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.”

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.

Makkah Abdur Salaam of Black Garnet Books in St. Paul recommends the nonfiction book “A More Perfect Party: The Night Shirley Chisholm and Diahann Carroll Reshaped Politics” by Juanita Tolliver. Abdur Salaam describes it as a “roadmap” for cultivating community.

Chisholm and Carroll both claimed important firsts for Black women. In 1972, Chisholm was the first Black woman to run for president. Carroll was the first Black woman to win a Tony for Best Actress in a Musical (for Richard Rodgers’ “No Strings”) in 1962.

Tolliver zeroes her focus on one event: a party hosted by Carroll in Hollywood to introduce Chisholm to a community of influencers to support her presidential run. Among the big names in attendance were Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party; Berry Gordy, founder of the Motown Record label; and actors Goldie Hawn and Flip Wilson. Each chapter of the book focuses on a different guest in attendance.

Makkah Abdur Salaam recommends reading this book as a great way to start Black History Month. “[Tolliver] lays out how Shirley Chisholm basically lays the foundation for the women to come after her, like Stacey Abrams, AOC, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Maxine Waters.”

It was the coalition-building focus of the book that Abdur Salaam, age 26, found most hopeful.

“I know that there’s a heightened — especially younger people — feeling of [being] isolated and lonely, not really knowing what to do in this kind of political sphere. So I think this book is a great road map on how to really stay grounded and how to just engage with the people who are around you.

“It’s a really great book to learn how to cultivate community and learn how to engage in sisterhood and brotherhood with each other in a way that is based in empathy and compassion for each other, as well as the spirit of reciprocity. I have to emphasize that [Chisholm] gave and gave to her community, and when she asked for them to show up for her, they did.”

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.

Fans of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass” were looking forward to her new collection of short essays “The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World,” which was published shortly before Thanksgiving.

Beth Hartung of Pearl Street Books in La Crosse, Wis., says it was at the top of her list of favorite books from last year. Weighing in at 128 pages with accompanying illustrations, “The Serviceberry” is “a true gem of a book” that’s an “incredible joy to read,” says Hartung.

Kimmerer is a biologist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, whose essay collection “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants” (published by Milkweed Press in Minneapolis in 2013) was called A New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Readers Pick.

In that collection, and in “The Serviceberry,” her short essays consider our connections with the natural world and with each other.

Serviceberries are shrubs or small trees, including some varieties indigenous to Minnesota, whose tart fruit feeds pollinators, birds, animals and humans alike.

Hartung explains that Kimmerer “uses the humble serviceberry as a metaphor to describe this world that she believes we can have, that we can exist in. And I believe it’s a world that many of us are longing to live in.

“It’s this world where there’s this abundance and that we’re focused on [having] enough, and we’re not focused on the scarcity. She describes a world where reciprocity is valued, a world where, individually and collectively, we recognize that we humans are interconnected with all of nature around us, and as we walk through the world, she urges us to really take note that what we do impacts everything else. And she describes [how] we can all adapt to or adopt sustainable living practices if we choose gift economy over capitalism.

“It’s just such an incredibly beautiful book. Every single page. I just wanted to pause after I read it and reflect on it and reread it. I’ve read it out loud to friends. I’ve gifted it to quite a few people already.”

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.

Lovers of little-known history, get ready: We’ve got a book that lifts a real-life Minnesota tax attorney out of WWII obscurity and into the limelight with an out-of-the-box plan to defeat the Nazis without ever going to war.

The book is Graham Moore’s meticulously researched novel, “The Wealth of Shadows,” and Rona Brinlee of The BookMark in Neptune Beach, Fla., says it was one of her favorite books of this past year.

In 1939, horrified by what the build-up of what will become WWII, Ansel Luxford goes to the U.S. Treasury Department with a proposal to bankrupt Germany while still appearing neutral on the world stage. They form a committee and start making plans for the future of the dollar; meanwhile, a potential Soviet spy has infiltrated the system.

Battle-by-economic-theory might sound dry, but bookseller Brinlee assures readers that it’s very readable, with fascinating characters, including well-known economist John Maynard Keynes. At the end of the book, the author reveals his research and clarifies the places where he inserted fiction, but much of it is true.

“There’s a lot of there’s some economic theory in there,” says Brinlee. “Because John Maynard Keynes proposes things that are based on the [value of the] dollar and how that would work. And I’m not an economist, and so I have to confess, I read those parts twice, but that was okay. I learned a lot, and I was more than happy to do that.”

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.

Part of the superpower of stories is to create spaces for empathy: Between the pages of the book, we get to step into the lives of other people, real or fictional.

That’s what Stefanie Chow of Stillwater Books in West Warwick, R.I., loves about Coco Mellors’ novel “Blue Sisters.”

“It's a very messy story,” Chow says, “but it’s really rooted in this unconditional love between sisters, and it just at one point they felt like flesh and bone to me.”

The topics of the novel are heavy indeed, since the Blue sisters of the title come with their share of addiction and unhealthy coping mechanisms. The oldest sister, Avery, is a recovering heroin addict turned high-powered lawyer living in London.

Middle sister Bonnie is a former world champion boxer who left the profession after a difficult loss. The baby of the family, Lucky, is an LA-based model stuck in a cycle of partying, drinking, and drugs. The novel begins one year after their fourth sister, Nicky, has passed away unexpectedly.

Stefanie Chow describes what she liked about this book: The story is basically these three sisters finding their way back to each other, but in order to do that, they really have to confront their pain.

And one thing that I really loved about the book is that it’s written with this attention to detail that just makes the characters feel so real. It's a very vulnerable story.

Every chapter is told from a different sister’s point of view. As they start to see the pain that their sisters are dealing with, they have this empathy and this pain at the same time that just makes everything so much harder.

There were times when they were really cruel to each other. Sometimes they came off as unlikable, but the fact that they find a way to forgive each other really won me back over as a reader.

— Stefanie Chow

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.

Rima Parikh of The Thinking Spot in Wayzata, Minn., recommends a book of short and sweet (and savory!) essays, perfect for gifting your favorite foodie. It’s called “Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees” by poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil, whose previous book “World of Wonders” was a New York Times bestseller.

Perhaps better than anything else, food can transport us back in time and evoke memories. Each of these nourishing personal essays focuses on a different food, drawing the reader in through stories and humor while weaving in facts about the foods and their history. Many passages focus on fruits, but she also throws in various savories, from potatoes to waffles.

Rima says: Along with her, we kind of get to travel the world. The fruits are from Greece and French Polynesia and India. And there are so many in there that I hadn’t even heard of. For example, there’s an apple banana, like a banana that tastes like apple.

[The book] is great for this time of year, when our attention span is so short and there's too many things going on!

You can take one essay at a time. In fact, I’d recommend it. You take one at a time, as if you were savoring the fruit and let any memories that come to you wash over you as you are reading it.

— Rima Parikh