ABOUT US

Although The Printed Garden is a new store, it has been built on a foundation of over twenty years of work in the book industry and a great deal of related higher education.  It is a traditional, independently owned, brick-and-mortar bookstore in Sandy's Historic Union Square shopping plaza.  When you walk in, you'll probably smell the coffee brewing - it's complimentary to our guests.  But this is Utah, after all, and if coffee's not your cup of tea, we can offer you a cup of tea (Earl Grey or Green) or a cup of hot peppermint cocoa!

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Ordering From The Printed Garden online:

We're actively creating online listings for all of the signed, rare, and less common books in our store!  They can be browsed or shopped at www.abebooks.com, where we have a storefront:

(https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/StoreFrontDisplay?cid=516397)

You can copy and paste the link or:
When you get to the abebooks homepage, click the "booksellers" link.  Enter "Printed Garden" in the name field and click the link that comes up.  This will take you to our storefront, where you can search our listings for a specific title or can simply click "list this seller's books" to browse.  You're also always welcome to simply call the store at 385-695-2042.  Your purchase will be carefully packaged, and shipped in a box.

About the Owner
(if you're still interested
​after reading this far)

In 1996, I was offered my first bookstore job at Crossroad Books (look for them online - they're great people!), a shop in Eau Claire, WI, that carried secondhand and rare books.  After moving on to the sole proprietorship of Rupert's Room, a small, online business that brokered the sale of rare and secondhand books, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin, working a five year stint at Barnes & Noble in Sugarhouse (after moving to Salt Lake City, of course), a one year period of working at Ken Sanders Rare Books, earning a Master of Arts degree in British and American Literature from the University of Utah and, most recently, eight years of work at The King's English Bookshop (where I learned more than I could ever possibly have imagined!), I have arrived at this great new place . . . and look forward to serving you!

Here are a few recent books that we've LOVED!

My Absolute Darling
​by Gabriel Tallent

Reviewed by Aaron Cance

It’s an easy thing, in the bookselling industry, to give oneself over to hyperbole. This is not just because it is a business of sorts, and we want to sell books, but also, largely, because really good booksellers are always reading (always!), and after about five or ten years treading the constant currents of new material being produced, the avid reader develops a pretty reliable sense for what he or she should pick up to read, and for what may be left alone.  Because of this developed sense, we end up discovering a disproportionate amount of very talented writers and reading a great many very good books.  And then we proceed to rave about them precisely because they really are very good books.  But how, then, to approach a book that stands above and beyond such a context, a book that is so tempestuous, so unforgettable, that the narrative, the setting, the protagonist, are indelibly branded into memory?

I was tempted to try to write about My Absolute Darling as a thunderstorm of a book that appears on the horizon, ominously flashing, but the truth of the matter is that it’s really much more the storm that comes, of a sudden, upon an unsuspecting ship at sea and, even before escaping the first chapter, the reader is terrified, and inescapably in its clutches.

At the outset, we find fourteen-year-old Turtle Alveston living with her father, Martin, in their long since overgrown, Northern California home.  It takes only a few pages and some indoor target shooting with the family Sig Sauer to realize that something’s not quite right about her life, and only a few more, the balance of the opening chapter, for all the horrifying details to come into focus, a few at a time.  Tallent, you see, does not need to save a sucker punch for the novel’s denouement because he has laid them, like landmines, in virtually every chapter throughout his remarkable debut - so much so that the reader begins to see danger at every turn, much like Turtle does.  The difference, of course, is that many of us have the luxury of being shocked by the world that Turtle takes for granted.  It is, though, the only life she has, and the only life she’s ever known, until a chance encounter with a stranded classmate leaves her with an acute awareness of an ordinary world lying only a stone’s throw from her own, a world that she wants.
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It’s dangerous to say too much about the narrative of My Absolute Darling.  It is, after all, a novel that takes many unexpected turns, most of which are truly shocking and ugly - but the end result, I would argue, all possible accusations of hyperbole aside, is an incomparable survival story, a debut novel infused with the same spirit and raw power as To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, and other works we consider to be modern classics, and it will hold its own among them.  The world Gabriel Tallent has written for My Absolute Darling is so vivid and so rich in detail that the reader feels confined to it, as if the reading were much more of a reality than usual, and reality a welcome respite from the book’s own dark happenings.  His Turtle Alveston feels everything with the primordial ferocity only possible in someone her age, and those who read her will never, ever forget her.

The Marsh King's Daughter
by Karen Dionne

Reviewed by Eric Boss

Featuring the strongest, most self-reliant female character I’ve enjoyed for some time, this fast-moving thriller will surely keep you up all night. The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is the setting: the most common inclination is to think of the area as a lovely unspoiled natural paradise but this tale alters that impression to one of pervading menace. Taken together these factors provide a compelling read told with skillful strokes.Helena Pelletier and her mother were abducted to a remote cabin in the farthest and most uninhabited regions of the UP when she was twelve years old. There she was raised by her domineering native American kidnapper as his own child. Both women had been virtual prisoners until one day an escape opportunity presented itself and her “father” as she had come to know him was captured and imprisoned. She’s now happily married and the mother of two girls when news of her father’s escape from prison is broadcast.

Knowing how cunning and skillful the man is in the woods she realizes that the only way to protect her family and herself is to hunt him down on her own. All her woodcraft and experience are called upon to achieve this, and the tale is harrowing, suspenseful and enthralling. One of the traits she has learned is ruthlessness when life and death are in the balance and she employs it to the fullest. The chess game they play in the wilds provides plenty of action and suspense.

Any reader of adventure will enjoy this, but themes of women’s self-actualization and the dynamic of male-female personal politics furnish a deeper meaning. I highly recommend it
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​Alfred A. Knopf - $25.95 - March 2017

Killers of the Flower Moon
by David Grann

Reviewed by Eric Boss

The history of our treatment of native Americans is an unlovely one but the story recounted here is among the most reprehensible I know. There were incidents with greater loss of life committed with more savagery but the cold-blooded and naked greed driving a disregard for the rights and even the lives of the Osage people of Oklahoma in the early part of the twentieth century is stunning and reflects shame upon our culture and our government.

Having been relegated to a barren and apparently worthless piece of land after being driven from their previous location in Kansas, the Osage people at least seemed likely to be left in peace, if not neglect. Oil was discovered beneath their land and a boom resulted in their becoming, temporarily, the wealthiest individuals per capita in the world. This situation rankled whites who felt they were entitled to some of the gravy, too. The governments of the reservation, the state and the nation would ultimately come to agree with this notion. Rich Indians and poor whites; it couldn’t last.

Soon prominent members of the tribe who were listed in the Osage Roll, the accounting of those entitled to benefit from the mineral rights to the land began to disappear, mysteriously, reappearing as corpses found scattered around the reservation. Since the deaths did not appear to follow a recurring method of murder little was done to investigate them, mostly being written off as death by misadventure. But one person, Molly Burkhardt, was sure something criminal had happened to her missing sister and the others. The authorities made half-hearted attempts to investigate but nothing likely to lead to prosecution was found.

A representative of the tribe was sent to Washington, D.C. to petition the U.S. government for help, but his body was found with a dozen or more gunshot wounds dumped in a ditch outside the city, and the deaths on the reservation continued. An official of the newly formed Bureau of Investigation, the young J. Edgar Hoover was given the task of seeking the truth of what was clearly a concerted effort to rid the tribe of anyone with legal rights to the oil money. The first moves of the bureau were abortive and ineffective until a veteran Texas Ranger was brought in and asked to dig into the facts.
​
The story of the investigation is rife with the ego-stroking of Hoover, the shameless dereliction of law enforcement and state government officials and the colossal greed and arrogance of the white citizens of the state. It’s a real-life serial killer/murder mystery written in a straightforward reportorial style that keeps the narrative moving briskly and with punch. Readers of fiction will find this as good as and better than some whodunits.

Everybody's Fool
by Richard Russo

Reviewed by Eric Boss

Russo’s latest is much darker than I remember either Nobody’s Fool or Straight Man being and more powerful, muscular and insightful. I expected something vaguely light and amusing, and there are plenty of humorous passages in the book, but this one really looks into the human soul in ways that are sobering.

Once again, Donald (Sully) Sullivan is the principal player in the farce that is life in North Bath, NY. His damaged, deficient and depressed buddy, Rub Squeers is also much in evidence. Many familiar characters from Nobody’s Fool who are more and less important to the story will also be recognized. Sully is little changed unless somewhat more irascible than before but still eager to start something he knows will not end well. It is his fate.

This time around, Russo has delved into the loves, hates and compulsions of his characters with more vigor than previously. Sensitive examinations of the self-loving and loathing that, to a greater or lesser degree plague most of us make this an important work as well as one that is a rewarding read. There’s no lack of pure entertainment value, but there is a thoughtful side to this book that makes it a little more serious read.

Add meditation on mortality and the meaning of life and you have a satisfyingly meaty experience. I recommend any of Russo’s works, but I am familiar only with the three cited here. You couldn’t go wrong reading Nobody’s before reading this one, but you don’t have to for comprehension or pleasure in the reading.

Exit Strategy
by Steve Hamilton

Reviewed by Aaron Cance

​Never really drawn, in the past, to series books with recurring characters, I did find myself experiencing a delicious sense of anticipation in the months leading up to the release of Exit Strategy, the second book by Steve Hamilton to feature the character Nick Mason. Hamilton’s readers were, after all, forced to leave Nick Mason in an unusual predicament as they finished his first book in the series, The Second Life of Nick Mason. Mason, five years into a twenty year sentence, has made a devil’s bargain with an incarcerated crime boss, Darius Cole, and finds himself, once again, on the streets of Chicago. The catch is that Mason now has a new cell phone that he’s beholden to. When it rings, he answers it wherever he is, regardless of what he’s doing. A voice on the other end provides him with instructions, and he is to follow them to the letter, and unquestioningly.

Hamilton’s first book in the series, The Second Life of Nick Mason, was a cleanly written crime story with a hard, spare prose that propelled his readers through the narrative. Despite it’s contemporary setting, it even seemed to have a bit of a Raymond Chandler feel about it, and accomplished some wonderful character building, following Nick Mason through his rite of passage from thief to killer while, at the same time, building a believable cast of secondary characters, from Quintero, Mason’s contact, facilitator, and guide on the outside, to Sandoval, the relentless detective who smells foul play all over Mason’s early release and follows him doggedly, to his old friend from the streets, Eddie.

Nick Mason rockets out of the starting gate in the opening pages of Exit Strategy on a job for Darius Cole in some high octane sequences that move along so quickly, I almost felt as if I had to sprint to keep up. Cole, it seems, has maneuvered his way into a retrial, and Mason’s new job is to make sure that none of the key witnesses survive to testify. At this point, Hamilton’s second Nick Mason installment could very easily have slipped into being a book that I’d already read many times, under many different titles - and this is what I was afraid was going to happen - but it didn’t. Hamilton, instead, complicated the circumstances of the narrative and exploited the inherent complexities of his characters to turn out a second Nick Mason story that was just as engaging and fresh as the first.

Mason, while working for Cole, is, of course, formulating the titled exit strategy in an effort to extricate himself from the agreement that he finds himself bound to, but it’s not said exit strategy that makes the book interesting, as readers might first suspect. Don’t get me wrong. There is material here that feels familiar, but the book does become something much more interesting. What really makes Hamilton’s second foray into Nick Mason’s world an absolute page turner is more of the same strong, sharp writing, his brilliant penchant for taking chances and defying the expectations of his readers, and his willingness to take some really sudden and shocking hard corners. After all is said and done, and the bodies lie, bleeding out, Hamilton’s readers, myself among them, can only begin the wait for more.

Celine
by Peter Heller

Reviewed by Eric Boss

Peter Heller has once again delivered a superior novel, not unlike his previous works; The Dog Stars and The Painter, both stellar achievements. It is gratifying to a serial reader that each book this author produces is completely unlike the one before. That is not always what a reader wants, but in the category of literary fiction it’s a joy. While I am reluctant to make comparisons between authors and books, this puts me in mind of Amor Towles’ latest, A Gentleman in Moscow in that the writing is elegant and fluid and the characters are endearing. My admiration for both is great indeed.

Heller has told us that his story is based on that of his mother, and I can only say I wish that I had known her. She is what would have been, at one time, called a “hellbender”. An American child living in Paris at the time of the Nazi invasion who barely escaped, as did her father at the very last moment, she grows up in an eccentric household of New England aristocrats taking the role of the “strange child” who knows too much too early, and not because anyone taught her. She’s just like that: fiercely independent. She senses moods, attitudes, emotional schisms, societal reluctance and any number of other things some of us never master all our lives, and yet this little girl “knows” what’s going on around her, sometimes to the sorrow of her family. She and her sisters are a handful and then some for parents, grandparents, teachers and extended family.

Celine endures personal tragedy with astonishingly adult and stoic strength to become a private investigator specializing in finding the lost parents of abandoned children. Also, she did a stretch with the FBI, but left to do more important work, that of reuniting families. This gives an insight into her character that is seminal to the book. Empathy, “the underdog gene”, outrage at social injustice, ill-treatment of women, are all part of her makeup.

I don’t want to say too much about this book because I want the reader to enjoy the fullness of the experience themselves. I will say that I am truly in awe of Peter Heller’s skills as a writer and a chronicler of human strengths, weaknesses, loves and hates. In addition, it’s a helluva story, with all the bells and whistles: suspense, violence, outstanding courage, tugging of the heartstrings, you name it, it’s here. Kudos to this most worthy writer.

​Alfred A. Knopf - $25.95 - March 2017

Wintering
by Peter Geye

Reviewed by Aaron Cance

I grew up on Wisconsin’s lakes and rivers.  I still have some nebulous, albeit abstractly pleasant, memories of making the three and a half hour drive north with my dad and grandfather in the late seventies to go freshwater smelting along the Lake Superior coastline. If you tried to describe smelting to someone who had never done it, it would surely sound like some type of insanity - you wait until the coldest part of the night (the water’s a handful of degrees above freezing), unroll a large net, peer into the water with a flashlight for fish the size of your fingers, and drag the waters along the coastline while the smelt make their spring migration to their spawning streams.  We were never out there alone - the coastline was alive with the subdued thumping of Willie Nelson songs, the quiet crackle of bonfires, and you could smell the beer in the air.  All around us, at a distance, was the vast, otherworldly darkness of the timber.Large smelt are only about seven inches long, so it takes a bunch to feed a family of six - but that’s neither here nor there because a good run will bring up a net full of the tiny, flipping fish.  In the end, we’d sleep away the drive home, and ate beer battered smelt for a few days and freeze the rest for other meals, firmly convinced that there’s nothing so indescribably delicious as eating right out of nature’s hand.

Over the years, pretty much everything in this heavily forested part of the world has changed, except, perhaps, the seemingly limitless expanse and potential ferocity of its wilderness, and I’ve become convinced that there aren’t very many writers who have captured it in its beautiful and violent fullness as well as Peter Geye has in his work.  I’ve felt the razor coldness of the north shore air, smelled the heady greenness of its forests, and heard the ice snap and pop like gunshots beneath my feet.  This landscape is reborn, and yet remains true, in Geye’s work, and when his new book, Wintering, hits the bookstore shelves next month, it’s truly cause for celebration on many levels.

First and foremost, readers will find, in Peter Geye, an author who creates with both brutality and deep sensitivity, his work having the rocky edges of a Cormac McCarthy novel, but who’s characters have, also, an uncommon psychological depth, some of which is laid bare before his readers and some of which is felt, almost as intuition.  Make no mistake.  This is truly a gift.  It’s one thing to explain in your work what your characters think; it’s another thing altogether to write in such a way that your readers can actually feel what what they’re thinking.  In his haunting previous work, The Lighthouse Road, Geye explores the diaphanous frontier between the ferocious landscape of the Minnesota northwoods and the psychology of its population, directing his readers into the darkened wilderness behind the eyes of each of his characters.  Delightfully, this is not an anomaly unique to his second book, but is, indeed, the driving force of his new novel, Wintering, and Geye knows these characters - these families - intimately because they are the descendants of the characters who populated his previous book.

Wintering opens with Gustav (Gus) Eide, grandson of The Lighthouse Road’s Odd Eide, visiting close family friend (and narrator) Berit Lovig, His aged and ailing father, Harry, it seems, has disappeared into the frozen wilderness just outside of town, presumably for the final time.  The atmosphere is bittersweet, and over the course of ensuing visits to Berit’s home, Gus begins to gradually disclose the yet-untold account of his father’s previous disappearance - one that took place some thirty years earlier - when Harry and a then eighteen year old Gus left Gunflint with a reconstructed map, setting out to cross seemingly immeasurable tracts of woodland to find, and “winter” at, the mythic Fort le Croix, as did French-Canadian voyageurs generations earlier.  But Harry has not been altogether honest with his son, and, unlike my considerably gentler interactions with this landscape, what begins for Gus as a journey seemingly meant to repair their tenuous relationship turns into nothing less than a savage struggle for survival,
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Aside from being a significant new work of Midwestern literature, Wintering is also a victory, I would suggest, for writers everywhere who are dedicated to their craft.  Peter Geye’s first two books, Safe From the Sea and The Lighthouse Road are both beautifully composed novels published by a small, literary-minded press called Unbridled Books, whom discriminating readers would do well to seek out .  As an observer of the publishing world, I can’t help but to feel, when a hard-working and talented writer like Geye is picked up by a major publisher of literary fiction like Alfred A. Knopf, that all of the industry’s mechanisms are operating just the way they should be. ​

The Trespasser
by Tana French

Reviewed by Eric Boss

Tana French is a master spinner of suspenseful tales and this book is no disappointment to those who value her talents. Her ability to create tension without subjecting the reader to gory scenes and gruesome anatomical/forensic details is welcome. We really don’t need to be splattered with brain matter and severed body parts to get the idea of how awful murder is.

Once again we find ourselves inside the Dublin Murder Squad, this time with an African-British detective who is at odds with just about everyone in the place except her partner, a red-haired freckled seemingly-simple or at least naïve detective who supports her at each turn. The tale hinges on the killing of a young woman who has ties to the police going back to the disappearance of her father when she was a gawky teen. She’s reinvented herself and has dedicated her life to bringing justice to those who misled her about her father’s fate. She’s out for vengeance. The fact that she had a date with a hapless bookseller who couldn’t get her to respond to his ring at her door seems to point to his guilt, but that idea comes into dispute early on and continues to furnish a matter of question throughout.

​As always, French is a great storyteller and her characters are fully realized and believable. Places and names, details about Dublin and its environs pepper the narrative with props to the verisimilitude and add spice. Her books are always a delight to mystery readers and those who just like a good tale told well. The process of delving into the psychology of the victim, the murderer and the detectives investigating the case become the real drivers of this book.

Days Without End
by Sebastian Barry

Reviewed by Eric Boss

I have not the words or the skill with them to describe the joy of reading the work of Sebastian Barry. He is among the master wordsmiths of our language and each time I read one of his works I am once again in awe of his power. There are not superlatives enough to adequately praise this man’s writing.

Once again a member of the McNulty family of Sligo is the subject, this time young Thomas, refugee from the old country who finds himself, along with the man who will become his life-long companion and lover John Cole, in the United States Army just prior to the Civil War. Their experiences, both in and out of the military are unusual, to say the least, but in many ways they are also typical of what men experienced in the armies of the time. Joy and sorrow in equal measure, sometimes more of one than the other, brutality, loyalty and love, suffering and exultation, even if that divine feeling is brought about by acts both violent and cruel. In his descriptions of all this Barry speaks in a voice that rings true: an uneducated but thoughtful narrator who is much more than the sum of his life’s adventures. Thomas McNulty is a poet, made manifest by the author’s facility with the English language.

Scenes of battle and slaughter are not usually ones that can be called beautifully limned, but that is the case here. Barry’s language is stunning in its variety and charming in its colloquialisms and argot of the times and the people. This book is a true joy to read in spite of the unpleasant nature of much of what is described there. A genuine voice, I would call it, and as lyrical as one could ask for. Anyone familiar with the author’s works will not be disappointed in his latest.

Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi

Reviewed by Aaron Cance

A perpetual enthusiast of African-American Literature, there were two books that I was waiting for this summer with great anticipation:  Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.  The first of the two has arrived and, as it turns out, has not only lived up to the pre-publication excitement, but has risen, seemingly, above it.  Yaa Gyasi’s remarkable debut appears to have broken free from its framework, growing organically through, and out of, all of the forms and various types of writing that have inspired it while, at the same time actually seeming to satisfy the various functions of those types, and pay homage to them.  Homegoing is not just a work of historical fiction.  It is not a slave narrative. It’s not a novel of the Harlem Renaissance or the Jazz age. Neither is it a sixties black power narrative or a contemporary success story.  It is, unbelievably, all of these things together.  And, while it might seem impossible to accomplish such a feat without the benefit of a thousand printed pages, Gyasi, quite simply, just does it.

The book’s most remarkable quality, and that which acts as the catalyst for it’s multifaceted range, is it’s structure.  Gyasi’s work is a multi-generational epic and, while it may seem odd, at a comparably modest three hundred and five pages, to refer to the book as an epic, it certainly does have that feel about it. The well-read, when they hear the word, might remember working their way through Homer or Virgil or, later, it may even invoke Milton’s shattering Paradise Lost.  But that the epic had to be a work of great length has never actually been codified, but does historically come, rather, from a sense of imaginative expansiveness not unlike that found in Homegoing.  The old epics never provided their readers with a concrete sense of space or time, allowing the imagination to roam freely within the space of the story.  This young author has provided some temporal parameters, but has given her readers a very broad field in which to roam.

Yaa Gyasi opens her narrative in 1754 Gold Coast Africa, introducing her readers to Cobbe Otcher, Big Man Asare, and Maame, the woman with whom they birth two half sisters, Effia and Esi Asare.  This might sound like it’s going to become complicated but it never really does, at least not on a narrative level. I have always been the type of reader that much prefers not to have a family tree or dramatis personae in the opening pages of a novel, feeling that a good writer should be able to introduce (even multiple) characters in a way that will make them memorable.  I don’t want to destroy a work’s dramatic tension by flipping back and forth between my place in the book and a chart in the opening pages.  However, Gyasi has structured Homegoing in such a way that each successive chapter is constructed entirely around, and titled after, a singular character, The chapters then also alternate between the lineage of Effia and that of Esi, moving sequentially through time.

​What results is what could arguably be considered a project not unlike Hemingway’s In Our Time or, perhaps more appropriately, Jean Toomer’s brilliant Cane (sans poetry) with with a much greater sense of historic expansiveness.  Each chapter is constructed as a self contained unit and operates like a fully developed short story of its own while, the entire time, contributing to a significantly more vast macrocosm, giving the reader a longer view of history while not losing sight of the details.  Each character directly contributes to the arc of his or her historic context and, in turn, each is shaped by that context, as well.  The real genius that the observant reader will find in Homegoing, too, is that each successive character is not built independently, but is constructed from the characters and situations that predicated them, and the family tree, rather than being a nuisance, becomes, instead, a helpful guide that may be consulted between chapters.

What this young writer brings to the table is nothing short of a narrative feast, exploring, by way of a multiplicity of meticulously crafted voices that span over two hundred and fifty years of history, all the different dimensions of the African slave trade and their historic ramifications for African-Americans today.  Gyasi rises above the desire to scapegoat any one particular party involved in favor of her quest for a broader and deeper understanding of the cultural forces, both colonial and indigenous, that contributed to the shameful trafficking of human beings from one continent to another.  It is a story in which no one is entirely guilty and no one entirely innocent, and the candid and often painful trail that she forges through over two centuries of time doesn’t find it’s conclusion in the suffering and grief of her characters, nor in their shame or their anger, but breaks through, in the end, to the light.