Parallel Pages: Yesteryear
Parallel Pages is our blog post series where we use a recent favourite read as a springboard to explore other books in the shop. This edition focuses on one of the biggest books of 2026, with recommendations coming from several of our booksellers, all of whom devoured and loved it.
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke is the twisty, gripping and horrifying story of Natalie, a hugely successful tradwife influencer sharing her ‘perfect’ life on social media. Natalie performs motherhood and femininity perfectly for her followers while her husband plays cowboy on their Idaho farm. Just as we’re getting drawn into their unsettling, sickly-sweet world, Natalie wakes up in the ‘good old days’ of 1855. Everything is nearly normal, the children running around look like hers, the farm is almost the same, but she can tell something isn’t quite right. The book is told in two timelines, flashing back and forth between Natalie’s rise to influencer fame and the harsh reality of her 19th century life.
Conversation in the shop has been non-stop since we turned the final pages of Yesteryear and it has inspired us all to explore various topics in our reading. If you fancy following us down the various rabbit holes of influencer culture, right-wing idealism, and misogyny (to name but a few), then here are some places you could begin:
Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn:
It was Natalie’s inner monologue that reminded me (Zoë) of Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne, but the similarities don’t stop there: intrigue, a questionable marriage, unreliable narrators and heart-pounding suspense make Gone Girl just as addictive as Yesteryear. At their core, both books are about performance and reality vs. what gets portrayed. It’s hard to say much more without giving away in my opinion one of the best twists in thriller fiction in the 21st century, but suffice to say this book remains popular after a decade for good reason. The film is also excellent and will give you something to watch while you’re waiting for Anne Hathaway’s Natalie to come to the big screen!
Influencer Creep - Sophie Bishop
A fascinating look at the impacts of ‘influencer’ culture and the content-ification of art, this book dives into the reason influencers like Natalie exist and succeed in the first place. Bishop examines how artists feel pressured to create social content in order to build an online presence in addition to their creative work. Yesteryear might take that concept to the extreme, but it touches on something real that Bishop lays out in her timely examination of self-branding and the rise of the microcelebrity.
Men Who Hate Women - Laura Bates
This is a true must-read for anyone looking to understand more about incel culture, the manosphere, and modern misogyny. Before I (Elise) worked as a bookseller, I had a career in Gender Based Violence prevention, so I thought I would know most of the things Bates covered in the book. I found myself shocked and horrified, routinely reading out passages to my poor flatmates because I needed to shout about everything I was learning. Bates delves into the different archetypes of online misogyny based on her years long investigations of different manosphere forums, websites, and influencers.
Nostalgia - Agnes Arnold-Forster:
In Yesteryear, Natalie harnesses the power of nostalgia to harken back to an age where everything was supposedly idyllic and far better than the present day, an ideology she is forced to confront when she finds herself living in 1805. A mix of neuroscience, history, and psychology, Arnold-Foster’s book is a wide ranging look at this powerful, exploitable emotion, linking nicely with how the real-life influencers Natalie is inspired by use nostalgia to lure us into their content, and distract us from anything other than watching them pretend to reset the clocks to a literal yesteryear.
Pink-Pilled - Lois Shearing
After learning all about the harm men and the manosphere are doing, it’s (unfortunately) time to look at the ways women are being recruited by the far right online. Shearing’s brilliant investigative work into the online communities that are harnessing the power of extreme right-wing rhetoric and ideology to build a coalition of women involves interviewing experts and even infiltrating communities for the book, including the ever-growing ranks of so-called ‘trad wife’ influencers like Natalie. This cutting-edge account shines a light on women’s experiences in these movements, including the violence and misogyny they experience.
Meet the Newmans - Jennifer Niven:
For more reading about lives that aren’t quite what they seem, we’re turning to Meet the Newmans next. It follows a fictional American TV family in the 1950s and all of the drama that bubbles to the surface at the advent of the 1960s. No longer America’s darlings, their ratings drop, their lives begin to unravel, and the mother, Dinah, takes matters into her own hands to regain control. Recommended for fans of Lessons in Chemistryand The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, we think this makes for a great historical fiction read that explores the themes of family, feminism, and the un-reality of celebrities that pop up in Yesteryear.
