Everyone loves a love story, and the love independent booksellers have for independent presses is epic. Among the many indie presses appearing at the ABA's Winter Institute in New Orleans next week, Other Press has two books getting major buzz: a novel, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker (January), and a memoir, Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and a Love Reclaimed by Leslie Maitland (April). Both authors will be at WI7.

Geoffrey Jennings of Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kan., said he felt "a little jetlagged" after staying up until 2:30 a.m. reading Crossing the Borders of Time, in which a former New York Times investigative reporter uses her skills to explore her parents' escape from Nazi Germany and find the Catholic Frenchman who was her mother's lover and reunite them. "I couldn't believe it was a true story," said Jennings. "This is a home run, no question. And photos are in it."

In her galley letter, Other Press publisher Judith Gurewich described The Art of Hearing Heartbeats this way: "Imagine a love story, set in Burma, between a crippled girl and a blind boy who don't see each other for fifty years, yet never stop believing in each other." Also imagine an omniscient astrologer telling this story to the boy's grown-up, skeptical, New York-savvy daughter, who goes to Burma searching for her missing father.

"Kudos Other Press," cheered Lanora Haradon from Next Chapter Books in Mequon, Wis., calling The Art of Hearing Heartbeats "book club gold." Haradon was hooked into the novel by reading the blurbs from booksellers in Germany, where the novel was published in 2002. The book has sold more than 300,000 copies in Europe.

A new indie press on the scene is MP Publishing. Last year the U.K. company launched a line of American writers, distributed by Publishers Group West, and hired some editorial talent with distinguished careers at MacAdam/Cage--Guy Intoci as editor-in-chief and Pat Walsh as acquiring editor. The editorial duo's latest literary discovery is Stephen Graham Jones. With eight novels and two collections to his credit, Jones is not new to publishing, but this Native American author, who is part of the trio of edgy authors behind welcometothevelvet.com (along with Will Christopher Bear and Craig Clevenger) is the kind of writer that Walsh and Intoci are adept at helping to break out to a wider audience.

In the novel Growing Up Dead in Texas, Jones returns to his hometown for the first time since high school to revisit in a fictional way a suspicious fire in the cotton fields that devastated and split the community and for which no one ever claimed credit or was punished. Jones, who teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder, will be at the WI7 authors' reception signing galleys of the book, which will be published in June. "That is the number one book I want to get my hands on," said Jennings.

Michele Filgate, events coordinator at McNally Jackson in New York City, has her eye on The Last Warner Woman by Kei Miller (Coffee House Press, April). "I just love Coffee House Press," she said. The novel opens in a Jamaican leper colony, where a woman with the "gift of warning" winds up in a mental institution and struggles to control the telling of her own story. Miller, a fellow at the University of Iowa, splits his time between Jamaica and Scotland.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker and recent winner of the Giller Prize, Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan (Picador, Feb.) is high on City Lights' Paul Yamazaki's WI7 buzz book list. It's about African American jazz musicians beginning in the 1920s, and set in the U.S., Germany and France. Yamazaki stressed that the book is not just for jazz aficionados. "As I was reading it, I put together my own playlist," he added.

Also on Yamazaki's radar are two memoirs--whose authors will be in New Orleans--coming from Grove/Atlantic. In Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (March), novelist Jeanette Winterson searches for her birth mother--and her sanity--as she delves into the horrors of her childhood with her adopted Pentecostal parents near London. "How did this child survive this sh*t?" asked Yamazaki. "It's almost like having a very gripping conversation with her."

Robert Sindelar from Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, Wash., said about Winterston's book: "Whenever a fine writer turns inward and talks about their development, it is always interesting." For his part, Jennings predicted that a signed galley of Winterson's memoir would be "Joan Didion collectible."

The other Grove memoir Jennings, Sindelar and Yamazaki all look forward to is Michael Thomas's The Broken King (May). In it, the author of the critically acclaimed paperback original novel Man Gone Down explores his relationship with his father.

In Father's Day: A Journey into the Mind and Heart of My Extraordinary Son (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May), Buzz Bissinger, the author of Friday Night Lights, writes about how he and his mentally disabled son travel and discover much about the country and each other. Expect long lines for Bissinger at the author reception.

While the author will not be at WI7, Alison Bechdel's latest graphic memoir, Are You My Mother: A Comic Drama (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May), is garnering lots of buzz, which is to be expected for a followup to the book about her father, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, that made so many best-of-year lists in 2006. An excerpt will be in the galley room. "Even a lot of people who do not like graphic novels, like her," said Filgate.

One of the memoirs on the radar for Valerie Koehler, owner of Blue Willow Books in Houston, is Let's Pretend This Never Happened: (A Mostly True Memoir) by Jenny Lawson (Penguin, April). Lawson's theBloggess blog has a big following, and Koehler said: "She has a David and Amy Sedaris snarky way about her."

Stewart O'Nan, a perennial handseller favorite among indies, will be at WI7 signing two new novels: Emily, Alone, the sequel to Wish You Were Here, which is just out in paperback, and The Odds: A Love Story. The latter is about a middle-aged couple who go to Niagara Falls to try to gamble their way out of financial disaster but have to face the reality of their relationship. "It's a small psychological book that packs a wallop of human honesty," said Cathy Langer, buyer at the Tattered Cover in Denver. And it's funny, she added.

Langer spoke for a lot of WI7 attendees when she said she can't wait to get there next week and hear what books are on other booksellers' radar. See you next week in New Orleans. Beignets, anyone?--Bridget Kinsella

Correction: In the first part of our WI7 coverage yesterday, we called The Orphan Master's Son Adam Johnson's debut novel, but Penguin published his first novel, Parasites Like Us, in 2004.