Barnes & Noble’s Latest Recommends “Main Selection”: A Vintage Affair by Isabel Wolff

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world's largest bookseller, today announced that Isabel Wolff’s new novel, A Vintage Affair (Bantam Books) is the latest "Main Selection" in the Barnes & Noble Recommends program. The book is on sale today and can be purchased at any Barnes & Noble store, online at Barnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com/recommends), or instantly downloaded on NOOK™.

“It kept me reading for three days straight,” said Pam Milek of Houston, Texas, one of the scores of Barnes & Noble booksellers from across the country who participated in the choice of the newest Recommends selection. “Isabel Wolff opened up a new world for me and even piqued my interest in vintage clothes.” A Vintage Affair won the booksellers’ endorsement from among the many early summer publications considered for the honor. “I want to share it with my mother, my sisters, and my friends. And don’t even get me started on the vintage clothes! Lovely!” agreed Bookseller Amy Abst of Duluth, Minnesota.

A riveting blend of romance, heartbreak, and humor—plus delightful descriptions of fashion from the 1920s through the 1980s—Wolff’s noveltells the story of Phoebe Swift, a young Londoner whose decision to quit her job, break her engagement, and open a vintage clothing boutique strikes some as peculiar. "I felt I needed a change," Phoebe explains to an attractive journalist just before the opening of her shop in South London. But it’s not really that simple. Although Phoebe’s store is the culmination of a lifelong passion, her heart is weighed down with grief due to the death of her best friend, for which she feels responsible. To evade her guilt, Phoebe throws herself into her work, filling the shop with Pucci silks, Balenciaga gowns, “cupcake dresses,” and other couture creations. As Phoebe embarks on an exciting love affair, she also becomes enmeshed in the past of Thérèse Bell, an elderly French woman who wishes to sell her designer suits and gowns. Coming unexpectedly upon a well-preserved child’s coat in her new friend’s wardrobe, Phoebe unlocks a secret that Thérèse has held close since her youth in Nazi-occupied France. A Vintage Affair is vividly colored with endearing characters and lovingly stitched with human sympathy. Readers will find it a perfect fit.

The Barnes & Noble Recommends program includes:

• Barnes & Noble store events. Reading group discussions for A Vintage Affair will be held in select Barnes & Noble stores.
• The online experience. A video interview with Isabel Wolff will be posted online at www.bn.com/recommends.
• A free reading group guide. A free reader's guide, including discussion questions and more about the author, is available at any Barnes & Noble store and at www.bn.com/recommends.
• Advice for reading groups. Customers can ask any Barnes & Noble bookseller for a copy of our free guide on how to start a reading group. The guide can also be found online at www.bn.com/bookclubs.

Each Barnes & Noble Recommends "Main Selection" is a book that Barnes & Noble believes is "unputdownable" and is especially appropriate for book discussion groups. The books can be discussed online at www.bn.com/recommends.

The previous 17 Barnes & Noble Recommends Main Selections are:

• Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (Atria).
• Chris Bohjalian’s The Double Bind (Crown).
• Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Harcourt).
• Paulette Jiles’ Stormy Weather (William Morrow).
• Sarah Addison Allen’s Garden Spells (Bantam Books).
• Maggie O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (Harcourt).
• Marisa de los Santos’ Belong to Me (William Morrow).
• Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 (Grand Central Publishing).
• Ethan Canin’s America America (Random House).
• Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’ The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (The Dial Press).
• Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo (Knopf).
• Spencer Quinn’s Dog On It (Simon & Schuster).
• Sarah Dallas’ Prayers For Sale (St. Martin’s Press).
• Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (Hyperion/Voice).
• Cathy Marie Buchanan’s The Day the Falls Stood Still (Hyperion/Voice).
• Louise Penny’s The Brutal Telling (Minotaur/Macmillan).
• Nancy Pickard’s The Scent of Rain and Lightning (Ballantine Books).

ABOUT BARNES & NOBLE, INC.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller and a Fortune 500 company, operates 723 bookstores in 50 states. Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Barnes & Noble, also operates 639 college bookstores serving nearly four million students and over 250,000 faculty members at colleges and universities across the United States. Barnes & Noble is the nation’s top bookseller brand for the seventh year in a row, as determined by a combination of the brand’s performance on familiarity, quality, and purchase intent; the top bookseller in quality for the second year in a row and the number two retailer in trust, according to the EquiTrend® Brand Study by Harris Interactive®. Barnes & Noble conducts its online business through Barnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com), one of the Web’s largest e-commerce sites, which also features more than one million titles in its eBookstore (www.bn.com/ebooks). Barnes & Noble customers can buy and read eBooks on the widest range of platforms, including NOOKTM by Barnes & Noble, eBook Readers from partner companies, and hundreds of the most popular mobile and computing devices using free BN eReader software.

General information on Barnes & Noble, Inc. can be obtained via the Internet by visiting the company’s corporate website: www.barnesandnobleinc.com.

NOOKTM is a trademark of Barnes & Noble, Inc.

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