Superb Holiday Gifts

Whether you need a gift for an armchair traveler or a wannabe space traveler, we have you covered this holiday season. Renowned authors Margaret Atwood, Pat Conroy, and Peter Ackroyd have books to suit every taste. Click on the covers below to learn more.

“Atwood’s prose is addictive … She crafts sentences with poise and grace and pitch-perfect highbrow humor.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer

At a time when speculative fiction seems less and less far-fetched, Margaret Atwood lends her distinctive voice and singular point of view to the genre in a series of essays that brilliantly illuminates the essential truths about the modern world. Deeply thoughtful and deftly argued, Atwood shows readers how science fiction fits into a long, venerable tradition.

“Conroy’s fans will savor these 15 essays on the books and people that helped shape his long writing career … They lend themselves to being taken up separately, at leisure, and savored like a rich dessert.”
—The Charlotte Observer

Beloved storyteller Pat Conroy’s My Reading Life is a celebration of the books and writers that have shaped his life. Written with Conroy’s trademark pathos and wit, each chapter offers a compelling case for reading as widely and deeply as we can. A passionate ode to lifelong learning.

“There’s plenty of marvelous information in the book about what lies beneath London … Ackroyd is not just interested in London’s hidden relics; he’s interested in what they—and the idea of an underground—mean to a culture.”
—The Daily Beast

London Under is a wonderful, atmospheric, imaginative, oozing short study of everything that goes on under London, from original springs and streams and Roman amphitheaters to Victorian sewers, gang hideouts, and modern tube stations. To go under London is to penetrate history, to enter a hidden world. As Ackroyd puts it, “The vastness of the space, a second earth, elicits sensations of wonder and of terror. It partakes of myth and dream in equal measure.”