I hope that everyone has checked the January update on the bookshop's website. We have a lot of staff picks, even some people who didn't have staff picks last month! Barnaby had to twist some arms, but we did manage to get some really good choices for this month. Surprisingly to me, many of our staff picks this month are from the publisher Random House. It's not a huge surprise that we picked so many books from them, they do publish good material, it just seemed so odd to have so many picks from our staff being from one publisher this month. I once asked Susan if a book I was holding was any good, because I wanted to read something that was well written. She then responded "Well, Random House published it, so it must be alright." She was right on that one. The book was Kabul Beauty School, by Deborah Rodriguez. This book is now one of my staff picks and I highly recommend it to anyone. It's one of those stories where women are being empowered to help themselves out of horrible situations. It's not overwhelming or intensely sad, it really is such a nice story of a hair dresser from the United States helping out women in Afghanistan.