Morally Gray, a romance-based bookstore, opened last month at 26 Perry St. in Newnan, Ga., just behind the historic downtown square. The City Menus reported that the bookshop, owned by Allie Turner, is "a cozy, welcoming space where readers can settle in with a good book, connect with fellow fans of the genre, and feel right at home."

Turner said, "The goal is simple, give romance readers in the community a place to belong." Morally Gray will host community events, monthly book clubs, and offer a space for local authors and merch creators to share their work. 

On the bookstore's website, Turner notes that she is "a therapist (still am!) turned bookstore owner. I have always loved books (always wanted Belle's library in Beauty & the Beast) and dreamed to someday have my own bookstore... and here we are. I started Morally Gray as a place to create community, a love of reading and books and to give my small town community a place they want to be, especially while reading. While we are a romance based bookstore I truly welcome any readers into my store. Come find a comfy chair on your lunch break, make yourself some tea and read. I hope to see you in the store."

After opening on October 18, she posted on social media: "I'm still in awe and so grateful for how yesterday went. I couldn't have asked for a better opening day!!!!!!"

Nature + Nurture, a nature-focused bookstore in Salem, Ohio, will move to a new, larger location next year, the Business Journal reported.

Currently located at 515 E. State St., Nature + Nurture will be moving to a building at 553 E. State St. that store owner Tricia Ross has purchased. The bookstore will double in size, with Ross planning to create an events space as well as room for customers to relax and read. The new building also has on-site storage space, office space, and a loading dock in the back.

"I should have that space to grow," Ross told the Business Journal. "I kept saying grow or die. I can't grow unless I literally have more space."

Nature + Nurture first began as a mail-order business specializing in nature-related home school materials. Roughly four years ago Ross took the leap of opening a bricks-and-mortar space. She expanded the inventory, concentrating on nature-themed children's books and toys, while adding gifts, stationery, and a selection of adult books.

Renovations are underway, with electrical work, flooring, and painting needed. Ross hopes the new building will be ready by late January.

Stella House Books, which announced plans in August to open next spring at 31 S. Range Line Road in Carmel, Ind., will hold an official groundbreaking tomorrow, November 7, "to begin extensive renovation and construction," the Hamilton County Reporter noted. Co-owners Sean and Miranda Armie expect to open in fall 2026.

Sean and Miranda Armie

"We're excited to officially break ground on Stella House," Miranda Armie said. "We hope this store will be more than just a store, but a place for the whole community to discover a hidden literary gem, revisit a beloved classic or just sit, have a coffee and some good conversation, and be inspired by the beautiful space we've created."

Sean Armie added: "I have a passion for classic literature across all genres. In an age of so much noise, people are looking for things that are timeless and true and good and beautiful. At Stella House, I want people to discover and read and ponder the classics, both the old and the new."

Stella House Books will offer customers "an immersive, elevated book-buying experience filled with wonder and charm from a bygone era while embracing the needs of today's thoughtful reader," the Reporter wrote. "The future store will feature cozy themed rooms, a crackling fireplace, a robust children's section complete with a whimsical playroom and a hidden mystery room with a secret door for curious minds to uncover. A dreamy patio, in-store café, and event space will provide inviting areas for readers to gather, reflect, and share a cup of coffee."

Barnes & Noble's Hamilton, Ohio, store

Barnes & Noble will open new stores Wednesday, November 12, in Lansing, Mich., Hamilton, Ohio, and Spring, Tex.

The Lansing store will open in the Frandor Shopping Center at 420 Frandor Ave. and span 16,000 square feet. It will include a B&N Cafe. The opening on Wednesday will feature a ribbon cutting and signing with Eric Thomas, author of You Owe You: Ignite Your Power, Your Purpose, and Your Why.

The new Hamilton location will occupy a 16,000-square-foot space in the Bridgewater Falls shopping center at 3339 Princeton Rd. The store will include a cafe, and for the opening on Wednesday science fiction author John Scalzi (The Shattering Peace, Redshirts) will be on hand to cut the ribbon and sign copies of his books.

Located at 6600 Spring Stuebner Rd., Suite 152 in the Grand Parkway Marketplace, the Spring B&N will span 12,000 square feet; it will not include a B&N Cafe. The ribbon cutting and signing Wednesday morning will feature Ashley Winstead, author of This Book Will Bury Me.

B&N plans to open more than 60 new stores by the end of 2025, with the Lansing store marking the 50th opening this year. Fourteen new stores are slated to open in November alone.

James Workman (second from left) and Environmental Defense Fund executive director Amanda Leland (third from left), co-authors of Sea Change: Unlikely Allies and a Success Story of Oceanic Proportions (Torrey House Press), were joined by two commercial fishermen who feature prominently in the book, Scott Hickman (far left) and Buddy Guindon (far right), at Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Texas. (photo courtesy EDF)

Books-A-Million has selected Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman (Ace) as its inaugural Book of the Year pick, which "recognizes the title that best embodies the joy of reading and the enthusiasm of Books-A-Million's team." Impetus for the selection came from Olivia McDaniel, v-p of marketing, "whose love for the series inspired an internal book club and a wave of new fans across the company."

"I've never played video games or even thought about DnD--Dungeons & Dragons, for the uninitiated--but I fell completely in love with Dungeon Crawler Carl," said McDaniel. "It's the most fun I've ever had reading--and I can't stop talking about it. I've personally convinced more than 70 people to read the series, from coworkers and gym friends to Facebook acquaintances I hadn't spoken to in years, and every single one of them couldn't put it down. No matter what kind of reader you are, this book is for you."

"We hear 6-7 is cool," Park Books, Sykesville, Md., noted in posting a video exploring the ubiquitous, probably meaningless 6-7 fad (IYKYK) that is currently warping the online zeitgeist.

How to Teach a Monster by Sue Fliess, illus. by Simona Sanfilippo (Sky Pony).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Andrew Zimmern, author of The Blue Food Cookbook: Delicious Seafood Recipes for a Sustainable Future (Harvest, $45, 9780063379770).

The View: Rainn Wilson, co-author of Soul Boom Workbook: Spiritual Tools for Modern Living (Grand Central, $19.99, 9781538775547).

Book TV airs on C-Span 2 this weekend from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Monday and focuses on political and historical books as well as the book industry. The following are highlights for this coming weekend. For more information, go to Book TV's website.

Saturday, November 8
11:15 a.m. to 6 p.m. Coverage of the 2025 Texas Book Festival in Austin, Tex.

6:35 p.m. John Ryan, author of America's Trial: Torture and the 9/11 Case on Guantanamo Bay (‎Skyhorse, $32.99, 9781510778917).

Sunday, November 9
11 a.m. Jeff Kisseloff, author of Rewriting Hisstory: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss (University Press of Kansas, $34.99, 9780700638338).

12:15 to 5 p.m. Continuing coverage of the Texas Book Festival.

5 p.m. Mary Theroux, author of Beyond Homeless: Good Intentions, Bad Outcomes, Transformative Solutions (‎Independent Institute, $28.99, 9781598133509).

6:20 p.m. Coverage of the 12th annual Kirkus Prize, given by Kirkus Reviews to authors of nonfiction, fiction, and young readers' books.

Australian author Helen Garner won the £50,000 (about $65,215) Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction for her book How to End a Story: Collected Diaries (Pantheon). Since its founding as the Samuel Johnson Prize in 1999, this is the first time the award, which recognizes the best of nonfiction and is open to authors of any nationality, has gone to a diary. 

Chair of judges Robbie Millen said: "After the mysterious alchemy of the judging process, Helen Garner emerged as our unanimous choice. All six judges agreed that How to End a Story, the first diaries to win the Baillie Gifford Prize, is a remarkable, addictive book. Garner takes the diary form, mixing the intimate, the intellectual, and the everyday, to new heights."

---

We Live Here Now by C.D. Rose (Melville House) has won the £10,000 (about $13,050) Goldsmiths Prize, which honors fiction that "breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form," and is sponsored by Goldsmiths University and the New Statesman.

Chair of judges Amy Sackville said, "A book about what art is and what it does (or doesn't do), C.D. Rose's We Live Here Now in its turn asks profound questions of the contemporary world and the systems that power it, in the aether, deep under the surface, far out at sea. Motifs emerge and recur: containers, erasures, shady markets, sound and silence, 'echo and drone.' This constellatory novel tests the bounds of the form while delivering all of its satisfactions: at once hilarious and deeply haunting, intellectually challenging and supremely entertaining."

Selected new titles appearing next Tuesday, November 11:

Exit Strategy: A Reacher Novel by Lee Child and Andrew Child (Bantam, $30, 9780593725849) is the 30th Jack Reacher thriller.

Nash Falls by David Baldacci (Grand Central, $32, 9781538757987) begins a new thriller series about a businessman recruited by the FBI.

The King's Ransom: A Novel by Janet Evanovich (Atria, $30, 9781668027479) is the second thriller with Gabriela Rose, hunter of stolen valuables.

Star of the Show: My Life on Stage by Dolly Parton with Tom Roland (‎Ten Speed Press, $55, 9781984863133) features personal stories and 500 color photos.

The American Revolution: An Intimate History by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns (Knopf, $80, 9780525658672) is a companion to the upcoming six-part PBS series.

Brigands & Breadknives by Travis Baldree (Tor, $28.99, 9781250334886) is the third Legends & Lattes humorous fantasy.

Some Bright Nowhere: A Novel by Ann Packer (‎Harper, $28.99, 9780063421493) follows an elderly man caring for his dying wife.

Turtle Island: Foods and Traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of North America by Sean Sherman with Kate Nelson and Kristin Donnelly (‎Clarkson Potter, $45, 9780593579237) presents 100 ancestral and modern recipes.

Gemini: Stepping Stone to the Moon, the Untold Story by Jeffrey Kluger (St. Martin's Press, $32, 9781250323002) explores the predecessor to the Apollo program.

Something from Nothing: A Cookbook by Alison Roman (‎Clarkson Potter, $37.99, 9781984826411) contains 100 recipes focused on pantry ingredients.

Big Jim Believes by Dav Pilkey (Scholastic/Graphix, $15.99, 9781546176183) is the 14th book in the globally bestselling Dog Man series.

Firefox Moon by Eoin Colfer (Roaring Brook, $18.99, 9781250372642) is a summertime companion to his holiday middle-grade novel, Juniper's Christmas. 

Paperbacks:
Next Time Will Be Our Turn by Jesse Q. Sutanto (Berkley, $19, 9780593816875).

Honeymoon Phase by Amy Daws (‎Canary Street Press, $18.99, 9781335498434).

The Marriage Narrative by Claire Kann (Berkley, $19, 9780593820179).

From last week's Indie bestseller lists, available at IndieBound.org, here are the recommended titles, which are also Indie Next Great Reads:

Hardcover
The Four Spent the Day Together: A Novel by Chris Kraus (Scribner, $29, 9781668098684). "Chris Kraus presents a sobering look at drug-addled rural America while pulling back the veil of rhetoric that we use to distance ourselves from a disease that is at the heart of this country's problems." --Gibran Graham, The Briar Patch, Bangor, Maine

The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery by Siddharth Kara (St. Martin's Press, $30, 9781250348227). "When you read the experiences in this horrific slavery voyage, you will not escape unmoved. The tragedy helped to trigger a more powerful movement towards abolition in recognition of the crimes against humanity from the transatlantic slave trade." --Todd Miller, Arcadia Books, Spring Green, Wis.

Paperback
The Blue Hour: A Novel by Paula Hawkins (Mariner Books, $18.99, 9780063396531). "A remote Scottish Island hides dark secrets as a young museum curator investigates a human bone in the work of the artist he exhibits. Drawn into an artistic world of love and jealousy, will he find the truth behind the lies?" --Benedict Tanter, Main Point Books, Wayne, Pa.

Ages 4-8
The Gift of Words (A Holiday Picture Book) by Peter H. Reynolds (Orchard Books, $18.99, 9781339000343). "Reynolds's heart is made of something much more valuable than gold (or even chocolate)--it's made of love and joy. The Gift of Words, about a boy who invites friends, family, and neighbors to fill a tree with words of joy, should inspire everyone to have their own trees filled with joyful words." --Jen Wills Geraedts, Beagle and Wolf Books & Bindery, Park Rapids, Minn.

Ages 8-12
Bunns Rabbit by Alan Barillaro (Candlewick, $18.99, 9781536214673). "Bunns Rabbit is the only rabbit in the meadow with short ears and wants nothing more than to look like everyone else. She sets off on a quest through the Great Forest to get her wish. A wonderful and heartfelt adventure about courage, friendship, and being true to yourself." --Jen Steele, Boswell Book Company, Milwaukee, Wis.

Ages 12+
Wavelength by Cale Plett (Groundwood Books, $17.99, 9781779460295). "Wavelength is a debut novel that the queer community will take to its heart. It's got the depth of understanding you'd hope for, while being lots of fun. With an emphasis on LGBTQ+ characters and young romance, this writer from Winnipeg, Manitoba, has gifted us with something fresh." --Linda Bond, Auntie's Bookstore, Spokane, Wash.

[Many thanks to IndieBound and the ABA!]

Korean Swiss journalist Rinny Gremaud's debut novel, Generator, provides a deeply meditative examination of identity--"relative, if not fluid"--provocatively conflating nuclear power with biological ancestry. Holly James smoothly translates from the original French. In 1977, the narrator was born at Kori, the site of a nuclear power plant in Busan, Korea. Her Korean mother's English fluency got her a job with a British company, where she met her daughter's father, a British engineer. Once reactor Kori 1 was complete, however, the father left Korea, abandoning mother and child.

Forty years later, in 2017, Kori's shutdown is imminent, which "unearth[s] something in the depths of [the protagonist's] conscience." At 40 herself, she's part of her own household in Switzerland, "made up of two adults and two children." This end of "the first atomic age" triggers a backward gaze: "The word 'generator' resounded throughout my child­hood.... It seemed to mean many things at once: generator as in genitor, birth, and spark. Generator as in father." The search commences to geographically trace "this absentee" across the world: "I'll constitute a genitor for myself from the little information I have."

At 16, this genitor left his widowed mother to become an engineering apprentice in the Port of Holyhead, Wales, in 1951. At 20, he spent 10 years with the U.K. lighthouse authority, then to Wylfa, a nuclear construction site on the Isle of Anglesey. After promising a local girl he'd return, he moved to Taiwan, where he would marry and father two children, before his "stint in South Korea." He then returned to his wife, relocated to the U.S, had two more children, and settled at his last known address, in Monroe, Mich. In following his trajectory, the protagonist also seeks "the power plants on [his] curriculum vitae, some nuclear, some thermal," plotting the potential points of implosion, physically and emotionally.

Gremaud writes in first person, eschewing names, as if names--like her protagonist's--are unreliable. She uses "you" to address the missing father, unapologetically creating his life on the page: "It doesn't matter whether you find this life resembles your own.... If you didn't want it to be this way, all you had to do was tell me the story yourself.... It was your coward­ice that gave me my omnipotence." In the four decades of his absence, she's earned the right to imagine him to life--and then decide whether to hold or discard him. --Terry Hong

Shelf Talker: In her debut novel, Generator, a Swiss Korean journalist deftly explores identity through a mixed-race narrator re-creating the British father who abandoned her 40 years ago.

Changing the clocks back an hour from Daylight Saving Time last weekend felt like using a sundial, and made me think we need more times: Present Saving Time, Past Saving Time, Future Saving Time. And if we're going to keep pace with the light-speed nature of the book trade now, maybe we should sync with the future and move our clocks forward every week, every day, every hour, every minute (while simultaneously living in the present and honoring the past). 

Over the years, most of us have attended or participated in conference and trade show panels that addressed the "future" of the book, of the book trade, and of bookselling. We continue to do so, but what we're really discussing isn't so much the future as time itself.

In Books: A Manifesto, Ian Patterson observes that "the more you think about novels, the more impossible it becomes to ignore thinking about time. Novels are all about time: they take time, and make time, but the imagined time you inhabit as you read them is just that, imagined, illusory, a fictional time confirmed within the parameters of a book.... Time in the novel, the time of the novel in the reader's mind, the time the novel takes to read, the long or short stretches of imagined time the reading gives rise to, all these complex interior responses live alongside the changes reading and books go through in time, in history."

My sense of book time was heightened a few weeks ago when I saw a production of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape at New York University's Skirball Center. Starring Irish actor Stephen Rea and directed by Vicky Featherstone, the play centers on a 69-year-old man confronting his past by listening to old reel-to-reel tapes he has recorded on his birthday over the decades, and particularly one from 30 years previously. 

Beckett wrote the play in 1958, and its "technology is rooted in that time, when tape recorders first became popularly available, so he set it 'in the future,' as his script notes--because Krapp needs to have been recording himself for most of his life," the New York Times noted. "Our technology is different now, our tendency to self-tape completely out of control, but mortality still threatens. This lean-in contemplation of it is timed just right for our too-short attention spans: 55 minutes, at the end of which you'll have added a classic to your day. Do." 

One of the annoying things about the future is that it's... unforeseeable. Maybe that's why we're amused by the past and its quaint ways. In the movie The Time Machine, Weena shows the Time Traveler talking rings:

"They speak?" he asks.
"Yes."
"Of what?"
"Things no one here understands."

Weena takes a ring from him, places it on its edge like a coin, and spins it on the smooth surface of a stone table. A disembodied voice fills the hall: "My name is of no consequence. The important thing you should know is that I am the last who remembers...." Talking rings don't exist in H.G. Wells's 19th-century novella. They were an imagined invention from the far distant future invented for a mid-20th century movie, but the concept already seems technologically antiquated. 

In the book trade, it's the present that sometimes feels like it is "beyond our wildest dreams" (the false promise of any future), but bookish folk have always toiled in the future (reading ARCs of books that won't be published for months) as well as the past (well, most books). We are time travelers, too.

More than a decade ago, author China Miéville wrote in the Guardian: "Futures of anything tend to combine possibilities, desiderata, and dreaded outcomes, sometimes in one sentence. There's a feedback loop between soothsaying and the sooth said, analysis is bet and aspiration and warning. I want to plural, to discuss not the novel but novels, not the future, but futures. I'm an anguished optimist."

Turn the clocks back further, to the fall of 2007. On my Amtrak trip north from Baltimore after NAIBA's Fall Conference, time was on my mind: the time that seems, in every age, to be shrinking even as we discover technological breakthroughs meant to make more efficient use of time.  

At the conference, I'd been on an Internet marketing panel led by Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, then events coordinator at McNally Robinson in New York City (now owner of Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn) and creator of The Written Nerd blog. The panel explored bookstore websites, blogs, and possible online strategies for booksellers.

During q&a, the subject of time management came up as a key impediment to engaging more creatively with Web 2.0 opportunities: If everyone was already working at full tilt, how could they incorporate online marketing into the mix? Where in the course of their busy days would they find time to blog, to update website staff picks, to send out e-mail newsletters, to check and fulfill online orders?

Almost two decades have passed since then. A hundred trade show panels couldn't fully answer these questions because book time is elusive. When booksellers were slipping index cards between the pages of books for inventory control, there wasn't enough time. What were we doing with all our extra time before we had to answer e-mails, texts, and cell phone calls all day?

Fortunately for us, book time continues to be found where we've always found it, in its devilish expandability.

The following were the most popular book club books during October based on votes from book club readers in more than 93,000 book clubs registered at Bookmovement.com:

1. The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon (Doubleday)
2. The Correspondent: A Novel by Virginia Evans (Crown)
3. The Wedding People: A Novel by Alison Espach (Holt)
4. Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy (Flatiron Books)
5. James: A Novel by Percival Everett (Doubleday)
6. The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (Riverhead)
7. All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker (Crown)
8. Atmosphere: A Love Story by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Ballantine)
9. The Briar Club: A Novel by Kate Quinn (Morrow)
10. The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali (Gallery Books) 

Rising Stars:
The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna (Berkley)
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach (W.W. Norton)