Meet Sanibel Island Mysteries author Jennifer Schiff in the bookshop on April 11th. She'll be signing copies of her new book, Something's Cooking in Chianti, along with the other books in the Sanibel Island Mysteries Series from 11:00 a.m. to 1 p.m. See you there!

Leah Weiss is a Southern writer born in North Carolina and raised in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She graduated from Dunbarton College in Washington DC with a degree in music and received an education degree from Kent State University. She worked at many jobs before becoming the Executive Assistant to the Headmaster at Virginia Episcopal School. In June of 2015 she retired from that 24-year career and signed with a New York agent.

Her debut novel IF THE CREEK DON’T RISE was released in August 2017 and has sold over 100,000 copies. It was selected as a Library Reads and an Indie Next and was #5 on the national Indie Picks for winter 2017-2018. It was nominated for the Southern Book Prize and was a 2018 finalist for both the Library of Virginia’s Literary Fiction and People’s Choice Awards. Her second novel, ALL THE LITTLE HOPES, holds traces of her mama’s Carolina life and was released in July 2021.

Leah writes full time and enjoys meeting with book clubs and speaking about the rewards of becoming a bestselling author late in life. When she’s not writing, she loves to travel and hike with her husband Dave, a gentle man, a beekeeper and avid reader.

A gripping story of Cuban émigré Galán Betances and his attempt to reunite with his sister, a dangerous plan that will test Galán’s deep friendship with a young US Coast Guard officer.

“A suspenseful, humane novel, moving in its portrait of families divided by the hostilities of their governments, in this case Cuba and the United States.” ― Tobias Wolff

“What would you risk for a sister, a brother, a friend, a stranger? Mona Passage is one of those rare novels that will expand your heart.” ― Janet Benton, author of Lilli de Jong

“This exciting debut novel brims with elements from Bardenwerper’s days at sea. I recommend it for anyone who wants to understand those souls caught on the edge of the American empire.”— Brian Castner, author of The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life that Follows

Thomas "Buddy" Bardenwerper served for five years in the US Coast Guard. He is currently pursuing a JD and a master’s in public policy at Harvard Law School and the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Constable Teddy Creque, the sole police officer on the tiny, sun-soaked island of Anegada, is used to weathering storms. So when Hurricane Leatha hits the Caribbean with brutal force, his main concern is keeping the island’s two-hundred residents safe.
Teddy expects the power to go out. He expects the phone lines to go down. But he doesn’t expect the radioed message from the Royal Virgin Islands Police Force headquarters, informing him of a dangerous escaped prisoner. Queen Ya-Ya is a practitioner of ancient Afro-Cuban rites – and rumor has it she can kill with magic.
Teddy doesn’t believe in magic, and when he easily recaptures the dignified, imposing Queen Ya-Ya, he doesn’t believe his prisoner is dangerous either. But when she mysteriously kills a man from inside her locked cell, before vanishing once more into the night, Teddy is forced to reconsider . . .

Join us at 4 p.m. for a conversation with Juliette Fay, bestselling author of Shortest Way Home, Shelter Me, the Tumbling Turner Sisters and City of Flickering Light, to name a few. This event will take place on the patio at MacIntosh and we’ll be discussing her latest novel, Catch Us When We Fall.

About the book:

On her own since the age of eighteen, Cass Macklin dated brilliant, troubled Ben McGreavy, convinced he was the smartest person she’d ever known. They partied their way through their twenties, slowly descending into a bleak world of binge-drinking and broken promises, inebriated for most of a decade. Now Ben is dead, and Cass is broke, homeless, scared…and pregnant.

Determined to have a healthy pregnancy and raise Ben’s baby, Cass has to find a way to stop drinking and build a stable life for herself and her child. But with no money, skills, or sober friends or family, the task seems insurmountable. At wit’s end, Cass turns to the only person with the means to help her: Ben’s brother Scott, third basemen for the Boston Red Sox, a man with a temper and problems of his own.

The two make a deal that neither one of them is sure they can live up to. As Cass struggles to take control of her life and to ask for help when she needs it, Scott begins to realize there’s a life for him beyond the baseball diamond.

By turns heartbreaking and humorous, with its message that change is possible, that forgiveness can be freely given, and that life, though imperfect, is worth embracing, Catch Us When We Fall is a story of human connectedness and hope.

Join us for a Sanibel tradition, Luminary 2021! We’ll have two authors in the shop to personalize books, hot cocoa and tasty treats! Come visit us in the Village Shops!

Join us for stories about the Everglades with authors Anne McCrary Sullivan & Holly Gentzen.

About this event

Join SCCF and MacIntosh Books + Paper for stories from the Everglades with authors Anne McCrary Sullivan and Holly Gentzen. Please use eventbrite to RSVP HERE.

Everglades National Park’s mangrove ecosystem, extending over 230,000 acres of south Florida, is the most expansive in the western hemisphere and the largest continuous system of mangroves in the world. Most of this mangrove area is remote, accessible only by boat, complex and difficult to navigate. Anne and Holly will be telling stories from their newest book, The Everglades: Stories of Grit and Spirit from the Mangrove Wilderness. In the book, we hear 21 stories from people who have ventured into this wilderness—for scientific work, artistic work, search-and-rescue missions, for personal renewal, or for the pure adventure of it. They tell stories of manatee rescue, shark encounters, storms and strandings, stories of environmental value and threat, wild beauty, personal enchantment and spirit. Together these stories reveal a world beyond the reach of most travelers. They also offer support and offer enticement to the intrepid few who may venture “out there” and return with stories of their own.

Books will be available for purchase and signing, with half of the proceeds benefitting SCCF.

About the authors:

Anne McCrary Sullivan

Anne is an avid paddler and Florida Master Naturalist. She is author of Ecology II: Throat Song from the Everglades and co-author of Paddling the Everglades Wilderness Waterway. Professor Emeritus of Interdisciplinary Studies (NLU), Fulbright Scholar and former Poetry Editor of the English Journal, she has articles, chapters and poems in many literary and academic publications. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College and a PhD in English Education from the University of Florida. She learned to love watery worlds during her childhood on the coast of southeastern coast North Carolina.

Holly Genzen

Holly is a Florida Master Naturalist and holds an M.S.Ed.in Outdoor Education from the University of Akron and a PhD in Educational Administration from Kent State University. She is a retired Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at National-Louis University. Before moving to Florida she solo thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail, and in the past decade has focused her attention on the water wilderness areas of south Florida. She has co-written a guidebook, Paddling the Everglades Wilderness Waterway, an effort that required extensive research into the social and natural history of the area. An artist, she keeps a daily nature sketchbook and explores the natural world through both oil and watercolor.

Lisa Black is the NYT bestselling author of 14 suspense novels, including works that have been translated into six languages, optioned for film, and shortlisted for the inaugural Sue Grafton Memorial Award. She is also a Latent Print Examiner and a certified Crime Scene Analyst, beginning her forensics career at the Coroner’s office in Cleveland Ohio and then the police department in Cape Coral, Florida. She has spoken to readers and writers at numerous conferences and will be a Guest of Honor at 2021 Killer Nashville.

Join us for a book chat and cocktails in the shop. Books will be available for signing and purchase.

Tickets are $50 and include lunch with Karen White and a signed copy of the Attic on Queen Street. Purchase tickets HERE!

Join us for cocktails on the porch with author Dianna Rostad. She’ll be here signing her new novel, You Belong Here, available in paperback from Harper Collins. Personalized copies can be purchased and shipped for those not on island by calling 239-472-1447 prior to the event.

“Set against the harsh backdrop of Montana, You Belong Here Now is a novel as straightforward and powerful as the characters who populate it. I love this book, and I guarantee you won’t find a finer debut work anywhere.”  — William Kent Krueger, New York Times bestselling author of This Tender Land

In this brilliant debut reminiscent of Kristina McMorris’s Sold on a Monday and William Kent Krueger's This Tender Land, three orphans journey westward from New York City to the Big Sky Country of Montana, hoping for a better life where beautiful wild horses roam free.

Montana 1925: An Irish boy orphaned by Spanish flu, a tiny girl who won’t speak, and a volatile young man who lies about his age to escape Hell’s Kitchen, are paraded on train platforms across the Midwest to work-worn folks. They journey countless miles, racing the sun westward. 

Before they reach the last rejection and stop, the oldest, Charles, comes up with a daring plan, and alone, they set off toward the Yellowstone River and grassy mountains where the wild horses roam. 

Fate guides them toward the ranch of a family stricken by loss. Nara, the daughter of a successful cattleman, has grown into a brusque spinster who refuses the kids on sight. She’s worked hard to gain her father’s respect and hopes to run their operation, but if the kids stay, she’ll be stuck in the kitchen.

Nara works them without mercy, hoping they’ll run off, but they buck up and show spirit, and though Nara will never be motherly, she begins to take to them. So, when Charles is jailed for freeing wild horses that were rounded up for slaughter, and an abusive mother from New York shows up to take the youngest, Nara does the unthinkable, risking everything she holds dear to change their lives forever.

“From the moment the reader steps on the train with these orphaned children, You Belong Here Now shows how beauty can emerge from even the darkest places.” —Erika Robuck, national bestselling author of Hemingway’s Girl

“Rostad’s bighearted debut is full of surprises, and warm with wisdom about what it means to be family.” —Meg Waite Clayton, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Train to London

Join us for a ticketed event with New York Times bestselling author Kristin Harmel as we celebrate the launch of her new book, Forest of Vanishing Stars. Lunch and book talk will be held at T2 beginning at 11, followed by a book signing at MacIntosh at noon. Tickets are $45 and include a hardcover copy of the book. Tickets can be purchased here.

After being stolen from her wealthy German parents and raised in the unforgiving wilderness of eastern Europe, a young woman finds herself alone in 1941 after her kidnapper dies. Her solitary existence is interrupted, however, when she happens upon a group of Jews fleeing the Nazi terror. Stunned to learn what's happening in the outside world, she vows to teach the group all she can about surviving in the forest--and in turn, they teach her some surprising lessons about opening her heart after years of isolation. But when she is betrayed and escapes into a German-occupied village, her past and present come together in a shocking collision that could change everything.

Inspired by incredible true stories of survival against staggering odds, and suffused with the journey-from-the-wilderness elements that made Where the Crawdads Sing a worldwide phenomenon, The Forest of Vanishing Stars is a heart-wrenching and suspenseful novel from the #1 internationally bestselling author whose writing has been hailed as "sweeping and magnificent."

Kristin Harmel is the New York Times bestselling author of a dozen novels including The Book of Lost Names, The Winemaker's Wife, The Room on Rue Amélie, and The Sweetness of Forgetting. She is also the cofounder and cohost of the popular web series, Friends and Fiction. She lives in Orlando, Florida.

Join us via Crowdcast for a conversation with Keith McWalter around his new book, When We Were All Still Alive. Register HERE.

About the book~

For Conrad Burrell—husband, father, and successful attorney in the autumn of his life—the world has come apart. Having long ago lost his first wife, the mother of his grown daughter and a widow herself, to youth and pride, he’s now lost his second to a violent accident,. “You think you’re finished, that you have no more stories in you,” his ex-wife warns, and he fears she’s right. Within hailing distance of the end of his days, after a lifetime of meeting the expectations of others, none are left but Conrad’s own, and he must discover whether love survives death as well as divorce—whether family memory can redeem individual mortality.

What do we do, then, we widows and widowers for whom there’s nothing left but the world’s permission to stop what we’ve done all our lives? In the cities of his youth, in the deserts of New Mexico, but most of all in a small Pennsylvania town, Conrad finds he has one more lesson in love to learn from the women of his past, and the one woman he's certain he can't live without.

For Conrad Burrell—husband, father, and successful attorney in the autumn of his life—the world has come apart. Having long ago lost his first wife, the mother of his grown daughter and a widow herself, to youth and pride, he’s now lost his second to a violent accident,. “You think you’re finished, that you have no more stories in you,” his ex-wife warns, and he fears she’s right. Within hailing distance of the end of his days, after a lifetime of meeting the expectations of others, none are left but Conrad’s own, and he must discover whether love survives death as well as divorce—whether family memory can redeem individual mortality.

When We Were All Still Alive is a novel of grief and healing, a portrait of a marriage, and a love song to ordinary lives.

Join us for a conversation about the Love Proof, the latest book by Madeleine Henry. We’ll be chatting about writing, this wonderful book and taking questions from those who’ve read the book and are curious about her process.

“Henry has done a masterful job… This book is academic and heartfelt and tender and loving. It is worth every minute spent reading it.” Kirkus Reviews

“The Love Proof is a fascinating story about how love opens us up to the remarkable possibilities of the Universe. Smart, sexy and scientific.” Jill Santopolo, New York Times bestelling author of The Light We Lost

Link to our chat via Crowcast HERE

Link to purchase the book via Bookshop.org HERE

Join us for special discounts, treats and bookish fun as we celebrate Independent Bookstore Day 2021! Here’s a message from this year’s Indie Ambassador, Glennon Doyle.

We’re especially excited about this offer from our audiobook partner, Libro.fm! Spend $15 or more in our shop and they’ll give a FREE audiobook download HERE. Choose from the books featured below.

Other IBD highlights-

*In-store purchases over $100 will include a special IBD tote.

*Enter a drawing to receive a $50 MacIntosh gift card with any purchase

*Meet local author Jennifer Schiff, signing her Sanibel Island Mysteries on our porch from 1-2 p.m.

See you at the bookshop!

Join us via Crowdcast for chat with Marie Bostwick, as we celebrate the launch of her latest novel, the Restoration of Celia Fairchild. You can register for this event by following this link to our Crowdcast page : https://www.crowdcast.io/e/meet-marie-bostwick

Join us for a celebration of Float Plan, written by SWFL author, Trish Doller. Float Plan has received glowing reviews and is sure to be the HOT summer romance! We’ll be bringing this event to you via Crowdcast and you can use this link to sign up. https://www.crowdcast.io/e/trish-doller-in

Signed copies of Float Plan by Trish Doller will be available at MacIntosh while supplies last and we are happy to ship. Don’t miss this great opportunity to hear from two of our favorite authors on this special day.