Bookshelf — Leah Worthy

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White Peach Press

White Peach Press

White Peach Press

Sunlight Finds You is a historical coming-of-age novel about a teenage girl who moves with her family to St. Petersburg, Florida in 1949. There’s a restlessness in the air. St. Petersburg is on the cusp of becoming a boomtown; America is on the

The imagery in Tailbone is so sharp and evocative it will pull you along even when the novel’s tone feels relentless in its hopelessness.

Set in Seoul against the backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis, Tailbone is about a teenage girl who r

The title of Nancy Lemann’s The Oyster Diaries refers to a daily log kept for over 20 years by the narrator’s father tracking the quality of the oysters served at The Pearl in New Orleans. The entries contain only a word or two, but taken

Julie Buntin’s Famous Men is a brilliantly nuanced exploration of a relationship between a young, aspiring writer and the older, award-winning author she first sought out when she was still holding on to a girlhood hope that he could be her fat

Chouette is proof that, sometimes, the best way to shine a blazing spotlight on something true is to tell a fantastical tale.

Tiny gives birth to an owl-baby and falls in love with her untamable ferocity. When her husband tries to turn Chouette in

The Palm House is centered on Laura and Putnam’s friendship, which feels entirely real from the novel’s start because Gwendoline Riley’s dialogue has that unmistakable ring of authenticity only the best dialogue has. Their intimacy

I enjoy baking cakes from scratch. I know a few chickens by name, and I think their eggs look nice sitting on a counter. Naturally, my algorithm fed me a lot of tradwife content before I’d heard of the term, possibly before anyone had come up w

My favorite thing about Ben Lerner’s writing is how he layers images and ideas so that none are used only once and left behind. Instead, they build upon one another until they converge into a whole that’s complex and nuanced and, without

In Elizabeth Von Arnim’s 1922 The Enchanted April, Lotty Wilkins meets Rose Arbuthnot and recognizes in her the weariness she feels in the face of her wifely duties. Even though they’ve just met, Lotty convinces Rose to rent a medieval ca

Set in 1968 San Francisco, Where the Girls Were tells the story of seventeen-year-old Baker Phillips, the focused and straightlaced valedictorian of her class with plans to attend Stanford in the fall. Baker dreams of becoming a writer someday, a hea

Published in 1971, The Condor Passes is a wild ride of a novel with so many POV characters, each of them so thoroughly fleshed out, that you’ll wonder how one book can contain so much life without coming apart at the seams.

Since he was youn

Sleep is full of beautiful sentences and moments of emotional depth that sneak up on you amongst its humor and honest portrayal of day-to-day routines. Margaret is reordering her life in the aftermath of her divorce, managing her career as an editor

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye considers intimacy from every angle through the point of view of a writer who moves to a secluded shed in the countryside, away from Xavier, the older man she loves deeply even though she no longer desires him, and away from the rou

Endling is set in Ukraine against the backdrop of the early days of the war. As if the moment were too restless and unresolved to fit into a conventional narrative structure, the novel breaks free of itself, shifting into metafiction that introduces

Seascraper is one of those novels that earns your trust instantly. Wood’s writing is so assured it seems to say, “You’re in good hands.”

Thomas Flett still fishes for shrimp the way his grandfather did, with a cart and horse

© 2022 Leah Worthy