Hello book lovers! The time has come again where we present you with a weekly line-up of highly recommended books from E. Shaver, Booksellers. Enjoy these page-turning titles!

Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh by Rachael Lippincott: What if you

 found a once-in-a-lifetime love…just not in your lifetime?

Audrey Cameron has lost her spark. But after getting dumped by her first love and waitlisted at her dream art school all in one week, she has no intention of putting her heart on the line again to get it back. So when local curmudgeon Mr. Montgomery walks into her family’s Pittsburgh convenience store saying he can help her, Audrey doesn’t know what she’s expecting…but it’s definitely not that she’ll be transported back to 1812 to become a Regency romance heroine.

Lucy Sinclair isn’t expecting to find an oddly dressed girl claiming to be from two hundred years in the future on her family’s estate. But she has to admit it’s a welcome distraction from being courted by a man her father expects her to marry—who offers a future she couldn’t be less interested in. Not that anyone has cared about what or who she’s interested in since her mother died, taking Lucy’s spark with her.

While the two girls try to understand what’s happening and how to send Audrey home, their sparks make a comeback in a most unexpected way. Because as they both try over and over to fall for their suitors and the happily-ever-afters everyone expects of them, they find instead they don’t have to try at all to fall for each other.

But can a most unexpected love story survive even more impossible circumstances?

Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins Dead: A prequel to

   Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes tells the coming-of-age story of future president and villain Coriolanus Snow. This young adult dystopian/soft sci-fi novel depicts an earlier Panem, the fictional country in which the annual Hunger Games take place, and details the contest’s cruel evolution. As introduced in the first three books and four film adaptations, the Games force a total of 24 young men and women to fight to the death. The last survivor secures ample food and riches for their impoverished district—hence the moniker “Hunger” Games. This contest serves as both punishment and reparation to the all-powerful Capitol: The 12 districts each sacrifice two of their children, one boy and one girl, as the blood price of their failed rebellion.

This riveting novel details the Tenth Annual Hunger Games as Coriolanus Snow turns 18 and worries about his future. The Snows, once wealthy and powerful, are practically no more after the deaths of Coriolanus’s mother and military father, the latter killed during the districts’ failed rebellion. Coriolanus and his cousin Tigris live with their grandmother whom the latter calls “Grandma’am.” While the novel can be read as a coming-of-age story, it also serves as an origin story, recounting a seemingly ordinary individual’s transition to villainy.

Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer: Under the watchful eye of The Company,

 three characters — Grayson, Moss and Chen — shapeshifters, amorphous, part human, part extensions of the landscape, make their way through forces that would consume them. A blue fox, a giant fish and language stretched to the limit.

A messianic blue fox who slips through warrens of time and space on a mysterious mission. A homeless woman haunted by a demon who finds the key to all things in a strange journal. A giant leviathan of a fish, centuries old, who hides a secret, remembering a past that may not be its own. Three ragtag rebels waging an endless war for the fate of the world against an all-powerful corporation. A raving madman who wanders the desert lost in the past, haunted by his own creation: an invisible monster whose name he has forgotten and whose purpose remains hidden.

Jeff VanderMeer’s “Dead Astronauts” presents a City with no name of its own where, in the shadow of the all-powerful Company, lives human and otherwise converge in terrifying and miraculous ways. At stake: the fate of the future, the fate of Earth – all the Earths.

This article appears in Connect Savannah | November, 2023.