Fort Collins Bookstore Curates Secret Love and Prairie Restoration

“Clara and Francis are madly in love and want to spend every minute together, forever. Yet, their love is a secret one because Francis is married and they have to sneak away from their lives just to be together.”

Teresa, co-owner of Old Firehouse Books in Fort Collins, doesn’t mince words when describing the central tension of Sophie Mackintosh’s new novel, Permanence. It’s a story about illicit love turning permanent, about the moment the stolen afternoons stop being a thrill and start becoming a cage.

The book is one of three staff recommendations featured this week in SunLit, The Colorado Sun’s literature section. But the selection isn’t random. It’s a deliberate curatorial choice that spans from the psychological confines of a secret affair to the vast, open skies of Montana’s prairie.

The first pick, Permanence, follows Clara and Francis as they wake up in an unnamed city, a self-contained sanctuary for adulterers. There are fountains, old town squares, and cafes with checkered tablecloths. The invisible threads binding them mean contact with the real world is impossible. The question, as Teresa puts it, is whether “forever together” is actually what they want once the cracks begin to show.

It’s a sharp contrast to the second recommendation, Wild On Purpose: The American Prairie Story and the Art of Thinking Bigger by Sean Gerrity.

If the novel is about confinement disguised as freedom, the non-fiction title is about the messy, difficult work of creating freedom from scratch. Gerrity chronicles the effort to establish the American Prairie Reserve, a wildlife reserve in Montana that rivals Yellowstone and Glacier in size.

Zane, a bookseller at Old Firehouse, frames it as a call to action for locals who might feel disconnected from the land.

“It’s time for us to collectively hyperfocus on how gosh dang cool prairie biomes are,” Zane says.

The book details how a small team of ordinary citizens defied conventional wisdom to restore vast areas of temperate grasslands. They brought back bison, elk, pronghorn, and pollinators. They had to win over skeptical neighbors and respect local Indigenous tribes. It wasn’t just about saving what was left; it was about making new wild spaces.

The third recommendation, though less detailed in the source material, rounds out the theme of persistence. It’s a story of one woman’s boundless resilience, tying the romantic struggle of Permanence and the ecological struggle of Wild On Purpose together under the banner of endurance.

For readers in Fort Collins, these picks offer more than just entertainment. They reflect a community interested in how we manage our relationships, our environment, and our own limits. Old Firehouse isn’t just selling books; they’re suggesting ways to think bigger about the spaces we occupy, whether that’s an unnamed city for lovers or a prairie for wildlife.

The books are available now, priced between $23.95 and $28. They’re not just items on a shelf. They’re invitations to look closer at the stories we tell ourselves about love and land.