Shelf Life

Category: Audiobooks

  • In My Time of Dying: An Evening with Sebastian Junger

    In My Time of Dying: An Evening with Sebastian Junger

    The Book Stall (811 Elm Street in Winnetka) is thrilled to host New York Times bestselling author Sebastian Junger at the store on Wednesday, June 19 at 6:30 pm for a discussion featuring his new book, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. Part medical drama, part searing autobiography, and part rational inquiry into the ultimate unknowable mystery, a near-fatal health emergency led to this powerful reflection on death and what might follow by the bestselling author of Tribe and The Perfect Storm. 

    This is a ticketed program. The ticket price of $30.51 includes a copy of the book, and options include a ticket that admits two people (with one book) or one person with one book. Sebastian Junger will be signing his work following the talk! To purchase tickets, please visit The Book Stall’s website or  CLICK HERE. 

    More About the Book: As an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. “It’s okay,” his father said. “There’s nothing to be scared of. I’ll take care of you.” That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day when he was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived.

    This experience spurred Junger, a confirmed atheist, raised by his physicist father to respect the empirical, to undertake a scientific, philosophical, and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die. How do we begin to process the brutal fact that any of us might perish unexpectedly on what begins as an ordinary day? How do we grapple with phenomena that science may be unable to explain? And what happens to a person, emotionally and spiritually, when forced to reckon with such existential questions?

    Sebastian Junger author photo by Christopher Anderson

    Bestselling author James Patterson says, “Let me start this way: I believe that Sebastian Junger is one of the finest writers of our generation. In My Time of Dying is a stunning book about life, about death, about the afterlife…Junger has clearly obsessed about his subject. The result is a powerful book that comes as close as anything I’ve read in explaining what it means to be human.”

    More About the Author: Sebastian Junger is the New York Times bestselling author of Tribe, War, Freedom, A Death in Belmont, Fire, and The Perfect Storm, and co-director of the documentary film Restrepo, which was nominated for an Academy Award. He is also the winner of a Peabody Award and the National Magazine Award for Reporting.

  • The Hunter’s Daughter: Is She As Evil As Her Father?

    The Hunter’s Daughter: Is She As Evil As Her Father?

    “And I didn’t ask any questions,” the narrator of Nicola Solvinic’s debut mystery-thriller The Hunter’s Daughter (Berkley ), says in her first-person account of what it’s like having been raised by a serial killer. “I truly didn’t want to know the answers. When the rifle went off, did I kill my dad? Or Agent Parkes? Did I miss them both, and did they fight it out? Did Dad get arrested, or did he kill Agent Parkes and run.”

    These obviously are not the typical questions most children have regarding interactions with their fathers. But police officer Anna Koray is the daughter of a notorious serial killer, a fact she keeps hidden with the use of a different name, a move far from home, and estrangement from her mother who did little to protect her.  

    It works for a while until a traumatic incident triggers long-repressed memories and Anna’s past, sealed off by her therapist in a controversial and experimental hypnosis treatment, begins to emerge. Her father, known as the Forest Strangler, murdered more than a dozen women, their bodies decorated and left as sacrifices to the god of the forest. But he also taught Anna to love the woods, to be one with the forest and nature. The dark dense woods with rustling trees that line the perimeter of her yard call out to her, beckoning her forward. In many ways, it’s where she feels most at home—the feel of dirt between her toes, the smell of the rotting leaves. But as much as it entices her, that forest also harbors secrets and possibly malignant forces that may harm or even destroy her.

    There are many questions confronting Anna as she deals with her surfacing memories. Can she trust her lover who may be hiding his own addictions? Is her father, who is supposedly dead, really alive? And is Anna herself a killer—someone who has her father’s propensity as well as his genetics to do evil? She has killed, supposedly in self-defense. But is that true? Or does she enjoy killing just as he did? And will she do it again?

    When her psychiatrist, the woman who hypnotized her into forgetting her past, is found murdered, Anna has to wonder if she played a part in the death. After all, she had broken into her office to steal her file folder before the police, who are closing in, can locate it and discover her true identity. Did she do more than take the file? Did she destroy the woman who can reveal her past?

    Desperate to keep people from realizing that she is the daughter of the Forest Strangler, Anna also has to try to determine that even though she became a police officer to help others, she may be as evil as her dad.

    A tense psychological thriller, terse plotting, and Anna’s own uncertainty about who she is, what acts she’s committed, and whether she can trust her own thoughts, feelings, and actions, keeps this book a page-turner.

    About the Author

    Nicola Solvinic has a master’s degree in criminology and has worked in and around criminal justice for more than a decade at local, state, and federal levels. She lives in the Midwest with her husband and cats, where she is surrounded by a secret garden full of beehives.

    This review originally appeared in the New York Journal of Books.

  • The French Ingredient: Making a Life in Paris One Lesson at a Time

    The French Ingredient: Making a Life in Paris One Lesson at a Time

    The Book Stall (811 Elm Street in Winnetka) is delighted to host author Jane Bertch on Thursday, April 11 at 6:30 pm for a discussion featuring her new book, The French Ingredient: Making a Life in Paris One Lesson at a Time, the inspiring and delicious memoir of an American woman who had the gall to open a cooking school in Paris. A true story of triumphing over French naysayers and falling in love with a city along the way, The French Ingredient is the story of a young female entrepreneur building a life in Paris. As she established her school, Jane learned how to charm, how to project confidence, and how to give it right back to rude waiters. Having finally made peace with the city she swore to never revisit, she now offers a love letter to France, and a master class in Parisian cooking and living.

    To register for this free event, please visit their website or CLICK HERE. Space is going fast!

    More About the Book: When Jane Bertch was eighteen, her mother took her on a graduation trip to Paris. Thrilled to use her high school French, Jane found her halting attempts greeted with withering condescension by every waiter and shopkeeper she encountered. At the end of the trip, she vowed she would never return. Yet a decade later she found herself back in Paris, transferred there by the American bank she worked for. She became fluent in the language and excelled in her new position. But she had a different dream: to start a cooking school for foreigners like her, who wanted to take French cuisine classes in a friendly setting, then bring their new skills to their kitchens back home.

    Predictably, Jane faced the skeptical French, as well as real-estate nightmares, and a long struggle to find and attract clients. Thanks to Jane’s perseverance, La Cuisine Paris opened in 2009. Now the school is thriving, welcoming international visitors to come in and knead dough, whisk bechamel, whip meringue, and learn the care, precision, patience, and beauty involved in French cooking.

    More About the Author: Jane Bertch has spent more than two decades living and working in Europe. In 2009, she started La Cuisine Paris, which has become the largest nonprofessional culinary school in France. She holds a BA in English, an MA in labor and industrial relations from the University of Illinois, and an executive MA from the French business school INSEAD. The French Ingredient is her first book. Follow her on her blog.

  • Max’s War: The Story of a Ritchie Boy

    Max’s War: The Story of a Ritchie Boy

    The Book Stall (811 Elm Street in Winnetka) on Thursday, April 18 at 6:30 pm is presenting a program with author Libby Fischer Hellman featuring her new book, Max’s War: The Story of a Ritchie Boy. This suspenseful coming-of-age war story is Libby Hellmann’s tribute to her late father-in-law who was active with the OSS and interrogated dozens of German POWs. To register for this free event, please visit their website or CLICK HERE. 

    More About the Book: As the Nazis sweep across Europe, Jewish teen Max and his parents flee German persecution to Holland, where Max finds friends and romance. But when Hitler invades in 1940, Max escapes to Chicago, leaving his parents and friends behind. When he learns of his parents’ murder, Max immediately enlists in the US Army. After basic training he is sent to Camp Ritchie, Maryland, where he is trained in interrogation and counterintelligence.

    Deployed to the OSS, Max carries out dangerous missions in Occupied countries. He also interrogates German POWs, especially after D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, where, despite life-threatening conditions, he elicits critical information about German troop movements.

    Post-war, he works for the Americans in the German denazification program, bringing him back to his Bavarian childhood home of Regensburg. Though the city avoided large-scale destruction, the Jewish community was decimated. Max roams familiar yet strange streets, replaying memories of lives lost to unspeakable tragedy. While there he reunites with someone from his past, who, like him, sought refuge abroad. Can they rebuild their lives together?

    More About the Author: Libby Fischer Hellmann left a career in broadcast news to write gritty crime fiction and historical fiction. She has written eighteen novels and twenty-five short stories and has been nominated for many awards in the mystery and crime writing community. She has been a finalist twice for the Anthony and the Shamus; and four times for Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year. She has also been nominated for the Agatha, the Daphne, and she won the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year in 2021. Her novels include the Ellie Foreman series, the Georgia Davis PI series, and five stand-alone historical thrillers.

    Her short stories have been published in anthologies, the Saturday Evening Post, and Ed Gorman’s 25 Criminally Good Short Stories collection. In 2006 she was the National President of Sisters in Crime, a 4000-member organization committed to the advancement of female crime fiction authors.

  • The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook: Discussion and Book Signing

    The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook: Discussion and Book Signing

    The Book Stall (811 Elm Street in Winnetka) is thrilled to host historian Hampton Sides on Monday, April 15 at 6:30 pm for a discussion featuring his new book, The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook. (Doubleday). From the New York Times bestselling author, an epic account of the most momentous voyage of the Age of Exploration, which culminated in Captain James Cook’s death in Hawaii, and left a complex and controversial legacy still debated to this day. 

    At once a ferociously-paced story of adventure on the high seas and a searching examination of the complexities and consequences of the Age of Exploration, The Wide Wide Sea is a major work from one of our finest narrative nonfiction writers. 

    This event is free with registration. To register, please visit The Book Stall’s website or CLICK HERE. 

    More About the Book: Hampton Sides’ bravura account of Cook’s last journey wrestles with Cook’s legacy and provides a thrilling narrative of the titanic efforts and continual danger that characterized exploration in the 1700s. Cook was renowned for his peerless seamanship, his humane leadership, and his dedication to science. He was also deeply interested in the native people he encountered. On previous expeditions, Cook mapped huge swaths of the Pacific, including the east coast of Australia, and initiated first European contact with numerous peoples. He treated his crew well and endeavored to learn about the societies he encountered with curiosity and without judgment.

    Yet something was different on this last voyage. Cook became mercurial, resorting to the lash to enforce discipline, and led his two vessels into danger time and again. Uncharacteristically, he ordered violent retaliation for perceived theft on the part of native peoples. This may have had something to do with his secret orders, which were to chart and claim lands before Britain’s imperial rivals could, and to discover the fabled Northwest Passage. Whatever Cook’s intentions, his scientific efforts were the sharp edge of the colonial sword, and the ultimate effects of first contact were catastrophic for Indigenous people around the world.

    The tensions between Cook’s overt and covert missions came to a head on the shores of Hawaii. His first landing there was harmonious, but when Cook returned after mapping the coast of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, his exploitative treatment of the Hawaiians led to the fatal encounter.

    Kirkus Reviews,in a starred review, says,“An acclaimed historian takes to the sea in this rousing tale of exploration … Sides draws on numerous contemporaneous sources to create a fascinating, immersive adventure story featuring just the right amount of historical context … Lusciously detailed and insightful history, masterfully told.” 

    More About the Author:  Hampton Sides is an award-winning editor of Outside and the author of the bestselling histories Hellhound on his Trial, Blood and Thunder, and Ghost Soldiers. He lives in New Mexico with his wife, Anne, and their three sons.

  • John Schu: Author Discussion & Book Signing in Conversation with Heidi Stevens 

    John Schu: Author Discussion & Book Signing in Conversation with Heidi Stevens 

    The Book Stall (811 Elm Street in Winnetka) proudly welcomes to the store author John Schu on Thursday, April 4 at 6:30 pm for a powerful discussion of his new book, Louder Than Hunger. (Candlewick Press). Based on his own experience of these conditions, Mr. Schu presents a vivid and immersive look at a teenage boy’s experience of anorexia, OCD, and depression. As a revered teacher, librarian, and story ambassador, Schu has created a wrenching, transformative, and unforgettable novel in verse with a moving introduction by two-time Newbery Medalist Kate DiCamillo. Mr. Schu will be in conversation with Heidi Stevens. This book is appropriate for readers ages 12 to adult. 

    This event is free with registration, to register, please visit The Book Stall’s website or CLICK HERE. 

    More About the Book: Jake volunteers at a nursing home because he likes helping people. He

    likes reading mysteries and comics aloud to the senior residents. He likes skating and singing, playing Bingo and Name That Tune. He also likes avoiding people his own age . . . and the cruelty of mirrors . . . and food. Jake has read about kids like him in books, the weird one, the outsider, and would do anything not to be that kid, including shrink himself down to nothing. But the less he eats, the bigger he feels. How long can Jake punish himself before he truly disappears?

    A fictionalized account of the author’s experiences and emotions living in residential treatment facilities as a young teen with an eating disorder, Louder Than Hunger is a triumph of raw honesty. With a deeply personal afterword for context, this much-anticipated verse novel is a powerful model for muffling the destructive voices inside, managing and articulating pain, and embracing self-acceptance, support, and love. 

    Katherine Applegate, author of The One and Only Ivan says, “Every so often a book comes along that is so brave and necessary, it extends a lifeline when it’s needed most. This is one of those books.”

    More About the Author: John Schu is the author of the acclaimed picture books This Is a School and This Is a Story. He also wrote the adult study The Gift of Story: Exploring the Affective Side of the Reading Life and was named a Library Journal Mover and Shaker for his dynamic interactions with students and his passionate adoption of new technologies as a means of connecting authors, illustrators, books, and readers. As a children’s librarian for Bookelicious, part-time lecturer at Rutgers University, and former Ambassador of School Libraries for Scholastic Book Fairs, Mr. Schu continues to travel the world to share his love of books. He lives in Naperville, Illinois. You can find him at www.JohnSchu.com and on social media @MrSchuReads.

    More About Our Conversation Partner: Heidi Stevens is a Chicago-based writer and the Director of External Affairs for the University of Chicago’s TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health, which works to provide parents, caregivers, and communities the knowledge and tools to optimize foundational brain development in all children. Prior to joining University of Chicago, Stevens worked at the Chicago Tribune for 23 years, where she wrote a daily column called “Balancing Act.” She was awarded the Anne Keegan Award for Distinguished Journalism in 2018. Stevens maintains a nationally syndicated weekly column and serves on the Family Action Network board of directors.

  • Reese’s Book Club Pick: “First Lie Wins”

    Reese’s Book Club Pick: “First Lie Wins”

    “This is Ashley Elston’s debut adult novel and it’s a real page turner, so good you hate to turn the last page.”

    “My mind splits, showing two different paths; This is definitely a crossroads moment,” recalls Lucca Marino alias Wendy Wallace alias Mia Blanchard and a whole long list of other names. “Taking the job Matt offers moved me deeper into the world but comes with the support that would make the feel of these cuffs biting into my wrist a distant memory. The other path requires me to go straight. To get out before I’m in any real trouble because as Saturday night proved, it will only be a matter of time before something else goes wrong.”

    And, of course it does, in this complicated and entrancing novel, “First Lie Wins” (Pamela Dorman Books 2024).

    Lucca, known by the people in her life as Evie Porter when we meet her, chooses the darker path. She’s agreed to work with Matt and his boss, Mr. Smith. The latter is just a mechanically altered voice over the phone, a devious man who likes to play his operatives against each other, but the pay is very good, and Evie is an expert at her work. Her job? To take on another identity and infiltrate the mark’s life, securing the necessary information that Mr. Smith wants. Sometimes it’s so he can blackmail them, sometimes to take over their business, or steal some vital data.

    As Evie, she starts a romance with Ryan, her latest victim. She isn’t sure what Mr. Smith wants from him; her instructions are parceled out over time. But she soon learns that Ryan, who invites her to live with him and meet his family and friends, is more than just a successful small town businessman who has taken over the family business. He’s somewhat shady, just as she is, helping move stolen goods.

    But Evie has a heart, as she has proven in her other jobs, and now, she’s falling for Ryan and the nice life he has to offer. Unfortunately, no one easily leaves Mr. Smith’s business. It’s not exactly the kind of job you retire from as she finds out when several other operatives meet untimely deaths.

    Whom do you trust? Evie is discovering that she doesn’t really know. Even Ryan may be more than a unwitting dupe, he may be in the plot to destroy her that Mr. Smith has put in place, framing her for a murder she didn’t commit.

    First Lie Wins is the ultimate cat-and-mouse caper, leaving you guessing until all the loose ends are neatly tied up. This is Ashley Elston’s debut adult novel and it’s a real page turner, so good you hate to turn the last page.

    This article originally appeared in the New York Journal of Books.

  • Dead Mountain by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

    Dead Mountain by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

    Two fraternity brothers taking a drunken joyride after too much Captain Morgan Spiced Rum crash their Jeep in the mountains of New Mexico on a freezing winter night. With no cell service available, they manage to find a cave to spend the night. Unfortunately for them they discover several other things as well. Besides ancient petroglyphs and a body resting in a prehistoric burial site which needs to be returned to ancestral lands, there’s also the remains of two students who went missing 15 years ago in a case code named “Dead Mountain.”

    The students were among a group of eight experienced mountaineers who for some reason became so afraid that they fled their tent half naked into a raging blizzard. The bodies of some had been found but now one remains missing.

    What happened that night so long ago and where is the missing student? With the case reopened, the services of archaeologist Nora Kelly and FBI Agent Corrie Swanson are called into action in this fourth book (though it works as a standalone) series about Nora Kelly written by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, the New York Times bestselling authors. Solving a cold case from so long ago is never easy, but the investigation is confounded by other issues as well. The parents of the deceased students believe there’s a cover-up going on and are actively protesting and Nora’s brother, Skip, has gotten into a tussle with a bombastic and media-seeking sheriff who is up for re-election, and now Skip is charged with attempted murder. 

    As Nora and Corrie continue investigating, they realize there are many long-buried secrets tied to the disappearance of the students and outside forces working against them to keep those secrets well hidden and now that the case is reopened, their own lives may be in jeopardy as well. 

    “As Corrie moved farther and farther down the passage, she began to feel like a character from some dreadful Twilight Zone episode: trapped in an endless tunnel of concrete, destined to walk down it forever and ever. . . .“

    “Why are we whispering?” Nora answered with a short laugh. “There’s no one here.”

    Corrie snorted. “You’re right. Only the dead…” 

    Soon after they discover the body of the last missing student. 

    “It took a moment for Corrie to pull herself together and examine the scene. A man lay on the bed, hands folded across his breast, looking more like a corpse laid out for viewing.” 

    But the two women were wrong about only the dead being nearby. Isolated in the frigid landscape of the mountains where the tragic deaths had occurred all those years ago, their investigation has led Swanson and Kelly to the truth and directly into the path of a group of men desperate to keep them from revealing it. 

    This review originally appeared in the New York Journal of Books.

    For ebook and audiobook versions of “Dead Mountain” click here.

  • CrimeReads: The Best Reviewed Books of the Month

    https://crimereads.com/the-best-reviewed-books-september-2023/

  • Sonali Dev writes about three generations of women in latest book

    Sonali Dev writes about three generations of women in latest book

    “The Vibrant Years” by Sonali Dev, the bestselling Indian American novelist, was the first book chosen by actress Mindy Kaling when she started her publishing imprint, Mindy’s Book Studio with the goal of bringing diversity to readers.

    “Sonali Dev’s ‘The Vibrant Years’ captures the spirit of Mindy’s Book Studio,” Kaling said in the press release announcement. “It’s a joyful and empowering read following a group of unconventional women trying to find themselves.”

    Dev, who lives in the Chicago area, found inspiration when she first began writing from all the Jane Austen novels she read while growing up. Though centuries and a continent separated the two, Dev liked the way Austen dissected British society with wit and flair.

    “You both have a snarky well, I don’t mean snarky but…” I say fumbling with words. I obviously hadn’t had enough coffee that morning.

    “I like that description because there’s so much in the world to be snarky about,” says Dev, who is always polite. “If we don’t laugh at the world around us, we’re just going to constantly believe all the lies they tell us, right? So I think snark is very healthy.”

    Okay, so we’ll call it snark. I like that.

    In “The Vibrant Life,” Dev writes about three generations of women. There’s 65-year-old Bindu Desai who has come into a fortune left to her by a man from her past—a past that she doesn’t want anyone to know about including her daughter-in-law who recently was divorced from her son and her granddaughter, Cullie. The latter is a technology whiz who created an app for coping with anxiety and she now has plenty of it, partly because she’s been betrayed by her boyfriend over the app’s future.

    “I think of it as everything I’ve ever wanted to say about being a woman and the essentially feminine journey has been a central theme of all my books,” says Dev whose other books include “Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors” and “Incense and Sensibility,” both of which were bestsellers. “This book about three generations of Indian American women is a culmination of that.”

    Working together, the three help Cullie in her attempts to regain control of her anxiety app while working on their own issues. Aly, the daughter-in-law, is struggling for recognition and advancement at the local news station where she works and where opportunities for Indian American women are limited. Bindu has used her legacy in part to purchase a condo in a posh Florida retirement community. But the members of her HOA board don’t like her attractiveness and vivaciousness. It’s like a replay of high school.

    Dev says she was inspired in part to switch from her more romance-oriented novels to what she describes as women’s humorous fiction because of all the grandmother jokes she saw in fiction.

    “Many older women characters in books are like cardboard, stereotypes,” she says. “They are either vinegary and outspoken or benevolent, wise and a font of affection kind of grandmother. But none of the women I know in their 60s and 70s are like that. I wanted to write characters that are like the older women in my life and the woman who I want to be when I am that age.”