Welcome to From the Front Bortch, a conversational podcast about books, small business, and life in the South.

Maybe friendship is being the guardian of another person's hope. Leave it with me, and I'll look after it for a while, if it feels too heavy for now.

I'm Annie Jones, owner of the bookshelf, and independent books are in beautiful downtown Thomasville, Georgia, and today we're kicking off a new monthly episode installment, new release roundup.

Every four weeks, I'll sit down with shop floor manager Olivia Schafer and online sales coordinator Lucy Stoltzfus to discuss our favorite newly released titles of the month.

It's a way to highlight new books without you feeling too terribly overwhelmed by your maybe already daunting TBR list.

We've been doing something pretty similar each week for our friends on Patreon, but weekly releases we're getting hard to keep up with, and we think this will be more manageable for everyone.

Readers and booksellers alike.

Hi, Olivia. Hi, Lucy. Hello. Oh my gosh, Lucy's here in person. Normally we'll be recording long distance because Lucy helps coordinate our online sales from Pennsylvania, which is very exciting.

But here I am in the beautiful humid South. I feel like you should sing something. Oh, what is this? Why, why could I sing? I'm here.

We're so glad she's here. It is very fun to get to record all three together. We used to do this on the reg, like we called it Newsday Tuesday, which I believe is Lucy's invention.

And we did it on Patreon. Olivia and I've been carrying that torch for a year. Yeah, I think so.

But Lucy reads so differently and we're very excited to have her voice back added to the mix and I think doing these on a monthly basis rather than a weekly.

It'll help me. I don't know if that's a selfish decision, but it just felt like you and I were talking about like 10 books each week.

It just feels like a lot. It was a lot. And so this is really going to narrow down kind of what we're featuring, which brings me to Olivia.

Tell us what your tastes are. What's your literary genre? Very sophisticated, if I may.

I love a good mystery, cozy mystery all the way up to a thriller, psychological thriller. And then I also read a lot of middle grade and chapter books as well.

And Lucy, how would you describe your literary tastes? Historical fiction. I usually do kind of off the wall historical fiction, but I also I'm going to talk about some kind of typical historical fiction.

And then also nonfiction, some memoirs. A couple of the ones on here are kind of like memoir mixed with nonfiction.

Okay, perfect. Okay. So we're going to do this round robin style as we used to do. I will kick us off.

The first book I'm featuring is Palm Beach. This is by Mary Atkins. It releases on August 3rd in Hardback. I love this book.

It's compulsively readable. Like I think I read it. It was one of those books that I started reading it and then took it out to lunch with me. Like took myself out to lunch to read it by myself. Just a lie full.

Took it in the car with me when Jordan and I drove to Bainbridge. Like everywhere I went, this book went with me until I finished it.

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