UNP staff members are always reading new books, both within our list and outside of what we publish. Here are some of the titles where our noses have been buried.

“This month I started reading Special Places, Sacred Circles: A Memoir by Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, who has also previously published with UNP. I picked up a copy from the South Dakota Historical Society Press booth at the SD Festival of Books last fall and am excited to finally dive into it.” -Sarah Kee

“I recently finished A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by George R.R. Martin. After falling in love with the HBO series of the same name, and Dunk and Egg’s characters in the show, I decided to also read this collection of three novellas. This series of stories is my favorite Game of Thrones experience yet, a prequel dating back a century before the main story begins.” -Lacey Losh

“I loved Mary Roach’s Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law so much that I decided to check out two of her other books, both dealing with dead things: Six Feet Over: Science Tackles the Afterlife and Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Endings haunt me, so I kind of want to be able to chat intelligently about mine when it comes about, especially if there’s an afterlife that involves discussion of what some geeky freaky (or not so freaky) scientist did with my dead body.” -Clark Whitehorn

“I’m re-reading Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations after seeing a short clip from the 1947 film. I read it in high school (a long time ago) and remembered little aside from Pip going to see the strange Miss Havisham. I love Dickens and his satiric take on the class-consciousness and class division in Britain, poignant and comical at the same time, and his writing is fabulous.” -Annie Shahan

“I recently read Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. This has been a very buzzy book with lots of mixed reviews and reactions. It follows a woman who showcases her traditional family lifestyle on social media, then finds herself transported back in time to the mid nineteenth century, forced to live a real ‘tradwife’ life. I found it compulsively readable, and it left me emotional at times. I’m still not sure if I’m completely convinced by certain elements, but it gave me so much to think about, and reading reviews has been very entertaining. I also just finished The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende, ahead of the new TV show adaptation. This is a beautifully written classic that follows a peculiar family in Chile throughout the twentieth century and into the 1973 coup that brought dictator Augusto Pinochet to power. It’s a tough read, but incredibly moving, and I highly recommend it.” -Madison Wigley

“I just listened to London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe. It is a true crime narrative about the mysterious death of ninteen-year-old Zac Brettler who fell from the balcony of a high-end London apartment building in 2019. Radden Keefe’s investigative work takes him through London’s underworld and the criminals Zac may have gotten himself intertwined with that led to his death. He is a skilled writer and an even better narrator. If you liked his last book, Say Nothing, I highly recommend this one!” -Taylor Gilreath

“I’ve been reading the debut novel of Robert Isaacs, It’s Hard to Be an Animal, which chronicles the mysterious—and funny—quest of a man in New York City who suddenly has the ability to understand the animals around him.” -Clare Jones