Common Good Books Garrison & Keillor

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Welcome to the new online home for Common Good Books--CGB 2.0--of St. Paul, MN. We hope that this new site makes it easier for you to find what you're looking for. We have added a number of things to the site that we hope you will take advantage of.

Spend a spring weekend lost in this great adventure. It is an adventure story in the old time sense. The brave young hero on a noble quest which pits him against the most evil of villians. Young Morgan Kinneson is walking from Vermont to Gettysburg the last place his brother Pilgrim was seen alive. But he must travel farther to find the truth of what happened to his brother, followed by a deadly mad band of prison escapees. History is the backdrop on which this story is pinned but Mosher is not bound by fact or for that matter, reality. There is a talking tortoise, a crying elephant and a rune stone that holds the secrets of the underground railway. Morgan meets famous, Abraham Lincoln and infamous, a house filled with ghosts trying to tempt wayward travelers. America is too practical to have a literary tradition of magical realism. We prefer to call them tall tales and Mosher has become a modern master of the genre. -Sue, CGB Store Manager

"This new novel from the author of The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is a wonderful tale of two generations. Elina and Ted, brand new parents of a son, live in current day London. Elina nearly died giving birth and Ted is haunted by having almost lost her. Lexie and Innes inhabit post war London of the 1950s where they publish a magazine chronicling the vibrant art world that surrounds them. The story of these couples tucks and weaves in unexpected ways that leave the reader wondering how they will ever connect. But OFarrell skillfully reels the two story lines toward each other until the reader understands in an Ah-hah moment how fate has touched them both. This is a love story, a mystery and a book that made me late for work having to finish it." -Sue, CGB Store Manager

A portrait of an iconic marriage on its way to dissolutionErdrichs unbridled urgency yields startlingly original phrasing as well as flashes of blinding lucidity. New York Times Book Review
Louise Erdrich, the owner of Minneapolis' fine independent Birchbark Books, is the author of thirteen novels as well as volumes of poetry, short stories, children's books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel Love Medicine won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse was a finalist for the National Book Award. Most recently, The Plague of Doves won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Shadow Tag is a stunning book from the National Book Critics Circle Awardwinning and New York Timesbestselling author of Love Medicine and Pulitzer-Prize-finalist The Plague of Doves. In the vein of the novels of such contemporaries as Zoe Heller and Susan Minot, Shadow Tag is an intense and heart-wrenching story of a troubled marriage and a family in disarrayand a radical departure from Erdrichs previous acclaimed work.

"Rash is a praised writer, drawing comparisons to John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy, and those comparisons ring true here. In 'Hard Times,' he produces the first of many images that sear into the brain. After Edna accuses her neighbor Hartley's dog of stealing eggs from her barn, Edna's husband, Jacob, rebuts, saying, 'I don't think it's your dog that's stealing the eggs." Hartley, a proud man upon whom the Great Depression has been exceptionally hard, states matter-of-factly, "But you don't know that for sure. It could be.' And then, 'Before Jacob could reply, the blade whisked across the hound's windpipe. The dog didn't cry out or snarl. It merely sagged in Hartley's grip. Blood darkened the road.' "It's haunting images like that, horrific, but utterly believable because of the desperate world Rash creates, that stay with the reader long after this book is finished." Read the rest of CGB bookseller David Doody's review in the Star Tribune here.

The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America Its Name (Hardcover)

"Without Toby Lester's fine book, the Waldseemller Map might remain an interesting historical footnote. A treasure, sure, for naming the Americas, but its importance would remain obscured for all but a few scholars. "Instead, one now understands the creation of the map as a world-changing moment, 'a birth certificate for the world that came into being in 1492 -- and ... a death warrant for the one that was there before.'" Read the rest of CGB Assistant Manager Martin Schmutterer's review in the Star Tribune here.