On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

For the next few weeks on Ask a Bookseller, we’ll be doing something a little different: focusing on books of hope.

Danielle King of Left Bank Books in St Louis, Mo., knew right away what she wanted to recommend: Sofia Samatar’s sci-fi novel “The Practice, the Horizon and the Chain.” Weighing in at 128 pages, this short novel packs a transformational punch.

The setting for this novel is the stars, where humanity lives, powered by an enslaved underclass, the Chained. The story focuses on a boy who is pulled from the Chained class and given an elite education, and his life is transformed by connections with two people in succession: a man called the Prophet and a woman (formerly Chained, herself) called the Professor.

Danielle King describes the story as: A transformation of the connection between people that are socially structured to be apart from each other. These people have so much in common, but they’re kept from one another, and when they finally can come together, it is one of the most uplifting stories I’d ever seen.

Fun fact, I was training to be a political philosopher before I became a bookseller. I used to study racial group consciousness, and I’ve read a lot of books about racial group consciousness.

In this little, tiny science fiction tone, Sophia Samatar did what thousands of race scholars have been unable to do — which is talk about the way racial group consciousness affects the people in that group, really accurately, really beautifully, and in a way that makes you feel like the way that the world is needn't be the way that the world is, because every day we have this opportunity to connect to one another, and in that connection, be transformed.

— Danielle King

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

Theresa Phung works at Yu & Me Books in Manhattan’s Chinatown. She recommends “Blob: A Love Story” by Maggie Su.

Su tells of Vi Liu, a young Taiwanese-American woman, who discovers a sentient blob and attempts to mold it into her ideal partner, leading to unexpected consequences.

Theresa says: The blob, as it watches TV, starts to gain more and more human emotions, human physical features, and is basically becoming a human being. Our heroine decides, “What better thing to do than to groom this blob into the perfect boyfriend?”

So it doesn’t go that well, at least initially, in many ways, like her, trying to teach this blob to be a person ends up sort of revealing a lot of the ways in which she is not a very good person — whether that means her job, her personal relationships, her family, her friendships.

The more she tries to sort of teach this alien entity how to be a human being, she really ends up teaching herself how to be one.

— Theresa Phung

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

Eowyn Ivey launched onto the literary scene in 2012 with her New York Times Bestselling debut “The Snow Child,” which grounds the fairy tale of a couple who makes a child out of snow in the hard reality of a 1920 Alaska homestead. Ivey weaves a world that feels both real and magical at the same time.

Thirteen years later, Ivey is out with her third novel “Black Woods, Blue Sky.” Olga Lijo Serans of Hearthside Books and Toys in Juneau, Alaska, says Ivey is “getting better and better at what she does.”

The novel is marketed as a twist on Beauty and the Beast. Lijo Serans says a better comparison would be within Native Alaskan mythology.

Set in contemporary Alaska, “Black Woods, Blue Sky” tells the story of a single mother, Birdie, who is struggling to make ends meet. She falls in love with a reclusive man and decides to join him, along with her daughter, in his isolated cabin in the mountains.

Theirs is a subsistence-living existence tied to nature, and at first Birdie finds it idyllic. But her partner has a secret. This could be the set-up of a horror novel, but while Lijo Serans describes the book as “raw” with thriller elements, the story goes in a different direction.

Lijo Serans describes Ivey’s writing:

“She’s totally grounded in the Alaska landscape and the Alaska way of life. But at the same time, she introduces an element of magic. The introduction is very slow. You sometimes aren’t really sure if the magic element is there or when it actually appeared. I found it totally engrossing, and I think that it’s just the thing to read on a winter night.”