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Check out these recommended reads, hand-picked by library staff just for readers like you!

 

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Queen Bee

Dorothea Benton Frank

“If I could only read one writer from now until the end of my life, it would be Dorothea Benton Frank." —Elin Hildebrand, the New York Times bestselling author of Summer of ’69, The Perfect Couple, and The Identicals

Immerse yourself in the enchanting world of New York Times bestselling author Dorothea Benton Frank’s Carolina Lowcountry in this evocative tale that returns at long last to her beloved Sullivan’s Island. 

Beekeeper Holly McNee Kensen quietly lives in a world of her own on Sullivan’s Island, tending her hives and working at the local island library. Holly calls her mother The Queen Bee because she’s a demanding hulk of a woman. Her mother, a devoted hypochondriac, might be unaware that she’s quite ill but that doesn’t stop her from tormenting Holly. To escape the drama, Holly’s sister Leslie married and moved away, wanting little to do with island life. Holly’s escape is to submerge herself in the lives of the two young boys next door and their widowed father, Archie.

Her world is upended when the more flamboyant Leslie returns and both sisters, polar opposites, fixate on what’s happening in their neighbor’s home. Is Archie really in love with that awful ice queen of a woman? If Archie marries her, what will become of his little boys? Restless Leslie is desperate for validation after her imploded marriage, squandering her favors on any and all takers. Their mother ups her game in an uproarious and theatrical downward spiral. Scandalized Holly is talking to her honey bees a mile a minute, as though they’ll give her a solution to all the chaos. Maybe they will.

Queen Bee is a classic Lowcountry Tale—warm, wise and hilarious, it roars with humanity and a dropperful of whodunit added for good measure by an unseen hand. In her twentieth novel, Dorothea Benton Frank brings us back to her beloved island with an unforgettable story where the Lowcountry magic of the natural world collides with the beat of the human heart.

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Blackout

Sarah Hepola

*A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER* 
For Sarah Hepola, alcohol was "the gasoline of all adventure." She spent her evenings at cocktail parties and dark bars where she proudly stayed till last call. Drinking felt like freedom, part of her birthright as a strong, enlightened twenty-first-century woman. 
But there was a price. She often blacked out, waking up with a blank space where four hours should be. Mornings became detective work on her own life. What did I say last night? How did I meet that guy? She apologized for things she couldn't remember doing, as though she were cleaning up after an evil twin. Publicly, she covered her shame with self-deprecating jokes, and her career flourished, but as the blackouts accumulated, she could no longer avoid a sinking truth. The fuel she thought she needed was draining her spirit instead. 
A memoir of unblinking honesty and poignant, laugh-out-loud humor, BLACKOUT is the story of a woman stumbling into a new kind of adventure--the sober life she never wanted. Shining a light into her blackouts, she discovers the person she buried, as well as the confidence, intimacy, and creativity she once believed came only from a bottle. Her tale will resonate with anyone who has been forced to reinvent or struggled in the face of necessary change. It's about giving up the thing you cherish most--but getting yourself back in return. 
 

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Definitely Better Now

Ava Robinson

A touching and deeply funny debut about starting over sober only to discover life's biggest messes are still waiting right where you left them.

The very last person anyone should worry about is Emma. Yes, hi, she's an alcoholic. But she's officially been sober for one entire year. That's twelve months of better health. Fifty-two whole weeks of focusing on nothing but her nine-to-five office job, group meetings, and avoiding the kind of bad decisions that previously left her awash in shame and regret. It's also been 365 days of not dating. And with her new dating profile, Emma, 26, of New York is ready to put herself back out there.

Except--was dating always this complicated? And did Emma's mother really have to choose now to move in with her new boyfriend? Being assigned to plan her office's holiday party feels like icing on the suddenly very overwhelming cake until her estranged father reappears with devastating news. Icing, meet cherry on top. But then there's Ben, the charming IT guy who, despite Emma's awkwardness and shortcomings, seems to maybe actually get her? Sobriety is turning out to be far from the flawless future Emma had once envisioned for herself, but as she allows herself to open up to Ben and confront difficult past relationships, she's beginning to realize that taking things one day at a time might just be the perfectly imperfect path she's meant to be on.

Bittersweet and darkly hilarious, Ava Robinson's debut novel about navigating sobriety and complicated family dynamics is witty, heartbreaking, and profoundly relatable.

 

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Catch Us when We Fall

Juliette Fay

If you love the emotionally complex novels of JoJo Moyes and the dramatic books of Jodi Picoult, you won't want to miss this newest book about second chances, redemption, and the power of hope from USA Today bestselling author of Shelter Me, Juliette Fay.
 

On her own since the age of eighteen, Cass Macklin dated brilliant, troubled Ben McGreavy, convinced he was the smartest person she'd ever known. They partied their way through their twenties, slowly descending into a bleak world of binge-drinking and broken promises, inebriated for most of a decade. Now Ben is dead, and Cass is broke, homeless, scared...and pregnant.

Determined to have a healthy pregnancy and raise Ben's baby, Cass has to find a way to stop drinking and build a stable life for herself and her child. But with no money, skills, or sober friends or family, the task seems insurmountable. At wit's end, Cass turns to the only person with the means to help her: Ben's brother Scott, third basemen for the Boston Red Sox, a man with a temper and problems of his own.

The two make a deal that neither one of them is sure they can live up to. As Cass struggles to take control of her life and to ask for help when she needs it, Scott begins to realize there's a life for him beyond the baseball diamond.

By turns heartbreaking and humorous, with its message that change is possible, that forgiveness can be freely given, and that life, though imperfect, is worth embracing, Catch Us When We Fall is a story of human connectedness and hope.

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Kitchen Confidential

Anthony Bourdain

When Chef Anthony Bourdain wrote "Don't Eat Before You Read This" in The New Yorker, he spared no one's appetite, revealing what goes on behind the kitchen door. In Kitchen Confidential, he expanded that appetizer into a deliciously funny, delectable shocking banquet that lays out his 25 years of sex, drugs, and haute cuisine.

From his first oyster in the Gironde to the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center, from the restaurants of Tokyo to the drug dealers of the East Village, from the mobsters to the rats, Bourdain's brilliantly written, wild-but-true tales make the belly ache with laughter.

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The Dry

Jane Harper

"I love Jane Harper's Australia-based mysteries." —Stephen King
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM IFC FILMS STARRING ERIC BANA
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“A breathless page-turner, driven by the many revelations Ms. Harper dreams up...You’ll love [her] sleight of hand...A secret on every page.” —The New York Times

“One of the most stunning debuts I've ever read... Every word is near perfect.” —David Baldacci

A small town hides big secrets in The Dry, an atmospheric, page-turning debut mystery by award-winning author Jane Harper.

After getting a note demanding his presence, Federal Agent Aaron Falk arrives in his hometown for the first time in decades to attend the funeral of his best friend, Luke. Twenty years ago when Falk was accused of murder, Luke was his alibi. Falk and his father fled under a cloud of suspicion, saved from prosecution only because of Luke’s steadfast claim that the boys had been together at the time of the crime. But now more than one person knows they didn’t tell the truth back then, and Luke is dead.

Amid the worst drought in a century, Falk and the local detective question what really happened to Luke. As Falk reluctantly investigates to see if there’s more to Luke’s death than there seems to be, long-buried mysteries resurface, as do the lies that have haunted them. And Falk will find that small towns have always hidden big secrets.

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Homegoing

Yaa Gyasi

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE'S JOHN LEONARD PRIZE • WINNER OF THE PEN / HEMINGWAY AWARD FOR DEBUT FICTION • Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery.

One of Oprah’s Best Books of the Year, Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi’s extraordinary novel illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed—and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.

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The Covenant of Water

Abraham Verghese

OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK - INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - SUBJECT OF A SIX-PART SUPER SOUL PODCAST SERIES HOSTED BY OPRAH WINFREY

From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala, South India, following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret

 

"One of the best books I've read in my entire life. It's epic. It's transportive . . . It was unputdownable!"--Oprah Winfrey, OprahDaily.com

 

The Covenant of Water is the long-awaited new novel by Abraham Verghese, the author of the major word-of-mouth bestseller Cutting for Stone, which has sold over 1.5 million copies in the United States alone and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years.
 


 

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India's Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning--and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala's long-existing Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl--and future matriarch, known as Big Ammachi--will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.


 

A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the difficulties undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. It is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.

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A Psalm for the Wild-Built

Becky Chambers

Winner of the Hugo Award!

In A Psalm for the Wild-Built, bestselling Becky Chambers's delightful new Monk and Robot series, gives us hope for the future.

It's been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend.

One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of "what do people need?" is answered. 

But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how.

They're going to need to ask it a lot.

Becky Chambers's new series asks: in a world where people have what they want, does having more matter?

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Nothing to See Here

Kevin Wilson

Kevin Wilson’s best book yet—a moving and uproarious novel about a woman who finds meaning in her life when she begins caring for two children with remarkable and disturbing abilities

Lillian and Madison were the unlikeliest of roommates at their elite boarding school: Madison, the daughter of a prominent Atlanta family, being groomed for greatness; Lillian, a scholarship student, plucked out of nowhere based solely on her intellect and athletic prowess. The two were as tight as could be, reveling in their unique weirdnesses, until Lillian had to leave the school unexpectedly.

Years later, the two have lost touch, but Madison writes and begs Lillian for help. Her husband’s twin stepkids are moving in with them and she wants Lillian to be their caretaker. However, there’s a catch: the twins can spontaneously combust when they get agitated, flames igniting from their skin in a disturbing but beautiful way.

Disbelieving at first but ultimately too intrigued by these strange children, Lillian agrees. And as they hunker down in the pool house, Lillian and the twins learn to trust each other—and stay cool—just as Madison’s family is bracing for a major announcement. It all seems impossible to manage, but Lillian soon accepts that she and the children need each other, urgently and fiercely.With a white-hot wit and a big, tender heart, Kevin Wilson has written a most unusual story of deep parental love that proves to be his best book yet. 

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Slade House

David Stephen Mitchell

The New York Times bestseller by the author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas - Named One of the Best Books of the Year by San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, National Post, BookPage, and Kirkus Reviews

Keep your eyes peeled for a small black iron door.

Down the road from a working-class British pub, along the brick wall of a narrow alley, if the conditions are exactly right, you'll find the entrance to Slade House. A stranger will greet you by name and invite you inside. At first, you won't want to leave. Later, you'll find that you can't. Every nine years, the house's residents--an odd brother and sister--extend a unique invitation to someone who's different or lonely: a precocious teenager, a recently divorced policeman, a shy college student. But what really goes on inside Slade House? For those who find out, it's already too late. . . .

Spanning five decades, from the last days of the 1970s to the present, leaping genres, and barreling toward an astonishing conclusion, this intricately woven novel will pull you into a reality-warping new vision of the haunted house story--as only David Mitchell could imagine it.

Praise for Slade House

"A fiendish delight . . . Mitchell is something of a magician."--The Washington Post

"Entertainingly eerie . . . We turn to [Mitchell] for brain-tickling puzzle palaces, for character studies and for language."--Chicago Tribune

"A ripping yarn . . . Like Shirley Jackson's Hill House or the Overlook Hotel from Stephen King's The Shining, [Slade House] is a thin sliver of hell designed to entrap the unwary. . . . As the Mitchellverse grows ever more expansive and connected, this short but powerful novel hints at still more marvels to come."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Like Stephen King in a fever . . . manically ingenious."--The Guardian (U.K.)

"A haunted house story that savors of Dickens, Stephen King, J. K. Rowling and H. P. Lovecraft, but possesses more psychic voltage than any of them."--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Tightly crafted and suspenseful yet warmly human . . . the ultimate spooky nursery tale for adults."--The Huffington Post

"Diabolically entertaining . . . dark, thrilling, and fun . . . a thoroughly entertaining ride full of mind games, unexpected twists, and even a few laughs."--The Daily Beast

"Plants died, milk curdled, and my children went slightly feral as I succumbed to the creepy magic of David Mitchell's Slade House. It's a wildly inventive, chilling, and--for all its otherworldliness--wonderfully human haunted house story. I plan to return to its clutches quite often."--Gillian Flynn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Gone Girl and The Grownup

"I gulped down this novel in a single evening. Painstakingly imagined and crackling with narrative velocity, it's a Dracula for the new millennium, a reminder of how much fun fiction can be."--Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

"David Mitchell doesn't break rules so much as he proves them to be inhibitors to lively intelligent fiction."--#1 New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz

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Say Nothing

Patrick Radden Keefe

"Meticulously reported, exquisitely written, and grippingly told, Say Nothing is a work of revelation."
- David Grann, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon

" This] gripping account of the Troubles is equal parts true-crime, history, and tragedy . . . A must read." - Gillian Flynn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Gone Girl

From award-winning New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions

In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders, her children clinging to her legs. They never saw her again. Her abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it. In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville's children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dress--with so many kids, she had always kept it handy for diapers or ripped clothes.

Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders. From radical and impetuous I.R.A. terrorists such as Dolours Price, who, when she was barely out of her teens, was already planting bombs in London and targeting informers for execution, to the ferocious I.R.A. mastermind known as The Dark, to the spy games and dirty schemes of the British Army, to Gerry Adams, who negotiated the peace but betrayed his hardcore comrades by denying his I.R.A. past--Say Nothing conjures a world of passion, betrayal, vengeance, and anguish.

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Dead Wake

Erik Larson

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author and master of narrative nonfiction comes the enthralling story of the sinking of the Lusitania

“Both terrifying and enthralling.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Thrilling, dramatic and powerful.”—NPR
“Thoroughly engrossing.”—George R.R. Martin

On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone. For months, German U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. But the Lusitania was one of the era’s great transatlantic “Greyhounds”—the fastest liner then in service—and her captain, William Thomas Turner, placed tremendous faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had kept civilian ships safe from attack. 

Germany, however, was determined to change the rules of the game, and Walther Schwieger, the captain of Unterseeboot-20, was happy to oblige. Meanwhile, an ultra-secret British intelligence unit tracked Schwieger’s U-boat, but told no one. As U-20 and the Lusitania made their way toward Liverpool, an array of forces both grand and achingly small—hubris, a chance fog, a closely guarded secret, and more—all converged to produce one of the great disasters of history.

It is a story that many of us think we know but don’t, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. Full of glamour and suspense, Dead Wake brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope to President Woodrow Wilson, a man lost to grief, dreading the widening war but also captivated by the prospect of new love. 

Gripping and important, Dead Wake captures the sheer drama and emotional power of a disaster whose intimate details and true meaning have long been obscured by history.

Finalist for the Washington State Book Award • One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Miami Herald, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, LibraryReads, Indigo

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The Fifth Season

N. K. Jemisin

"Intricate and extraordinary." - New York Times on The Fifth Season (A New York Times Notable Book of 2015)

WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL 2016

This is the way the world ends...for the last time.
A season of endings has begun. 

It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world's sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. 

It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. 

It starts with betrayal, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester. 

This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy. 


For more from N. K. Jemisin, check out:

The Inheritance Trilogy 
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
The Broken Kingdoms
The Kingdom of Gods

The Inheritance Trilogy (omnibus edition) 
Shades in Shadow: An Inheritance Triptych (e-only short fiction) 
The Awakened Kingdom (e-only novella) 

Dreamblood Duology
The Killing Moon
The Shadowed Sun

The Broken EarthThe Fifth SeasonThe Obelisk Gate

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Feed

M. T. Anderson

In a future where most people have computer implants in their heads to control their environment, a boy meets an unusual girl who is in serious trouble. So says Titus, a teenager whose ability to read, write, and even think for himself has been almost completely obliterated by his "feed," a transmitter implanted directly into his brain. Feeds are a crucial part of life for Titus and his friends. After all, how else would they know where to party on the moon, how to get bargains at Weatherbee & Crotch, or how to accessorize the mysterious lesions everyone's been getting? But then Titus meets Violet, a girl who cares about what's happening to the world and challenges everything Titus and his friends hold dear. A girl who decides to fight the feed.

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Station Eleven

Emily St. John Mandel

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FINALIST • Set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse—the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity. • Now an original series on HBO Max. • Over one million copies sold!

Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end. 

Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.

Look for Emily St. John Mandel’s bestselling new novel, Sea of Tranquility!

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Starry Messenger

Neil deGrasse Tyson

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Bringing his cosmic perspective to civilization on Earth, Neil deGrasse Tyson shines new light on the crucial fault lines of our time—war, politics, religion, truth, beauty, gender, and race—in a way that stimulates a deeper sense of unity for us all.

In a time when our political and cultural views feel more polarized than ever, Tyson provides a much-needed antidote to so much of what divides us, while making a passionate case for the twin chariots of enlightenment—a cosmic perspective and the rationality of science.

After thinking deeply about how science sees the world and about Earth as a planet, the human brain has the capacity to reset and recalibrates life’s priorities, shaping the actions we might take in response. No outlook on culture, society, or civilization remains untouched.

With crystalline prose, Starry Messenger walks us through the scientific palette that sees and paints the world differently. From insights on resolving global conflict to reminders of how precious it is to be alive, Tyson reveals, with warmth and eloquence, an array of brilliant and beautiful truths that apply to us all, informed and enlightened by knowledge of our place in the universe.

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The Astonishing Color of After

Emily X.R. Pan

"Emily X.R. Pan's brilliantly crafted, harrowing first novel portrays the vast spectrum of love and grief with heart-wrenching beauty and candor. This is a very special book."--John Green, bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All the Way Down 
A stunning, heartbreaking debut novel about grief, love, and family, perfect for fans of Jandy Nelson and Celeste Ng.
An APALA Honor BookA Walter Award Honor Book

Leigh Chen Sanders is absolutely certain about one thing: When her mother died by suicide, she turned into a bird.
Leigh, who is half Asian and half white, travels to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time. There, she is determined to find her mother, the bird. In her search, she winds up chasing after ghosts, uncovering family secrets, and forging a new relationship with her grandparents. And as she grieves, she must try to reconcile the fact that on the same day she kissed her best friend and longtime secret crush, Axel, her mother was taking her own life.
Alternating between real and magic, past and present, friendship and romance, hope and despair, The Astonishing Color of After is a stunning and heartbreaking novel about finding oneself through family history, art, grief, and love.

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The Death of Vivek Oji

Akwaeke Emezi

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Electrifying. -- O: The Oprah Magazine 

Named a Best Book of 2020 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, USA TODAY, Vanity Fair, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Marie Claire, Shondaland, Teen Vogue, Vulture, Lit Hub, Bustle, Electric Literature, and BookPage

What does it mean for a family to lose a child they never really knew?

One afternoon, in a town in southeastern Nigeria, a mother opens her front door to discover her son's body, wrapped in colorful fabric, at her feet. What follows is the tumultuous, heart-wrenching story of one family's struggle to understand a child whose spirit is both gentle and mysterious. Raised by a distant father and an understanding but overprotective mother, Vivek suffers disorienting blackouts, moments of disconnection between self and surroundings. As adolescence gives way to adulthood, Vivek finds solace in friendships with the warm, boisterous daughters of the Nigerwives, foreign-born women married to Nigerian men. But Vivek's closest bond is with Osita, the worldly, high-spirited cousin whose teasing confidence masks a guarded private life. As their relationship deepens--and Osita struggles to understand Vivek's escalating crisis--the mystery gives way to a heart-stopping act of violence in a moment of exhilarating freedom.

Propulsively readable, teeming with unforgettable characters, The Death of Vivek Oji is a novel of family and friendship that challenges expectations--a dramatic story of loss and transcendence that will move every reader.

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The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

James McBride

THE RUNAWAY NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A NEW YORK TIMES READERS PICK: 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY

WINNER OF THE 2024 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PRIZE FOR AMERICAN FICTION

FROM ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE OF 2024

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR/FRESH AIR, WASHINGTON POST, THE NEW YORKER, AND TIME MAGAZINE

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2023

“A murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel . . . Charming, smart, heart-blistering, and heart-healing.” —Danez Smith, The New York Times Book Review

“We all need—we all deserve—this vibrant, love-affirming novel that bounds over any difference that claims to separate us.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

From James McBride, author of the bestselling Oprah’s Book Club pick Deacon King Kong and the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird, a novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.

    As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.

    Bringing his masterly storytelling skills and his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has written a novel as compassionate as Deacon King Kong and as inventive as The Good Lord Bird.

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Megabugs

Helaine Becker

Meet some gigantic prehistoric critters! A bug the size of a small crocodile? Or as large as a basketball player? As scary as it seems, supersized, insect-like creatures such as these roamed Earth long before humans. This peek into prehistory introduces seven of these fascinating megabugs — the ancestors of modern-day insects, spiders, crabs and other arthropods — which lived from 480 million to 47 million years ago. It explores when, where and how they each lived, why they grew so big and what caused their eventual extinction. Kids will never look at bugs the same way again!

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Kelly Doudna

Consonants and short vowels are featured and highlighted in simple words and children's names
- - Large type; ample spacing between words
- - Easy-to-follow layout; text appears at same place on every page
- - Print separated from photos
- - Short words and simple sentences
- - Short vowel sounds
- - Introduces digraphs, consonant blends
- - Common "picture words" list helps reader decode text
- - Word repetition reinforces learning
- - Photos assist reader with word recognition and reflect multicultural diversity

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The Last Policeman

Ben H. Winters

“A genre-defying blend of crime writing and science fiction.” –Alexandra Alter, The New York Times

Winner of the 2013 Edgar® Award for Best Paperback Original!

What’s the point in solving murders if we’re all going to die soon, anyway?
 
Detective Hank Palace has faced this question ever since asteroid 2011GV1 hovered into view. There’s no chance left. No hope. Just six precious months until impact.

The economy spirals downward while crops rot in the fields. Churches and synagogues are packed. People all over the world are walking off the job—but not Hank Palace. He’s investigating a death by hanging in a city that sees a dozen suicides every week—except this one feels suspicious, and Palace is the only cop who cares. 

The first in a trilogy, The Last Policeman offers a mystery set on the brink of an apocalypse. As Palace’s investigation plays out under the shadow of 2011GV1, we’re confronted by hard questions way beyond “whodunit.” What basis does civilization rest upon? What is life worth? What would any of us do, what would we really do, if our days were numbered?

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Going Camping

Harold Rober

What do you need to go camping? What do you do once you reach the campsite? Learn all about going camping in this reading-level-appropriate text! Vibrant photos draw the reader in to the fun of experiencing the great outdoors, while critical thinking questions and a photo glossary introduce nonfiction reading skills.

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The Boy in the Suitcase

Lene Kaaberbol

Nina Borg, a Red Cross nurse, wife, and mother of two, is a compulsive do-gooder who can't say no when someone asks for help--even when she knows better. When her estranged friend Karin leaves her a key to a public locker in the Copenhagen train station, Nina gets suckered into her most dangerous project yet. Inside the locker is a suitcase, and inside the suitcase is a three-year-old boy: naked and drugged, but alive.


Is the boy a victim of child trafficking? Can he be turned over to authorities, or will they only return him to whoever sold him? When Karin is discovered brutally murdered, Nina realizes that her life and the boy's are in jeopardy, too. In an increasingly desperate trek across Denmark, Nina tries to figure out who the boy is, where he belongs, and who exactly is trying to hunt him down.

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Nonfiction Sight Word Readers: Guided Reading Level C (Parent Pack)

Liza Charlesworth

Set the stage for your child to soar with these just-right books that teach the third 25 sight words! This cheery green box includes 25 titles, each focused on a key sight word: will, up, other, about, out, etc. The books' real-world topics with predicable text are super-engaging to make mastering these must-know words easy and fun. Includes motivating stickers PLUS a mini-activity book. Books correlate with Guided Reading Level C.

Third 25 Sight Words (Fry List): will, up, other, about, out, many, then, them, these, so, some, her, would, make, like, him, into, time. has, look. two, more, write, go, see

Includes:

  • 25 full-color, 8-page books
  • 32-page activity book
  • sticker sheet
  • sturdy storage box
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I Know Who You Are

Barbara Rae-Venter

The amateur DNA sleuth who solved one of the most infamous cold cases in American history—the Golden State Killer crime spree—tells the incredible true story of how she did it, and explains how her methods have forever changed criminal investigations.

In the span of just a few years, Barbara Rae-Venter went from researching her family history as a retiree to finding a serial killer who had baffled law enforcement for decades. I Know Who You Are tracks her improbable journey to becoming the nation’s leading authority in investigative genetic genealogy, and to identifying the Golden State Killer—who had evaded authorities for forty-four years—in just sixty-three days.

Rae-Venter also details other extraordinary cases that she has worked on, from the first criminal cold case she ever cracked—uncovering the long-lost identity of a child abductee—to the heartbreaking case of the Billboard Boy, which began with unidentified remains dumped along a North Carolina highway. When she looks at DNA data, Rae-Venter sees numbers, percentages, probabilities—but she also sees the very stuff that makes us who we are. Drawing on both her own experiences and insights from all the key players in her investigations, Rae-Venter brings readers inside her unique “grasshopper mind" as she analyzes DNA data; pores through obituaries, marriage records, and old newspapers articles; and envisions different scenarios that bring her closer and closer to her target. She lets readers join in on urgent calls from sheriffs, FBI agents, district attorneys, and researchers, and she takes us inside the struggle to obtain a usable crime scene DNA sample and other unexpected roadblocks that often make the search more difficult. Time and again, Rae-Venter pushes through setbacks, finds new angles of investigation, and uses the most cutting-edge new technology—much of it developed during her search—until, finally, a critical piece of the puzzle suddenly tumbles into place. 

I Know Who You Are captures the exhilaration of the moment of discovery in cold case investigations, but also the sheer depth of emotion that lingers around these cases and informs Rae-Venter’s careful approach to her work. It is a story of relentless curiosity, of constant invention and reinvention, and of recognizing that we may not be who we thought we were.

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The Devil at His Elbow

Valerie Bauerlein

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The definitive account of the Murdaugh murders. Forget the podcasts, the TV specials, and the documentaries—this is the version of the story you’ll want to read. And once you pick it up, you won’t be able to put it down.”—John Carreyrou, Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of Bad Blood

Power, privilege, and blood—this is the true story of Alex Murdaugh’s violent downfall, from a veteran Wall Street Journal reporter who has become an authority on the case.
 
Alex Murdaugh was a benevolent dictator—the president of the South Carolina trial lawyers’ association, a political boss, a part-time prosecutor, and a partner in his family’s law firm. He was always ready with a favor, a drink, and an invitation to Moselle, his family’s 1,700-acre hunting estate. The Murdaugh name ignited respect—and fear—for a hundred miles.

When he murdered his wife, Maggie, and son Paul at Moselle on a dark summer night, the fragile façade of Alex’s world could no longer hold. His forefathers had covered up a midnight suicide at a remote railroad crossing, a bootlegging ring run from a courthouse, and the attempted murder of a pregnant lover. Alex, too, almost walked away from his unspeakable crimes with his reputation intact, but his downfall was secured by a twist of fate, some stray mistakes, and a fateful decision by an old friend who’d finally seen enough.

Why would a man who had everything kill his wife and grown son? To unwind the roots of Alex’s ruin, award-winning journalist Valerie Bauerlein reported not just from the courthouse every day but also along the backroads and through the tidal marshes of South Carolina’s Lowcountry. When the jurors made their pilgrimage to the crime scene, trying to envision Maggie and Paul’s last moments, she walked right behind them, sensing the ghosts that haunt the Murdaughs’ now-shattered legacy.

Through masterful research and cinematic writing, The Devil at His Elbow is a transporting journey through Alex’s life, the night of the murders, and the investigation that culminated in a trial that held tens of millions spellbound. With her stunning insights and fearless instinct for the truth, Bauerlein uncovers layers of the Murdaugh murder case that have not been told.

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Blue, Barry & Pancakes

Dan & Jason

Blue, Barry, and Pancakes are best friends, but sometimes friends make mistakes. 

One day, when the gang goes to the beach, Barry and Pancakes lose Blue’s beloved beach ball. They come up with a plan to get it back, but things go way off course. Now, these pals will have to go inside a giant whale’s stomach, crash a pool party on an alien spaceship, and survive Duckzilla’s volcanic birthday bash if they ever hope to see Blue’s beach ball again!

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Big Nate: In a Class by Himself

Lincoln Peirce

Big Nate is in a class by himself!

But things don't always go your way just because you're awesome.

  • Nate barely survives his dad's toxic oatmeal before rushing off to school—minus his lunch.
  • He body slams the no-nonsense principal.
  • He accidentally insults his least favorite teacher, the horrifying Mrs. Godfrey (aka Godzilla).
  • And school has barely started!

Nate keeps his cool. He knows he's destined for greatness. A fortune cookie told him so.

For fans of the ever popular, ever hilarious Diary of a Wimpy Kid series: Get ready to meet Big Nate!

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The King of Diamonds

Rena Pederson

The thrilling story of a brazen, uncatchable jewel thief who roamed the homes of Dallas high society—and a window into the dark secrets lurking beneath the surface of the Swinging Sixties.

As a string of high profile jewel thefts went unsolved during the Swinging Sixties, the press dubbed the elusive thief "the King of Diamonds" because he eluded police and the FBI for more than a decade.
Like Cary Grant in "To Catch a Thief," the King was so bold that he tip-toed into the homes of millionaires while they were watching television, or hosting parties. He hid in their closets. And dared to smoke a cigarette while they were sleeping not far away. Rena Pederson, then a young reporter withUPI, started following the elusive thief while she managed the night desk.

With gymnastic skill, this thief climbed trees or crawled across rooftops to get into sprawling mansions. He took jewels from heiresses, oil kings, corporate CEOs. These were not just some of the richest people in Texas; they were some of the richest people of their time. Scotland Yard and Interpol were on the look-out. But the thief was never caught and the jewels never recovered.

To follow the tracks of the thief, Rena has interviewed more than two hundred people, from veteran cops to strippers. She went to pawn shops, Las Vegas casinos, and a Mafia hangout—and discovered that beneath the glittering façade of Dallas debutante parties was a world of sex trafficking, illegal gambling, and political graft. When one of the leading suspects was found dead in highly unusual circumstances, the story darkened. High society crashed head-first into Mickey Spillane.

The odd psychological aspects of the The King of Diamonds give us different kind of crime story. Detectives were stumped: Why did the thief break into houses when his targets were inside, increasing the risk of being captured? Why did he hide in their closets? Many times, he was so close he could hear their breathing as they slept. As one socialite put it, “It was a very peculiar business.”

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The Long Call

Ann Cleeves

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!
NOW A BRITBOX SERIES STARRING BEN ALDRIDGE AND PEARL MACKIE

The Long Call from Ann Cleeves—bestselling and award-winning author of the Vera and Shetland series, both of which are hit TV shows—introduces the first in the stunning Matthew Venn series. 

“In Matthew Venn, Ann has created a complex, daring, subtle character.” —Louise Penny

"Matthew Venn is a keeper. A stunning debut for Cleeves’ latest crimefighter."—David Baldacci 

In North Devon, where two rivers converge and run into the sea, Detective Matthew Venn stands outside the church as his estranged father’s funeral takes place. On the day Matthew left the strict evangelical community he grew up in, he lost his family too.

Now, as he turns and walks away again, he receives a call from one of his team. A body has been found on the beach nearby: a man with a tattoo of an albatross on his neck, stabbed to death.

The case calls Matthew back to the people and places of his past, as deadly secrets hidden at their hearts are revealed, and his new life is forced into a collision course with the world he thought he’d left behind.

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The God of the Woods

Liz Moore

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2024

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST THRILLER OF 2024

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST CRIME NOVEL OF 2024

PEOPLE MAGAZINE'S #1 BOOK OF THE YEAR

A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY TOP 10 PICK OF 2024

ONE OF NPR’S “BOOKS WE LOVE” 2024

ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE’S “100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2024”

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY:
REAL SIMPLE ● OPRAH DAILY ● NEWSWEEK ● VULTURE

“Extraordinary . . . Reminds me of Donna Tartt’s 1992 debut, The Secret History . . . I was so thoroughly submerged in a rich fictional world, that for hours I barely came up for air.” —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air, NPR

“This expertly paced thriller ...has the kineticism of a well-crafted miniseries.” 
The New Yorker

When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.

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The Running Grave

Robert Galbraith

In this New York Times bestselling installment of the "outrageously entertaining" Strike series (Financial Times), detective duo Cormoran and Robin must rescue a man ensnared in the trap of a dangerous cult.​ 

Private Detective Cormoran Strike is contacted by a worried father whose son, Will, has gone to join a religious cult in the depths of the Norfolk countryside. 



The Universal Humanitarian Church is, on the surface, a peaceable organization that campaigns for a better world. Yet Strike discovers that beneath the surface there are deeply sinister undertones, and unexplained deaths. 



In order to try to rescue Will, Strike's business partner, Robin Ellacott, decides to infiltrate the cult, and she travels to Norfolk to live incognito among its members. But in doing so, she is unprepared for the dangers that await her there or for the toll it will take on her. . .



Utterly page-turning, The Running Grave moves Strike's and Robin's story forward in this epic, unforgettable seventh installment of the series.

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There There

Tommy Orange

ONE OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

WINNER OF THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE

One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, NPR, Time, O, The Oprah Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, GQ, The Dallas Morning News, Buzzfeed, BookPage, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews   

NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLER 

Tommy Orange’s “groundbreaking, extraordinary” (The New York Times) There There is the “brilliant, propulsive” (People Magazine) story of twelve unforgettable characters, Urban Indians living in Oakland, California, who converge and collide on one fateful day. It’s “the year’s most galvanizing debut novel” (Entertainment Weekly).
 
As we learn the reasons that each person is attending the Big Oakland Powwow—some generous, some fearful, some joyful, some violent—momentum builds toward a shocking yet inevitable conclusion that changes everything. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life back together after his uncle’s death and has come to work at the powwow to honor his uncle’s memory. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil, who has taught himself traditional Indian dance through YouTube videos and will to perform in public for the very first time. There will be glorious communion, and a spectacle of sacred tradition and pageantry. And there will be sacrifice, and heroism, and loss.
 
There There is a wondrous and shattering portrait of an America few of us have ever seen. It’s “masterful . . . white-hot . . . devastating” (The Washington Post) at the same time as it is fierce, funny, suspenseful, thoroughly modern, and impossible to put down. Here is a voice we have never heard—a voice full of poetry and rage, exploding onto the page with urgency and force. Tommy Orange has written a stunning novel that grapples with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and profound spirituality, and with a plague of addiction, abuse, and suicide. This is the book that everyone is talking about right now, and it’s destined to be a classic.

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The Perfect Couple

Elin Hilderbrand

From New York Times bestselling author Elin Hilderbrand, comes a novel about the many ways family can fill our lives with love...if they don't kill us first. 

*New York Times bestseller*

It's Nantucket wedding season, also known as summer-the sight of a bride racing down Main Street is as common as the sun setting at Madaket Beach. The Otis-Winbury wedding promises to be an event to remember: the groom's wealthy parents have spared no expense to host a lavish ceremony at their oceanfront estate.
But it's going to be memorable for all the wrong reasons after tragedy strikes: a body is discovered in Nantucket Harbor just hours before the ceremony-and everyone in the wedding party is suddenly a suspect. As Chief of Police Ed Kapenash interviews the bride, the groom, the groom's famous mystery-novelist mother, and even a member of his own family, he discovers that every wedding is a minefield-and no couple is perfect. Featuring beloved characters from The Castaways, Beautiful Day, and A Summer Affair, The Perfect Couple proves once again that Elin Hilderbrand is the queen of the summer beach read.

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A Friend for Dear Dragon

Margaret Hillert

A boy and his pet dragon make friends with their new neighbors- a girl and her unicorn.  This 21st Century edition is re-illustrated with a fresh and modern look.  These timeless beginning readers foster independent reading and comprehension.  Using high frequency words and repetition, readers gain confidence while enjoying every day experiences with a boy and his imaginary pet dragon.  Educator resources include reading reinforcement activities and a word list in the back.  Activities focus on foundational, language and reading skills.  Sections include phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. Teachers' notes available on publisher's website.

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Sweetgrass Baskets and the Gullah Tradition

Joyce V. Coakley

The ancient African art of sweetgrass basket making has been practiced for more than 300 years in the Christ Church Parish of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. Seen on the roadways of Charleston County and in museums and galleries worldwide, these unique handmade baskets are crafted from sweetgrass, bullrush, pine needles, and palm leaves. Traditionally, artisans use a piece of the rib bone of a cow and a pair of scissors as their only tools for construction. When English settlers founded Christ Church Parish in the late 1600s, they saw a place rich in natural beauty and ideal for harvesting rice, cotton, and indigo. Skilled agricultural laborers were needed, and consequently, South Carolina became the top importer of enslaved West Africans. Finding a landscape similar to their homeland, those who came kept many of their traditional practices. Today, the richness of the West African presence can be seen in Charleston's architecture, basketry, and ironworks.

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The Caretaker

Ron Rash

ONE OF THE NEW YORKER'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR * Told against the backdrop of the Korean War as a small Appalachian town sends its sons to battle, The Caretaker by award-winning author Ron Rash ("One of the great American authors at work today" --The New York Times) is a breathtaking love story and a searing examination of the acts we seek to justify in the name of duty, family, honor, and love.

It's 1951 in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Blackburn Gant, his life irrevocably altered by a childhood case of polio, seems condemned to spend his life among the dead as the sole caretaker of a hilltop cemetery. It suits his withdrawn personality, and the inexplicable occurrences that happen from time to time rattle him less than interaction with the living. But when his best and only friend, the kind but impulsive Jacob Hampton, is conscripted to serve overseas, Blackburn is charged with caring for Jacob's wife, Naomi, as well.

Sixteen-year-old Naomi Clarke is an outcast in Blowing Rock, an outsider, poor and uneducated, who works as a seasonal maid in the town's most elegant hotel. When Naomi eloped with Jacob a few months after her arrival, the marriage scandalized the community, most of all his wealthy parents who disinherited him. Shunned by the townsfolk for their differences and equally fearful that Jacob may never come home, Blackburn and Naomi grow closer and closer until a shattering development derails numerous lives.

A tender examination of male friendship and rivalry as well as a riveting, page-turning novel of familial devotion, The Caretaker brilliantly depicts the human capacity for delusion and destruction all too often justified as acts of love.

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We Are at the Park

Mary Elizabeth Salzmann

FEATURES
- Full-color Photographs
- Picture Word Index
- More Sight Word List
- Similar Objects and Topics
- Use of High Frequency Words
- Simple Punctuation
- Supports Language Arts Learner Outcomes

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I See Au

Shannon Anderson

This interactive book features pictures of familiar objects whose names contain the vowel team au. Simple sentences, decodable words, and engaging questions support young readers as they sharpen fluency and phonics skills. Downloadable Teacher Notes available.

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Outdoor Adventures! (Bob Books Stories: Scholastic Reader, Level 1)

Lynn Maslen Kertell

Celebrate the great outdoors in this Scholastic Level 1 Reader from the creators of the beloved Bob Books(R) learn-to-read phonics box sets. Perfect for reading alongside the Stage 3 Bob Books box sets, or for any child reading at Guided Reading Level G.

Jack and Anna go on a hike. They duck under trees, hop over streams, and see many animals along the way. They wish they could go on a hike the next day, too, but Mom says no. Can they have their own outdoor adventure in their backyard?

Bob Books Stories include:

  • Words that children can sound out (decode); both short and long vowels
  • Sight words
  • Simple sentence structures
  • Simple, colorful, friendly illustrations that support children's reading and add fun!
  • Longer stories than the books in the Bob Books box sets, which helps children build reading endurance

Bob Books has been helping children learn to read through simple phonics and playful text and illustrations for more than forty years. Your child will soon join the millions of happy kids who say, "I read the whole book!"(R)

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Written in the Stars

Aisha Saeed

A heart-wrenching tale of forbidden love

'A wonderfully complex love story unlike any you’ve read before. Saeed has given a novel that is both entertaining and important.”—Matt de la Peña, New York Times bestselling author
 
Naila’s conservative immigrant parents have always said the same thing: She may choose what to study, how to wear her hair, and what to be when she grows up—but they will choose her husband. Following their cultural tradition, they will plan an arranged marriage for her. And until then, dating—even friendship with a boy—is forbidden. When Naila breaks their rule by falling in love with Saif, her parents are livid. Convinced she has forgotten who she truly is, they travel to Pakistan to visit relatives and explore their roots. But Naila’s vacation turns into a nightmare when she learns that plans have changed—her parents have found her a husband and they want her to marry him, now! Despite her greatest efforts, Naila is aghast to find herself cut off from everything and everyone she once knew. Her only hope of escape is Saif . . . if he can find her before it’s too late.

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All My Rage

Sabaa Tahir

National Book Award WINNER
Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature WINNER
An INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!
An INSTANT INDIE BESTSELLER!

"All My Rage is a love story, a tragedy and an infectious teenage fever dream about what home means when you feel you don’t fit in." — New York Times Book Review

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Sabaa Tahir comes a brilliant, unforgettable, and heart-wrenching contemporary novel about family and forgiveness, love and loss, in a sweeping story that crosses generations and continents.

Lahore, Pakistan. Then.
Misbah is a dreamer and storyteller, newly married to Toufiq in an arranged match. After their young life is shaken by tragedy, they come to the United States and open the Clouds' Rest Inn Motel, hoping for a new start.
 
Juniper, California. Now.
Salahudin and Noor are more than best friends; they are family. Growing up as outcasts in the small desert town of Juniper, California, they understand each other the way no one else does. Until The Fight, which destroys their bond with the swift fury of a star exploding.  
 
Now, Sal scrambles to run the family motel as his mother Misbah’s health fails and his grieving father loses himself to alcoholism. Noor, meanwhile, walks a harrowing tightrope: working at her wrathful uncle’s liquor store while hiding the fact that she’s applying to college so she can escape him—and Juniper—forever.
 
When Sal’s attempts to save the motel spiral out of control, he and Noor must ask themselves what friendship is worth—and what it takes to defeat the monsters in their pasts and the ones in their midst.  
 
From one of today’s most cherished and bestselling young adult authors comes a breathtaking novel of young love, old regrets, and forgiveness—one that’s both tragic and poignant in its tender ferocity.

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Violeta [English Edition]

Isabel Allende

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • This sweeping novel from the author of A Long Petal of the Sea tells the epic story of Violeta Del Valle, a woman whose life spans one hundred years and bears witness to the greatest upheavals of the twentieth century.

“An immersive saga about a passion-filled life.”—People

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: PopSugar, Real Simple, Reader’s Digest

Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first girl in a family with five boisterous sons. From the start, her life is marked by extraordinary events, for the ripples of the Great War are still being felt, even as the Spanish flu arrives on the shores of her South American homeland almost at the moment of her birth.

Through her father’s prescience, the family will come through that crisis unscathed, only to face a new one as the Great Depression transforms the genteel city life she has known. Her family loses everything and is forced to retreat to a wild and beautiful but remote part of the country. There, she will come of age, and her first suitor will come calling.

She tells her story in the form of a letter to someone she loves above all others, recounting times of devastating heartbreak and passionate affairs, poverty and wealth, terrible loss and immense joy. Her life is shaped by some of the most important events of history: the fight for women’s rights, the rise and fall of tyrants, and ultimately not one, but two pandemics.

Through the eyes of a woman whose unforgettable passion, determination, and sense of humor carry her through a lifetime of upheaval, Isabel Allende once more brings us an epic that is both fiercely inspiring and deeply emotional.

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Mickey7

Edward Ashton

Now experience where the hit movie from Academy Award-winning director Bong Joon-ho, starring Robert Pattinson, started in Mickey7 (the inspiration for the film Mickey 17).

Dying isn’t any fun...but at least it’s a living.

Mickey Barnes is an Expendable: a disposable employee on a human expedition sent to colonize the ice world Niflheim. Whenever there’s a mission that’s too dangerous—even suicidal—the crew turns to Mickey. After one iteration dies, a new body is regenerated with most of his memories intact. After six deaths, Mickey7 understands the terms of his deal...and why it was the only colonial position unfilled when he took it.

On a routine scouting mission, Mickey7 goes missing and is presumed dead. By the time he returns to the colony base, surprisingly helped back by native life, his fate has been sealed. There’s a new clone, Mickey8, reporting for Expendable duties, and there can only be one Expendable. If Mickey7 reports his survival to Command, one of them is going into the recycler. If he doesn’t and they’re caught, they both are.

Meanwhile, life on Niflheim is getting worse. The atmosphere is unsuitable for humans, food is in short supply, and terraforming is going poorly. The native species are growing curious about their new neighbors, and that curiosity has Commander Marshall very afraid. Ultimately, the survival of both lifeforms will come down to Mickey7.

That is, if he can just keep from dying for good.

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Dune

Frank Herbert

• DUNE: PART TWO • THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE
Directed by Denis Villeneuve, screenplay by Denis Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts, based on the novel Dune by Frank Herbert • Starring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, Dave Bautista, Christopher Walken, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Léa Seydoux, with Stellan Skarsgård, with Charlotte Rampling, and Javier Bardem

Frank Herbert’s classic masterpiece—a triumph of the imagination and one of the bestselling science fiction novels of all time.

Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of Paul Atreides—who would become known as Muad'Dib—and of a great family's ambition to bring to fruition mankind's most ancient and unattainable dream.

A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, environmentalism and politics, Dune won the first Nebula Award, shared the Hugo Award, and formed the basis of what is undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction.

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The Three-Body Problem

Cixin Liu

The inspiration for the Netflix series 3 Body Problem!

WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL

Over 1 million copies sold in North America

“A mind-bending epic.”The New York Times • “War of the Worlds for the 21st century.”The Wall Street Journal • “Fascinating.”TIME • “Extraordinary.”The New Yorker • “Wildly imaginative.”—Barack Obama • “Provocative.”Slate • “A breakthrough book.”—George R. R. Martin • “Impossible to put down.”GQ • “Absolutely mind-unfolding.”NPR • “You should be reading Liu Cixin.”The Washington Post

The Three-Body Problem is the first novel in the groundbreaking, Hugo Award-winning series from China's most beloved science fiction author, Cixin Liu.

Set against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.

The Three-Body Problem Series
The Three-Body Problem
The Dark Forest
Death's End

Other Books by Cixin Liu
Ball Lightning 
Supernova Era
To Hold Up the Sky
The Wandering Earth
A View from the Stars

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A Gentleman in Moscow

Amor Towles

A New York Times “Readers’ Choice: Best Books of the 21st Century” Pick

The mega-bestseller with more than 2 million readers—Now a Paramount+ with Showtime series starring Ewan McGregor as Count Alexander Rostov

From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway and Table for Two, a beautifully transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.

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The Bone Collector

Jeffery Deaver

DON'T MISS THE NBC TELEVISION SERIES LINCOLN RHYME: HUNT FOR THE BONE COLLECTOR

The first novel in the New York Times bestselling series featuring forensic detective Lincoln Rhyme—from the author of The Never Game.

“Lightning-paced…a breakneck thrill ride.”—The Wall Street Journal

Lincoln Rhyme was once a brilliant criminologist, a genius in the field of forensics—until an accident left him physically and emotionally shattered. But now a diabolical killer is challenging Rhyme to a terrifying and ingenious duel of wits. With police detective Amelia Sachs by his side, Rhyme must follow a labyrinth of clues that reaches back to a dark chapter in New York City’s past—and reach further into the darkness of the mind of a madman who won’t stop until he has stripped life down to the bone.

 Includes the short story “A Perfect Plan” and a chapter from The Midnight Lock.

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Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro

From the acclaimed author ofTheRemains of the DayandWhen We Were Orphans,a moving new novel that subtly reimagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love.

As a child, Kathy–now thirty-one years old–lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory.

And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed–even comforted–by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham’s nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood–and about their lives now.

A tale of deceptive simplicity,Never Let Me Goslowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance–andtakes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro’s finest work.

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Dark Matter

Blake Crouch

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OVER ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD! • NOW STREAMING ON APPLE TV+

A “mind-blowing” (Entertainment Weekly) speculative thriller about an ordinary man who awakens in a world inexplicably different from the reality he thought he knew—from the author of Upgrade, Recursion, and the Wayward Pines trilogy

“Are you happy with your life?”

Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the kidnapper knocks him unconscious. 

Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits.

Before a man he’s never met smiles down at him and says, “Welcome back, my friend.”

In this world he’s woken up to, Jason’s life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college professor but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.

Is it this life or the other that’s the dream? And even if the home he remembers is real, how will Jason make it back to the family he loves?

From the bestselling author Blake Crouch, Dark Matter is a mind-bending thriller about choices, paths not taken, and how far we’ll go to claim the lives we dream of.

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Moonshot

Hope Nicholson

MOONSHOT: The Indigenous Comics Collection brings together dozens of creators from North America to contribute comic book stories showcasing the rich heritage and identity of indigenous storytelling. From traditional stories to exciting new visions of the future, this collection presents some of the finest comic book and graphic novel work on the continent.

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Carry

Toni Jensen

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE * A powerful, poetic memoir about what it means to exist as an Indigenous woman in America, told in snapshots of the author's encounters with gun violence.

Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize * Goop Book Club Pick * "Essential . . . We need more voices like Toni Jensen's, more books like Carry."--Tommy Orange, New York Times bestselling author of There There

Toni Jensen grew up around guns: As a girl, she learned to shoot birds in rural Iowa with her father, a card-carrying member of the NRA. As an adult, she's had guns waved in her face near Standing Rock, and felt their silent threat on the concealed-carry campus where she teaches. And she has always known that in this she is not alone. As a Métis woman, she is no stranger to the violence enacted on the bodies of Indigenous women, on Indigenous land, and the ways it is hidden, ignored, forgotten.

In Carry, Jensen maps her personal experience onto the historical, exploring how history is lived in the body and redefining the language we use to speak about violence in America. In the title chapter, Jensen connects the trauma of school shootings with her own experiences of racism and sexual assault on college campuses. "The Worry Line" explores the gun and gang violence in her neighborhood the year her daughter was born. "At the Workshop" focuses on her graduate school years, during which a workshop classmate repeatedly killed off thinly veiled versions of her in his stories. In "Women in the Fracklands," Jensen takes the reader inside Standing Rock during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests and bears witness to the peril faced by women in regions overcome by the fracking boom.

In prose at once forensic and deeply emotional, Toni Jensen shows herself to be a brave new voice and a fearless witness to her own difficult history--as well as to the violent cultural landscape in which she finds her coordinates. With each chapter, Carry reminds us that surviving in one's country is not the same as surviving one's country.

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Too Afraid To Cry

Ali Cobby Eckermann

Stolen from her family as an infant, a prize-winning poet recounts her arduous journey to reconnect with the Aboriginal culture of her birth.

In Too Afraid to Cry, Ali Cobby Eckermann—who was recently awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world—describes with searing detail the devastating effects of racist policies that tore apart Indigenous Australian communities and created the Stolen Generations of “adoptees,” Aboriginal children forcibly taken from their birth families. Told at first through the frank eyes of a child whose life was irretrievably changed after being “adopted” into a German Lutheran family, Too Afraid to Cry braids piercingly lyrical verse with spare prose to tell an intensely personal story of abuse and trauma. After years of suffering as a dark-skinned “outsider,” Eckermann reveals her courageous efforts to reconcile with her birth family and find acceptance within their Indigenous community. Too Afraid to Cry offers a mirror to America and Canada’s own dark history of coerced adoption of Native American children, and the violence inflicted on our continent’s Indigenous peoples.

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Firekeeper's Daughter

Angeline Boulley

A PRINTZ MEDAL WINNER!
A MORRIS AWARD WINNER!
AN AMERICAN INDIAN YOUTH LITERATURE AWARD YA HONOR BOOK!

A REESE WITHERSPOON x HELLO SUNSHINE BOOK CLUB YA PICK

An Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller

Soon to be adapted at Netflix for TV with President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama's production company, Higher Ground. 

“One of this year's most buzzed about young adult novels.” —Good Morning America

A TIME Magazine Best YA Book of All Time Selection
Amazon's Best YA Book of 2021 So Far (June 2021)
A 2021 Kids' Indie Next List Selection
An Entertainment Weekly Most Anticipated Books of 2021 Selection
A PopSugar Best March 2021 YA Book Selection

With four starred reviews, Angeline Boulley's debut novel, Firekeeper's Daughter, is a groundbreaking YA thriller about a Native teen who must root out the corruption in her community, perfect for readers of Angie Thomas and Tommy Orange.

Eighteen-year-old Daunis Fontaine has never quite fit in, both in her hometown and on the nearby Ojibwe reservation. She dreams of a fresh start at college, but when family tragedy strikes, Daunis puts her future on hold to look after her fragile mother. The only bright spot is meeting Jamie, the charming new recruit on her brother Levi’s hockey team.

Yet even as Daunis falls for Jamie, she senses the dashing hockey star is hiding something. Everything comes to light when Daunis witnesses a shocking murder, thrusting her into an FBI investigation of a lethal new drug. 

Reluctantly, Daunis agrees to go undercover, drawing on her knowledge of chemistry and Ojibwe traditional medicine to track down the source. But the search for truth is more complicated than Daunis imagined, exposing secrets and old scars. At the same time, she grows concerned with an investigation that seems more focused on punishing the offenders than protecting the victims.

Now, as the deceptions—and deaths—keep growing, Daunis must learn what it means to be a strong Anishinaabe kwe (Ojibwe woman) and how far she’ll go for her community, even if it tears apart the only world she’s ever known.

Return to Sugar Island in Warrior Girl Unearthed...

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Five Little Indians

Michelle Good

"

Taken from their families when they are very small and sent to a remote, church-run residential school, Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie and Maisie are barely out of childhood when they are finally released after years of detention.



 

Alone and without any skills, support or families, the teens find their way to the seedy and foreign world of Downtown Eastside Vancouver, where they cling together, striving to find a place of safety and belonging in a world that doesn't want them. The paths of the five friends cross and crisscross over the decades as they struggle to overcome, or at least forget, the trauma they endured during their years at the Mission.



 

Fuelled by rage and furious with God, Clara finds her way into the dangerous, highly charged world of the American Indian Movement. Maisie internalizes her pain and continually places herself in dangerous situations. Famous for his daring escapes from the school, Kenny can't stop running and moves restlessly from job to job--through fishing grounds, orchards and logging camps--trying to outrun his memories and his addiction. Lucy finds peace in motherhood and nurtures a secret compulsive disorder as she waits for Kenny to return to the life they once hoped to share together. After almost beating one of his tormentors to death, Howie serves time in prison, then tries once again to re-enter society and begin life anew.



 

With compassion and insight, Five Little Indians chronicles the desperate quest of these residential school survivors to come to terms with their past and, ultimately, find a way forward.

"

 

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Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer

A New York Times Bestseller
A Washington Post Bestseller
A Los Angeles Times Bestseller
Named a Best Essay Collection of the Decade by Literary Hub
A Book Riot Favorite Summer Read of 2020
A Food Tank Fall 2020 Reading Recommendation

Updated with a new introduction from Robin Wall Kimmerer, the special edition of Braiding Sweetgrass, reissued in honor of the fortieth anniversary of Milkweed Editions, celebrates the book as an object of meaning that will last the ages. Beautifully bound with a new cover featuring an engraving by Tony Drehfal, this edition includes a bookmark ribbon, a deckled edge, and five brilliantly colored illustrations by artist Nate Christopherson. In increasingly dark times, we honor the experience that more than 350,000 readers in North America have cherished about the book--gentle, simple, tactile, beautiful, even sacred--and offer an edition that will inspire readers to gift it again and again, spreading the word about scientific knowledge, indigenous wisdom, and the teachings of plants.

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise" (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings--asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass--offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

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The Beet Queen

Louise Erdrich

On a spring morning in 1932, young Karl and Mary Adare arrive by boxcar in Argus, North Dakota. After being orphaned in a most peculiar way, they seek refuge in the butcher shop of their aunt Fritzie and her husband, Pete; ordinary Mary, who will cause a miracle, and seductive Karl, who lacks his sister's gift for survival, embark upon an exhilarating life-journey crowded with colorful, unforgettable characters and marked by the extraordinary magic of natural events.

The bestselling, award-winning author of The Painted Drum, Louise Erdrich dazzles in this vibrant and heartfelt tale of abandonment and sexual obsession, jealousy and unstinting love that explores with empathy, humor, and power the eternal mystery of the human condition.

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Happiness Falls: A GMA Book Club Pick

Angie Kim

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK • When a father goes missing, his family’s desperate search leads them to question everything they know about him and one another in this thrilling page-turner, a deeply moving portrait of a family in crisis from the award-winning author of Miracle Creek.

OPRAH DAILY’S #1 NOVEL OF THE YEAR • ONE OF PEOPLE’S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR •  A WASHINGTON POST, BOOKPAGE, KIRKUS REVIEWS, NEW YORK POST, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, BOOK RIOT, CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY, REAL SIMPLE, CRIMEREADS, AND SHE READS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Belletrist Book Club Pick • Finalist for the New American Voices Award • Finalist for the Virginia Literary Award • “This is a story with so many twists and turns I was riveted through the last page.”—Jodi Picoult

“A brilliant, satisfying, compassionate mystery that is as much about language and storytelling as it is about a missing father. I loved this book.”—Gabrielle Zevin, author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“I fell in love with the fascinating, brilliant family at the center of this riveting book.”—Ann Napolitano, author of Hello Beautiful

“We didn’t call the police right away.” Those are the electric first words of this extraordinary novel about a biracial Korean American family in Virginia whose lives are upended when their beloved father and husband goes missing.

Mia, the irreverent, hyperanalytical twenty-year-old daughter, has an explanation for everything—which is why she isn’t initially concerned when her father and younger brother Eugene don’t return from a walk in a nearby park. They must have lost their phone. Or stopped for an errand somewhere. But by the time Mia’s brother runs through the front door bloody and alone, it becomes clear that the father in this tight-knit family is missing and the only witness is Eugene, who has the rare genetic condition Angelman syndrome and cannot speak.

What follows is both a ticking-clock investigation into the whereabouts of a father and an emotionally rich portrait of a family whose most personal secrets just may be at the heart of his disappearance. Full of shocking twists and fascinating questions of love, language, and human connection, Happiness Falls is a mystery, a family drama, and a novel of profound philosophical inquiry. With all the powerful storytelling she brought to her award-winning debut, Miracle Creek, Angie Kim turns the missing-person story into something wholly original, creating an indelible tale of a family who must go to remarkable lengths to truly understand one another.

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The Feather Thief

Kirk Wallace Johnson

As heard on NPR's This American Life

“Absorbing . . . Though it's non-fiction, The Feather Thief contains many of the elements of a classic thriller.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

“One of the most peculiar and memorable true-crime books ever.” —Christian Science Monitor

From the author of The Fishermen and the Dragon, a rollicking true-crime adventure and a captivating journey into an underground world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers, for readers of The Stranger in the Woods, The Lost City of Z, and The Orchid Thief.

On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins—some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace, who'd risked everything to gather them—and escaped into the darkness.

Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man's destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.

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The Frozen River

Ariel Lawhon

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - GMA BOOK CLUB PICK - AN NPR BOOK OF THE YEAR - From the New York Times bestselling author of I Was Anastasia and Code Name Hélène comes a gripping historical mystery inspired by the life and diary of Martha Ballard, a renowned 18th-century midwife who defied the legal system and wrote herself into American history.

"Fans of Outlander's Claire Fraser will enjoy Lawhon's Martha, who is brave and outspoken when it comes to protecting the innocent. . . impressive."--The Washington Post

"Once again, Lawhon works storytelling magic with a real-life heroine." --People Magazine

Maine, 1789: When the Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As a midwife and healer, she is privy to much of what goes on behind closed doors in Hallowell. Her diary is a record of every birth and death, crime and debacle that unfolds in the close-knit community. Months earlier, Martha documented the details of an alleged rape committed by two of the town's most respected gentlemen--one of whom has now been found dead in the ice. But when a local physician undermines her conclusion, declaring the death to be an accident, Martha is forced to investigate the shocking murder on her own.

Over the course of one winter, as the trial nears, and whispers and prejudices mount, Martha doggedly pursues the truth. Her diary soon lands at the center of the scandal, implicating those she loves, and compelling Martha to decide where her own loyalties lie.

Clever, layered, and subversive, Ariel Lawhon's newest offering introduces an unsung heroine who refused to accept anything less than justice at a time when women were considered best seen and not heard. The Frozen River is a thrilling, tense, and tender story about a remarkable woman who left an unparalleled legacy yet remains nearly forgotten to this day.

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The Burning Girls: A Completely Gripping Crime Thriller Packed with Heart-pounding Twists

Rita Herron

The girl was beautiful, even in death. Her skin was translucent beneath the sliver of moonlight peeking through the bare branches of the surrounding pines, and her chestnut hair had tumbled around her pale shoulders. Around her, smoke twisted in the air, curling into the inky sky.

 

The remote town of Crooked Creek has barely recovered from its most recent tragedy when wildfires tear through the mountains. Detective Ellie Reeves is grappling with her own heartbreak--she has just discovered she was adopted and that her childhood was a lie.

 

Under the scorching summer sun, Ellie is called to a river where a body has been found. She spots a lone woman's shoe caught in a nearby tangle of vines, and a pearl necklace scattered by the water's edge. The remains are surrounded by a circle of stones, which Ellie is certain means something. Was the victim--whoever she was--caught in the fire or is something more sinister at play?

 

The Fourth of July usually means festivals and fireworks, but when another body turns up the town is left in tatters. A young girl with dark hair lies dead, surrounded by stones, smoke drifting in the air. Thanks to an engraved silver necklace, Ellie identifies the body as eighteen-year-old Katie Lee Curtis, and the diary she finds hidden under the teenager's mattress could get her close to the killer.

 

With two victims in less than twenty-four hours, it's clear Ellie's up against a serial killer, and she vows that no more innocent girls will be sacrificed. For her, every day is a battle to come to terms with her past, but when this case becomes personal, will she win?

 

A totally gripping and utterly addictive page-turner that will have you racing through and reeling at the twists. Perfect for fans of Melinda Leigh, Lisa Regan and Kendra Elliot, it's best read with the lights on!

 

Readers absolutely love Rita Herron:

 

"Wow!... I literally haven't been able to put this book down! This has completely gripped me and been utterly impossible to put down." Goodreads Reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

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Take My Hand

Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Winner of the 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work - Fiction

“Deeply empathetic yet unflinching in its gaze…an unforgettable exploration of responsibility and redemption.”—Celeste Ng

Inspired by true events that rocked the nation, a searing and compassionate new novel about a Black nurse in post-segregation Alabama who blows the whistle on a terrible injustice done to her patients, from the New York Times bestselling author of Wench

Montgomery, Alabama, 1973. Fresh out of nursing school, Civil Townsend intends to make a difference, especially in her African American community. At the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, she hopes to help women shape their destinies, to make their own choices for their lives and bodies.

But when her first week on the job takes her along a dusty country road to a worn-down one-room cabin, Civil is shocked to learn that her new patients, Erica and India, are children—just eleven and thirteen years old. Neither of the Williams sisters has even kissed a boy, but they are poor and Black, and for those handling the family’s welfare benefits, that’s reason enough to have the girls on birth control. As Civil grapples with her role, she takes India, Erica, and their family into her heart. Until one day she arrives at their door to learn the unthinkable has happened, and nothing will ever be the same for any of them.

Decades later, with her daughter grown and a long career in her wake, Dr. Civil Townsend is ready to retire, to find her peace, and to leave the past behind. But there are people and stories that refuse to be forgotten. That must not be forgotten.

Because history repeats what we don’t remember.

Inspired by true events and brimming with hope, Take My Hand is a stirring exploration of accountability and redemption.

“Highlights the horrific discrepancies in our healthcare system and illustrates their heartbreaking consequences.”—Essence

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North Woods

Daniel Mason

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR

A WASHINGTON POST TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD AND THE MARK TWAIN AMERICAN VOICE IN LITERATURE AWARD

A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries—“a time-spanning, genre-blurring work of storytelling magic” (The Washington Post) from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier.

“With the expansiveness and immersive feeling of two-time Booker Prize nominee David Mitchell’s fiction (Cloud Atlas), the wicked creepiness of Edgar Allan Poe, and Mason’s bone-deep knowledge of and appreciation for the natural world that’s on par with that of Thoreau, North Woods fires on all cylinders.”—San Francisco Chronicle

New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time, The Boston Globe, NPR, Chicago Public Library, The Star Tribune, The Economist, The Christian Science Monitor, Real Simple, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Bookreporter

When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to growing apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths an ancient mass grave—only to discover that the earth refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a sinister con man, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle: As the inhabitants confront the wonder and mystery around them, they begin to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

This magisterial and highly inventive novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason brims with love and madness, humor and hope. Following the cycles of history, nature, and even language, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment, to history, and to one another. It is not just an unforgettable novel about secrets and destinies, but a way of looking at the world that asks the timeless question: How do we live on, even after we’re gone?

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Mort

Terry Pratchett

New York Times bestselling author Sir Terry Pratchett makes Death a central character in Mort, his fourth sojourn to Discworld, the fantasy cosmos where even the angel of darkness needs some assistance. 

When inept, but well-intentioned Mort gets only one offer for an apprenticeship—with Death—he can’t exactly turn it down. But Mort finds that being Death’s right-hand man isn’t as bad as it seems—until he falls back to his old, bumbling ways.

With more than 80 million books sold worldwide, Pratchett has solidified his place next to Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, and Douglas Adams as one of the top satirists of all time. Mort offers readers an unlikely set of heroes and a comical, yet poignant look at life through the lens of its antithesis.

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Becoming Ella Fitzgerald

Judith Tick

Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996) possessed one of the twentieth century's most astonishing voices. In this first major biography since Fitzgerald's death, historian Judith Tick offers a sublime portrait of this ambitious risk-taker whose exceptional musical spontaneity made her a transformational artist.

Becoming Ella Fitzgerald clears up long-enduring mysteries. Archival research and in-depth family interviews shed new light on the singer's difficult childhood in Yonkers, New York, the tragic death of her mother, and the year she spent in a girls' reformatory school--where she sang in its renowned choir and dreamed of being a dancer. Rarely seen profiles from the Black press offer precious glimpses of Fitzgerald's tense experiences of racial discrimination and her struggles with constricting models of Black and white femininity at midcentury.

Tick's compelling narrative depicts Fitzgerald's complicated career in fresh and original detail, upending the traditional view that segregates vocal jazz from the genre's mainstream. As she navigated the shifting tides between jazz and pop, she used her originality to pioneer modernist vocal jazz. Interpreting long-lost setlists, reviews from both white and Black newspapers, and newly released footage and recordings, the book explores how Ella's transcendence as an improvisor produced onstage performances every bit as significant as her historic recorded oeuvre.

From the singer's first performance at the Apollo Theatre's famous "Amateur Night" to the Savoy Ballroom, where Fitzgerald broke through with Chick Webb's big band in the 1930s, Tick evokes the jazz world in riveting detail. She describes how Ella helped shape the bebop movement in the 1940s, as she joined Dizzy Gillespie and her then-husband, Ray Brown, in the world-touring Jazz at the Philharmonic, one of the first moments of high-culture acceptance for the disreputable art form.

Breaking ground as a female bandleader, Fitzgerald refuted expectations of musical Blackness, deftly balancing artistic ambition and market expectations. Her legendary exploration of the Great American Songbook in the 1950s fused a Black vocal aesthetic and jazz improvisation to revolutionize the popular repertoire. This hybridity often confounded critics, yet throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Ella reached audiences around the world, electrifying concert halls, and sold millions of records.

A masterful biography, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald describes a powerful woman who set a standard for American excellence nearly unmatched in the twentieth century.

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Baseball Heaven

Peter Golenbock

"With its personal feel and near-mystical quality, this highly recommended work will mesmerize baseball lovers and casual fans." Library Journal, Starred Review

A behind-the-scenes look at baseball history, as told through timeless interviews with major leaguers

For fifty years, bestselling author Peter Golenbock has been interviewing some of the most fascinating figures in baseball. Their conversations are a journey back in time to the days of Ruth and Gehrig, Gehringer and Greenberg, Robinson and Reese, and Howard and Mantle, as they reflect on the sport's greatest moments and biggest issues.

In Baseball Heaven, Golenbock brings together for the first time the most historic and captivating of these conversations. The stories range from Elden Auker remembering the day Lou Gehrig told him he was sick to Albert Happy Chandler reflecting on his decision to allow Jackie Robinson into the big leagues, from Ralph Branca discussing the home run he gave up that cost the Dodgers the pennant to Del Webb talking about why he hired Casey Stengel and why he fired him.

Baseball Heaven is baseball history at its very best. It pulls back the curtain on the major leagues to reveal inside stories, intimate reminiscences, and the friendships and rivalries that make baseball America's Game.

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Oona Out of Order

Margarita Montimore

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK

"With its countless epiphanies and surprises, Oona proves difficult to put down." —USA Today

"By turns tragic and triumphant, heartbreakingly poignant and joyful, this is ultimately an uplifting and redemptive read." —The Guardian

A remarkably inventive novel that explores what it means to live a life fully in the moment, even if those moments are out of order.

It’s New Year’s Eve 1982, and Oona Lockhart has her whole life before her. At the stroke of midnight she will turn nineteen, and the year ahead promises to be one of consequence. Should she go to London to study economics, or remain at home in Brooklyn to pursue her passion for music and be with her boyfriend? As the countdown to the New Year begins, Oona faints and awakens thirty-two years in the future in her fifty-one-year-old body. Greeted by a friendly stranger in a beautiful house she’s told is her own, Oona learns that with each passing year she will leap to another age at random. And so begins Oona Out of Order...

Hopping through decades, pop culture fads, and much-needed stock tips, Oona is still a young woman on the inside but ever changing on the outside. Who will she be next year? Philanthropist? Club Kid? World traveler? Wife to a man she’s never met? Surprising, magical, and heart-wrenching, Margarita Montimore has crafted an unforgettable story about the burdens of time, the endurance of love, and the power of family.

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Piranesi

Susanna Clarke

New York Times Bestseller
Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction
World Fantasy Awards Finalist

From the New York Times bestselling author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an intoxicating, hypnotic new novel set in a dreamlike alternative reality.

Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.

There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.

For readers of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane and fans of Madeline Miller’s Circe, Piranesi introduces an astonishing new world, an infinite labyrinth, full of startling images and surreal beauty, haunted by the tides and the clouds.

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They Called Us Enemy

George Takei

New York Times Bestseller!

A stunning graphic memoir recounting actor/author/activist George Takei's childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps during World War II. Experience the forces that shaped an American icon -- and America itself -- in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love.

George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his captivating stage presence and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in Star Trek, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father's -- and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future.

In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten "relocation centers," hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard.

They Called Us Enemy is Takei's firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the joys and terrors of growing up under legalized racism, his mother's hard choices, his father's faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future.

What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? When the world is against you, what can one person do? To answer these questions, George Takei joins co-writers Justin Eisinger & Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker for the journey of a lifetime.

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Notes on Grief

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

From the globally acclaimed, best-selling novelist and author of We Should All Be Feminists, a timely and deeply personal account of the loss of her father:With raw eloquence, Notes on Grief … captures the bewildering messiness of loss in a society that requires serenity, when you’d rather just scream. Grief is impolite ... Adichie’s words put welcome, authentic voice to this most universal of emotions, which is also one of the most universally avoided” (The Washington Post).

Notes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's beloved father’s death in the summer of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world, and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure. 
 
Expanding on her original New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year; about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating detail on the page—and never without touches of rich, honest humor—Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father’s death with threads of his life story, from his remarkable survival during the Biafran war, through a long career as a statistics professor, into the days of the pandemic in which he’d stay connected with his children and grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria. 

In the compact format of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, Adichie delivers a gem of a book—a book that fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal human experiences. Notes on Grief is a book for this moment—a work readers will treasure and share now more than ever—and yet will prove durable and timeless, an indispensable addition to Adichie's canon.

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A Year of Last Things

Michael Ondaatje

From one of the most influential writers of his generation, a gorgeously surprising poetry collection about memory, history, and the act of looking back

Following several of his internationally acclaimed novels, A Year of Last Things is Michael Ondaatje’s long-awaited return to poetry. In pieces that are sometimes witty, sometimes moving, and always wise, we journey back through time by way of alchemical leaps, unearthing writings by revered masters, moments of shared tenderness, and the abandoned landscapes we hold on to to rediscover the influence of every border crossed.

Moving from a Sri Lankan boarding school to Molière’s chair during his last stage performance, to Bulgarian churches and their icons, to the California coast and his beloved Canadian rivers, Michael Ondaatje casts a brilliant eye that merges memory with the present, in the way memory as the distant shores of art and lost friends continue to influence everything that surrounds him.

From his poem "His chair, a narrow bed, a motel room, the fox":
At the Hacienda Motel in Los Angeles Sam Cooke was shot dead.
‘See that shadow on the wall . . .’ All those motels and hotels
in literature and song, where X wrote this,
where Y got drunk, where Z overdosed.
The one Hank Williams was driven past, dead already in his car.
The Slavianski Bazaar Hotel in "The Lady with a Dog,"
where Dmitri imagines their dark but hopeful future.
The Hôtel de ville de Courtrai, where Verlaine shot Rimbaud.
The Casa Verdi in Milan, where retired opera singers were welcomed
along with various heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa in their afterlife.

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The Rain in Portugal

Billy Collins

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * From former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins comes a twelfth collection of poetry offering over fifty new poems that showcase the generosity, wit, and imaginative play that prompted The Wall Street Journal to call him "America's favorite poet."

The Rain in Portugal--a title that admits he's not much of a rhymer--sheds Collins's ironic light on such subjects as travel and art, cats and dogs, loneliness and love, beauty and death. His tones range from the whimsical--"the dogs of Minneapolis . . . / have no idea they're in Minneapolis"--to the elegiac in a reaction to the death of Seamus Heaney. A student of the everyday, Collins here contemplates a weather vane, a still life painting, the calendar, and a child lost at a beach. His imaginative fabrications have Shakespeare flying comfortably in first class and Keith Richards supporting the globe on his head. By turns entertaining, engaging, and enlightening, The Rain in Portugal amounts to another chorus of poems from one of the most respected and familiar voices in the world of American poetry.

Praise for The Rain in Portugal

"Nothing in Billy Collins's twelfth book . . . is exactly what readers might expect, and that's the charm of this collection."--The Washington Post

"This new collection shows [Collins] at his finest. . . . Certain to please his large readership and a good place for readers new to Collins to begin."--Library Journal

"Disarmingly playful and wistfully candid."--Booklist

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Small Things Like These

Claire Keegan

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING CILLIAN MURPHY

A New York Times Bestseller - Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize - Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction

One of the New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

"A hypnotic and electrifying Irish tale that transcends country, transcends time." --Lily King, New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers

Small Things Like These is award-winning author Claire Keegan's landmark new novel, a tale of one man's courage and a remarkable portrait of love and family

It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.

An international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.

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The Passion of Artemisia

Susan Vreeland

In her luminous debut novel, Susan Vreeland told the story of a Vermeer painting that transformed the lives of its many owners with its beauty. Now, in her stunning new novel, she tells the story of a painter who transformed Renaissance Italy with the beauty of her work. The Passion of Artemisia chronicles the extraordinary life of Artemisia Gentileschi, the first woman to make a significant contribution to art history. 

At age eighteen, Artemisia Gentileschi finds herself humiliated in papal court for publicly accusing the man who raped her-Agostino Tassi, her painting teacher. When even her father does not stand up for her, she knows she cannot stay in Rome and begs to have a marriage arranged for her. Her new husband, an artist named Pietro Stiatessi, takes her to his native Florence, where her talent for painting blossoms and she becomes the first woman to be elected to the Accademia dell'Arte. But marriage clashes with Artemisia's newfound fame as a painter, and she begins a lifelong search to reconcile painting and motherhood, passion and genius. 

Set against the glorious backdrops of Rome, Florence, and Genoa, peopled with historical characters such as Cosimo de' Medici and Galileo and filled with the details of the life of a Renaissance painter, The Passion of Artemisia is the story of Gentileschi's struggle to find love, forgiveness, and wholeness through her art. At once a dramatic tale of love and a moving father-daughter story, it is the portrait of an astonishing woman that will captivate lovers of Gentileschi's paintings and anyone interested in the life of a woman who ignored the conventions of her day and dared to follow her heart.

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The Art Forger

B. A. Shapiro

 

Almost twenty-five years after the infamous art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—still the largest unsolved art theft in history—one of the stolen Degas paintings is delivered to the Boston studio of a young artist. Claire Roth has entered into a Faustian bargain with a powerful gallery owner by agreeing to forge the Degas in exchange for a one-woman show in his renowned gallery. But as she begins her work, she starts to suspect that this long-missing masterpiece—the very one that had been hanging at the Gardner for one hundred years—may itself be a forgery. The Art Forger is a thrilling novel about seeing—and not seeing—the secrets that lie beneath the canvas.

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The Art Thief

Michael Finkel

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • One of the most remarkable true-crime narratives of the twenty-first century • “The Art Thief, like its title character, has confidence, élan, and a great sense of timing."—The New Yorker

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Lit Hub 

"Enthralling." —The Wall Street Journal

Stéphane Bréitwieser is the most prolific art thief of all time.

He pulled off more than 200 heists, often in crowded museums in broad daylight.

His girlfriend served as his accomplice.

His collection was worth an estimated $2 billion.

He never sold a piece, displaying his stolen art in his attic bedroom.

He felt like a king.

Until everything came to a shocking end.

In this spellbinding portrait of obsession and flawed genius, Michael Finkel gives us one of the most remarkable true-crime narratives of our times, a riveting story of art, theft, love, and an insatiable hunger to possess beauty at any cost.

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All the Colors of the Dark: A Read with Jenna Pick

Chris Whitaker

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of We Begin at the End comes a soaring thriller and an epic love story that “hits like a sledgehammer . . . an absolutely must-read novel” (Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl).

Read with Jenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today 
The Boston Globe’s #1 Thriller/Mystery of 2024 So Far
A Washington Post and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year

“Kept me frantically turning the pages and somehow made me cry at the end . . . Brava!”—Kristin Hannah, author of The Women

“Melds tense suspense with a powerful exploration of devotion, obsession, and love.”—People (Best New Books)

1975 is a time of change in America. The Vietnam War is ending. Muhammad Ali is fighting Joe Frazier. And in the smalltown of Monta Clare, Missouri, girls are disappearing.

When the daughter of a wealthy family is targeted, the most unlikely hero emerges—Patch, a local boy, who saves the girl, and, in doing so, leaves heartache in his wake.

Patch and those who love him soon discover that the line between triumph and tragedy has never been finer. And that their search for answers will lead them to truths that could mean losing one another.

A missing person mystery, a serial killer thriller, a love story, a unique twist on each, Chris Whitaker has written a novel about what lurks in the shadows of obsession and the blinding light of hope.

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The Year of Living Danishly

Helen Russell

When she was suddenly given the opportunity of a new life in rural Jutland, journalist and archetypal Londoner Helen Russell discovered a startling statistic: the happiest place on earth isn't Disneyland, but Denmark, a land often thought of by foreigners as consisting entirely of long dark winters, cured herring, Lego and pastries.

What is the secret to their success? Are happy Danes born, or made? Helen decides there is only one way to find out: she will give herself a year, trying to uncover the formula for Danish happiness.

From childcare, education, food and interior design to SAD, taxes, sexism and an unfortunate predilection for burning witches, The Year of Living Danishly is a funny, poignant record of a journey that shows us where the Danes get it right, where they get it wrong, and how we might just benefit from living a little more Danishly ourselves.

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Atlas Obscura

Joshua Foer

It's time to get off the beaten path. Inspiring equal parts wonder and wanderlust, Atlas Obscura celebrates over 700 of the strangest and most curious places in the world.

Talk about a bucket list: here are natural wonders—the dazzling glowworm caves in New Zealand, or a baobob tree in South Africa that's so large it has a pub inside where 15 people can drink comfortably. Architectural marvels, including the M.C. Escher-like stepwells in India. Mind-boggling events, like the Baby Jumping Festival in Spain, where men dressed as devils literally vault over rows of squirming infants. Not to mention the Great Stalacpipe Organ in Virginia, Turkmenistan's 40-year hole of fire called the Gates of Hell, a graveyard for decommissioned ships on the coast of Bangladesh, eccentric bone museums in Italy, or a weather-forecasting invention that was powered by leeches, still on display in Devon, England.

Created by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton, ATLAS OBSCURA revels in the weird, the unexpected, the overlooked, the hidden and the mysterious. Every page expands our sense of how strange and marvelous the world really is. And with its compelling descriptions, hundreds of photographs, surprising charts, maps for every region of the world, it is a book to enter anywhere, and will be as appealing to the armchair traveler as the die-hard adventurer.

Anyone can be a tourist. ATLAS OBSCURA is for the explorer.

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World Travel

Anthony Bourdain

A guide to some of the world's most fascinating places, as seen and experienced by writer, television host, and relentlessly curious traveler Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain saw more of the world than nearly anyone. His travels took him from the hidden pockets of his hometown of New York to a tribal longhouse in Borneo, from cosmopolitan Buenos Aires, Paris, and Shanghai to Tanzania's utter beauty and the stunning desert solitude of Oman's Empty Quarter--and many places beyond.

 

In World Travel, a life of experience is collected into an entertaining, practical, fun and frank travel guide that gives readers an introduction to some of his favorite places--in his own words. Featuring essential advice on how to get there, what to eat, where to stay and, in some cases, what to avoid, World Travel provides essential context that will help readers further appreciate the reasons why Bourdain found a place enchanting and memorable.

Supplementing Bourdain's words are a handful of essays by friends, colleagues, and family that tell even deeper stories about a place, including sardonic accounts of traveling with Bourdain by his brother, Christopher; a guide to Chicago's best cheap eats by legendary music producer Steve Albini, and more. Additionally, each chapter includes illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook.

For veteran travelers, armchair enthusiasts, and those in between, World Travel offers a chance to experience the world like Anthony Bourdain.



 

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The Lost City of Z

David Grann

A grand mystery reaching back centuries. A sensational disappearance that made headlines around the world. A quest for truth that leads to death, madness or disappearance for those who seek to solve it. The Lost City of Z is a blockbuster adventure narrative about what lies beneath the impenetrable jungle canopy of the Amazon.

After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed New Yorker writer David Grann set out to solve "the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century": What happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest for the Lost City of Z?

In 1925 Fawcett ventured into the Amazon to find an ancient civilization, hoping to make one of the most important discoveries in history. For centuries Europeans believed the world’s largest jungle concealed the glittering kingdom of El Dorado. Thousands had died looking for it, leaving many scientists convinced that the Amazon was truly inimical to humankind. But Fawcett, whose daring expeditions helped inspire Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, had spent years building his scientific case. Captivating the imagination of millions around the globe, Fawcett embarked with his twenty-one-year-old son, determined to prove that this ancient civilization—which he dubbed “Z”—existed. Then he and his expedition vanished.

Fawcett’s fate—and the tantalizing clues he left behind about “Z”—became an obsession for hundreds who followed him into the uncharted wilderness. For decades scientists and adventurers have searched for evidence of Fawcett’s party and the lost City of Z. Countless have perished, been captured by tribes, or gone mad. As David Grann delved ever deeper into the mystery surrounding Fawcett’s quest, and the greater mystery of what lies within the Amazon, he found himself, like the generations who preceded him, being irresistibly drawn into the jungle’s “green hell.” His quest for the truth and his stunning discoveries about Fawcett’s fate and “Z” form the heart of this complex, enthralling narrative.

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Turn Right at Machu Picchu

Mark Adams

What happens when an adventure travel expert-who's never actually done anything adventurous-tries to re-create the original expedition to Machu Picchu? 

July 24, 1911, was a day for the history books. For on that rainy morning, the young Yale professor Hiram Bingham III climbed into the Andes Mountains of Peru and encountered an ancient city in the clouds: the now famous citadel of Machu Picchu. Nearly a century later, news reports have recast the hero explorer as a villain who smuggled out priceless artifacts and stole credit for finding one of the world's greatest archaeological sites.

Mark Adams has spent his career editing adventure and travel magazines, so his plan to investigate the allegations against Bingham by retracing the explorer's perilous path to Machu Picchu isn't completely far- fetched, even if it does require him to sleep in a tent for the first time. With a crusty, antisocial Australian survivalist and several Quechua-speaking, coca-chewing mule tenders as his guides, Adams takes readers through some of the most gorgeous and historic landscapes in Peru, from the ancient Inca capital of Cusco to the enigmatic ruins of Vitcos and Vilcabamba. 

Along the way he finds a still-undiscovered country populated with brilliant and eccentric characters, as well as an answer to the question that has nagged scientists since Hiram Bingham's time: Just what was Machu Picchu?

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The Women

Kristin Hannah

A #1 bestseller on The New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times!

From the celebrated author of The Nightingale and The Four Winds comes Kristin Hannah's The Women—at once an intimate portrait of coming of age in a dangerous time and an epic tale of a nation divided.

Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath hears these words, it is a revelation. Raised in the sun-drenched, idyllic world of Southern California and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing. But in 1965, the world is changing, and she suddenly dares to imagine a different future for herself. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path.

As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is over-whelmed by the chaos and destruction of war. Each day is a gamble of life and death, hope and betrayal; friendships run deep and can be shattered in an instant. In war, she meets—and becomes one of—the lucky, the brave, the broken, and the lost.

But war is just the beginning for Frankie and her veteran friends. The real battle lies in coming home to a changed and divided America, to angry protesters, and to a country that wants to forget Vietnam. 

The Women is the story of one woman gone to war, but it shines a light on all women who put themselves in harm’s way and whose sacrifice and commitment to their country has too often been forgotten. A novel about deep friendships and bold patriotism, The Women is a richly drawn story with a memorable heroine whose idealism and courage under fire will come to define an era.

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Crying in H Mart

Michelle Zauner

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the indie rock sensation known as Japanese Breakfast, an unforgettable memoir about family, food, grief, love, and growing up Korean American—“in losing her mother and cooking to bring her back to life, Zauner became herself” (NPR). • CELEBRATING OVER ONE YEAR ON THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LIST

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. 

As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.

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With the Fire on High

Elizabeth Acevedo

From the New York Times bestselling author of the National Book Award longlist title The Poet X comes a dazzling novel in prose about a girl with talent, pride, and a drive to feed the soul that keeps her fire burning bright.

Ever since she got pregnant freshman year, Emoni Santiago’s life has been about making the tough decisions—doing what has to be done for her daughter and her abuela. The one place she can let all that go is in the kitchen, where she adds a little something magical to everything she cooks, turning her food into straight-up goodness.

Even though she dreams of working as a chef after she graduates, Emoni knows that it’s not worth her time to pursue the impossible. Yet despite the rules she thinks she has to play by, once Emoni starts cooking, her only choice is to let her talent break free.

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The Cooking Gene

Michael W. Twitty

2018 James Beard Foundation Book of the Year | 2018 James Beard Foundation Book Award Winner inWriting | Nominee for the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction | #75 on The Root100 2018

A renowned culinary historian offers a fresh perspective on our most divisive cultural issue, race, in this illuminating memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces his ancestry—both black and white—through food, from Africa to America and slavery to freedom.

Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who "owns" it is one of the most provocative touch points in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, culinary historian Michael W. Twitty takes readers to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine.

From the tobacco and rice farms of colonial times to plantation kitchens and backbreaking cotton fields, Twitty tells his family story through the foods that enabled his ancestors’ survival across three centuries. He sifts through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents, and travels from Civil War battlefields in Virginia to synagogues in Alabama to Black-owned organic farms in Georgia.

As he takes us through his ancestral culinary history, Twitty suggests that healing may come from embracing the discomfort of the Southern past. Along the way, he reveals a truth that is more than skin deep—the power that food has to bring the kin of the enslaved and their former slaveholders to the table, where they can discover the real America together.

Illustrations by Stephen Crotts

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Salt

Mark Kurlansky

Homer called salt a divine substance. Plato described it as especially dear to the gods. Today we take salt for granted, a common, inexpensive substance that seasons food or clears ice from roads, a word used casually in expressions ("salt of the earth," take it with a grain of salt") without appreciating their deeper meaning. However, as Mark Kurlansky so brilliantly relates in his world- encompassing new book, salt�the only rock we eat�has shaped civilization from the very beginning. Its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of mankind.

Until about 100 years ago, when modern chemistry and geology revealed how prevalent it is, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities, and no wonder, for without it humans and animals could not live. Salt has often been considered so valuable that it served as currency, and it is still exchanged as such in places today. Demand for salt established the earliest trade routes, across unknown oceans and the remotest of deserts: the city of Jericho was founded almost 10,000 years ago as a salt trading center. Because of its worth, salt has provoked and financed some wars, and been a strategic element in others, such as the American Revolution and the Civil War. Salt taxes secured empires across Europe and Asia and have also inspired revolution (Gandhi's salt march in 1930 began the overthrow of British rule in India); indeed, salt has been central to the age-old debate about the rights of government to tax and control economies.

The story of salt encompasses fields as disparate as engineering, religion, and food, all of which Kurlansky richly explores. Few endeavors have inspired more ingenuity than salt making, from the natural gas furnaces of ancient China to the drilling techniques that led to the age of petroleum, and salt revenues have funded some of the greatest public works in history, including the Erie Canal, and even cities (Syracuse, New York). Salt's ability to preserve and to sustain life has made it a metaphorical symbol in all religions. Just as significantly, salt has shaped the history of foods like cheese, sauerkraut, olives, and more, and Kurlansky, an award-winning food writer, conveys how they have in turn molded civilization and eating habits the world over.

Salt is veined with colorful characters, from Li Bing, the Chinese bureaucrat who built the world's first dam in 250 BC, to Pattillo Higgins and Anthony Lucas who, ignoring the advice of geologists, drilled an east Texas salt dome in 1901 and discovered an oil reserve so large it gave birth to the age of petroleum. From the sinking salt towns of Cheshire in England to the celebrated salt mine on Avery Island in Louisiana; from the remotest islands in the Caribbean where roads are made of salt to rural Sichaun province, where the last home-made soya sauce is made, Mark Kurlansky has produced a kaleidoscope of history, a multi-layered masterpiece that blends economic, scientific, political, religious, and culinary records into a rich and memorable tale.

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Relish

Lucy Knisley

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Lucy Knisley loves food. The daughter of a chef and a gourmet, this talented young cartoonist comes by her obsession honestly. In her forthright, thoughtful, and funny memoir, Lucy traces key episodes in her life thus far, framed by what she was eating at the time and lessons learned about food, cooking, and life. Each chapter is bookended with an illustrated recipe—many of them treasured family dishes, and a few of them Lucy's original inventions. 

A welcome read for anyone who ever felt more passion for a sandwich than is strictly speaking proper, Relish is a graphic novel for our time: it invites the reader to celebrate food as a connection to our bodies and a connection to the earth, rather than an enemy, a compulsion, or a consumer product.

A Publishers Weekly Best Children's Book of 2013
An NPR Best Book of 2013

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My Sister, the Serial Killer

Oyinkan Braithwaite

Pulpy, peppery and sinister, served up in a comic deadpan...This scorpion-tailed little thriller leaves a response, and a sting, you will remember.--NEW YORK TIMES

The wittiest and most fun murder party you've ever been invited to.--MARIE CLAIRE

WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR MYSTERY/THRILLER 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 WOMEN'S PRIZE

A short, darkly funny, hand grenade of a novel about a Nigerian woman whose younger sister has a very inconvenient habit of killing her boyfriends

Femi makes three, you know. Three and they label you a serial killer.

Korede is bitter. How could she not be? Her sister, Ayoola, is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola's third boyfriend in a row is dead.

Korede's practicality is the sisters' saving grace. She knows the best solutions for cleaning blood, the trunk of her car is big enough for a body, and she keeps Ayoola from posting pictures of her dinner to Instagram when she should be mourning her missing boyfriend. Not that she gets any credit.

Korede has long been in love with a kind, handsome doctor at the hospital where she works. She dreams of the day when he will realize that she's exactly what he needs. But when he asks Korede for Ayoola's phone number, she must reckon with what her sister has become and how far she's willing to go to protect her.

Sharp as nails and full of deadpan wit, Oyinkan Braithwaite's deliciously deadly debut is as fun as it is frightening.

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The Great Divide

Cristina Henriquez

A TODAY Show Read With Jenna Book Club Pick!

A powerful novel about the construction of the Panama Canal, casting light on the unsung people who lived, loved, and labored there

It is said that the canal will be the greatest feat of engineering in history. But first, it must be built. For Francisco, a local fisherman who resents the foreign powers clamoring for a slice of his country, nothing is more upsetting than the decision of his son, Omar, to work as a digger in the excavation zone. But for Omar, whose upbringing was quiet and lonely, this job offers a chance to finally find connection.

Ada Bunting is a bold sixteen-year-old from Barbados who arrives in Panama as a stowaway alongside thousands of other West Indians seeking work. Alone and with no resources, she is determined to find a job that will earn enough money for her ailing sister's surgery. When she sees a young man--Omar--who has collapsed after a grueling shift, she is the only one who rushes to his aid.

John Oswald has dedicated his life to scientific research and has journeyed to Panama in single-minded pursuit of one goal: eliminating malaria. But now, his wife, Marian, has fallen ill herself, and when he witnesses Ada's bravery and compassion, he hires her on the spot as a caregiver. This fateful decision sets in motion a sweeping tale of ambition, loyalty, and sacrifice.

Searing and empathetic, The Great Divide explores the intersecting lives of activists, fishmongers, laborers, journalists, neighbors, doctors, and soothsayers--those rarely acknowledged by history even as they carved out its course.

Named a Most Anticipated Book By: Washington Post * Book Riot * Electric Literature * LitHub * ELLE * The Millions * Goodreads * Reader's Digest

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Homegoing

Yaa Gyasi

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE'S JOHN LEONARD PRIZE • WINNER OF THE PEN / HEMINGWAY AWARD FOR DEBUT FICTION • Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery.

One of Oprah’s Best Books of the Year, Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi’s extraordinary novel illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed—and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.

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James

Percival Everett

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND THE BOOKER PRIZE - KIRKUS PRIZE WINNER - A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

In development as a feature film to be produced by Steven Spielberg - A Best Book of the Year of the Year so Far for 2024: The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, W Magazine, Bustle, LitHub

"Genius"--The Atlantic - "A masterpiece that will help redefine one of the classics of American literature, while also being a major achievement on its own."--Chicago Tribune - "A provocative, enlightening literary work of art."--The Boston Globe - "Everett's most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful."--The New York Times

When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river's banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin...), Jim's agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.

Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a "literary icon" (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.

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The Duke and I

Julia Quinn

A #1 New York Times Bestseller 

 

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Julia Quinn comes the story of Daphne Bridgerton, in the first of her beloved Regency-set novels featuring the charming, powerful Bridgerton family, now a series created by Shondaland for Netflix.

In the ballrooms and drawing rooms of Regency London, rules abound. From their earliest days, children of aristocrats learn how to address an earl and curtsey before a prince--while other dictates of the ton are unspoken yet universally understood. A proper duke should be imperious and aloof. A young, marriageable lady should be amiable...but not too amiable.

Daphne Bridgerton has always failed at the latter. The fourth of eight siblings in her close-knit family, she has formed friendships with the most eligible young men in London. Everyone likes Daphne for her kindness and wit. But no one truly desires her. She is simply too deuced honest for that, too unwilling to play the romantic games that captivate gentlemen.

Amiability is not a characteristic shared by Simon Basset, Duke of Hastings. Recently returned to England from abroad, he intends to shun both marriage and society--just as his callous father shunned Simon throughout his painful childhood. Yet an encounter with his best friend's sister offers another option. If Daphne agrees to a fake courtship, Simon can deter the mamas who parade their daughters before him. Daphne, meanwhile, will see her prospects and her reputation soar.

The plan works like a charm--at first. But amid the glittering, gossipy, cut-throat world of London's elite, there is only one certainty: love ignores every rule...

This novel includes the 2nd epilogue, a peek at the story after the story.

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Wicked

Gregory Maguire

The New York Times bestseller and basis for the Tony-winning hit musical, soon to be a major motion picture starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande

With millions of copies in print around the world, Gregory Maguire’s Wicked is established not only as a commentary on our time but as a novel to revisit for years to come. Wicked relishes the inspired inventions of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, while playing sleight of hand with our collective memories of the 1939 MGM film starring Margaret Hamilton (and Judy Garland). In this fast-paced, fantastically real, and supremely entertaining novel, Maguire has populated the largely unknown world of Oz with the power of his own imagination. 

Years before Dorothy and her dog crash-land, another little girl makes her presence known in Oz. This girl, Elphaba, is born with emerald-green skin—no easy burden in a land as mean and poor as Oz, where superstition and magic are not strong enough to explain or overcome the natural disasters of flood and famine. Still, Elphaba is smart, and by the time she enters Shiz University, she becomes a member of a charmed circle of Oz’s most promising young citizens.

But Elphaba’s Oz is no utopia. The Wizard’s secret police are everywhere. Animals—those creatures with voices, souls, and minds—are threatened with exile. Young Elphaba, green and wild and misunderstood, is determined to protect the Animals—even if it means combating the mysterious Wizard, even if it means risking her single chance at romance. Ever wiser in guilt and sorrow, she can find herself grateful when the world declares her a witch. And she can even make herself glad for that young girl from Kansas. 

Recognized as an iconoclastic tour de force on its initial publication, the novel has inspired the blockbuster musical of the same name—one of the longest-running plays in Broadway history. Popular, indeed. But while the novel’s distant cousins hail from the traditions of magical realism, mythopoeic fantasy, and sprawling nineteenth-century sagas of moral urgency, Maguire’s Wicked is as unique as its green-skinned witch. 

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