Bay City Books: New Books from Bay Area Authors – April 2024

Sing, I 

By Ethel Rohan (San Francisco)
Triquarterly Books (April 15, 2024)

Ester Prynn (a sly nod to the protagonist of Hawthorne’s 1850 novel “The Scarlet Letter”)  is leading an ordinary life, working in a convenience store in Half Moon Bay and worrying about her failing marriage, her ailing father, and her troubled teenage son. But when a masked gunman robs the store, Ester is so traumatized she reconsiders her life choices. She changes jobs and finds herself unexpectedly attracted to her new boss – a woman. She joins a women’s choral group. She plots to uncover the identity of her assailant. “Sing, I” follows Ester’s odyssey of self-discovery, which includes new highs, burning regrets, and what-ifs. 

The Forgetters

By Greg Sarris (Santa Rosa)
Heyday Books (April 16, 2024)

Greg Sarris, serving his sixteenth term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, brings back the enigmatic Crow sisters, Question Woman and Answer Woman, in his new collection, “The Forgetters.”  First introduced in Sarris’ 2017 novel, “How a Mountain Was Made” the two sisters sit on Gravity Hill and tell stories from dawn to dusk.  Set on Sonoma Mountain and traversing the homelands of the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo, the Crow sisters recount the stories of the Forgetters, so everyone can remember. There is the boy who opens clouds in the sky, a young woman who befriends three enigmatic people who might also be animals, and two village leaders who hold a storytelling contest. All are looking for a crucial lesson from the past that will help them repair the rifts in their own lives.

Your Presence is Mandatory

By Sasha Vasilyuk (San Francisco)
Bloomsbury Publishing (April 23, 2024)

​​Sasha Vasilyuk’s debut novel, “Your Presence is Mandatory”  is based on a true story and spans seven decades in Ukraine and Russia from World War II to today’s conflict between the countries. It’s a region that the journalist is passionate about: she was born in Soviet Crimea and spent her childhood in Ukraine and Russia before moving to San Francisco at 13. The novel tells the story of a Ukrainian Jewish man who portrayed himself as a World War II hero. When he dies, his family discovers a letter to the KGB that reveals a secret about his war service that casts his life in a new light and upends the family’s beliefs about themselves. 

Outraged

By Brian Copeland (San Leandro)
Black Odyssey Media (April 23, 2024)

Brian Copeland, a television and radio host, actor, comedian, and playwright has written his first thriller, “Outraged,” set in the San Francisco Bay Area. The story opens with the shooting of a San Francisco cop who killed an unarmed Black honors student. More shootings of cops who have killed Blacks continue. Topher Davis, the only Black television journalist at his station, has three weeks to investigate the murders before corporate budget cuts eliminate his position. He enlists the help of his sister, San Francisco Police Department Homicide Detective Lynn Sloan. Can they figure out who the killer is without getting shot themselves?

Lucky

By Jane Smiley (Santa Cruz)
Knopf (April 23, 2024)

​​Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Jane Smiley was born in St. Louis, as is the protagonist of her new novel, “Lucky.” Jodie Rattler got lucky at age 6 when she accompanied her uncle to a racetrack and won a bet. Luck seems to follow Jodie throughout her life. One of her songs hits it big. She launches a folk singing career that brings her to the heights of Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. She performs around the world, gets rich, and has numerous lovers. Yet something, as Jodie explains in this narrative written in the first-person, is missing. Is it true love?

Real Americans 

By Rachel Khong (San Francisco)
Knopf (April 30, 2024)

Rachel Khong’s debut novel, “Goodbye, Vitamin”, won the 2017 California Book Award for First Fiction. Her long-anticipated second book, “Real Americans”, follows three members of a Chinese American family from Communist China in the 1960s to Silicon Valley in 2030. The book opens in 1999 when 22-year-old intern, Lily Chen, meets and gets together with Matthew, an heir to a vast pharmaceutical company fortune. It continues 15 years later when their son Nick goes to San Francisco in search of his long-absent father and ends in 2030 when Mei, Lily’s mother, remembers her time as a young student at Peking University, where she studied genetics. Khong, who was born in Malaysia to Chinese parents, explores what makes a “real” American, the different kinds of loving each generation expects, how immigration impacts belonging, and whether destiny is preordained.

Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life

By Jason Roberts (Oakland)
Random House (April 9, 2024)

Imagine wanting to identify and describe all life on Earth. In the 18th Century, two men
decided to do this simultaneously. Their quests would have an indelible impact on how we see nature, how we name species, and the future of the Earth itself. “Every Living Thing,” is a dual biography of the two competing scientists. Carl Linnaeus, “a
pious Swedish doctor with a huckster’s flair,” as Jason Roberts describes him,
and Georges-Louis de Buffon, “an aristocratic polymath,” from France who was best known as a mathematician, set out to categorize life on earth. They assumed
it would be a simple task of just counting a few thousand species. (After all, they all fit on Noah’s Ark). Of course, they grossly underestimated how many life forms there, and never reached their goal. Roberts traces how each man approached his quest, expressing dismay that Linnaeus’ hierarchical, almost eugenics-like approach to classifying species prevailed over that of de Buffon, who believed living things were shaped by the environment. Why is Linnaeus known today while de Buffon is mostly forgotten? Roberts also asks. (It has a lot to do with the French Revolution and how Linneaus’ supporters pilloried de Buffon by painting him an aristocrat, and therefore unworthy of attention).

Somehow: Thoughts on Love

By Anne Lamott (Fairfax)
Riverhead Books (April 9, 2024)

“Somehow: Thoughts on Love” is Marin County writer and spiritual guru Anne Lamott’s 20^th book and another tome that encourages people to find joy despite the craziness of the world. She draws from her own life to show how love is a transformative power that buoys people in the face of despair. Each chapter explores a different kind of love. She examines the unexpected love for a partner late in life (she married a fellow writer, Neal Allen, in 2019 when she was 65), love that inflicts pain (her parents’ divorce) how to love a child who disappoints, how love helps her embrace sinners, and love we have for mementos of those we have loved and lost.

Portrait of a Woman: Art, Rivalry, and Revolution in the Life of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard

By Bridget Quinn
Chronicle Books (April 16, 2024)

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard was born in Paris in 1749. A shopkeeper’s daughter with a passion for painting, she rose to become an official portraitist of the royal court and a member of the exclusive Académie Royale. But much of her work was burned in the French Revolution and she is not well known today, particularly in comparison to other female portraitists who wrote memoirs, such as her rival, Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun. But Quinn, an art historian and the author of “Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History (In That Order),” has long been fascinated by Labille-Guiard. Despite the paucity of her paintings and personal documents, Quinn relies on her knowledge of French society and the art world to imaginatively flesh out the life of a talent long ignored.

Backyard Bird Chronicles

By Amy Tan (Sausalito)
Knopf (April 23, 2024)

Amy Tan grew up playing in a creek near her house, catching snakes and lizards, poking frogs to make them jump, and pill bugs to make them roll up. Playing there gave her an appreciation of nature and revealed her need for it. But it wasn’t until the 2016 election of Donald Trump unleashed a torrent of hatred, racism, and misinformation upon the U.S. that Tan paid close attention to the birds in her backyard. Seeking solace from the turbulent public sphere, Tan, the acclaimed writer of “The Joy Luck Club,” and other works turned to birding. “The Backyard Bird Chronicles” charts Tan’s growing reliance on the tranquility the natural world provides through diary-style vignettes, sketches and drawings, and essays about birding behavior.

The Whole Staggering Mystery: A Story of Fathers Lost and Found

By Sylvia Brownrigg (Berkeley)
Counterpoint Press (April 23, 2024)

Novelist Sylvia Brownrigg didn’t even know she had unanswered family questions until midlife when she was handed a mysterious bundle that had been stored in her aunt’s basement for 50 years. She was told to deliver it to her father, Nick, a man she saw only rarely who lived off the grid in northern California. The bundle, which Brownrigg opens after her father’s death, is filled with items about her grandfather, an English baronet who wrote a novel in the 1930s about two Lesbians (the word is capitalized throughout the tome.) Brownrigg learns he died in Kenya at 27 by suicide. As she reconstructs her grandfather’s brief life in “The Whole Staggering Mystery,” taking readers from England to Africa to Pasadena, Brownrigg learns secrets about her family that had been hidden for decades.