Book of the Month

Every now and then we encounter a new book that we’re so excited about we want to shout it from the rooftops, so we've created a special tag to distinguish it from the rest: Tattered Cover Book of the Month (formerly called Tattered Cover V.I.B.)!  

Our latest selection is:

Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey

This small but mighty debut from Miranda Popkey is told over the course of 20 years in the conversations that one unnamed narrator has. Mostly, these are conversations amongst women—a group of mothers in Fresno getting wine drunk while their babies sleep in the next room, divulging how they wound up single and pregnant; a family trip to Italy that falls into a sensual interaction between the narrator and her friend’s mother; a near-evil back and forth between the narrator and a friend who treats her terribly as they walk through an art exhibit on female pain, inspired by the real work of artist Sophie Calle. Although Popkey focuses on the ways that women express their desires and pain to each other, she occasionally veers off into other types of interaction: the narrator roleplays with a man she picked up in a hotel bar, coaching him to become a character she could hate more than any other. She has stream-of-consciousness style back-and-forths inside her own head that unfurl all the ways that the world we live in creates a chasm in its women between wanting to take all of our power back and wanting to give up control completely and hand the reins to someone, anyone else. This book doesn’t have any answers, but it has an awful lot of all the right questions. In short: remarkable.

—Afton Montgomery, Adult Frontlist Buyer

Purchase this and previous Books of the Month below: