastal community of Onset, Massachusetts, but in The Stolen Coast, the sophomore novel from Dwyer Murphy, the risky spirit of the Bogart-and-Bacall fugitive-abetting classic imbues its balmy northeastern setting. The thriller’s protagonist, Jack, lives two lives: Aboveboard, he’s an upstanding attorney with a Harvard degree. In the shadows, he helps fugitives on the run from powerful people to receive new identities and new lives. The family business, which he runs with his retired-spy father, is going swimmingly until the unexpected entrance of Elena, Jack’s former lover, whose own illicit scheme will upend his tidy life. As the editor-in-chief of the great crime-fiction vertical CrimeReads, Murphy knows his way around a great twisty narrative, and The Stolen Coast has been praised across the board for its shocking twists as well as its humor and heart.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
Another haunting and masterly sprawl from the serial award-winning author of The Good Lord Bird and Deacon King Kong, James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store looks to America’s unenlightened past to ponder its present divisions. With the punch of great crime fiction, the book opens in a working-class Pennsylvania borough in 1972, as workers digging the foundation for a new development discover a skeleton at the bottom of a well. The identification of these remains is the first of many mysteries to unspool over McBride’s 400 pages, which transport the reader back to the 1920s Rust Belt, and the town of Chicken Hill, an enclave where Jewish immigrants and African-Americans labored under similar conditions and a similar sense of ostracization from white Christian America. The title place, we learn, is a market run by one such immigrant businesswoman, but heaven and earth also stand in for the love and community that bring people together even in the most trying circumstances.
ESSAYS
Jenn Shapland, author of this much-praised essay collection, knows about its title all too well: She was literally diagnosed with thin skin, aka extreme dermatologic sensitivity. Perhaps it’s made her a more reflective, compassionate and, yes, sensitive writer. The works in Thin Skin look both inward and outward, from “The Meaning in Life,” in which she mounts a defense for not having children, to the sobering title essay, in which she reckons with the horrific fallout, morally and health-wise, of the Manhattan Project in a way that “Oppenheimer” only hinted at. Shpaland’s home state of New Mexico is the setting for much if not all of Thin Skin, but her selection of topics is broad and transcendent, touching on queerness, consumerism, racism and the seemingly ever-looming threat of fascism. If not exactly a summer beach read, it’s probably the kind of book we should all be reading to better understand the world around us.
COFFEE TABLE BOOK
If you love Florida and are protective of its inveterate weirdness, this hulking 575-page road trip through the “Redneck Riviera” is an essential addition to your library. Unlike other Florida-skewering tomes and blogs, it lampoons largely with love; its contributions are written by Floridians with a passion for protecting the state’s more, er, unique qualities. These include portions on coleslaw wrestling, the Skunk Ape, Hemingway lookalike contests, high-flying mullet fish, a family nudist resort, the tailed entertainers at Weeki Wachie and, of course, the creature from the Black Lagoon. It even includes a pictorial history of Publix. Florida! was released in 2022, but you can now purchase signed copies from Calise, a culture writer for the Tampa Bay Times, at Books & Books. Among the book’s copious South Florida connections? Gabriel Alcala, who moonlights as the lead singer of Miami indie rockers Jacuzzi Boys, contributed its flavorful illustrations.
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