A collection of our picks for Book Club! Use code BOOKCLUB for 20% off these titles and join us from 6-8pm at our shop on the following dates:
✨January 30th - Death By A Thousand Cuts
✨February 27th - Rules For Second Chances
✨March 27th - The End Of Her
✨April 24th - The Capital Of Dreams
✨May 29th - Heavy Are The Stones
✨June 26th - The Lightning Bottles
✨July 31st - All Hookers Go To Heaven
✨August 28th - The Berry Pickers
✨September 25th - Real Ones
✨October 22nd - Rouge
✨November 27th - The Serviceberry
Death by a Thousand Cuts
Regular price $24.95A writer discovers that her ex has published a novel about their breakup. An immunocompromised woman falls in love, only to have her body betray her. After her boyfriend makes an insensitive comment, a college student finds an experimental procedure that promises to turn her brown eyes blue. A Reddit post about a man’s habit of grabbing his girlfriend’s breasts prompts a shocking confession. An unsettling second date leads to the testing of boundaries. And when a woman begins to lose her hair, she embarks on an increasingly nightmarish search for answers.
With honesty, tenderness, and a skewering wit, these stories boldly wrestle with rage, longing, illness, and bodily autonomy, and their inescapable impacts on a woman’s relationships with others and with herself.
The Capital of Dreams
Regular price $34.99
A breathtaking dark fairy tale of survival and betrayal from the vivid imagination of Heather O’Neill
Fourteen-year-old Sofia Bottom lives in a small country that Europe has forgotten. But inside its borders, the old myths of trees that come alive and fairies who live among their roots have given way to an explosion of the arts and the consolations of philosophy. No one, from the clarinetists to the cabaret singers, is as revered as Sofia’s brilliant mother, the writer Clara Bottom. How can Sofia, with a tin ear and an enduring love of the old myths, ever hope to win her mother’s love?
When the country’s greatest enemy invades, and the Capital is under threat, at last Clara turns to her daughter. Sofia must smuggle her new manuscript to safety on the last train evacuating children from the city. But the train draws to a suspicious halt in the middle of a forest, and Sofia runs for her life, losing her mother’s most prized possession. Frightened and alone in a country at war, Sofia must find a way to reclaim what she has lost. On an epic journey through woods and razed towns, colliding with soldiers, survivors and other lost children, Sofia must make the choice between kindness and survival.
In this stunning dark fairy tale of a novel, Heather O’Neill reveals once again her mastery of language that is as delicious as cake and as serious as a gunshot.
Critical Praise
"The Capital of Dreams is not so much a novel to read but one to live (and dream) in. A dark, wistfully comic fable that's as imaginative as it is poignant. An entire world that only Heather O'Neill could create." — Iain Reid, bestselling author of Foe and We Spread
"The Capital of Dreams is a feminist adventure with all of the darkness of a war novel, the charm of a fairy tale, and the heart of a coming-of-age story. O’Neill’s crystal-clear, aphoristic prose reveals complex themes about freedom, desire, and destiny. I underlined passages with one hand and turned pages with the other, rapt right through the stunning final twist." — Maria Adelmann, author of How to Be Eaten
“Uncommonly poetic, nuanced and insightful, The Capital of Dreams is a masterpiece of the tangled threads and beating hearts that make us both ordinarily human and extraordinarily magical. I wish every girl could replace her mirror with pages of O’Neill’s work, to see herself as a fierce and lusty creature well-placed to weave new worlds. The Capital of Dreams will make you grateful you wandered up a dark path and tumbled down a rabbit hole.” — Cherie Dimaline, author of VenCo and Empire of Wild
Heavy Are The Stones
Regular price $43.32WJB Book Club Pick for May 2025!
Use code BOOKCLUB for 20% off the list price!
Facing the truth can be deadlier than facing the killer.
Ten days to keep a lie.
Ten plagues if you deny.
Ten ways to watch them die.
Five years ago, when Detective Jena Campbell put the Leviticus Killer behind bars, she locked her darkest secret away with him. Something never meant to surface. Something better left to rot with the madman who had destroyed so many lives.
When a strange man calling himself Azrael appears on social media with threats to unleash ten plagues, ten deaths, in ten days, unless Leviticus is released, Jena is forced to reopen that door and face her past.
Unable to share what she knows, she turns to the only man who can help her find Azrael before he kills again, the man she condemned. Jena quickly learns the only thing more terrifying than facing him, is facing herself.
J.D. Barker is the New York Times and international best-selling author of numerous novels, including DRACUL and THE FOURTH MONKEY. His latest, BEHIND A CLOSED DOOR, released May 13. His books have been translated into two dozen languages, sold in more than 150 countries, and optioned for both film and television. Barker resides in coastal New Hampshire with his wife, Dayna, and their daughter, Ember.
A clinical neuropsychologist by day, Christine Daigle’s work includes brain-computer interface, translating brain signals into commands that can control technology. As a writer, her novel was selected for the Pitch Wars industry mentorship program. An anthology including her short fiction was a finalist for an Aurora Award. Her co-authored, pen-named work on Kindle Vella was consecutively one of the top 250 serials for several years. In addition to her writing, she also co-hosts the Writers, Ink podcast. She lives in Ontario with her husband, son, and mercurial cat.
The Lightning Bottles
Regular price $26.99WJB's Book Club Pick for June 2025!
Use code BOOKCLUB for 20% off the list price.
INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
The author of New York Times bestseller and Reese’s Book Club pick Lucky returns with a spellbinding story of rock ’n’ roll and star-crossed love—about grunge-era musician Jane Pyre’s journey to find out what really happened to her husband and partner in music, who abruptly disappeared years earlier.
He was the troubled face of rock ’n’ roll…until he suddenly disappeared without a trace.
Jane Pyre was once half of the famous rock n’ roll duo, the Lightning Bottles. Years later, she’s perhaps the most hated—and least understood—woman in music. She was never as popular with fans as her bandmate (and soulmate), Elijah Hart—even if Jane was the one who wrote the songs that catapulted the Lightning Bottles to instant, dizzying fame, first in the Seattle grunge scene, then around the world.
But ever since Elijah disappeared five years earlier and the band’s meteoric rise to fame came crashing down, the public hatred of Jane has taken on new levels, and all she wants to do is retreat. What she doesn’t anticipate is the bombshell that awaits her at her new home in the German countryside: the sullen teenaged girl next door—a Lightning Bottles superfan—who claims to have proof that not only is Elijah still alive, he’s also been leaving secret messages for Jane. And they need to find them right away.
A cross-continent road trip about two misunderstood outsiders brought together by their shared love of music, The Lightning Bottles is both a love letter to the 90s and a searing portrait of the cost of fame.
The Berry Pickers
Regular price $25.99WJB's Book Club Pick for August 2025!
Use code BOOKCLUB to get 20% off at checkout.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
WINNER 2023 BARNES & NOBLE DISCOVER PRIZE
WINNER of the ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL for EXCELLENCE in FICTION
WINNER Best First Novel, Crime Writers of Canada Award
WINNER Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction
FINALIST Amazon First Novel Award
FINALIST for the Atwood-Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
FINALIST Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, Fiction
FINALIST Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award
FINALIST OLA Forest of Reading Evergreen Award
Longlisted for the First Nation Communities READ
A four-year-old girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a tragic mystery that remains unsolved for nearly fifty years
July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, is seen sitting on her favourite rock at the edge of a field before mysteriously vanishing. Her six-year-old brother, Joe, who was the last person to see Ruthie, is devastated by his sister’s disappearance, and her loss ripples through his life for years to come.
In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as an only child in an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, while her mother is overprotective of Norma, who is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem to be too real to be her imagination. As she grows older, Norma senses there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she pursues her family’s secret for decades.
A stunning debut novel, The Berry Pickers is a riveting story about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma, and the persistence of love across time.
Critical Praise
"The ghosts of lost children haunt generations in this lucid and assured debut." — New Yorker
“A harrowing tale of Indigenous family separation . . . [Peters] excels in writing characters for whom we can’t help rooting . . . With The Berry Pickers, Peters takes on the monumental task of giving witness to people who suffered through racist attempts of erasure like her Mi’kmaw ancestors.” — New York Times Book Review
"Peters beautifully explores loss, grief, hope, and the invisible tether that keeps families intact even when they are ripped apart. A quiet and poignant debut from a writer to watch." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A stunning debut about love, race, brutality, and the balm of forgiveness." — People magazine
“A gripping read, a mystery and a moving narrative all in one book.” — A New York Post Best Book of the Year
"Peters skillfully manages to hold the reader’s attention from the first page to the last . . . The Berry Pickers isn’t a mystery, it’s a truth telling by characters you can reach out and touch—characters whose misfortunes, regrets, feelings, and redemption most readers will relate to." — New York Journal of Books
"The Berry Pickers offers an unforgettable exploration of grief, love, and kin." — Boston Globe
"Enthralling . . . Powerfully rendered . . . [A] cogent and heartfelt look at the ineffable pull of family ties." — Publishers Weekly
"The strength of Amanda Peters’s novel lies in its understanding of how trauma spreads through a life and a family, and its depiction of the challenges facing Indigenous people . . . [A] powerful message about truth, forgiveness and healing." — Washington Post
"The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters completely broke my heart because it highlights how a moment, a decision by one person can change the course of another person’s life. It has this deep complexity surrounding a well-intentioned woman who acted in an irrational way out of desperation and the book is basically about the impact of her choices." — Jen Psaki, Elle
"This book is a heartbreaking tale of family and loss, deathbed regrets and revelations. It's a force as powerful as any of those." — Good Housekeeping
"Amanda Peters delivers an un-put-down-able novel of identity, forgiveness, and insistent hope." — Christian Science Monitor
"This powerful debut novel examines the search for truth in the face of trauma and the enduring nature of family love." — Electric Literature
"Peters' debut combines narrative skill and a poignant story for a wonderful novel to which many readers will gravitate . . . Indigenous stories like this matter." — Booklist
"There is something very special about starting on a debut novel and finding you're in the grip of a precocious talent. Amanda Peters writing is fabulously compelling. Our booksellers love this book, and we are thrilled to name it our 2023 Discover Prize winner." — James Daunt, CEO Barnes & Noble
“Amanda Peters manages to take you home to the East Coast in the very best ways – through family love and personal grief and the precious accounting of minutes and memories. You cannot help but love these characters from the first chapter. They stay with you long after the last page.” — Cherie Dimaline, bestselling author of The Marrow Thieves
“The Berry Pickers is an intimate story about the destruction wreaked on a family when their youngest child goes missing. Peters brilliantly crafts a multi-layered tale about how one irrational act creates irrevocable harm that ripples through multiple lives, including the lives of the perpetrators. This is an emotional novel that is beautifully rendered. An amazing read from a talented new voice.” — Michelle Good, bestselling author of Five Little Indians
“A marvelous debut. The Berry Pickers has all the passion of a first book but also the finely developed skill of a well-practiced storyteller. The Berry Pickers is a triumph.” — Katherena Vermette, bestselling author of The Break
“The thing about picking a handful of berries is that each one is different—some are sweet, some sour, some extra juicy. The Berry Pickers is just like a handful of berries. It’s an unassuming novel filled with so much sweet, so much sour, so much juice. Reading this book, I was only ever hungry when it ended.” — Morgan Talty, award-winning author of Night of the Living Rez
“The Berry Pickers is a beautiful novel about family and about the way it makes and breaks and re-makes us again. This is a story of many border crossings, journeying away and coming back, and it contains a cast of characters you will never forget. With this book, Amanda Peters establishes herself as an essential new voice in Canadian Literature.” — Alexander MacLeod, author of Animal Person
"One family’s secret is the source of another family’s pain in this poignant debut that reads like a modern literary classic. Moving, heartbreaking, and hopeful, The Berry Pickers is a powerful tale of haunting regret, bonds that will never be broken, and unrelenting love. Amanda Peters’ skilled storytelling evokes all the sensations of summer in Maine, singing around a fire, and the horror that takes hold when a child goes missing." — Nick Medina, author of Sisters of the Lost Nation
"In 1960s Maine, Joe is troubled by the guilt of being the last person to see his little sister Ruthie before she disappeared. Nearby, Norma grows up to unhappy parents with a lot of secrets. The Berry Pickers is a profound study of the love, grief and betrayals of two families." — ’inews, The best new books to read
“The Berry Pickers is a beautifully written, immersive book with a unique, propulsive structure. Its enduring resonance inspired us to think deeply about the issue of kidnapping and family separation. The three-dimensional characters are well-drawn, revealing flaws that inspire empathy, strong family bonds, and the search for the truth that ties this story together in a deeply satisfying way.... The Berry Pickers is a deeply poignant read that we'd recommend to anyone. It's a wonderful achievement in crime fiction, marking the marvellous debut of an exciting Canadian writer. Bravo!” — Jury, Crime Writers of Canada Awards
real ones
Regular price $35.00
*LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 GILLER PRIZE*
From the author of the nationally bestselling Strangers saga comes a heartrending story of two Michif sisters who must face their past trauma when their mother is called out for false claims to Indigenous identity.
June and her sister, lyn, are NDNs—real ones.
Lyn has her pottery artwork, her precocious kid, Willow, and the uncertain terrain of her midlife to keep her mind, heart and hands busy. June, a Métis Studies professor, yearns to uproot from Vancouver and move. With her loving partner, Sigh, and their faithful pup, June decides to buy a house in the last place on earth she imagined she’d end up: back home in Winnipeg with her family.
But then into lyn and June’s busy lives a bomb drops: their estranged and very white mother, Renee, is called out as a “pretendian.” Under the name (get this) Raven Bearclaw, Renee had topped the charts in the Canadian art world for winning awards and recognition for her Indigenous-style work.
The news is quickly picked up by the media and sparks an enraged online backlash. As the sisters are pulled into the painful tangle of lies their mother has told and the hurt she has caused, searing memories from their unresolved childhood trauma, which still manages to spill into their well curated adult worlds, come rippling to the surface.
In prose so powerful it could strike a match, real ones is written with the same signature wit and heart on display in The Break, The Strangers and The Circle. An energetic, probing and ultimately hopeful story, real ones pays homage to the long-fought, hard-won battles of Michif (Métis) people to regain ownership of their identity and the right to say who is and isn’t Métis.
____________________________
katherena vermette (she/her/hers) is a Michif (Red River Métis) writer from Treaty 1 territory, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Her first book, North End Love Songs (Muses’ Company), won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Her novels The Break (House of Anansi), The Strangers and The Circle (Hamish Hamilton) were all national bestsellers and won multiple literary awards. Her work for children and young adults includes the picture book The Girl and the Wolf (Theytus) and the graphic novel series A Girl Called Echo (Highwater). She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia, and an honourary Doctor of Letters from the University of Manitoba. katherena lives with her kids—fur and human—in a cranky old house within skipping distance of the temperamental Red River.
Rouge
Regular price $24.95
*INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER*
*USA TODAY BESTSELLER*
A New York Times Editor’s Choice
From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a “Grimm Brothers fairy tale for the modern age” (Good Housekeeping) and “darkly funny horror novel” (NYLON) about a lonely young woman who’s drawn to a cult-like spa in the wake of her mother’s mysterious death. “Surreal, scary and deeply moving—like all the best fairytales” (People).
A Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by Time, Vogue, The Guardian, Goodreads, Bustle, The Millions, LitHub, Good Housekeeping, PureWow, Our Culture Mag, and more!
For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror—and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass.
Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, Rouge explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry—as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze. Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, Rouge holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.
The Serviceberry
Regular price $25.00WJB's Book Club Pick for November 2025!
An Instant New York Times Bestseller
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.
As Indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution ensures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”
As Elizabeth Gilbert writes, Robin Wall Kimmerer is “a great teacher, and her words are a hymn of love to the world.” The Serviceberry is an antidote to the broken relationships and misguided goals of our times, and a reminder that “hoarding won’t save us, all flourishing is mutual.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer is donating her advance payments from this book as a reciprocal gift, back to the land, for land protection, restoration, and justice.