August 2026
Picture Books
Whirby by Molly Harris, illustrated by Jacob Souva
If you (and your children!) struggle with setting a nighttime routine, staying up for countless hours, and regretting it the day after—this picture book is for you!
Whirby the robot is all systems go for his favorite school activity: bot battles! All that clinking, clanging, beeping, and banging makes Whirby so excited.
So excited that he forgets to recharge at night. He stays up practicing his best moves and building the coolest contraptions before the big battle.
But when it’s finally his turn to compete…BWOMP! BZZZ! ZZT!
With his battery on 0%, will Whirby find a way to still be the bot battle champion? Find out in this funny new offering from The Big Squeeze author, Molly Harris, and the illustrator of Big Bike, Little Bike, Jacob Souva!
Adult Fiction
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
Discover the word-of-mouth hit hailed by Ann Patchett as “A cause for celebration”—an intimate novel about the transformative power of the written word and the beauty of slowing down to reconnect with the people we love.
“This novel is a complete and utter joy.”—Ann Napolitano, author of Hello Beautiful
“Quietly dazzling.”—The New York Times
“I cried more than once as I witnessed this brilliant woman come to understand herself more deeply.”—Florence Knapp, author of The Names
“Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle. . . . Isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?”
Filled with knowledge that only comes from a life fully lived, The Correspondent is a gem of a novel about the power of finding solace in literature and connection with people we might never meet in person. It is about the hubris of youth and the wisdom of old age, and the mistakes and acts of kindness that occur during a lifetime.
Sybil Van Antwerp has throughout her life used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter.
Sybil expects her world to go on as it always has—a mother, grandmother, wife, divorcee, distinguished lawyer, she has lived a very full life. But when letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realizes that the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in her heart to offer forgiveness.
Sybil Van Antwerp’s life of letters might be “a very small thing,” but she also might be one of the most memorable characters you will ever read.
Land by Maggie O’Farrell
The award-winning, bestselling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait returns with a soaring historical novel set in Ireland in the years before and after the Great Hunger.
On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster.
The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is unexpectedly sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and the lives of those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás, and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping and get them both home?
Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away. As spellbinding and varied as the landscape that inspired it, Land is, above all, a story of survival, for our times and for all time.
Adult Nonfiction
The following nonfiction titles were purchased with donations provided by the community. Thank you!
Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily Nagoski, PhD and Amelia Nagoski, DMA
“This book is a gift! I’ve been practicing their strategies, and it’s a total game changer.”—Brené Brown, PhD, author of Dare to Lead
This groundbreaking book explains why women experience burnout differently than men—and provides a roadmap to minimizing stress, managing emotions, and living more joyfully.
Burnout. You, like most American women, have probably experienced it. What’s expected of women and what it’s really like to exist as a woman in today’s world are two different things—and we exhaust ourselves trying to close the gap. Sisters Emily Nagoski, PhD, and Amelia Nagoski, DMA, are here to help end the all-too-familiar cycle of feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. They compassionately explain the obstacles and societal pressures we face—and how we can fight back.
You’ll learn
• what you can do to complete the biological stress cycle
• how to manage the “monitor” in your brain that regulates the emotion of frustration
• how the Bikini Industrial Complex makes it difficult for women to love their bodies—and how to defend yourself against it
• why rest, human connection, and befriending your inner critic are keys to recovering from and preventing burnout
With the help of eye-opening science, prescriptive advice, and helpful worksheets and exercises, all women will find something transformative in Burnout—and will be empowered to create positive change.
On Living Well: Brief Reflections on Wisdom for Walking in the Way of Jesus by Eugene H. Peterson
In these never-before-published stories, sayings, and biblical teachings, the beloved author and translator of The Message Bible shows us how the wisdom of deep faith helps us live well.
“Jesus’ words bring us the news of an expanded world, a bright world, a full-dimensioned world, a world in which God rules, mercy is common experience, and love is the daily working agenda.”
Eugene H. Peterson (1932–2018) was one of the most beloved authors, pastors, poets, and professors of our time. While millions have read his bestselling paraphrased Bible translation, The Message, far fewer have heard his direct practical insights and wisdom about how to live well.
Eugene knew the extraordinary spirituality of ordinary life. He understood that we actually become more, not less, human as we grow to live like Jesus. And living like Jesus means living well.
On Living Well collects some of Eugene’s best never-before-published short writings to help you walk in the way of Jesus with a little more courage, passion, and hope—by offering new ways to practice generosity, community, prayer, simplicity, worship, inner peace, and so much more . . . even with the challenges of today.
This book is a rich feast for the soul, ideal as a daily spiritual touchpoint or simply to nourish a heart hungry for pastoral wisdom. It is your invitation to enter into the meaningful simplicity of life with Jesus in a world of immense beauty, real difficulty, and endless wonder.
July 2026
Board Books
Alan’s Big, Scary Teeth by Jarvis
A goofy and lonely denizen of the jungle has just one talent — scaring other creatures with his big, scary teeth! What would he do without them?
Deep in the jungle lurks Alan the alligator, descended from a long line of very scary alligators. He prepares carefully — polishing his scales, brushing each of his big, scary teeth, and practicing his frightening faces — then sneaks into the jungle to terrorize the jungle critters. (“I’m big, scary Alan! Fear my razor-sharp teeth!”) But after a long day of scaring, Alan likes nothing better than to enjoy the crossword, run a warm mud bath, and take out his teeth, which nobody else knows are false. Until one morning, when Alan wakes up and finds that his teeth are gone! Without those teeth, he’s just not very scary, and scaring is the only thing he knows how to do. Or is it? Witty, charming, and playful storytelling will have preschoolers cheering for Alan as he discovers a new way to fit in.
Picture Books
The River of Caregiving by Jocelyn Chung, Illustrated by Sarah Gonzales
An uplifting celebration of familial love and support through the generations
Caregiving flows through a little girl’s family in so many ways, like a river connecting them all. Her grandfather cares for her by picking her up from school with a snack and a smile, and she cares for him by keeping him company at his doctors’ appointments with a snack and a smile. Her mother helps her grandmother get ready for the day, just as her grandmother once helped her mother. And when the relatives send packages to each other, their caring makes them feel closer. Through occasions big and small, it’s a comfort to know this river of love is ever-present, and her family will always be there for each other.
Jocelyn Chung’s evocative text and Sarah Gonzales’ gorgeous pictures remind us that our family’s love is a gift to be treasured.
I Told a Little Lie by Judith Henderson
One teensy, tiny lie has a BIG impact in this picture book with an irresistible heroine and charming mixed-media illustrations.
When a little girl finds a balloon, she figures it’s her lucky day. Hooray!
But the crowd around her assumes it’s her birthday. . . Oops.
The girl doesn’t correct them, and the next thing she knows, they’re expecting a party and a cake. It seems that one little lie can have big consequences. The group demands to know: How many layers? What kind of frosting? Will there be sprinkles?
What’s a girl to do?! It’s hard to confess to a lie–especially when you didn’t intend for it to go this far. She thinks about it… and thinks about it… and realizes that she knows just how to remedy the situation. It’s time to make cupcakes. (With frosting!)
A universally relatable topic comes to life with a light, kid friendly touch. Perfect for young readers who have been known to “embellish” their stories or let an assumption get carried away.
The Wildest Thing by Emily Winfield Martin
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author and illustrator of The Wonderful Things You Will Be comes an enchanting picture book about a child finding their “wild” self.
What would you do if you let the wild in?
Eleanor loved wild things.
Every wing and wild sprout.
There was something wild inside of her,
waiting to come out…
With gorgeous illustrations, this book is the ideal addition to any bedtime reading routine or read aloud. The Wildest Thing beautifully expresses a timeless message about little ones unleashing their inner “wild” and encouraging their budding imagination and unique individuality.
The Weedy Garden by Margaret Renkl, illustrated by Billy Renkl
This debut picture book from acclaimed and New York Times bestselling author Margaret Renkl—with collage illustrations by her brother, fine artist Billy Renkl—invites readers to observe and wonder about the various inhabitants in the vibrant ecosystem of a wildlife-friendly backyard garden.
If you were hungry squirrel in the weedy garden, where would you find an acorn? If you were a cottontail rabbit, where would you hide your bunnies? And if you were a child, sitting still and listening, what would the weedy garden say to you?
Margaret Renkl, a beloved regular contributor to The New York Times and two-time recipient of the Southern Book Prize, writes beautifully about our changing natural world. In her debut picture book, she asks questions that draw young readers deeper and deeper into the garden, inviting observation and conversation along the way. Each page turn introduces a new plant or animal friend, buzzing and dancing with quiet wonder. The fine artist Billy Renkl, Margaret Renkl’s brother and frequent collaborator, brings the weedy garden to life through his signature mixed-media collages. Includes backmatter with more information about the residents of the garden, eco-friendly gardening tips, and instructions on how to make your own collage art project at home or in school.
This book was purchased with funds donated by The Hanover Garden Club.
Jia Has a Dog Problem by Stephanie Ellen Sy, illustrated by Isabella Kung
A young girl is afraid of dogs, and a small dog is afraid of children in this funny, bighearted picture book about overcoming fear to find friendship.
Jia runs from every dog—big, tiny, spotted, or shaggy. Charlie the French bulldog hides from every kid—behind couches, laundry, even grown-ups’ legs.
When something far scarier forces these two together, they discover a sweet surprise: a friend who understands.
Early Chapter Books
The Fabled Stables: Belly of the Beast by Jonathan Auxier, illustrated by Olga Demidova
Belly of the Beast is the third book in the one-of-a-kind Fabled Stables adventure series from New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Auxier, exploring the real magic behind simple acts of kindness—with colorful illustrations by Olga Demidova.
Auggie loves his job at the Fabled Stables, but he fears the day when it will come to an end. Fen keeps dropping hints that caretakers don’t stay forever, and it’s giving Auggie the grumps. Thankfully, there always seems to be a new stall to fill. This time, the stables set Auggie on a quest to rescue a beast called the Shibboleth—but the portal leads Auggie and Fen to the lair of the evil Rooks!
In the dark, damp dungeon, they meet one mysterious girl and one very hungry monster. It’s already gobbled up all of the Rooks, and Auggie and Fen are next unless they figure out the one way to calm the creature. Will they be able to work together to complete the mission before it’s too late?
Youth Graphic Novels
Through the Black Gate by Alfredo Cáceres
A “poignant, insightful, and otherworldly” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) middle grade graphic novel about an orphaned girl and a music-loving boy who venture into the land of the dead with the hope of seeing their loved ones again.
Thirteen-year-old orphan Irene believes her father’s soul is trapped inside her cat, Moses. Living at her caregiver Ruth’s hostel, Irene spends every waking hour studying a mystical book that her parents left behind in the fire that took their lives. Irene thinks the book can help her see them again, if only Moses will give her a clue.
Then, just as a strange fog sweeps over their quiet Chilean town, a mysterious young musician named Francis moves into the hostel. Irene and her new roommate don’t particularly get along, but Moses soon leads them both through the fog to a strange tear in reality: an entrance to the Land of the Dead.
Believing this is the key to seeing her parents again, Irene and Francis cross to the other side. There, they encounter the Ferryman of the Dead, who is desperate to escape into the Land of the Living. The Ferryman offers to return Irene and Francis’s loved ones in exchange for their help. In the face of such a massive promise, Irene and Francis must decide whether to risk the fate of both the Lands of the Living and the Dead or be braver than they ever thought possible.
The Hidden Dominion of Geordie James by Mike Dawson
In this uplifting middle grade novel, loner Geordie James joins four other struggling fifth graders in a science fair group project that answers the question “what is our place in this world?”
When Geordie becomes obsessed with the fate of a pig who escaped from a factory farm, the group project is put in jeopardy. As Geordie starts to push harder into difficult questions, he finds everything changing—his friendships, his ability to express himself, even how he plays his favorite online role-playing game, Dominion.
The Hidden Dominion of Geordie James is about kids coming to terms with a world that feels outside of their control, ending with the message that we humans do not exist apart from nature, but rather as an integral part of it.
Spider-Man: Animals Assemble! by Mike Maihack
Marvel Comics’ friendly neighborhood superhero becomes a pet sitter in Spider-Man: Animals Assemble, an original graphic novel for early readers by award-winning author-illustrator Mike Maihack.
When the Avengers are assembled to contain a super threat in New York City, Spider-Man is given the most important job of all: to make sure all the Avengers’ super pets are safe! Spidey wants in on the bad guy fighting action, but with great power comes great pet sitting.
Featuring fan favorite Avengers like Captain America, Captain Marvel, and Black Panther, this fun and funny original graphic novel sees the mighty web-slinger teaming up with the most unlikely of heroes to save the day!
Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters by Yevgenia Nayberg
Strong-willed Genya sets her mind to attending art school in 1980s Ukraine, amidst the turmoil of Soviet control, the Cold War, and the unfolding Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
Genya—the nickname of the book’s author and story’s protagonist, Yevgenia—knows from age five that she wants to be an artist. When she turns eleven, she’ll apply to the same prestigious art school that her mother attended. But making the cut won’t be easy, especially with the school’s open-secret rule that no more than 1% of the student body can be Jewish.
The years before Genya’s eleventh birthday bring plenty to distract her. Nothing in Soviet Ukraine is quite as it seems; adults mock the government, but only in private; and her classmates are terrified of American bomb strikes. And that’s all before April 26, 1986, when Genya’s police officer neighbor gets called to an emergency in a town she’s never heard of: Chernobyl.
A graphic memoir account of creator Yevgenia Nayberg’s childhood, Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters is both deeply personal and a glimpse into broader Soviet intelligentsia experiences. Young readers curious about life elsewhere, particularly in the face of disaster, will find ample details to devour, while those dreaming of a creative life will take inspiration from Genya’s perseverance. Salient and yet often slyly funny, this is a must-read for any graphic memoir fan.
Fruitcake by Rex Ogle & Dave Valeza
A pitch-perfect middle-grade graphic memoir about crushes, coming out, and finding the courage to be yourself.
Eighth grade isn’t off to a great start. Everyone but Rex seems to be coupling up, and he’s starting to feel like an outsider… until he meets Charlotte. She’s fearless, smart, pretty, and she likes him back. But as great as Charlotte is, there’s someone else Rex can’t stop thinking about.
Drew is Rex’s childhood best friend, so when he kisses Rex, all kinds of new feelings begin to stir. Though at school, Drew acts like he doesn’t even know Rex, making those feelings turn really confusing really fast. And with all the strong opinions Rex hears from friends and at church, he questions his own worth and what his affections actually mean. Rex wants to be more like his new friend, Nina, and not care what others think, but being himself seems impossible. When did middle school get so confusing?!
Katie the Catsitter: Villain Con by Colleen AF Venable and Stephanie Yue
Welcome to Villain Con! Is Katie the Catsitter actually a villain?! Find out in this bestselling girl (and cat) power graphic novel series that’s perfect for fans of Babysitters Club, Sweet Valley Twins, and anyone who loves cats!
Sometimes the line between villain and hero can be hard to see.
Middle school is a roller coaster and lately Katie doesn’t know which way is up or down, who’s a hero…and who’s a villain. Even the people she cares about most keep surprising her. Are Katie’s best friends leaving her behind?! Katie just wants things to stay the same–but is she holding her friends…and herself back? Maybe it’s time for a change. Afterall, Madeline is running for mayor to try to change things in the city. Maybe Katie’s changing too. And maybe some of the things she thought she knew about villains–and about heroes–were wrong. Is Katie ready to move forward…even if means moving away from her friends?
Get ready for more friendship and fun, more drama and disguises (and cats, definitely more cats!) in Katie the Catsitter: Villain Con!
Junior Fiction
The Magic of the Unicorn – A Choose Your Own Adventure Book by Deborah Lerme Goodman
Search for a magical unicorn’s horn in this interactive book where YOU decide what happens next! Packed with 27 possible endings!
Choose Your Own Adventure books–the 4th bestselling children’s series of all time–are back and as much fun as you remember. Kids and adults agree, these are the books that get 9- to 12-year-olds reading.
YOU are your medieval village’s last hope at finding a magical unicorn’s horn that can purify your water. Will your enchanted net catch a unicorn or a dragon? Can the sorceress help? Or will she cause even more trouble? A fire-breathing dragon, angry warlock, and powerful wood-witch all stand in your path. Be careful, the choices YOU make might end in glory, disaster, or certain death.
Nell O’Dell Hates Quests by Emily B. Martin
What happens when the quest finds you, despite your best efforts? A reluctant adventurer sets off on an unexpected journey in this broadly appealing fantasy at once earnest and self-aware, funny and heartfelt, and thoroughly charming.
Nell O’Dell yearns for a quiet life tending her garden and caring for her chickens. Unfortunately, her family runs the bustling Crossroads Inn—accommodating all species of patron from fairies to fauns to half-giants, most of them questers on their way to seek glory and fortune. What’s more, her parents are retired questers themselves, and everyone assumes that Nell will follow in their footsteps. Then the day comes when a letter arrives from the government, threatening the Inn and all that Nell holds dear, and someone needs to go on a short journey to the capital to take care of it. Nell is the only one available—but that’s fine, because it’s just a boring business trip, not a quest! Even if she does find herself up against an excitable travel partner, a thief in the night, a stolen treasure, and a mysterious knife . . . Lively black-and-white illustrations by the author embellish this breezy, bighearted adventure that will satisfy both longtime questers and first-time visitors to the genre.
Youth Nonfiction
Diamond Fever!: A True Crime Story in the Wild West by Steve Sheinkin, illustrated by Jon Chad
A fun, high-stakes true crime story story set in the Wild West, featuring spot art and comics throughout. Perfect for fans of MONA LISA VANISHES!
Late one night, two travel-weary miners, Philip Arnold and John Slack, show up at a businessman’s office in San Francisco. The miners seem nervous. They’ve got something that needs to be locked in a safe overnight. What is it? Well, that really has to stay secret, but it’s…
DIAMONDS! And lots of them.
Had these two miners just discovered America’s first diamond mine? Well, this is the Gold Rush era after all. Plenty of people are striking it rich. Anything is possible.
When word of the find hits the streets, diamond fever sweeps the country. Wealthy investors are desperate to elbow Arnold and Slack aside and seize control—but can they persuade the miners to reveal the location of their bonanza? At the same time, thousands of prospectors fan out across the mountains and deserts of the West—will one of them find the site before greedy bankers grab everything for themselves?
In this page-turning, high-stakes western adventure, New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Steve Sheinkin tells the true story of the Great Diamond Hoax of 1872, a rollicking tale of heists and hijinks, scams and scoundrels—and the last-minute triumph of a most unlikely hero.
Young Adult Graphic Novels
How to Survive the End of the World: A Graphic Exploration of How to (Maybe) Avoid Extinction by Katy Doughty
In a full-color debut, a graphic novelist takes an engrossing, gleefully existential deep dive into the many ways that humanity could—and almost did—meet its end.
Since 99.9 percent of all species that have lived are extinct, it’s bound to be our turn eventually, right? So what’s most likely to kill us? A well-timed asteroid? Some new robot overlords? With wit and dry humor, debut graphic novelist Katy Doughty blends science and history to explore our chances of surviving disasters such as plagues, global warming, and alien invasion. Drawing on interviews with experts in fields like infectious diseases, AI, and interplanetary exploration, she combines cutting-edge research with compelling visuals: mugshots of the deadliest microbes, graphs of the winners and losers of mass extinction events, and a whole lot of dinosaur drawings. For apocalypse aficionados, the morbidly curious, and the just plain curious, this is your antidote to existential dread—a timely, imaginative, and ultimately hopeful take on humankind’s ability to survive the odds.
Heartstopper (Vol. 1) by Alice Oseman
Boy meets boy. Boys become friends. Boys fall in love. A sweet and charming coming-of-age story that explores friendship, love, and coming out.
Shy and softhearted Charlie Spring sits next to rugby player Nick Nelson in class one morning. A warm and intimate friendship follows, and that soon develops into something more for Charlie, who doesn’t think he has a chance. But Nick is struggling with feelings of his own, and as the two grow closer and take on the ups and downs of high school, they come to understand the surprising and delightful ways in which love works.
Adult Fiction
Road Trip by Mary Kay Andrews
New from the beloved New York Times bestselling author of Summers at the Saint and Hello, Summer! Pack your bags for a summer journey shaped by family secrets, long-buried history, and charming men with Irish accents.
Maeve and Therese Dunigan haven’t spoken in years. Raised under the same roof in Savannah, the two sisters could not be more opposite―Maeve the rule follower, Therese the unapologetic rebel. But when their mother’s death pulls them back together, they inherit more than just grief: a mysterious painting that may be worth millions…if it’s real.
Determined to uncover the truth―and desperately in need of the money―the sisters set out on a journey to Ireland, tracing their family’s roots and the origins of the portrait. What begins as a search for answers soon becomes something deeper―a reckoning with the past, as they uncover secrets that span generations and reshape everything they thought they knew about their family.
With tensions simmering, the two hit the road and find themselves on twisty lanes, in colorful villages, at local pubs, and with handsome men whose gift of the gab is surpassed only by their charm.
Can Maeve and Therese actually survive the journey without killing each other? Join Mary Kay Andrews on a road trip that will entertain you for miles.
Monk and Robot: A Psalm for the Wild-Built & A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers
Becky Chambers’ two award-winning, bestselling, beloved, and uplifting Monk and Robot stories, A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, together in trade paperback for the first time! This delightful, post-Utopian, Hugo Award-winning 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’ series asks: in a world where people have what they want, does having more matter?
Storm Tide by Paul Doiron
Game Warden Mike Bowditch investigates a series of brutal killings during a life-changing year in Storm Tide, the harrowing new thriller from Edgar Award-nominated author Paul Doiron.
When the magnificent home of entrepreneur Brian Malloy mysteriously goes up in flames, Maine game warden Mike Bowditch tries to pull Malloy’s burning body from the fire but is too late. Malloy was suspected of murdering his young, illegitimate son. Now it looks like someone else has delivered a verdict.
Miles away, on a lonely stretch of icy railroad track, the body of Axl Deming, once accused of a brutal rape, is found literally cut in half. Though the two murders seem unrelated, a cryptic text from an unknown number draws Bowditch to the scene―and hints at a chilling connection. He believes someone is orchestrating the executions of criminals who escaped justice, and for reasons he can’t explain, his own name is on the list, but the state police aren’t convinced. His search for the truth takes him through frozen harbors, trackless forests, and remote islands, far from rescue.
Meanwhile, Bowditch is facing a disciplinary hearing that could end his career. His wife Stacey, just weeks from giving birth, is being stalked by a stranger in a white van. And when he realizes someone has also been watching their home, the case turns increasingly personal.
To protect his family, Bowditch must work alone to uncover who’s behind the killings―and stop them before he becomes their next victim.
Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer
Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less, showcases his wit, sophistication, and deep knowledge of focaccia in this tale of a young man who takes an unspecified job with a charismatic elderly Baronessa at her crumbling villa in the Tuscan hills.
An aspiring archivist determined to begin a “serious” life after an undistinguished undergraduate career takes up residence in the Italian countryside. Here, he becomes the all-purpose assistant to the Baronessa, known to her friends as Coco, a defiantly youthful and naturally flamboyant woman of ninety-two. Amid a chaotic and colorful milieu of gin-swilling princesses, incomprehensible handymen, roaming boarhunters, nuns, and other local wildlife, our young man does his best to catalog the villa’s extensive collection of art and antiques—although he notices that things seem to go missing from right under his nose.
Despite himself, he tumbles into an affair with a married man, complicating his future plans considerably. And when the Baronessa loses someone close to her, he becomes an unwitting accomplice in the acceleration of Coco’s great and final plan: to locate the love of her life and be reunited before it’s too late. Told with the signature wit, charm, and humanity that made Less an international phenomenon, Villa Coco is a dazzling, sun-soaked ode to life itself, a meditation on how seriously we ought to take ourselves, and a bawdy Mediterranean ballad about becoming who we’ve always wanted to be.
Before I Forget by Tory Henwood Hoen
A funny, heartfelt, late coming-of-age story that examines the role of memory in holding us back―and in moving us forward―for fans of The Collected Regrets of Clover and Maame.
Call it inertia. Call it a quarter-life crisis. Whatever you call it, Cricket Campbell is stuck. Despite working at a zeitgeisty wellness company, the 26-year-old feels anything but well. Still adrift after a tragedy that upended her world a decade ago, she has entered early adulthood under the weight of a new burden: her father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
When Cricket’s older sister Nina announces it is time to move Arthur from his beloved Adirondack lake house into a memory-care facility, Cricket has a better idea. In returning home to become her father’s caretaker, she hopes to repair their strained relationship and shake herself out of her perma-funk. But even deeply familiar places can hold surprises.
As Cricket settles back into the family house at Catwood Pond―a place she once loved, but hasn’t visited since she was a teenager―she discovers that her father possesses a rare gift: as he loses his grasp of the past, he is increasingly able to predict the future. Before long, Arthur cements his reputation as an unlikely oracle, but for Cricket, believing in her father’s prophecies might also mean facing the most painful parts of her history. As she begins to remember who she once was, she uncovers a vital truth: the path forward often starts by going back.
With laugh-out-loud humor and profound grace, Before I Forget explores the nuances of family, the complexities of memory, and how sometimes, the people we know the best are the ones who surprise us the most.
The Shampoo Effect by Jenny Jackson
An accidental pregnancy turns a tight-knit group on its head in this witty and irresistible summer novel from the New York Times bestselling author.
OVER ONE LONG SUMMER, WHO KNOWS WHAT MIGHT COME OUT IN THE WASH?
When writer Caroline Lash arrives in Greenhead, she falls immediately for its scenic beaches and New England charm – and even harder for Van Whittaker, a gorgeous, fleece-wearing, litter-collecting, kayak enthusiast.
She meets his friends: Augusta, old money and uptight; Fran, drowning in everyone else’s problems whilst keeping two kids (and an inebriated husband) afloat; and Bailey, who is sexy, confident… and inconveniently pregnant with Van’s child.
Determined nothing will dull the shine of her new romance, Caroline joins the friends as they run wild through Greenhead, drinking on houseboats, gossiping on beaches while their children paddle, and playing risky games.
It seems the fun will last forever – until it doesn’t. As decades-old friendships and marriages begin to fracture, Caroline’s place in their world is called into question. And with all the group’s most tightly held secrets at stake, who knows what might come out?
It Could Have Been Her by Lisa Jewell
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Then She Was Gone, two women’s lives converge in a house containing devastating secrets that refuse to stay buried in this “deliciously dark, devilishly addictive” (Alice Feeney, bestselling author of My Husband’s Wife) novel.
Jane Trevally is walking her dogs on her country estate when a small white terrier appears, alone and with no sign of the teenaged girl he’d been staying with nearby. When the teenager is reported missing, Jane offers to return the dog to his registered owner, hours away in London. Arriving at a run-down house called Thornwood in the deepest backwaters of Hampstead, she is immediately on alert—because Jane has a dark history with this house.
The man who answers the door is not the man that Jane remembers from her past. He is cagey, and claims to know nothing about the missing teenage girl. Then, through the window of the house, Jane catches a glimpse of a haunted-looking woman.
Conjuring her memories from twenty-five years ago, Jane knows this unsettling house holds the key—to the missing teenager, to her own traumatic story, and to the dark secrets of the past.
Country People by Daniel Mason
A year in the life of a family as they strike out into the unknown (aka Vermont)—a “witty and gorgeous” (The Guardian) novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason, the bestselling author of North Woods
Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales and increasingly haunted by a sense that he’s become a disappointment to his family. So when his wife, Kate, accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the faraway forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be the year to finally move forward with his life.
But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, one who possesses, in Kate’s words, a great capacity “to fall in with anyone, anywhere.” And no sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as those of any of his folktales, from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, from a Shakespearean temptress to a photographer of snowflakes obsessed with chronicling, on thousands of index cards, the world’s delusions in an Inventory of Wrong Ideas.
The new friends, the enchanted woods, the histories: sure, no PhD, but all good fun. Until Miles stumbles upon a bizarre—perhaps ridiculous—local legend, which, he soon suspects, might not be just a legend after all.
Joyous, absurd, and life-affirming, Country People is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.
Whistler by Ann Patchett
The acclaimed, prize-winning #1 New York Times bestselling writer returns with a moving, luminous novel that reminds us of the sweetness and impermanence of life and the power of connection to defy time.
When Daphne Fuller and her husband Jonathan visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they notice an older, white-haired gentleman following them. The man turns out to be Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, who had been married to her mother for a little more than year when Daphne was nine. Now fifty-three, Daphne hasn’t seen Eddie for many years, not since the fateful event that changed the direction of both their lives. Meeting again, time falls away; while their relationship was brief, it had a profound impact on them both, and now that they are reunited, they have no intention of ever being separated again.
Whistler is a story about two adults looking back over the choices they made, and the choices that were made for them. It’s a story about bravery, memory, the often small yet consequential moments that define our lives, and the endless stream of loss that in time comes for us all. Beautiful in its simplicity, it is ultimately about how love endures, and how the feeling of being known by one other person, even for a short period of time, can change everything.
Seek the Traitor’s Son by Veronica Roth
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Veronica Roth comes a sweeping new epic featuring a world consumed by fever and a prophecy that will shake the stars.
Elegy Ahn did not ask for destiny to find her.
She is happy with her life as a soldier. She spends her days fighting the Talusar, whose deadly Fever and mysterious gifts threaten her small country’s very existence.
But then she’s summoned to hear a prophecy–her, and the most ruthless of Talusar generals, Rava Vidar. Brought face to face, they learn that one of them will lead their people to victory over the other…but they don’t know which. And at the center of both of their fates: a man. A man that, Elegy is told, she will fall in love with.
In just one day, Elegy’s old life–her job, her purpose, and her future–is over. She and Rava are destined to collide, with the fate of their nations hanging in the balance. And when they do, only one will be left standing.
Elegy intends to make sure it’s her.
Daughters of the Sun and Moon by Lisa See
From belovedbestselling author Lisa See, the story of three Chinese women whose unexpected friendship helps them survive and, despite the odds, thrive, in the turmoil of post–Civil War Los Angeles.
In 1870, three Chinese women arrive in the small, dusty, and violent pueblo of Los Angeles. Dove, the bound-footed daughter of an imperial scholar, is entrancing and innocent. These characteristics should bring her great rewards, beginning with her arranged marriage to a much older merchant. Petal, the big-footed daughter of peasants, has grown up hungry and with dirt between her toes. In a moment of desperation, Petal’s father sells her to buy money for rice seed, and she is loaded onto a ship to the Gold Mountain—America—where she is once again sold. Moon is married to a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine. She is educated, speaks fluent English, and has been endowed with a face of great beauty, yet her failed footbinding as a child has left her with a limp that lessens her value in the eyes of many.
Each woman has her own desires. Dove wants to love and be loved, Petal desires freedom, and Moon seeks justice. Together they face a larger society that wishes them not one ounce of good will. Anti-Chinese sentiment is strong in Los Angeles, and this eventually leads to the Night of Horrors during which all three women are challenged in ways they could not have imagined. Brought together by hardship and heartbreak, they must use their bravery, endurance, and ability to “eat bitterness” to discover their voices, find freedom, and connect through solace and friendship. Together they are daughters of the sun and moon.
A Year of Marvelous Ways by Sarah Winman
The remarkably life-affirming novel from the highly acclaimed author of Still Life, set in 1940s Cornwall following the unlikely friendship between an eighty-nine-year-old woman at the end of her story and a young soldier, reeling from World War II, at the start of his own.
Marvelous Ways has lived alone alongside a winding creek near the rugged Cornwall coast for nearly all her life, and has recently taken to spending her days sitting on the steps of her caravan with a telescope. She is waiting for something, but she’s not sure what. She will know when she sees it and that is good enough for her.
Francis Drake, a young soldier adrift after the death of a fellow comrade, is grateful for the mission that guides his days. He has agreed to fulfil his friend’s last wish: to hand-deliver a letter to his father in Cornwall. But Francis’s journey doesn’t go as planned. After a brief, sweet, and serendipitous reunion with a woman from his past, Francis washes up in Marvelous’s creek, broken both in body and spirit.
Marvelous will come to his aid, and an unlikely friendship will grow between these two solitary souls. Marvelous has lived a long life, with many loves and countless stories to tell, and Francis needs a reason to keep going—even just the hope that life still has more to offer.
A beautiful, bighearted story that bursts with the magic of what it means to grab hold of connection and purpose when it is right in front of you, A Year of Marvelous Ways is a testament to friendship and another timeless classic from the acclaimed Sarah Winman.
Adult Graphic Novels
The Cartoon History of the Universe (Volumes 1-3) by Larry Gonick
An irreverent and highly entertaining graphic novel approach to the history of the universe that traces world history from the big bang to Alexander the Great (Volume 1), then from the “springtime” of China to the fall of Rome (Volume 2), and finallly from the rise of Arabia to the Renaissance (Volume 3). You’ll never look at history in quite the same way again!
Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home by Nora Krug
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Comics Beat, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal
This“ingenious reckoning with the past” (The New York Times), by award-winning artist Nora Krug investigates the hidden truths of her family’s wartime history in Nazi Germany.
Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. Yet she knew little about her own family’s involvement; though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it.
After twelve years in the US, Krug realizes that living abroad has only intensified her need to ask the questions she didn’t dare to as a child. Returning to Germany, she visits archives, conducts research, and interviews family members, uncovering in the process the stories of her maternal grandfather, a driving teacher in Karlsruhe during the war, and her father’s brother Franz-Karl, who died as a teenage SS soldier. In this extraordinary quest, “Krug erases the boundaries between comics, scrapbooking, and collage as she endeavors to make sense of 20th-century history, the Holocaust, her German heritage, and her family’s place in it all” (The Boston Globe). A highly inventive, “thoughtful, engrossing” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) graphic memoir, Belonging “packs the power of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and David Small’s Stitches” (NPR.org).
Charity & Sylvia by Tillie Walden
An openly Lesbian couple survives and thrives in 19th century Vermont–a true story, as told by Tillie Walden
The month is February in the year 1807. The place is Weybridge, Vermont: small, cold, lonely, and beautiful. Sylvia Drake is exhausted. As an unwed woman with few prospects, she is residing with and caring for her sister’s rambunctious family. Today the house is abuzz awaiting a guest―Charity Bryant. A friend of the family, she is most known for her elegant letters, with their swoopy and evocative penmanship and carefully chosen prose. But Charity’s visit is a guise, she is coming to Vermont to start over after heartbreak and rumours―so many rumours―that have grown too loud back in Massachusetts.
Being openly gay in 19th century New England is not an easy row to hoe. But Charity can only be herself, and she immediately catches―and holds―the eye of none other than Sylvia Drake. From this point on, for 44 years, the two would be inseparable, building a life together despite all odds and living as a lesbian couple in small town Vermont.
The true, exceptional story of these remarkable women is brought to life with humor and passion by the unparalleled and award-winning Tillie Walden (Spinning, On A Sunbeam). We see America grow alongside these women over a period that brings about the railroad, many novels, 14 Presidents, riots, rebellion, plagues, and poetry. Based on extensive archives of their writing, Charity and Sylvia is a groundbreaking biography that is also the story of 19th century America.
Adult Nonfiction
The following nonfiction titles were purchased with donations provided by the community. Thank you!
The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers by Carlos Barragán
An astonishing work of immersion journalism about four young romance scammers in Lagos, Nigeria, exploring how and why they scam, and the moral dilemmas they face
When his mother started emailing with a handsome American soldier who promised to send gold bars to her Madrid apartment, the journalist Carlos Barragán came face to face with the human toll of online romance fraud. After tracing the emails to an IP address in Nigeria, he set off on a journey to Lagos to find his mother’s scammer, where he stumbled on a much bigger story. There, in a crowded and impoverished neighborhood in the midst of Africa’s largest city, he encountered thousands of young men engaged in romance scamming. They call themselves “Yahoo Boys,” and each year they catfish millions of dollars from lonely victims overseas, building a dizzying local economy from their phones.
In this astonishing work of immersion journalism, Barragán takes us inside the lives of four of the Yahoo Boys of Lagos. We meet Biggy and Chibuike, each struggling with the temptations of fast money; Azeez, a tailor’s apprentice caught between the lure of crime and Nigeria’s economic crisis; and Richie, who is convinced that he’s responsible for the death of a woman in Kentucky he manipulated online for years. Some Yahoo Boys attain the status of folk heroes, buying houses and cars with the money they make, while others become dependent on drugs and “cash out”―successfully scam a victim―only to lose it all.
Through the Yahoo Boys’ twisting fortunes, Barragán discovers the psychological tactics they perfect, the brutal economic realities that drive them, and the moral dilemmas they confront. A work of radical empathy, this book reveals the human face behind a global phenomenon, and shows how loneliness in the West and poverty in Nigeria are two sides of the same screen.
When Memory Fades: What to Expect at Every Stage, from Early Signs to Full Support for Alzheimer’s and Dementia by Nathaniel Chin, MD with George Spencer
A geriatrician whose perspective on his specialty changed when his own father was diagnosed with dementia provides clear, calm questions to ask and tasks to tackle―as well as what not to worry about―from the first moments of concern.
When Nate Chin’s father, also a doctor, began to feel his mind slipping, even a family as knowledgeable and capable as theirs was knocked back on its heels, disorganized, and unsure of what to do first. Chin, who in addition to his practice, became one of his father’s primary caregivers until he died, determined to figure out the best way to move forward, for his own family, his patients, and now for everyone else.
When Memory Fades is clear, smart, and cuts through the understandable impulse to grasp at ineffective treatments. From the first concerns that something might be wrong right through to the toughest stages of the disease, Chin gives granular information and frames topics that help readers figure out how to think about what’s happening:
–How to Distinguish Normal Signs of Aging from Clinical Dementia
–How to Avoid Delaying Assessment
–Navigating the Medical Exam
–How to Plan & Run a Family Meeting
–Focus on the early stages/transition period to full disease can be determinative to both quality of patient life and interactions
–How to Set New Routines & Healthy Habits
–Day to Day Patient Care
–Community and Connection, and How to Maintain Them
–Dying of Alzheimer’s is Just Dying
Pizza Before We Die: An Eyewitness Account in Gaza by Hassan Kanafani with Yasuko Thanh
A heart-wrenching personal account of the ongoing devastation in Gaza by an ordinary citizen who bears witness to the undoing of his community and homeland
The human tragedy unfolding in Gaza has been made all the more tragic by the widespread denial and apathy expressed by much of the rest of the world. Here is an urgent first-hand account of life and death in Gaza, written not by a war correspondent, but an ordinary citizen whose life was upended when the genocide began.
In the midst of the chaos, Hassan began posting about his daily experiences on Reddit. Three activists, moved by his words, started collecting his posts without a clear plan—only the conviction that his story needed to be seen and the hope that somehow, it might help raise funds for him. By chance, those posts found their way to award-winning author Yasuko Thanh, who helped Hassan frame them for a book.
Hassan’s missives are a vivid, heartbreaking account of war and its toll—on families, on children, on innocent civilians. These are stories of hunger, survival, and death. These are stories that demand to be heard. And yet, stories like these are not being told: Mainstream media has largely remained silent. Foreign journalists are barred from Gaza. Local journalists are being killed. In this vacuum, Hassan’s voice breaks through out of the darkness and into the light.
Pizza Before We Die is literary journalism at its rawest and most urgent—clear eyed, unflinching, and deeply humane. Hassan captures the unspeakable horror of the tragedy in Gaza with restraint and precision, never sensationalizing, always bearing witness. It is a work of raw power and emotion and a reminder that in the midst of chaos and tragedy, our shared humanity remains intact.
In addition to editing this book, Yasuko Thanh has written a foreword that provides context for Hassan’s powerful story.
How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind by Clancy Martin
FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR NONFICTION • ONE OF TIME’S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF THE YEAR • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW’S CRITICS’ PICKS • ONE OF THE BOSTON GLOBE’S 55 BOOKS WE LOVED THIS YEAR • ONE OF KIRKUS’S BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR• An intimate, insightful, at times even humorous blend of memoir and philosophy that examines why the thought of death is so compulsive for some while demonstrating that there’s always another solution—from the acclaimed writer and philosophy professor, based on his viral essay, “I’m Still Here.”
If you’re going to write a book about suicide, you have to be willing to say the true things, the scary things, the humiliating things. Because everybody who is being honest with themselves knows at least a little bit about the subject. If you lie or if you fudge, the reader will know.
The last time Clancy Martin tried to kill himself was in his basement with a dog leash. It was one of over ten attempts throughout the course of his life. But he didn’t die, and like many who consider taking their own lives, he hid the attempt from his wife, family, coworkers, and students, slipping back into his daily life with a hoarse voice, a raw neck, and series of vague explanations.
In How Not to Kill Yourself, Martin chronicles his multiple suicide attempts in an intimate depiction of the mindset of someone obsessed with self-destruction. He argues that, for the vast majority of suicides, an attempt does not just come out of the blue, nor is it merely a violent reaction to a particular crisis or failure, but is the culmination of a host of long-standing issues. He also looks at the thinking of a number of great writers who have attempted suicide and detailed their experiences (such as David Foster Wallace, Yiyun Li, Akutagawa, Nelly Arcan, and others), at what the history of philosophy has to say both for and against suicide, and at the experiences of those who have reached out to him across the years to share their own struggles.
The result combines memoir with critical inquiry to powerfully give voice to what for many has long been incomprehensible, while showing those presently grappling with suicidal thoughts that they are not alone, and that the desire to kill oneself—like other self-destructive desires—is almost always temporary and avoidable.
The Vermont Farm to Table Cookbook: Over 50 Fresh & Local Recipes for Every Season by Nora Rice & Jenna Rice
The Vermont Farm to Table Cookbook is an ode to the flavors and ingredients of Vermont. Featuring over 50 recipes focused on fresh, local ingredients, this homegrown cookbook is your invitation to savor the bounty of the Green Mountain State.
The Vermont Farm to Table Cookbook is a celebration of Vermont’s unique flavors, focusing on recipes that utilize locally grown meats, dairy products, and vegetables.
Experience a full year in a Vermont kitchen—every dish flows with the rhythm of the land, no matter the season. Featured recipes include:
• Herbed Ricotta Stuffed Chicken
• Potato and Wild Leek Gratin
• Asparagus and Goat Cheese Frittata
• Maple Bourbon Glazed Pork Chops
• Blackened Peach Salad
• Summer Berry Maple Pavlova
• Roasted Delicata with Cider Syrup
• Red Wine Braised Short Ribs
• Apple Celeriac Salad
• Maple Fudge
With expert tips, beautiful photography, and a variety of dishes to suit any taste, The Vermont Farm to Table Cookbook is a love letter to all the colors and flavors of Vermont.
America’s Test Kitchen: The Complete Baby and Toddler Cookbook
Being a new parent usually means an overload of information on how to keep your baby healthy and happy. But what information should we trust as parents? America’s Test Kitchen, with their years of expertise and their tried-and-true testing methods, has opened their test kitchens for the first time ever to include the youngest of foodies: babies and toddlers! This baby food book is the perfect choice for parents looking to dive into the world of baby food recipes and cooking toddler food!
From purees to smoothies to family meals that everyone can enjoy, this cookbook includes the very best (kitchen-tested!) recipes to get you through the early years. Whether you’re looking for ways to introduce your child to solid foods or engage kids in the kitchen, this is the essential cookbook young families need.
I Eat the Stars: How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World by Sarah Wilson
From New York Times bestselling author Sarah Wilson comes a deeply moving, wise guide to finding joy and meaning in a world that seems to be falling apart
It’s hard to escape the feeling that something is deeply wrong . . . that life has become precariously off-balance. We are hit hourly with headlines about catastrophic wildfires, unprecedented flooding, record heat waves, collapsing democracies, AI and nuclear threat, rising economic inequality, widespread unrest, and more. In I Eat the Stars, Sarah Wilson argues we are undergoing what every complex civilization before us has—systemic collapse.
So how do we continue to live as sensitive humans amidst such a tumultuous shift? What does life look like when the systems we rely on deteriorate? Should we be having kids? How do we make financial decisions? Should we be prepping? And, most importantly, how do we avoid succumbing to doom and despair?
In I Eat the Stars, Sarah Wilson delves into these pressing questions. Drawing on many years of research and wisdom gained from more than 200 conversations with philosophers, poets, game theorists, and spiritual leaders, Wilson takes readers on an intimate journey as she lays out a path for living fully, meaningfully, and beautifully through these troubled times. Our predicament, she argues, is ultimately an urgent call to us all to relish what is valuable to us—to eat the stars—and to return to our humanity once again.
I Eat the Stars empowers readers to move beyond panic, doom, and despair. With her warm, incisively intelligent, wise, and down-to-earth voice, Wilson creates a space for readers to confront their fears and anxieties about an uncertain future, guiding them toward one rooted in truth, hope, justice, creativity, community, and to step up as “warriors” and meet the moment.
We are in what we were warned about for decades. But from a crisis comes stunning possibility.
Games
Join a team of fearless adventurers on a do-or-die mission to capture four sacred treasures from the ruins of this perilous paradise. 2-4 players, ages 10+
June 2026
Picture Books
Flip-o-storic by Sara Ball
Create your own imaginary prehistoric beasts by turning over the flaps of this clever book.
This interactive board book lets you mix and match the heads, bodies, and tails of ten real prehistoric animals―like the saber-tooth tiger, woolly mammoth, and Macrauchenia―in order to create almost a thousand different imaginary ones. The flaps include interesting facts about each animal part, so you can learn how your Flip-o-storic creature would behave. There’s also a handy chart that shows the actual size of the ten real animals that make up the “ingredients” of your Flip-o-storic, and gives the meaning and pronunciation of their names.
Flip-o-storic―which follows the incredible popularity of Sara Ball’s recently released dinosaur book, Flip-o-saurus―will captivate the imagination of anyone fascinated by these impressive and now extinct species. With its fun concept, beautiful artwork, and high production values, this book will thrill any kid who loves the prehistoric.
Navigating Night by Julie Leung
A girl guides her dad on his route delivering Chinese take-out food in this touching picture book — written by an APALA award winner and illustrated by a Caldecott Honor winner — that celebrates the unique bond between immigrant parents and their children.
Every night, a girl must help her dad, whose English is not as good as hers, make deliveries for their small family restaurant. Sitting next to him in the car, she studies a map and gives him directions in Cantonese. She helps him get to the places he needs to go.
She hates doing this, though. Hates carrying grease-stained boxes of Mongolian beef and moo goo gai pan to customers’ doors. Hates being different from the kids behind these doors. Why can’t her family be normal like everyone else’s?
But when her dad tells her about how he immigrated, all alone as a teenager, to the United States, she comes to better understand him, and appreciate how he has made her American life possible.
Easy Readers
Dragon’s Halloween by Dav Pilkey
From Dav Pilkey, creator of the #1 New York Times bestselling Dog Man and Captain Underpants series, comes Dragon, the heartwarming hero adored by Dav’s youngest readers!
Dragon is so excited for Halloween! He plans to carve a big, scary jack-o’-lantern and create a creepy costume. Unfortunately, Dragon can’t find a big pumpkin, and he can’t decide which costume to wear. Plus, when Dragon goes for a walk through the woods, he hears some unexpected growling — yikes! Will Dragon’s Halloween be filled with more tricks than treats?
Junior Fiction
A Wish with Wings by Sarah Guillory
A tender tale of courage, hope, and holding onto yourself even when everything around you seems to be falling apart — perfect for fans of Katherine Applegate and Barbara O’Connor.
Everyone says twelve-year-old Evan Calais is feral. She likes to spend her time outside, fishing and having mud fights in her small town of Little John Island, Louisiana. But when a sinkhole causes the town mine to collapse, trapping all forty-eight miners, everything in her life comes to a standstill. Because Evan’s dad is one of the miners trapped inside.
Evan seeks solace the only way she knows how—in the outdoors—and comes upon the most peculiar thing. An egg.
It’s a large egg. And it’s alone. So while Evan waits for her dad to come home, she also finds herself caring for the strange, abandoned egg. If this egg can hatch…maybe her dad has a chance of coming home, too. But as she incubates the egg, Evan will need to make a big decision. For she has a secret—she might know what caused the cave-in.
Sarah Guillory’s latest middle grade novel is a deeply heartwarming exploration of the importance of imagination, the freedom in nature, and the power of the truth.
My Brother Oliver by R.L. Toalson
A “gut-wrenching and unforgettable” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) novel in verse about a boy struggling with guilt as his family reels from the fallout of his older brother’s extreme depression and tries to hold onto hope.
My brother’s not here.
My brother’s not here.
My brother’s not here.
And it’s all
because of
me.
Brooks loves and adores his older brother, Oliver. That’s why it was so hard—practically impossible, really—for him to have done what he did and told his parents about what Oliver wanted to do.
Now Oliver has been sent away. He’s miserable, and Brooks’s family is falling apart. His mom and dad are sad and scared, and it seems like nothing will ever be okay again. Maybe things would be better if Brooks had just kept his mouth shut. Can he and his family find the hope they need to keep going?
The Sweet Spot by Elane Vickers
A home run of a novel about baseball and belonging, from the acclaimed author of Half Moon Summer.
Twelve-year-old Trip’s summer to-do list has exactly one thing on it: win the local Little League championship. But then Dad unexpectedly deploys overseas just before the season starts. And Sam (short for Samantha) joins the team, which changes more than just the line-up. Suddenly nothing feels right at home or on the field—the two places he’s always belonged.
The season isn’t what he imagined, but Trip sticks with it. Until news about Dad leaves him convinced that he has to choose between family and baseball. Feeling more unsure than ever about who he’s supposed to be and where he belongs, Trip makes an impossible decision. But what if he doesn’t need to choose at all?
Fast-paced and player-focused, The Sweet Spot highlights the challenges of being a passionate athlete and a compassionate person at the same time.
Youth Graphic Novels
Detective Beans: Adventures in Cat Town by Li Chen
The world’s cutest cat detective is back on the case in this indie bestselling series. Li Chen’s newest Detective Beans adventures are a must-read for anyone who loves mystery stories, cute animals, and hilarious original storytelling.
Detective Beans is back on the case! In this series of mysteries and adventures, the world’s cutest cat detective comes to the aid of his fellow villagers, searching for a cooky thief (with surprising results!), aiding a deceptive duck in the recovery of lost goods, and even doing his best to help a confused bear prove that the moon is made of cheese. In addition to these small capers, Adventures in Cat Town features behind-the-scenes footage of the crime-solving documentary directed by Beans best friend, Biscuits, as well as comics, stories, and even horoscopes illustrated by Beans himself. Called a “must-read” by School Library Journal and “absurdly funny and clever” by Kirkus, it’s no mystery why this new series is such a hit!
One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia
“I wish I didn’t know that I was marching my sisters into a boiling pot of trouble cooking in Oakland…”
Eleven-year-old Delphine is like a mother to her two younger sisters, Vonetta and Fern. She’s had to be, ever since their mother, Cecile, left them seven years ago for a radical new life in California.
But when the sisters arrive from Brooklyn to spend the summer with their mother in Oakland, Cecile is nothing like they imagined. While the girls hope to go to Disneyland and meet Tinker Bell, their mother sends them to a day camp run by the Black Panthers.
Unexpectedly, Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern learn much about their family, their country, and themselves during one truly crazy summer.
This beloved Newbery Honor Book, National Book Award finalist, and Coretta Scott King Award–winning novel about the three unforgettable Gaither sisters has been adapted into a beautiful full-color graphic novel for a new generation, with vibrant art by Sharee Miller.
Youth Nonfiction
Paper Airplanes with Dollar Bills: Another Way to Throw Money Away by Duy Nguyen
Those dollar bills really will go places when they’re turned into these super paper airplanes. Select from 13 different models, all created from a variety of easy folds and a buck. (There’s no cutting, drawing, or taping involved, so the currency isn’t defaced or destroyed.) Duy Nguyen, author of more than a dozen origami books featuring every motif from creepy-crawly critters to holiday designs, presents a hangar full of cool aircrafts, accompanied by fun money facts. Just follow his simple, well-illustrated instructions to assemble a Boeing 747, F14A Tomcat, B-52 Stratofortress, Battlestar Gallactica Raider, Concorde, and others. It’s the best way to “throw away” that wealth!
The Survival Guide for Kids with Autism Spectrum Disorder (And Their Parents) (Updated Edition) by Elizabeth Verdick * Elizabeth Reeve, M.D.
This positive, straightforward book offers kids with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) their own comprehensive resource for both understanding their condition and finding tools to cope with the challenges they face every day.
Some children with ASDs are gifted; others struggle academically. Some are more introverted, while others try to be social. Some get “stuck” on things, have limited interests, or experience repeated motor movements like flapping or pacing (“stims”). The Survival Guide for Kids with Autism Spectrum Disorder (And Their Parents) (Updated Edition) covers all of these areas, with an emphasis on helping children gain new self-understanding and self-acceptance.
Meant to be read with a parent, the book addresses questions such as “What is ASD?” and “Why me?” and provides strategies for communicating, making and keeping friends, and succeeding in school. Body and brain basics highlight symptom management, exercise, diet, hygiene, relaxation, sleep, and toileting. Emphasis is placed on helping kids handle intense emotions and behaviors and get support from family and their team of helpers when needed. The book includes stories from real kids, fact boxes, helpful checklists, resources, and a glossary. Sections for parents offer more detailed information.
Young Adult Fiction
Change of Plans by Sarah Dessen
From acclaimed and #1 New York Times bestselling author Sarah Dessen comes a “sweet, nuanced, and reflective coming-of-age love story” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) about an unassuming girl who learns to stand on her own while falling in love during a life-changing summer.
Finley has always felt most comfortable in someone else’s shadow. Fortunately, she’s got Colin, her magnetic boyfriend, who sweeps her along for activities, friendships, and future plans. Then she goes on a last-minute trip with her distant mom to a family vacation house that Finley didn’t know existed and is now about to be sold.
Her mom was estranged from her own parents and siblings since leaving home for college, and it’s a novelty for Finley to see her aunts and cousins. There’s also the handful of teens who work at the Egg, her aunt’s diner, and make up a found family of their own—including undeniably handsome guitarist Ben.
Then her relationship with Colin goes into freefall, and Finley’s roadmap for life after high school is gone. She has no choice but to live, for the first time, without plans. The longer Finley stays, the closer she gets to the truth about why her mother stayed away—and why she’s brought Finley here now.
And the closer she grows to new friends at the Egg, the more she starts to fall for charmingly awkward, soulful Ben and to realize how much of herself she’s been missing. By the end of the summer, nothing will be the same—for this community or for Finley herself.
Her Hidden Fire by Clíodhna O’Sullivan
In the first book of a heart-pounding, Irish-inspired debut romantasy series set in a world of dragons and magic, one girl must make an impossible decision: watch the boy she loves get exiled for lack of magic, or pass her formidable powers off as his own.
How far would you go to empower the one you love?
In a world where dragons soar through the skies and magical abilities are an elite privilege, the ruling family of Ailm’s Keep is on a knife-edge: Can their son Ionáin prove that he can channel magic, or will his entire family be cast out in disgrace?
Éadha, a servant girl who loves Ionáin, is shocked to discover shortly before the test that she can wield magic herself. It’s extremely rare for a girl to have this talent, especially outside the few great Families. At Ionáin’s moment of truth, when it’s clear he is about to fail, Éadha makes a desperate gamble to save him from humiliation by pretending her magic is his, forfeiting her own claim to power.
Her decision sends them both to an academy of magic, where she must shield her secret from every grim Master and scheming apprentice—especially the handsome but enigmatic Gry. As Éadha enters this whirlwind of patriarchy, class, heartache, and jealousy, she also learns about magic’s terrible cost—the human price that Channellers willingly pay to maintain their power.
Adult Fiction
Ironwood (A Catalina Novel) by Michael Connelly
Sworn to protect a scenic island meant to be far from the evils of the mainland, Detective Sergeant Stilwell can feel danger closing in.
Detective Sergeant Stilwell knows that his posting on Catalina Island is no paradise, but to most residents, it seems blissfully separated―by twenty-two miles of ocean―from the troubles of Los Angeles County. But now a threat is coming to his safe haven.
Acting on a tip from a confidential informant, Stilwell and his deputies watch a plane land in the middle of the night at the Airport in the Sky, a remote airstrip in the mountains. A duffel bag of drugs is dropped and the deputies move in, but things quickly go sideways. While Stilwell chases the fleeing pickup man into the mountainside brush, shots are fired on the runway and the plane flies off.
An internal inquiry follows, putting Stilwell on the bench until he is cleared of responsibility for the disastrous operation. But he is determined to find out who brought deadly violence to his island, and begins his own secret investigation into the drug deal gone wrong.
While under orders to remain in the sheriff’s substation, he finds in the lost and found a valuable backpack that was never claimed. He traces it to a woman who disappeared while hiking on the island four years ago. But then why was the pack only turned in two months back? Now thoroughly intrigued, he follows the mystery all the way to the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit and Detective Renée Ballard.
Stilwell and Ballard work the case from both sides of the channel, and soon realize they are on the trail of a criminal who revels in taunting the authorities. Meanwhile, frustrated at being shut out of an investigation on his own island, Stilwell risks his already shaky standing in the department to pursue a case whose reach is wider than he ever imagined.
Page-turning, packed with intrigue, and bringing together an unstoppable investigative team, Ironwood continues the Catalina series with all of Michael Connelly’s signature “relentless narrative drive…evocative atmosphere, realistic dialogue, and well-developed characters” (Washington Review of Books).
The Midnight Train by Matt Haig
“Matt Haig returns with another life-affirming novel . . . If you enjoy the “Midnight” experience, climb aboard.” —The New York Times Book Review
When your life flashes before your eyes, where would you stop?
No one can change the past, but the Midnight Train can take you there.
The chance to re-live the moments that meant most.
To see what kind of person you really were.
For Wilbur his best days were with Maggie, the love of his life. On his honeymoon in Venice.
Before he gave it all away.
He wishes he could go back and live differently. But to do so risks everything . . .
A magical, time-travelling love story, from the world of The Midnight Library.
Radiant Star by Ann Leckie
Space opera’s sharpest mind returns to the world of the Imperial Radch in this brilliant standalone from award-winning author Ann Leckie.
The Temporal Location of the Radiant Star has always been a source of both conflict and hope for the people of Ooioiaa. However, the imperial Radch see it only as an inconvenience, an antiquated religious site soon to be absorbed into their own, superior culture. But local politics is complicated, and the Radch have made a final concession: One last man will be allowed to join the mummified bodies in the temporal location to become a “living saint”.
But this decision will ripple out to affect every part of the city. Amidst a slowly worsening food shortage, riots, and a communication blackout from the rest of the Radch Empire, a religious savant will entertain visions of his own sainthood, a socialite will discover her comfortable life upended, and a young man sold into servitude will find unlikely escape.
Ghalen: A Romance in Black by Walter Mosley
A stellar addition to the Amistad list: a beautiful coming-of-age novel from MWA Grand Master and PEN and Edgar Award-winner Walter Mosley that explores love in all forms—romantic, familial, and platonic, centered on one Black family, including a neurodivergent man, and the found bonds that helps ground them.
One of the most acclaimed writers working today, Walter Mosley spins magic once again in this beautiful novel that explores the lives of Black characters and one remarkable family through a lens both universal and unique. It touches on the lives of those whose deepest thoughts and motivations are seldom explored—including the neurodivergent, the incarcerated, and the immigrant tortured by their past—characters who will stay with you and change how you see the world.
Ghalen, a brilliant young Black man, is the son of two seemingly mismatched parents. His mother, a gifted scientist, whose own mother expected her to exceed all the achievements in her family, and his father, a gentle cook at a small vegan restaurant, whose idiosyncratic nature shows the young woman a radically different love and understanding of life, despite his inexperience and lack of education.
His parents’ grand love story starts it all off, setting us up to follow Ghalen and his family so deeply, that each new twist and turn feels personal.
The journey through Ghalen’s coming-of-age tale, as he ventures out into the world, is marked with peaks and valleys and such a drive that you can’t help but strap in for it all, while not wanting it to end.
Lush and cinematic, with the narrative drive and indelible power of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead and Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, Ghalen is one of this bestselling, prize-winning writer’s finest achievements.
The Last Mandarin by Louise Penny & Mellissa Fung
A gripping thriller about family and power co-written by Louise Penny, #1 bestselling author of the Gamache novels, and Mellissa Fung, an award-winning journalist.
A mother and a daughter race against time in this all-too-real thriller that reaches from Tiananmen Square all the way to the White House.
Alice Li, a first-generation Chinese American and former food blogger, has long lived in the shadow of her mother, Vivien Li― a Tiananmen Square dissident turned world-renowned human rights activist and passionate advocate for a free and democratic China.
When security and fire alarms go off simultaneously all around the world, setting off a panic, the signal is traced back to China. As world leaders scramble to respond, Vivien and Alice are called to the White House in hopes Madame Li can interpret the Chinese intentions. But why involve Alice?
If China isn’t behind the attack, Vivien warns, someone even more dangerous is pulling the strings. Mother and daughter must join together to overcome their estrangement if they have any hope of preventing global catastrophe. From DC to Ohio to Hong Kong, they work to prevent the next attack, along the way decoding an ancient legend and uncovering a secret language invented by women, for women.
The Last Mandarin is an electrifying study of absolute power and voracious greed, political terror and personal conviction. But it is also an intimate examination of choice, of sacrifice, of memory and myths, both cultural and personal. It is the story of a mother and daughter, as well as a compelling international thriller about the precarious balance of power across the world, and within a family. And what happens when both break down.
In a world ruled by power, even family can be a weapon.
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this “profound, resplendent novel”* from Pulitzer Prize–winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Strout, a chance incident sparks a powerful realization in a beloved teacher’s life
Artie Dam is living a double life. He spends his days teaching history to eleventh graders, expanding their young minds, correcting their casual cruelties, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He goes to holiday parties with his wife of three decades, makes small talk with neighbors, and, on weekends, takes his sailboat out on the beautiful Massachusetts Bay. He is, by all appearances, present and alive. But inside, Artie is plagued by feelings of isolation. He looks out at a world gone mad—at himself and the people around him—and turns a question over and over in his mind: How is it that we know so little about one another, even those closest to us?
And then, one day, Artie learns that life has been keeping a secret from him, one that threatens to upend his entire world. Once he learns it, he is forced to chart a new course, to reconsider the relationships he holds most dear—and to make peace with the mysteries at the heart of our existence.
Elizabeth Strout, as we have come to expect, delivers a moving exploration of the human condition—one that brims with compassion for each and every one of her indelible characters. With exquisite prose and profound insight, The Things We Never Say takes one man’s fears and loneliness and makes them universal. And in the same breath, captures the abiding love that sustains and holds us all.
The Politician (A DS George Cross Mystery) by Tim Sullivan
“A perfect detective for our time and for all time.”—Stephen Fry
A ransacked room. A dead politician. A burglary gone wrong – or a staged murder?
DS George Cross loves puzzles – he’s good at them – and he immediately spots one when he begins investigating the death of former mayor Peggy Frampton. To most, the crime scene looks like a burglary that went horribly wrong. But George can see what others can’t: This was murder.
After her political career ended, Peggy became a controversial blogger whose forthright opinions attracted a battalion of online trolls. And then there’s her family: an unfaithful husband and a gambling-addicted son. With yet more enemies in her past, the potential suspects are unending.
Cross must unpick the never-ending list of seedy connections to find her killer – but the sheer number of suspects is clouding his usually impeccable logic. He’s a relentlessly methodical detective, but no case can last forever. And politics can be a dangerous game – especially for people who don’t know the rules.
The Patient (A DS George Cross Mystery) by Tim Sullivan
No fingerprints. No weapon. No witnesses. Can DS Cross prove it was murder?
When a young woman is found dead – with no fingerprints, no weapon, and no witnesses –the Bristol Crime Unit is ready to close the case as suicide, especially after the coroner cites the victim’s long history of drug abuse. But her mother is convinced it was murder, saying that her daughter had been clean and sober for over two years.
DS Cross is determined to defy his bosses and re-open the case, even if it costs him his career. Soon he is mired in a labyrinth of potential suspects – but can he solve the case before his superiors shut it down for good?
A Murder in Springtime: A Bruno, Chief of Police Novel by Martin Walker
In the next installment of the Bruno, Chief of Police series, a newcomer to St. Denis is found dead at the home of one of Bruno’s best friends—and for once, Bruno feels as though he is too close to the case to investigate, until it becomes clear that he’s the only person who can solve the crime.
After Bruno sees he’s missed several phone calls from his longtime neighbor Pamela, he has no idea what to expect. He’s shocked to hear that she’s found her new lodger on her back patio, brutally murdered. Bruno knows that Pamela isn’t capable of killing anyone, but then who’s the culprit? And what’s the motive? The victim had only just moved to town to take a job at the local nursing home. She had no enemies in the village—but no friends, either.
Bruno decides that he can’t be impartial where Pamela is involved, so the force assigns the case instead to their rising star rookie, Fabien. Bruno is happy for Fabien to take the lead. Lately, Bruno’s been distracted: by his faltering relationship, by a meddlesome film crew that’s descended on the Dordogne, by a group of opinionated small business owners Bruno wants to help to organize a logistically complicated night market. He can’t seem to catch a break.
But when Fabien realizes that the victim is connected to his own past, Bruno steps back in to help. The village has never felt more crowded, and the clock is ticking: Will Bruno and Fabien be able to catch a killer?
Adult Nonfiction
The following nonfiction titles were purchased with donations provided by the community. Thank you!
Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children by Mac Barnett
“Conversational essays on wonder . . . A meditation on what gives life meaning. . . . A loving sermon on the rewards of children’s books.” ―Kirkus Reviews
Make Believe is bestselling children’s author Mac Barnett’s rallying cry for art and imagination, and a celebration of the power of storytelling in all our lives. It’s an incisive, intimate, and timely invitation to approach children’s literature not only as an art form worthy of deep study and criticism, but as a portal into the lives of the children. And at a time when we are faced with a national literacy crisis, he champions the profound joys of literature and the importance of reading for pleasure.
What if children are a great audience for art?
What if they are in fact better equipped to engage deeply with stories than adults?
What if humans’ ability to appreciate art is, if not innate, awakened early in childhood?
Well, then we’d better do our best to make some good kids’ books.
Written with humor and academic rigor, Make Believe reads like a letter from your smartest and funniest friend.
Includes spreads from Goodnight Moon and Busy, Busy Town, illustrations by Caldecott Medalist Jon Klassen, and cover art by celebrated illustrator Carson Ellis.
What’s Going Right: A Powerful New Method for Optimizing Your Mental Health by Paul Conti, MD
This affirming book from world-renowned psychiatrist, Dr. Paul Conti, offers a paradigm-shifting approach to optimizing mental health, offering readers a proven way towards a joyful life—based on the popular series on Andrew Huberman’s podcast.
More than one in five US adults are living with a mental illness. Since 2010, adults ages eighteen to twenty-five have experienced a 139 percent increase in anxiety. For all of the increasing and well-intended mental health resources at our immediate disposal, we could easily ask where we are going wrong. Yet, Dr. Paul Conti wants to know, “what’s going right?”
Backed by celebrities and esteemed colleagues such as Lady Gaga, Mel Robbins, and Kim Kardashian, Dr. Conti poses that the key to embracing this new narrative is tapping into our often ignored and long over-looked generative drive, the primary factor that’s already going right in each of us. The generative drive helps you get things done, solve problems creatively, help others and feel connected to something larger than yourself. When activated, it brings you peace, contentment, and delight.
With Dr. Conti’s notorious straightforward sincerity, he shares the exact method he uses on his patients and celebrity clients to help them tap into their generative drives including:
- The 5-Part Function of Self: When you alter your function you alter your life trajectory
- Cultivating a daily self-inquiry practice
- Learning compassionate curiosity
- Progressive muscle relaxation
- Rewiring Life Narratives
What’s Going Right offers readers a proven offramp from the toxic pursuits that keep them stuck and an onramp towards happiness.
In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man: A Memoir by Tom Junod
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • From two-time National Magazine Award winner Tom Junod, a searching, brilliantly stylized memoir about a charismatic, philandering father who tried to mold his son in his image, the many secrets he hid, the son’s obsessive quest to uncover them, and ultimately, the true meaning of manhood
“Affecting. . . . Moves like a song, drawing you in with its melody before delivering an emotional wallop.” —The New York Times
Big Lou Junod dominated every room he entered. He worshipped the sun and the sea, his own bronzed body, Frank Sinatra, and beautiful women. He was a successful traveling handbag salesman who carried himself like a celebrity. He’d return from the road with stories of going to nightclubs where the stars—Ava Gardner, maybe Liz Taylor—“couldn’t keep their eyes off . . . your father.” He had countless affairs and didn’t do much to hide them.
Lou could be cruel to Fran, his wife of fifty-nine years, but he loved his youngest son. Tom was a skin-and-bones, nervous boy, devoted to his mother, but Lou sought to turn him into a version of himself. He showered him with advice about how to dress (“A turtleneck is the most flattering thing a man can wear”), how to be an alpha male, and especially, how to attract and bed women. His parting speech when Tom went to college was: “Do yourself a favor and date a Jewish girl. They’re all nymphos.”
Tom wrestled with Lou’s imposing presence all his life. When one of Lou’s mistresses stood up at his funeral and announced, “Can we all . . . just agree . . . that this . . . was a man,” Tom set off to learn the facts of his father’s life, and why he was the way he was. The stunning secrets he uncovered—about his father, his father’s lovers, and deceptions going back generations—staggered Tom, but in the process allowed him, at last, to become his own man, by his own lights.
In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man is an intensely emotional detective story powered by a series of cascading revelations. The book is a triumph of bravura writing; it is a tale of a son reckoning with the consequences of his father’s life, and in the end, the story of the son’s redemption.
How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty by Bonny Reichert
“Beautifully written, heartbreaking and hopeful.”—Ruth Reichl, New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Novel
When you’re raised by someone who once survived on potato peels and coffee grounds, you develop a pretty healthy respect for food.
Bonny Reichert avoided everything to do with the Holocaust until she found herself, in midlife, suddenly typing those words into an article she was writing. The journalist had grown up hearing stories about her father’s near-starvation and ultimate survival in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but she never imagined she would be able to face this epic legacy head-on.
Then a chance encounter with a perfect bowl of borscht in Warsaw set Bonny on a journey to unearth her culinary lineage, and she began to dig for the roots of her food obsession, dish by dish. Stepping into the kitchen to connect her past with her future, the author recounts the defining moments of her life in a poignant tale of scarcity and plenty: her colorful childhood in the restaurant business, the crumbling of her first marriage and the intensity of young motherhood, her decision to become a chef, and that life-altering visit to Poland. Whether it’s the flaky potato knishes and molasses porridge bread she learned to bake at her baba Sarah’s elbow, the creamy vichyssoise she taught herself to cook in her tiny student apartment, or the brown butter eggs her father, now 93, still scrambles for her whenever she needs comfort, cuisine is both an anchor and an identity; a source of joy and a signifier of survival.
How to Share an Egg is a journey of deep flavors and surprising contrasts. By turns sweet, salty, sour, and bitter, this is one woman’s search to find her voice as a writer, chef, mother, and daughter. Do the tiny dramas of her own life matter in comparison to everything her father has seen and done? This moving exploration of heritage, inheritance, and self-discovery sets out to find the answer.
May 2026
Picture Books
Truman Toad and the Quest for the Perfect Hug by Oren Lavie, illustrated by Anke Kuhl
A self-important but good-hearted toad, with an ample amount of self-love, discovers his love for others in this entertaining and charming picture book!
When Truman Toad―the most stubborn, perfectionist toad in Green Grove―wakes up one morning from a dream about the perfect hug, he knows exactly what he must do: find whoever is holding the other half.
With a charmingly witty text by author Oren Lavie and playful illustrations by beloved artist Anke Kuhl, Truman Toad and the Quest for the Perfect Hug is a delightful tale that reminds us that the best things in life will always take us by surprise!
Easy Readers
Adventures of the Berenstain Bears by Stan & Jan Berenstain
Mama and Papa Bear, Brother and Sister Bear the Berenstain Bears are instantly recognizable to young readers everywhere. Here, four of their adventures are presented in the same volume!
In time for spring-cleaning, the Bears decide to have a yard sale in The Berenstain Bears Clean House. Brother and Sister Bear step up to the plate in The Berenstain Bears Play T-Ball. Will they be able to put together a winning team? Brother and Sister must learn to take care of their pet in The Berenstain Bears’ New Pup. When Brother and Sister find a baby chipmunk in the garden, they are eager to take care of him in The Berenstain Bears and the Baby Chipmunk.
Youth Nonfiction
Science Comics: Prehistoric Mammals: From the Jurassic to the Ice Age by Joe Flood
Learn how mammals survived the test of time in this volume of Science Comics, the smash-hit STEM graphic novel series that has sold over a million copies!
Mammals are survivors―when dinosaurs went extinct, they survived. From lush jungles to deep oceans to sweltering deserts, mammals now dominate nearly every environment on Earth. But how did they do it? Take a trip back in time and discover how extreme changes in climate have pushed mammals to evolve new traits, including hooves, claws, tusks, big brains, and even blow holes. Join us as we explore our mammalian history, and maybe the past will hold the key to surviving in the future.
Young Adult Fiction
1984 by George Orwell
Written more than 70 years ago, 1984 was George Orwell’s chilling prophecy about the future. And while 1984 has come and gone, his dystopian vision of a government that will do anything to control the narrative is timelier than ever…
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
Winston Smith toes the Party line, rewriting history to satisfy the demands of the Ministry of Truth. With each lie he writes, Winston grows to hate the Party that seeks power for its own sake and persecutes those who dare to commit thoughtcrimes. But as he starts to think for himself, Winston can’t escape the fact that Big Brother is always watching…
A startling and haunting novel, 1984 creates an imaginary world that is completely convincing from start to finish. No one can deny the novel’s hold on the imaginations of whole generations, or the power of its admonitions—a power that seems to grow, not lessen, with the passage of time.
Adult Fiction
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A GMA BOOK CLUB PICK • A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (SO FAR) • A traditional American woman, a “tradwife” influencer, suddenly awakens in the brutal reality of 1855—where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel.
My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.
Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the heir to a political dynasty? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it.
Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a ruthless reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible.
A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood.
The Language of Liars by S.L. Huang
A story of secrets, body jumping, and the power of language, The Language of Liars is a poignant, thought-provoking new masterpiece from award-winning author of The Water Outlaws, S. L. Huang.
Speak another people’s language. Know them. Become them.
And discover you’ve destroyed them.
In his training as a spy, Ro was warned: you will always be living a lie.
Jumping into a Star Eater’s mind in the first place requires a moment of perfect psychic connection, and he has studied all his life to comprehend their species. Admires them, respects them, is reverent at the idea of being one of them―the only species physiologically capable of mining the element needed for lightyear-spanning space travel. The species all others crave to know more of, but who have notoriously shared so very little. The species Ro’s own small civilization, with its dwindling resources and withering reach, needs to know more about.
It will feel real, his elders impressed upon him. It will never be real.
But Ro’s certainty runs deep: he will be different. Ro will not be an imposter hiding the truth of his past, because his heart will be one of them. He will be one of them.
To understand is to become. It never occurs to him that the mere act of understanding can destroy.
The Last Letters of Sally and Walter by Cammie McGovern
With the tenacious spirit of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand and the long-lived verve of Thursday Murder Club comes a heartwarming story of a curmudgeon and a newcomer who strike up an unlikely friendship over cutthroat Scrabble at their retirement home, outrageously starting something new in their golden eras.
As a new resident of Golden Grove, an independent living community for active seniors, Sally wants to do everything in her power to start off on the right foot. But between navigating unspoken social rules of the community and leaving two struggling adult children back at home, fitting in becomes harder than she expected. So when she sees flyers advertising the Scrabble Club, she thinks she might as well give it a try. She quickly realizes her faux pas when she walks into the library to find just one man, Walter Kretzer, who has a reputation for being “a bit intense.”
Walter has taken his Scrabble club a pinch too seriously in the past, but when he meets Sally, with her golden-flecked eyes and sensible style, and discovers she is something of a prodigy at the game, he can’t help but feel his fate is about to change. As he draws Sally into the world of high-stakes Scrabble tournaments, his feelings for her grow and inspire him to take a hard look at his life. When the truth about Sally’s reasons for moving to Golden Grove are suddenly exposed, Walter finds himself with the gumption to make his last chapter in life the best yet.
The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett
The multimillion-copy-selling author of The Help returns with a bold, big-hearted novel about a group of unbreakable women, fighting for what’s rightfully theirs—and the power of friendship to change everything.
Oxford, Mississippi, 1933.
Abandoned by her mother one Christmas Eve, eleven-year-old Meg Lefleur has learned the hard way to rely on no one. Now one of the unadoptable “big girls” at the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum, she fights each day to keep her spirit unbowed.
Birdie Calhoun, unmarried and outspoken, has come to Oxford to ask her socialite sister to help the struggling family she’s left behind. But as the Depression tightens its grip, Birdie discovers her sister’s seemingly charmed life is a tapestry of lies.
Then, Birdie encounters Charlie, a woman running low on luck with little left to lose. When their fates—and Meg’s—converge, Charlie comes up with an audacious plan for them to take control of their lives. But in a place and time where hypocrisy is rife and women’s freedom is fragile, even the smallest act of defiance can have dangerous consequences.
The Calamity Club will make you laugh, cry, and cheer—an epic testament to underestimated women who know that calamity can be the spark of new beginnings. This is Kathryn Stockett at her most confident, heartfelt, and hilarious—the triumphant return of one of the most beloved storytellers of our time.
John of John by Douglas Stuart
From the Booker Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo comes a vivid, moving novel following a young man returning to his Hebridean island home, a portrait of a father’s expectations and a son’s desires
Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides to find that little has changed except for him. He returns to the windswept croft and the two pillars of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and lay preacher in the local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian whose steady warmth helped Cal weather the sudden departure of his mother.
Cal privately wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, while John is dismayed by his son’s long hair, strange clothes, and seeming unwillingness to be Saved. But Cal isn’t the only one in the croft house who is keeping secrets. As lambing season turns to shearing season, the threads holding together the community together become increasingly frayed, and nothing will remain as it was before.
John of John is a singular novel about duty, passion, and the transformative power of the truth. It is a magnificent literary work that cements Douglas Stuart’s reputation as one of our greatest novelists working today.
Adult Nonfiction
Most of the following nonfiction titles were purchased with donations provided by the community. Thank you!
The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise by Pico Iyer
From “one of the most soulful and perceptive writers of our time” (Brain Pickings): a journey through competing ideas of paradise to see how we can live more peacefully in an ever more divided and distracted world.
Paradise: that elusive place where the anxieties, struggles, and burdens of life fall away. Most of us dream of it, but each of us has very different ideas about where it is to be found. For some it can be enjoyed only after death; for others, it’s in our midst—or just across the ocean—if only we can find eyes to see it.
Traveling from Iran to North Korea, from the Dalai Lama’s Himalayas to the ghostly temples of Japan, Pico Iyer brings together a lifetime of explorations to upend our ideas of utopia and ask how we might find peace in the midst of difficulty and suffering. Does religion lead us back to Eden or only into constant contention? Why do so many seeming paradises turn into warzones? And does paradise exist only in the afterworld – or can it be found in the here and now?
For almost fifty years Iyer has been roaming the world, mixing a global soul’s delight in observing cultures with a pilgrim’s readiness to be transformed. In this culminating work, he brings together the outer world and the inner to offer us a surprising, original, often beautiful exploration of how we might come upon paradise in the midst of our very real lives.
Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age by Ibram X. Kendi
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The acclaimed author of How to Be an Antiracist and the National Book Award winner Stamped from the Beginning charts how “great replacement theory” has become a dominant political idea of our time and ushered in an antidemocratic age.
Recall the words chanted in Charlottesville, Virginia: “You will not replace us!” Recall the string of mass shooters across the globe—in Oslo, Christchurch, Buffalo, El Paso, and Pittsburgh—who claimed their crimes were a defense against “White genocide.” Recall business and media figures cultivating anxiety and furor over demographic change. These incidents only scratch the surface: Popular and ruling politicians in every region of the world have expressed some version of great replacement theory, eroding democratic norms in the name of preventing demographic change.
The term was coined in 2011 by a French novelist who argued that Black and Brown immigrants were “invading” Europe, brought by shadowy elites to “replace” the White population. From there, politicians and theorists in the United States and elsewhere repackaged it as a story of “globalists” welcoming “migrant criminals” and promoting diversity to take away the jobs, cultures, electoral power, and very lives of White people. Over time, great replacement theory has expanded those under threat to include citizens, men, Jews, Christians, heterosexuals, and ethnic majorities in countries as distinct as Russia, El Salvador, Brazil, Italy, and India, all targeted with the message that they are facing an existential attack that only a strongman can prevent.
In Chain of Ideas, internationally bestselling author Ibram X. Kendi offers an unsettling but indispensable global history of how great replacement theory brought humanity into this authoritarian age—and how we can free ourselves from it.
You Don’t Have to Quit: 20 Science-Backed Strategies to Help Your Loved One Drink Less by Maureen Palmer with Michael Pond
Help your loved one drink less, reduce your stress, save your relationship
In a world that glorifies alcohol―from signature cocktails to craft beer―helping a loved one with a drinking problem feels like a losing battle. You’ve begged, bargained, and demanded they stop, only to see consumption ramp up and your relationship break down. This approach enforces a vicious cycle of confrontation, shame, and more drinking. Author and filmmaker Maureen Palmer has been there, and she’s found a better way.
In You Don’t Have to Quit, Palmer shifts the conventional abstinence-only mindset to one that encourages positive change and harm reduction. She interviews world experts who’ve created successful tools, techniques, and resources to help reduce or stop drinking entirely. Her twenty practical, science-backed strategies operationalize compassion and empathy―and healthy boundaries―to help your loved one drink less.
With refreshing candor, Palmer shares her hard-won experience to debunk powerful myths that breed shame and secrecy and lead to relationship-killing conflict. This is the road map out of combat into collaboration and reduced consumption: harm reduction for the relationship too. Whether drinking less is a shared goal, or you want to influence your loved one in that direction, this book shows you how.
The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary by Terry Tempest Williams
“I go to Terry Tempest Williams for the reasons I go to Whitman and Thoreau: to recover a capacious spirit and to rejoin the urgent living world. She gives me something bigger than hope.”―Richard Powers, author of The Overstory
From the visionary New York Times bestselling author, a revelatory work of narrative nonfiction exploring beauty in the desert, climate change, and, transformative moments of power in a world beset by uncertainty
Whether we believe it or not, rapid change is upon us. I am searching for grace.
In this time of political fragility, climate chaos, and seeking beauty wherever we can find its glimmer, Terry Tempest Williams introduces us to the Glorians. They are not distant deities, but the ordinary, often overlooked presences—animal, plant, memory, moment—that reveal our shared vulnerability and interconnectedness with the natural world. The Glorians can be as small as an ant ferrying a coyote willow blossom to its queen or as commonplace as the night sky. But what they can collectively show us—about the radical act of attending to beauty and carrying forward against all odds—is immense.
Journeying through encounters with the Glorians in the red rock desert of Utah during the pandemic to Harvard University where she teaches in the Divinity School, Williams weaves a story of astonishing personal and societal insight. As she grapples with the unsettled state of the world, she turns not to despair but to deep reflection. She sees how the Glorians are calling us to attention, not as an army, but as fellow inhabitants of our sacred, threatened home. They remind us of the power of contact between species and the profound courage—and awareness—it will take to dream a more cohesive future into being.
Wise and lyrical, The Glorians is a testament to the power of witness, a field guide to finding grace in the unexpected, and a moving invitation to engage with one another and our surroundings with renewed intention. In a modern world filled with increasing noise and anxiety, Terry Tempest Williams offers honest sustenance for the mind and spirit and distinguishes herself again as a trusted voice to whom we can turn to more fully understand our times.
April 2026
Board Books
Spring! by Leslie Patricelli
Puddle, puddle, puddle, MUD! Our favorite bald baby celebrates a new season with an adorable friend.
Squish! Squoosh! Squash! It’s raining, but that’s OK, because rain means that spring is here! Baby and a best buddy love to be outside, enjoying the tulips and daffodils, the leaves on the trees, the butterflies and bumblebees. Look, there’s a bunny hopping! And a froggy plopping! Best of all is playing together in the slippery mud . . . oops! Good thing the rain is coming down to clean everyone off! Little fans and big ones alike will skip along with Baby in this salute to the season of everything new.
Picture Books
Jayden Noticed by Carolyn Crimi, illustrated by Shamar Knight-Justice
With the help of a rock he’s collected, a child moving to a new house learns to embrace change and make a like-minded friend in this story celebrating our most thoughtful little observers.
Jayden notices everything. He notices the way the moon looks different every night as it peeks through the oak tree. He notices spiderweb wheels and egg freckles, mouse paws and rose petals. But most of all, Jayden notices rocks. Jayden collects a rock to go with everything: a homework rock, a Saturday rock, even enough wishing rocks to fill up a jar. But now that he and his family have moved to a different house, where the trees are too short, the color is off, and the mailbox is in the wrong place, will he find a rock to grant him courage—and help him make a new friend, maybe even a noticer like him? In a tender story for curious and observant little readers, Carolyn Crimi’s text joins with Shamar Knight-Justice’s expressive illustrations in a tale that offers comfort in the face of life’s many changes.
Into the Wilderness by Haven Iverson, illustrated by August Zhang
Into the Wilderness is a celebration of the outdoors and the lessons and strengths we gain from spending valuable time in nature ― inspired by the Rocky Mountains. Perfect for fans of Hike and Wonder Walkers, and fans of national parks!
Every summer, a child and their parents leave behind the roads and houses. And with backpacks full of food and sleeping bags, they go into the wilderness.
As they climb tall mountains and explore mossy forests, they carry their supplies. And really good trail snacks.
As this child ages, they can carry more. Like their own backpack and, eventually, the map.
They learn independence and bravery. And they learn that, when everything gets to be a little too much, they can put down what they carry. They can smell the pine in the air, look up at the cliffs and trees holding them in a great big circle, and they can let the beauty of the world carry them.
Bud Finds Her Gift by Robin Wall Kimmerer, illustrated by Naoko Stoop
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass comes a beautiful and lushly illustrated tale celebrating gratitude, reciprocity, and finding our place in the natural world, ideal for sharing with the youngest readers.
When young Bud sees people bustling around, intent on their chores and their screens, she is certain they must be doing important things—and she wants to be included. But wise Nokomis, her grandmother, shows her that there is a different way to find belonging, one that relies on stillness and observing the natural world. As Bud discovers the freely given gifts of the Earth, she wonders if she has something important to give back: What is her gift?
Infused with warmth, humor, and insight, and beautifully illustrated by Naoko Stoop, the first picture book by renowned author and Indigenous ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer inspires readers to treasure nature’s generosity and the gifts each one of us can share with the Earth.
Easy Readers
Snow by Roy McKie and P.D. Eastman
This classic Beginner Book edited by Dr. Seuss is a delightful ode to winter.
Brrrrr—it snowed! From snowball fights and skiing to fort building and snowman-making, P. D. Eastman and Roy McKie’s Snow will have young readers eager for the kind of fun only a wintry-white day can bring. Perfect for enjoying with a cup of hot cocoa, it makes an ideal gift for the holidays, and happy occasions of all kinds! Originally created by Dr. Seuss, Beginner Books encourage children to read all by themselves, with simple words and illustrations that give clues to their meaning.
Early Chapter Books
Kaiju Gaga: A Choose Your Own Adventure Jr. Book by E.C. Myers, illustrated by Norm Grock
You’re the unexpected caretaker of a small but mighty monster in this interactive book from the bestselling Choose Your Own Adventure series, now for readers 5-8! Filled with colorful illustrations, these books for little kids make reading together extra fun. But be careful!!! The choices YOU make could land you in a real-life monster movie!
You’re on a school trip at the Museum of Media, just in time to catch the last day of their exhibit on classic monster movies. When you sneak away to check it out, you stumble upon props from one of your favorites: “Kaiju Gaga.” There’s even a monster egg from the film! But when you reach out and touch the egg … it cracks.
Is that an eye looking out at you? Should you run back to join your class and pretend like nothing happened? Or do you want to meet whatever’s emerging face-to-face, and accept the Kaiju consequences?
Fairy House: A Choose Your Own Adventure Jr. Book by James Preller, illustrated by Norm Grock
Choose from 9 possible endings in this interactive book from the bestselling Choose Your Own Adventure series, now for 5- to 8-year-old readers! Filled with colorful illustrations, these books for little kids make reading together extra fun. But be careful!!! The choices YOU make might end up with you getting turned into a statue.
Bored and ignored by your busy parents, YOU decide to go outside and build a fairy house. Just when you’re sure nothing is going to happen, you meet Bert the Below Average: a real live fairy. He’s not exactly what you had in mind. But he’ll do. Will you trust Bert to grant your wishes? Or will he turn you into an inchworm? Let the Fairy House adventures begin!
Mermaid Island: A Choose Your Own Adventure Jr. Book by Sarah Bounty Ridyard, illustrated by Fian Arroyo
Choose from 9 possible endings in this interactive book from the bestselling Choose Your Own Adventure series, now for 5- to 8-year-old readers! Filled with colorful illustrations, these books for little kids make reading together extra fun. But be careful!!! The choices YOU make might end up with you lost in the Sea Kelp Forest.
YOU are a magical mermaid who has lived her entire life in an underwater palace. You celebrate and protect all species under the sea. Princess Island and Prince Island, the very best royal summer camps, are right nearby. Ever since you were a little mermaid you have dreamed of leaving your underwater home and joining the land of princesses. Will you leave your comfortable palace under the sea and teach the land princesses and princes the importance of protecting the planet and our oceans?
Orris and Timble: Star Stories by Kate DiCamillo, illustrated by Carmen Mok
In a soaring conclusion to a moving trilogy, national treasure Kate DiCamillo shows how friendship, trust, and stories—lived and shared—transform us.
Orris and Timble are friends. Orris is a rat, Timble is an owl, and they meet each night in an old barn to share stories. One night, Timble asks a fateful question: “Why don’t you ever leave the barn, Orris?” Strong and brave, the owl offers to carry the rat on his back. Orris will be able to see it all for himself—the rivers and fish, roads and farms, mountains and coyotes. But why would Orris leave the barn when all he needs is there: his books, the moon and stars above, and Timble’s nightly tales of high-flying adventure? What would you do if you had the chance to fly? In the final installment of an exquisitely illustrated and deeply felt early-reader trilogy, two-time Newbery Medalist Kate DiCamillo reveals how trust and friendship can lift us into our best lives.
Junior Fiction
A Potion, a Powder, a Little Bit of Magic: Or, Like Lightning in an Umbrella Storm by Philip Stead
A plucky young goatkeeper sets out on a misadventurous rescue mission in this uproarious debut novel with premium hardcover features, perfect for fans of Kate DiCamillo and Lemony Snicket.
In a kingdom ruled by a capricious king, the castle rests on the backs of twenty-four goats, and the welfare of those goats rests on the back of a girl called Bernadette. So when one goat escapes, it’s up to her—with the help of a very forgetful wizard and a Boat That Does Not Grant Wishes—to bring it back safely.
Her task may be straightforward, but this book is anything but. Like a swirling herd of restless goats, the chapters are all out of order. The ending may prove to have been the beginning all along. All the while, the author of Bernadette’s saga—a character himself—hurries to write her a resolution, with very mixed results. And if you’re feeling lost, don’t worry; the story has twenty-four morals, of varying advisability, to edify you along the way.
Award-winning picture book author and illustrator Philip Stead makes a confident debut as a novelist in this laugh-out-loud, one-of-a-kind illustrated tale, chock-full of running gags, broken fourth walls, and underdog triumph.
The Queen’s Granddaughter by Diane Zahler
Embark on a sweeping journey of self-discovery in this adventurous historical middle grade novel perfect for fans of Karen Cushman and Gary Paulsen.
Twelve-year-old Blanca of Castile is the granddaughter of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, once the wife of both the king of France and the king of England. When Eleanor comes to select the girl who will marry the prince of France, all expect her to pick Blanca’s much older, and much prettier, sister. But Queen Eleanor has always loved surprises.
To meet her destiny, Blanca, along with her best friend Suna, must set out over the Pyrenees Mountains for France. But the journey there is not easy. The group, which includes knights, attendants, and Queen Eleanor herself, faces blizzards and hunger, treacherous roads and even a kidnapping.
As Blanca overcomes the many perils of the journey, she will need to learn how to protect herself and those around her — and discover what it takes to follow in the footsteps of a queen.
Youth Graphic Novels
Minecraft: Stories from the Overworld
From blocks to panels! Minecraft returns to comics in this stand-alone anthology collection of officially licensed, original comic stories!
With tales of witch and pillager rivals finding common ground, a heartless griefer who bit off more than they could chew, and valiant heroes new (or not!) to the Overworld, this anthology tells tales that span the world of Minecraft. Featuring stories from star writers Hope Larson (Batgirl), Kevin Panetta (Zodiac Starforce, Bloom), Rafer Roberts (Modern Fantasy, Grumble), and Ian Flynn (Sonic, Mega Man) and exciting artists Meredith Gran (Octopus Pie) and more, this collection brings together stories from all realms, leaving no block unturned!
Youth Nonfiction
The New Encyclopedia of the Horse by Elwyn Hartley Edwards
In this superb expanded and updated volume, equestrian expert Elwyn Hartley Edwards traces the evolution of the horse, covering every major breed of horse and pony as well as the contribution the horse has made to civilization — in the wild, at work, at war, and in sport and recreation.
Chronicling the history of the horse, The New Encyclopedia of the Horse encompasses the early domestication of the horse. This expanded edition features new information on Western riding as well as classical riding styles, and current international sporting events. There are also completely new chapters on horse management, training, and equipment.
Visual Breed Guide: There are more than 150 of the world’s major breeds of horse and pony photographed in specially commissioned full-figure portraits as well as hundreds of action shots. The origin, history, and uses of each breed are explained, and each breed is brought to life by historical anecdotes and fascinating, little-known facts. Outstanding specimens of familiar as well as obscure breeds are featured, including Dutch Warmbloods and Camargues, Icelandic and Timor Ponies, Morgans and Shetlands, Andalucian and Lusitano, and the Cutting Horse.
Brand New Chapters: The new sections on horse management, training, and equipment explain the basics of the proper care of the horse. Information is also included on farriers, feeding, grooming, horse behavior, training techniques, and which equipment to use, including saddles, bridles, and bits. Truly encyclopedic in scope, this is the essential reference for every horse lover.
(Librarian’s note: This is for all the horse lovers – adults and children, alike – but it will be housed with the juvenile nonfiction titles for discoverability.)
History Smashers: Ancient Egypt by Kate Messner
Myths! Lies! Secret mummy curses? Grab your head lamp, the award-winning History Smashers are headed to Ancient Egypt to dig up the truth about this incredible early civilization—and the many myths that will be buried once and for all.
In 1922, explorers opened King Tut’s tomb and a nasty hex was placed on everyone present. RIGHT? Not so much. Okay, but aliens did soar in on a space craft and build the Pyramids, right? WRONG!
The discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb taught historians a lot about ancient Egyptian culture. But no one incurred the wrath of a mummy. And this early civilization had the money, power, and smarts to build the Pyramids–along with a host of other impressive structures!
If You Lived During the American Revolution by Chris Newell, illustrated by Steffi Walthall
What do you know about the American Revolution?
What if you lived in a different time and place? What would you wear? What would you eat? How would your daily life be different?
Scholastic’s If You Lived… series answers all of kids’ most important questions about events in American history. With a question and answer format, kid-friendly artwork, and engaging information, this series is the perfect partner for the classroom and for history-loving readers.
What if you lived during the American Revolution? What would you have eaten? What would daily life look like? Which side would you have fought on?
Chris Newell answers all these questions and more in this comprehensive dive into the American Revolution and the history leading up to it. Carefully crafted to explore all sides of this historical event, this book is a great choice for Revolutionary War units.
Goldfinches by Mary Oliver, art by Melissa Sweet
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Caldecott Honoree Melissa Sweet gorgeously illustrates the work of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Mary Oliver for the first time in picture book form.
Have you heard them singing in the wind, above the final fields?
Have you ever been so happy in your life?
Mary Oliver, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, is one of America’s most beloved poets. Introducing her unforgettable words to children for the very first time, her poem “Goldfinches” joyfully observes the power of the natural world as only Mary Oliver can.
Illuminated by the exquisite mixed-media artwork of Caldecott Honoree Melissa Sweet, Goldfinches fills the reader with wonder for the beauty around them and gratitude for the ability to bear witness to it.
Eyewitness Books: Mythology by Neil Philip
From the mighty Zeus of Ancient Greece to the trickster Coyote of Native America, a host legendary icons spring to life in this comprehensive overview of world mythology. With a cultural and topical approach, Mythology examines the various interpretations of phenomena such as creation, afterlife, deities, and heroes from the Greek, Norse, Egyptian, Native American, Asian, Celtic, African, Maya, Inca, and Hindu traditions. Stunning color photographs and a rich array of artifacts and renderings highlight the influence of mythology on the arts and world religions.
Young Adult Fiction
Beth Is Dead by Katie Bernet
Beth March’s sisters will stop at nothing to track down her killer—until they begin to suspect each other—in this “brilliantly snappy…electrifying” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) debut thriller that’s also a bold, contemporary reimagining of the beloved classic Little Women.
When Beth March is found dead in the woods on New Year’s Day, her sisters vow to uncover her murderer.
Suspects abound. There’s the neighbor who has feelings for not one but two of the girls. Meg’s manipulative best friend. Amy’s flirtatious mentor. And Beth’s lionhearted first love. But it doesn’t take the surviving sisters much digging to uncover motives each one of the March girls had for doing the unthinkable.
Jo, an aspiring author with a huge following on social media, would do anything to hook readers. Would she kill her sister for the story? Amy dreams of studying art in Europe, but she’ll need money from her aunt—money that’s always been earmarked for Beth. And Meg wouldn’t dream of hurting her sister…but her boyfriend might have, and she’ll protect him at all costs.
Despite the growing suspicion within the family, it’s hard to know for sure if the crime was committed by someone close to home. After all, the March sisters were dragged into the spotlight months ago when their father published a controversial bestseller about his own daughters. Beth could have been killed by anyone.
Beth’s perspective told in flashback unfolds next to Meg, Jo, and Amy’s increasingly fraught investigation as the tragedy threatens to rip the Marches apart.
The Escape Game by Marissa Meyer & Tamara Moss
An unforgettable young adult murder mystery set in an escape-room themed game show filled with sabotage, betrayal, and puzzles to die for.
It’s all fun and games until someone ends up dead.
Six months ago, season four of The Escape Game ended in horror when contestant Alicia Angelos was found murdered on set.
Now season five is underway, and new contestants are ready to put their skills to the test solving the show’s trickiest escape rooms. There’s Adi, the cryptographer; Carter, the math whiz; Beck, the wannabe game master; and . . . Sierra Angelos, the girl who got away with her sister’s murder. Or so everyone believes.
But Sierra’s not just here to win. She’s here for justice.
When the contestants begin uncovering clues that hint at the identity of Alicia’s true killer, it becomes clear that the stakes aren’t high just in this competition—they’re deadly. If these teens want to win—and survive—the game, they must solve the biggest mystery of all: who killed Alicia Angelos?
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Marissa Meyer and rising star Tamara Moss comes a twisty thrill-ride that will take readers on an exhilarating hunt to uncover secrets, conspiracy, and cold-blooded murder.
Adult Fiction
Life: A Love Story by Elizabeth Berg
A warm, intimate novel that reminds us of the richness that can be found all throughout our lives—by the New York Times bestselling author of The Story of Arthur Truluv and Open House
As ninety-two-year-old Florence “Flo” Greene nears the end of her life, she writes a letter to Ruthie, the woman who grew up next door to her, describing the items Flo is leaving Ruthie in her will. But as it goes on, telling surprising stories about those “little” things Flo will leave behind (What could possibly be the worth of a rubber band kept in a matchbox tied up in red ribbon?), an unforgettable portrait of the life she has lived emerges.
The letter starts off as an autobiography in things, but it turns out to do much more than that: ultimately, it will transform Flo and those around her. In the time she has left, Flo decides to take herself up on tiny dares. She encourages Ruthie to reconsider her impending divorce by sharing a startling, long-buried secret about her own perfect-seeming marriage. Flo has never had a pedicure before now, and as long as she’s going to a beauty parlor, she arranges to have a blue streak put in her hair, too. And as these adventures lead her to make new friends, Flo helps them, too, find the fulfillment that living a full life has led her to understand.
Full of Elizabeth Berg’s characteristic mix of warmth, humor, and poignancy, Life: A Love Story is a reminder that whatever your circumstances, as long as you’re alive, you can keep on investing in life. The joy will inevitably follow.
The Ending Writes Itself by Evelyn Clarke
Six authors.
One private island.
Seventy-two hours to write the ending that will change their lives.
Arthur Fletch, one of the world’s bestselling novelists, is a reclusive genius known for his iconic protagonists and fiendish twists. When six struggling authors are invited to spend a weekend on his private Scottish island, they arrive to discover a shocking secret: Arthur Fletch is dead . . . and his last book is unfinished.
Desperate to publish the novel, Fletch’s agent and editor have summoned these writers in the hope that one of them will imagine a worthy ending for this final book. To sweeten the deal, they are offering an irresistible prize: in addition to ghost-writing the last chapter––for a mind-boggling sum––they will also help the lucky writer successfully re-launch their own career, guaranteeing future bestsellers. The catch: the writers have just seventy-two hours to finish Fletch’s magnum opus.
It’s the perfect plot. All it needs is a killer ending.
The Paris Match by Kate Clayborn
A woman tests the limits of her so-called amicable divorce when she flies to Paris for the destination wedding of her former sister-in-law, only to butt heads with the deliciously gruff best man, in a poignant and romantic novel from Kate Clayborn.
Physician Layla Bailey has spent over a year telling herself she’s moved on from a painful but amicable divorce from her college sweetheart. Staying friends with her ex seemed like the mature thing to do, but when Layla is invited to her former sister-in-law’s destination wedding in Paris—where Layla once spent her own romantic honeymoon—she knows her commitment to maturity might be her worst enemy…especially since her ex isn’t attending alone.
The only thing that could make the week more difficult is getting through it without the distraction of the wedding…. But when what Layla thought was a harmless conversation about the choices of her younger self leads to the bride getting cold feet, Layla finds herself facing down the groom’s mysterious, taciturn best man, Griffin, who will do anything to make sure this wedding happens.
Since she broke it, Griff demands she help him fix it. Going along with his plan to alleviate the engaged couple’s doubts seems like Layla’s best chance at maintaining a good relationship with a family she once called her own. But as she learns more about the past heartbreak that’s driving Griff to help his friend, she gets closer and closer to confronting the true depth of her own pain…while finding herself more and more willing to risk it all again for Griff.
Judge Stone by Viola Davis and James Patterson
Academy Award winning actress Viola Davis and the world’s #1 bestselling author James Patterson’s Judge Stone “delivers first-class courtroom drama, small-town excitement, and strong characters all wrapped in a moral dilemma. Tense, readable, and relevant.” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)
All rise… for Judge Stone.
The most respected citizen in Union Springs, Alabama (population 3,314), is Judge Mary Stone. She holds two responsibilities sacred: running her family farm and presiding over her courtroom. It’s there she draws the most controversial case in the history of the South.
Criminally, it’s open-and-shut.
Ethically, there is no middle ground. Essentially, it’s a choice between life and death.
No judge can satisfy everyone. It would be dangerous to try. But Judge Stone is willing to fight to bring justice to the people and place she loves.
Python’s Kiss: Stories by Louise Erdrich
From Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich, a captivating collection of short stories
It was as though I was chosen—marked out by the python’s kiss for wisdom or maybe sorrow. Or perhaps, I think now, a sense of the ridiculous in extremes of experience. Also, I hoped for a long life.
Written over the past two decades, Louise Erdrich’s magnificent story collection features a range of characters—a tribal newsletter editor whose son tells her a story that nothing in her experience can encompass, immigrant farmers whose tenuous hold on the earth, and sanity, is challenged, and ordinary people, bird lovers, artists, grade-school teachers, and romantics. A girl decides to spend her life with a stone. A man is confronted with a folk-singing thief. A woman enters a corporately owned afterlife to seek revenge on her father.
Accompanied by specially commissioned artwork by Aza Erdrich Abe—an intimate and revelatory creative collaboration between mother and daughter—these stories offer an opportunity to celebrate the wisdom and brilliant, wide-ranging imagination of one of America’s most important writers.
The Golden Boy by Patricia Finn
An unexpected letter sends a man and his wife into their pasts—and offers them both a shot at redemption.
After an involuntary retirement from his high-flying Hollywood career, Stafford Hopkins has retreated to a luxury estate on Maui, along with his wife Agnes, both grimly resigned to life in a paradise where neither feels fully at home.
Stafford is ready to retreat into himself, too, when a letter arrives with shocking news. Stafford has been named guardian of four children he didn’t know existed: the grandchildren of his late childhood friend, Bobby Shepherd, whose ghost Stafford can no longer ignore.
Returning to both the hardscrabble farming town and the dark secret he’d tried to forget for decades, Stafford is forced to confront his past in order to rebuild his future—and to redirect the fates of his family and the four young people suddenly in his care.
Slyly funny and deeply moving, The Golden Boy is a captivating debut about love, mercy, and second chances.
The Keeper by Tana French
From the iconic crime writer who “inspires cultic devotion in readers” (The New Yorker) and has been called “incandescent” by Stephen King, comes the third and final book in the million-copy-bestselling Cal Hooper trilogy.
On a cold night in the remote Irish village of Ardnakelty, a girl goes missing. Sweet, loving Rachel Holohan was about to be engaged to the son of the local big shot. Instead, she’s dead in the river.
In a close-knit small town, a death like this isn’t simple. It comes wrapped in generations-old grudges and power struggles, and it splits the townland in two. Retired Chicago detective Cal Hooper has friends here now, and he owes them loyalty, but his fiancée Lena wants nothing to do with Ardnakelty’s tangles. As the feud becomes more vicious, their settled peace starts to crack apart. And when they uncover a scheme that casts a new light on Rachel’s death and threatens the whole village, they find themselves in the firing line.
“One of the greatest crime novelists writing today” (Vox) crafts a masterwork of atmospheric suspense that brings the story of one of her most beloved characters to a spellbinding conclusion.
So Old, So Young by Grant Ginder
“Grant Ginder has written The Big Chill of our times…and possibly done an even better job. So Old, So Young is a triumph. I will never forget these characters.” —Elin Hilderbrand
Six Friends.
Five Parties.
Twenty Years…
How did we get So Old, So Young?
From Grant Ginder, the bestselling author of The People We Hate at the Wedding, comes a generation-defining novel that is part love story, part tragic comedy. Five parties over the course of twenty years bring six college friends together, exploring the ways we run from and cling to our friends in love, life, and death.
For Marco and Mia, Sasha and Theo, Richie and Adam, the one constant in life after college together has been change. New jobs. New cities. New spouses. New children. Through it all, one thing they thought would always stay the same is their friendship.
But time has a way of breaking even the strongest bonds, and testing what we thought we knew. From East Village apartment parties and disastrous destination weddings, to fortieth birthdays and suburban backyard barbecues, Grant Ginder’s resonant, funny, and deeply moving novel is a story about the growing pains of the Millennial generation, and a celebration of how love can shift, stumble, and grow into something bigger than we ever could have imagined.
Brave New World & Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley
One of the twentieth century’s most profound and terrifying evocations of the future, BRAVE NEW WORLD is a brilliant, witty, and satiric novel of natural man in an unnatural world, of a civilization in which contemporary concepts of freedom and morality have become obsolete. Set in the year 632 After Ford, Huxley’s world is one where human beings are scientifically mass-produced, classified (as Alphas, Betas, Gammas), and “decanted” in laboratory factories. Father and Mother are forbidden words; pleasure comes in euphoria-producing tablets; efficiency is the rule. With no place for emotions, God, or art, it is a horrifying, but often humorous, glimpse into a future perhaps not far from fact.
In BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED, Huxley’s equally famous essay, the author links the realities of the modern world to his fictional vision–demonstrating with unflinching logic the closeness of reality to his automated nightmare. Scrutinizing numerous methods for curtailing individual freedoms and the sometimes irresistible pressures to adopt them, the book is a fervent plea for humankind to educate itself for liberty before it is too late.
Both written with Huxley’s customary artistic skill and intellectual vigor, BRAVE NEW WORLD and BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED provide incisive and challenging views of the modern world that are still relevant today.
The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits
“Feels less like reading a novel and more like sitting in a car beside a dear friend as he navigates the road up ahead. A profoundly moving experience.” —Ann Patchett
A triumphantly life-affirming road trip novel about marriage, middle-age, and a man at a crossroads in his life.
When Tom Layward’s wife had an affair twelve years ago, he resolved to leave her as soon as his youngest child left the nest. Now, while driving his college-bound daughter to Pittsburgh, he remembers his promise to himself. He is also on the run from his own health issues and a forced leave from work.
So, rather than returning to his wife in Westchester, Tom keeps driving west, with the vague plan of visiting people from his past—an old college friend, his ex-girlfriend, his brother, his son—en route, maybe, to California. He’s moving towards a future he hasn’t even envisioned yet while he considers his past and the choices he’s made that have brought him to this particular present. Pitch-perfect, tender, and keenly observed, The Rest of Our Lives is a story about what to do when the rest of your life is only just the beginning of your story.
Westward Women by Alice Martin
For fans of Emma Cline and Emily St. John Mandel, Westward Women is a hypnotic and hopeful debut―part fever dream, part dystopian road trip that claws its way towards a jaw-dropping finale.
It starts with an itch.
In homes across the country, women ages eighteen to thirty-five begin to slow down.
Tired. Blank. Restless.
Drawn to the Pacific Ocean like it’s calling them home. They abandon their lives―jobs, families, their very selves. And once they reach the West, they vanish forever.
At the center of the story are three young women caught in the pull of something unstoppable.
Aimee follows the trail of her missing best friend to a man called the Piper―known for leading infected women West.
Teenie, afflicted and unraveling, clings to a single memory as she looks out the window of the Piper’s van.
And Eve, a former journalist, is chasing the story that might just consume her.
Each on the edge of transformation. Drawn toward the unknown. In search of a way forward.
Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A rising storm on the horizon.
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants. Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore.
Isolation has taken its toll on the Salts, but as they nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, it begins to feel like she might just be what they need. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting herself, starts imagining a future where she could belong to someone again.
But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, they all must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late―and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.
A novel of breathtaking twists, dizzying beauty, and ferocious love, Wild Dark Shore is about the impossible choices we make to protect the people we love, even as the world around us disappears.
Animal Farm & 1984 by George Orwell
ANIMAL FARM George Orwell’s classic satire of the Russian Revolution is an intimate part of our contemporary culture. It is the account of the bold struggle, initiated by the animals, that transforms Mr. Jones’s Manor Farm into Animal Farm–a wholly democratic society built on the credo that All Animals Are Created Equal. Out of their cleverness, the pigs Napoleon, Squealer, and Snowball emerge as leaders of the new community in a subtle evolution that proves disastrous. The climax is the brutal betrayal of the faithful horse Boxer, when totalitarian rule is reestablished with the bloodstained postscript to the founding But some Animals Are More Equal Than Others….
1984 In 1984, London is a grim city where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston is a man in grave danger for the simple reason that his memory still functions. Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a secret revolutionary organization called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party. Together with his beloved Julia, he hazards his life in a deadly match against the powers that be.
The Final Problem by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
In this locked-room mystery set in 1960, a washed-up actor puts his on-camera detective skills to the test when a suspicious death shatters the quiet peace for a group of strangers staying at an isolated Greek island resort. Perfect for fans of Knives Out, Benjamin Stevenson, and Anthony Horowitz.
June, 1960. Rough weather at sea leaves a group of strangers stranded on the idyllic Greek island of Utakos, all guests of the only local hotel. Nothing could prepare them for what happens next: Edith Mander, a quiet British tourist, is found dead inside a beach cabana. What appears at first glance to be a clear suicide reveals possible signs of foul play to Ormond Basil, an out-of-work but still well-known actor who in his glory days portrayed the most celebrated detective of all time. Accustomed to seeing him display Sherlock Holmes’ amazing powers of deduction on the big screen, the other guests believe that the actor is the best equipped to uncover the truth.
But when a second body is discovered, there is not a doubt in Basil’s mind: a murderer walks among them. What’s more, the killer is staging each crime as a performance, leaving complex clues that bear an eerie resemblance to those found in the pages of Conan Doyle stories. This is a criminal who knows every trick in the book and is playing a deadly literary game. As the storm rages, Basil must become the genius detective he has only pretended to be.
This clever, whip-smart, locked-room mystery from internationally bestselling author Arturo Pérez-Reverte is a love letter to golden-age detective novels. The Final Problem delights in exploring the tension between an investigator and his suspects, as well as a writer and his reader, delivering a revelatory twist that will shock even the sharpest of mystery fans.
Once and Again by Rebecca Serle
New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Serle, the author behind “heartbreaking, redemptive, and authentic” (Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author) modern classic In Five Years, returns with an unforgettable tale of a family of women with an astonishing gift: the ability to redo one moment in their lives.
The women of the Novak family were each born with a gift: they can, just once, turn back time.
Lauren has known since she was fifteen that her mother Marcella saved Lauren’s father from a deadly car accident. Dave is alive and happy, and out on the Malibu waves. But ever since, Marcella, her power spent, has lived in fear of what she won’t be able to reverse. Her own mother, Sylvia, is her polar opposite: a free-spirited iconoclast with a glamorous past she only hints at. Lauren has spent her life between these two role models—and waiting for her own catastrophe to strike.
Then one summer, Lauren’s husband takes a job in New York and she moves back to Broad Beach Road, back into her childhood home on the shores of Malibu. Lauren looks forward to surfing with her dad again and perhaps repairing an unspoken fracture in her relationship with her mother. What she doesn’t expect is for the boy next to door to return home as well: Stone, Lauren’s first love, who broke her heart nearly a decade before.
As Lauren falls into familiar patterns, with her family and, more dangerously, Stone, she finds herself thinking about all the choices, large and small, that have brought her to this moment. And wondering, finally, if one of them should be undone.
Fatherland by Victoria Shorr
A tale of the American dream on the rocks. A legacy of broken promises, deceit, and perseverance against the backdrop of family commitment.
Martin and Lora Brier, with three young children, possess all the trappings of a perfect life . . . except Martin is having yet another affair. Without warning, he abandons the family for his mistress and a new house on the other side of town.
Set in a prosperous midwestern town in the 1950s, Fatherland is a story about the effect of convenient lies and discovered truths. While Martin’s abandonment throws up new difficulties for bewildered Lora, a housewife, who must now find a way to nurture and provide for herself and children, it unleashes a swirl of emotions in their daughter, Josie, who struggles to come to term with his absence. Fatherland follows Josie from this fateful event, across many decades and milestones and through the phases of her tenuous, emotionally fraught relationship with Martin―and the way she begins to move beyond their shared past.
Written in Victoria Shorr’s inimitable clean, spare prose, Fatherland is a powerful, layered novel of a family in the aftermath of deception.
American Fantasy by Emma Straub
From New York Times bestselling author of This Time Tomorrow, an irresistible story about what happens when your teenage fantasy comes true after you’re already an adult.
When the American Fantasy cruise ship sets sail for a four-day themed voyage, aboard are all five members of a famous, nineties-era boy band and three thousand screaming women who have worshipped them since childhood.
Feeling slightly out of place amid this crowd is Annie, here on a lark to appease her sister. Yet when the lights come up and the idols of her youth begin to sing, something is unlocked. Call it memory. Call it nostalgia. Call it the chemical reaction of hormones, hope, and sexual reawakening. Between the slushy alcoholic drinks, the familiar music, and the throngs of middle-aged women acting like lovesick teenagers, Annie finally reconnects to a long-submerged part of herself. By the time she meets one of the band members—not just a celebrity but someone in need of a friend—she has accessed a new sense of possibility.
In a smart and incisive book packed with laugh-out-loud reflections on fame, aging, and marriage, Emma Straub delivers a richly textured story that shows us real passion is never truly lost, that what we love makes us who we are, and that deep meaning can sometimes be found in a sea of screaming fans.
Lake Effect by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Nest and Good Company comes a wry and tender portrait of two families forever changed by one lovestruck decision that will reverberate for decades.
It’s 1977 and an air of restlessness has settled on the residents of Cambridge Road in Rochester, New York, a place long fueled by the booming fortunes of Kodak and Xerox and, for some, the mores of the Catholic church. When Nina Larkin is given a copy of The Joy of Sex by her newly divorced friend, she can no longer dismiss the nearly nonexistent intimacy of her marriage. Just as her oldest child, Clara, is falling in love for the first time, Nina finds herself longing for the forbidden: a midlife awakening. An intoxicating fling with a prominent neighbor brings Nina a freedom she never thought possible—but also risks the reputations of both families and unravels Clara’s world, just as she stands on the threshold of adulthood.
Years later, Clara, now a successful food stylist in New York City, has never been able to move past the long-ago scandal. Drawn back home by the pull of a family wedding and wrestling with her own demons, she makes a pivotal decision that turns her life upside down. Written with Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s signature humor and insight, Lake Effect is a wise and probing look at love and desire, mothers and daughters, loss and grief, and what we owe the people we love most.
Adult Nonfiction
Most of the following nonfiction titles were purchased with donations provided by the community. Thank you!
King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR NONFICTION • KIRKUS PRIZE WINNER • From the author of the landmark bestseller Lawrence in Arabia comes a stunningly revelatory narrative history of the Iranian Revolution, one of the most momentous events in modern times. This groundbreaking work exposes the jaw-dropping stupidity of the American government and traces the rise of religious nationalism, offering essential insights into today’s global unrest.
“A masterful and propulsive account that chronicles a devastatingly transformative series of events whose aftereffects reverberate to this day.” —The Kirkus Prize 2025 Jury
“An exceptional and important book. Scrupulous and enterprising reporting rarely combine with such superb storytelling.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A masterful and gripping account. Anderson gives us a page-turning history lesson that is more relevant than ever.” —Rajiv Chandrasekaran, author Imperial Life in the Emerald City, a finalist for the National Book Award
On New Year’s Eve, 1977, on a state visit to Iran, President Jimmy Carter toasted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, Shadow of God on Earth, praising Iran as “an island of stability “ due to “your leadership and the respect and admiration and love which your people give to you.” Iran had the world’s fifth largest army and was awash in billions of dollars in oil revenues. Construction cranes dotted the skyline of its booming capital, Tehran. The regime’s feared secret police force SAVAK had crushed communist opposition, and the Shah had bought off the conservative Muslim clergy inside the country. He seemed invulnerable, and invaluable to the United States as an ally in the Cold War. Fourteen months later the Shah fled Iran into exile, forced from the throne by a volcanic religious revolution led by a fiery cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini. The ensuing hostage crisis forever damaged America’s standing in the world. How could the United States, which had one of the largest CIA stations in the world and thousands of military personnel in Iran, have been so blind?
The spellbinding story Scott Anderson weaves is one of a dictator blind to the disdain of his subjects and a superpower blundering into disaster. Scott Anderson tells this astonishing tale with the narrative brio, mordant wit, and keen analysis that made his bestselling Lawrence in Arabia one of the key texts in understanding the modern Middle East. The Iranian Revolution, Anderson convincingly argues, was as world-shattering an event as the French and Russian revolutions. In the Middle East, in India, in Southeast Asia, in Europe, and now in the United States, the hatred of economically-marginalized, religiously-fervent masses for a wealthy secular elite has led to violence and upheaval – and Iran was the template. King of Kings is a bravura work of history, and a warning.
Traveling Different: Vacations Strategies for Parents of the Anxious, the Inflexible, and the Neurodiverse by Dawn M. Barclay
The award-winning travel bible for parents of children with autism spectrum disorder and/or mood and distraction disorders.
“An essential read, not only for parents of autistic or otherwise neurodivergent children but for all families.”―Library Journal, Starred Review
Traveling with children is always challenging, but for parents of children with autism spectrum disorder and/or mood and attention and distraction disorders it can be especially intimidating. In Traveling Different, Dawn M. Barclay presents travel strategies and anecdotes from Certified Autism Travel Professionals™, parents of special needs children, associations and advocates, and mental health professionals, broken down by mode of transportation and type of venue. The heart of the book outlines suggested itineraries for spectrum families as well as venues that cater to the unique special interests that are characteristic of individuals with autism.
Culminating with a guide of travel agents who specialize in special needs travel and lists of organizations that advocate for special needs families, Traveling Different is the essential resource to make the cultural, educational, and bonding benefits of vacations available to all.
Capitalism: A Global History by Sven Beckert
A New York Times Notable Book • A Financial Times Best Book of the Year
“A learned, formidable and vivid story… Readers around the world will study and ponder this monumental work of history, agreeing and arguing with it, all the while affirming its generational importance, for decades to come.” — Marcus Rediker, The New York Times
“Epic… Read this book and you will learn innumerable things you did not previously know culled from places you have never been… [Readers], including me, will be genuinely grateful for exposure to this breadth of scholarship and be glad to have a valuable tool of reference on their shelves.” –John Kay, Financial Times
A landmark event years in the making, a brilliant global narrative that unravels the defining story of the past thousand years of human history
No other phenomenon has shaped human history as decisively as capitalism. It structures how we live and work, how we think about ourselves and others, how we organize our politics. Sven Beckert, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning Empire of Cotton, places the story of capitalism within the largest conceivable geographical and historical framework, tracing its history during the past millennium and across the world. An epic achievement, his book takes us into merchant businesses in Aden and car factories in Turin, onto the terrifyingly violent sugar plantations in Barbados, and within the world of women workers in textile factories in today’s Cambodia.
Capitalism, argues Beckert, was born global. Emerging from trading communities across Asia, Africa, and Europe, capitalism’s radical recasting of economic life rooted itself only gradually. But then it burst onto the world scene, as a powerful alliance between European states and merchants propelled them, and their economic logic, across the oceans. This, Beckert shows, was modern capitalism’s big bang, and one of its epicenters was the slave labor camps of the Caribbean. This system, with its hierarchies that haunt us still, provided the liftoff for the radical transformations of the Industrial Revolution. Fueled by vast productivity increases along with coal and oil, capitalism pulled down old ways of life to crown itself the defining force of the modern world. This epic drama, shaped by state-backed institutions and imperial expansion, corresponded at no point to an idealized dream of free markets.
Drawing on archives on six continents, Capitalism locates important modes of agency, resistance, innovation, and ruthless coercion everywhere in the world, opening the aperture from heads of state to rural cultivators. Beckert shows that despite the dependence on expansion, there always have been, and are still, areas of human life that the capitalist revolution has yet to reach.
By chronicling capitalism’s global history, Beckert exposes the reality of the system that now seems simply “natural.” It is said that people can more easily imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. If there is one ultimate lesson in this extraordinary book, it’s how to leave that behind. Though cloaked in a false timelessness and universality, capitalism is, in reality, a recent human invention. Sven Beckert doesn’t merely tote up capitalism’s debits and credits. He shows us how to look through and beyond it to imagine a different and larger world.
The Greatest Horse Trainer on Earth: The Sylvia Zerbini Story by Rebecca M. Didier
Look behind the curtain and step into the ring with a master liberty trainer.
Sylvia Zerbini was born into the circus life, a ninth-generation performer who went solo as an aerialist at thirteen, what would be the beginning of a tremendous career captivating audiences from a trapeze, thirty feet above the ground. But it’s her remarkable connection with horses that propelled her to international fame. One of the first to mix aerial and equestrian showmanship, Zerbini has performed for audiences totaling nearly ten million worldwide as part of the biggest names in events and entertainment, including Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus (“The Greatest Show on Earth”) and as lead trainer with Cavalia, the highly acclaimed equestrian-themed spectacular created by one of the pioneers of Cirque du Soleil. In the decades she has shared her breathtaking liberty horse acts, Sylvia Zerbini has redefined the relationship between horse and human.
In this thoughtful and uniquely portrayed retrospective, richly illustrated with over a hundred historical photographs, a story of life in the circus provides an unconventional backdrop for Zerbini’s development as an extraordinary horse trainer. By intertwining the fascinating history of circus families and their legacy of wild animal training with a sensitive exploration of the mental fortitude cultivated when you dance with danger high in the air for a living, these pages permit an unprecedented look behind the curtain at what it takes to communicate and connect with another species. In Sylvia Zerbini, we glimpse what is truly possible in partnership with the horse―a chance for all to become “the greatest horse trainer on earth.”
The Dyslexic Advantage: Unlocking the Hidden Potential of the Dyslexic Brain (Revised and Updated) by Brock Eide, MD, MA and Fernette Eide, MD
What if we viewed dyslexia as a learning and processing style rather than as a learning disorder?
Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide use their impressive backgrounds in neurology and education to debunk the standard deficit-based approach to dyslexia. People typically define “dyslexia” as a reading and spelling disorder. But through published research studies, clinical observations, and interviews with dyslexic individuals, the Eides prove that these challenges are not dyslexia’s main features but are instead trade-offs resulting from an entirely different pattern of brain organization and information processing that has powerful advantages. For example, dyslexic adults routinely outperform their non-dyslexic peers in studies on three-dimensional spatial reasoning and divergent creativity—one of the reasons why so many dyslexics are successful engineers. Approximately 20 percent of the U.S. population has dyslexia, and The Dyslexic Advantage shows how each one is predisposed to powerful skills called MIND strengths (Material, Interconnected, Narrative, and Dynamic Reasoning), leading them to possess incredible pattern detection, divergent thinking, episodic memory, problem solving, and prediction abilities.
The revised and updated edition of The Dyslexic Advantage includes eighteen rich new profiles of remarkable individuals with dyslexia—such as several world-renowned scientists, a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, a world-record-setting memory specialist, three MacArthur “Genius” Award winners, the technical advisor for the Jurassic Park movies, and many more. Meanwhile, the enormous advances in dyslexia research over the last ten years provide valuable new insights for educators, employers, parents, dyslexic adults, and anyone interested in neurodiversity and human cognition. Blending personal stories with hard science, The Dyslexic Advantage (Revised and Updated) provides empowering advice on how to identify, understand, nurture, and enjoy the strengths of the dyslexic mind.
How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay: Tips and Tricks that Kept Me Alive, Happy, and Creative in Spite of Myself by Jenny Lawson
Warm, insightful, and witty, the first book of advice from New York Times bestselling author Jenny Lawson—aka the Bloggess
Jenny Lawson is full of contradictions. She’s a celebrated author but battles self-doubt, paralysis, and anxiety. She’s an award-winning humorist but struggles with treatment-resistant depression. The questions people most often ask her are, “How do you do it? How do you keep going even when it feels impossible? How do you keep creating?” This book is her answer.
In How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay, Jenny shares more than one hundred humorous, heartfelt, and genuine tools and tricks that she relies on to keep her going even when her brain isn’t working properly due to depression, anxiety, and ADHD. She also offers tips to stay passionate and focused on creative endeavors, especially when everything around you is saying to give up.
With chapters like “Wash Your Brain More Than You Wash Your Bra” (sleep, you beautiful human), “Working on Easy Mode Is Still Working” (asking for accommodations is okay!), “Celebrate Good Times, Come On!” (make it a habit to celebrate the good things), and many more, How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay is a balm and companion, reminding us all that we are not alone. It’s for anyone who struggles with self-doubt, guilt, motivation, and mental blocks and wants to rekindle their passion for creating. Funny, simple, empathetic, and full of hope, it will encourage you not to just survive but to find and curate joy in the face of difficult times.
A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Change Your Mind, a panoptic exploration of consciousness—what it is, who has it, and why—and a meditation on the essence of our humanity
When it comes to the phenomenon that is consciousness, there is one point on which scientists, philosophers, and artists all agree: it feels like something to be us. Yet the fact that we have subjective experience of the world remains one of nature’s greatest mysteries. How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would a scientific investigation of our inner life look like, when we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of the sea? In A World Appears, Michael Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness, bringing radically different perspectives—scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic—to see what each can teach us about this central fact of life.
When neuroscientists began studying consciousness in the early 1990s, they sought to explain how and why three pounds of spongy gray matter could generate a subjective point of view—assuming that the brain is the source of our perceived reality. Pollan takes us to the cutting edge of the field, where scientists are entertaining more radical (and less materialist) theories of consciousness. He introduces us to “plant neurobiologists” searching for the first flicker of consciousness in plants, scientists striving to engineer feelings into AI, and psychologists and novelists seeking to capture the felt experience of our slippery stream of consciousness.
In Pollan’s dazzling exploration of consciousness, he discovers a world far deeper and stranger than our everyday reality. Eye-opening and mind-expanding, A World Appears takes us into the laboratories of our own minds, ultimately showing us how we might make better use of the gift of awareness to more meaningfully connect with the world and our deepest selves.
March 2026
Picture Books
Bartleby by Matt Phelan
From New York Times-bestelling and award-winning creator Matt Phelan, Bartleby is a whimsical, yet powerful new modern classic picture book for fans of The Rabbit Listened that follows a dapper polar bear who learns the power of staying true to himself.
Everyone says NO sometimes.
Bartleby says, “I prefer not to.”
He says it a lot.
Bartleby does things his own way, in his own time.
And that’s what makes him extraordinary.
Matt Phelan’s Bartleby is an endearing, adorable, and humorous celebration of being yourself even when you stand out–sure to delight readers everywhere.
Is It Spring? Kevin Henkes
If one day buds bloom and birds chirp, and the next day a late snow falls from the sky, is it spring? Will it ever be spring? An evergreen, child-friendly picture book that explores themes of patience, hope, the seasons, and nature by the New York Times bestseller and Caldecott Medalist Kevin Henkes.
A flower in the garden down the street. Birds in the sky. Buds on the branches in the park. It must be spring.
But wait! What is this icy gust of wind? Why are snowflakes falling from heavy gray clouds? Will it ever be spring? Yes, says the sun. Just be patient.
Early Chapter Books
Bubble Town: A Choose Your Own Adventure Book by Tamara Ellis Smith
Choose from 9 possible endings in this interactive book from the bestselling Choose Your Own Adventure series, now for 5- to 8-year-old readers!
Filled with colorful illustrations, these books for little kids make reading together extra fun. But be careful!!! The choices YOU make might end up with you and your grandfather floating through the sky.
You’re lonely as the new kid in school but discover you have a magical gift—you can talk to animals when you blow bubbles! Suddenly, you have a band of new-found animal friends, including a plucky duck named Stuart, but then you learn their habitat is in danger. Can you save a grove of ancient trees and protect your new friends’ homes?
Heartwood Hotel: Family Forever by Kallie George
Courage, kindness, and adventure abound in this charming, illustrated chapter book series! While the search for a golden acorn has Fernwood Forest all a-fluster, Mona the mouse plans a surprise of her own to bring all the animals together.
Everything is humming at the Heartwood Hotel one year after the forest fire. Yet Mona the mouse feels like something is missing. Something besides the Golden Acorn—a legendary treasure buried and forgotten long ago. When a stranger turns up at the Heartwood with a map, suddenly the whole forest is taking part in a big treasure hunt and the hotel’s regular activities are turned upside down.
But Mona has an idea to get things back to normal: throw a surprise birthday party for Mr. Heartwood! As the Heartwood attracts treasure hunters—well-meaning and otherwise—and as Mona’s best friend Tilly seems to be pulling away, Mona feels like her plans are slipping through her paws! Who will find the legendary treasure? And what if danger finds the hotel first?
Youth Graphic Novels
DnDoggos: Spells Like Trouble by Scout Underhill
Four adorable doggos and their new friend dive into another adventure-filled session of their favorite role playing game in DnDoggos: Spells Like Trouble, the second book in the hilarious graphic novel series by Scout Underhill.
Magnus, Pickles, Tonka, and Zoey are ready to play! After leveling up, the doggos have new spells, new gear, new maps, and even a new friend: Toast the cat! But Maxilla’s spell has woken a slumbering giant, and the threatening rumbles are growing louder. Plus, their new friend Toast has an unusual type of magic that is causing all kinds of trouble for our heroes.
Will leveling up help the DnDoggos and Toast stop Maxilla before she causes even more trouble? Or will their own magic get the best of them?
I Am Not Okay by David DeGrand
How the Grinch Stole Christmas meets Ren & Stimpy in this graphic novel about confronting your emotions, perfect for kids who love the fun weirdness of the Catwad and Bird & Squirrel series.
All the woodland creatures of Happy Forest (where even trees and flowers smile) go to Fluff Nugget, a fluffy, round critter of indeterminate species, when they need cheering up–he just sings them the “Goodbye Grumpy Grumps” song and they feel happy again! But when this happens too much…like, WAY too much…it starts to wear on Fluff Nugget, until he feels grumpier than anyone. After he lets loose a cry of “I AM NOT OK!” Fluff Nugget and his woodland friends must figure out a better way to boost the mood. Will the Happy Forest ever be the same again?
A Kid Like Me by Norm Feuti
Perfect for fans of Jeff Kinney and Terri Libensen, A Kid Like Me is a timely exploration about finding your place in the ever-evolving social landscape that is middle school, written and illustrated by award-winning graphic novelist Norm Feuti.
Ethan doesn’t want to stand out, he just wants to fit in. But fitting in is tough when your peers call out your ancient cell phone, busted backpack, and discount clothing. To make matters worse, his best friend, Ricky, insists on hanging out with a group of guys who just don’t get him… they’re more interested in playing pranks than playing his favorite card game Bio Battle. Things start looking up, though, when Ethan befriends Aiden, a new kid in school, but it’s only matter of time before even that goes sideways.
Can Ethan figure out where he belongs without forgetting who he is and who he wants to be?
Say Something, Poupeh Babaee! by Haleh Massey
Moving to a new country is hard enough, especially when you have to do it alone during a national travel ban. When the pressures of a new school, a new language, and new bullies leaves Poupeh selectively mute, she struggles to find her voice which leaves her family pleading, “Say something, Poupeh Babaee!”
Poupeh Babaee is an Iranian girl sent to live with her relatives in the United States. Although Poupeh understands and speaks English, the stress of entering a new school in a foreign land renders her mute, and she is diagnosed with selective mutism. Worse yet, a travel ban–which labels Iran a “dangerous country”–has barred her parents from entering the US!
In order to help her parents immigrate, Poupeh must find a way to speak up for them during an interview with an embassy officer or risk being separated. This powerful, heart-warming graphic novel debut shows the bravery and courage of a young girl who will do anything to reunite her family.
Youth Nonfiction
Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales: Bones and Berserkers: 13 True Tales of Terror by Nathan Hale
Warning―frightening (and true) stories ahead! Author-illustrator Nathan Hale tells some of the scariest tales in US history in Bones and Berserkers, the 13th book in the #1 New York Times bestselling graphic novel series.
Bones and Berserkers is the unlucky 13th book in the New York Times bestselling Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales series, and you know what that means? It’s time to gather around the gallows and tell the spookiest stories in US history!
In this chilling collection, learn about the devil baby who terrorized New Jersey; a haunted well full of restless Confederate soldiers; a demon cat whose appearance has been an omen for some of the darkest days in American history; and a massacre by a murderous butler whose motives remain unknown to this day.
Full of a frightful mix of folk tales and facts, this newest entry is sure to fascinate readers . . . if they’re brave enough to read to the end.
Making It Up As You Go Along by Patricia Forde, illustrated by Mary Murphy
Learn how to write stories with Patricia Forde and some of the best middle-grade children’s authors.
In this fun and practical illustrated guide, young writers can learn from some of Ireland’s most beloved authors, including Eoin Colfer (Artemis Fowl) Catherine Doyle (Twin Crowns), Pádraig Kenny (Stitch) and Derek Landy (Skullduggery Pleasant), and discover how to:
- Find inspiration to start your story
- Craft and develop twisty plots
- Create brilliant characters
- Build spectacular new worlds
Also includes imaginative exercises, accessible explanations of writing terms and engaging illustrations by beloved Irish artist Mary Murphy.
Adult Fiction
The Astral Library by Kate Quinn
From New York Times bestselling author Kate Quinn comes a gorgeously written fantastical adventure which poses the question: Have you ever wished you could live inside a book? Welcome to the Astral Library, where books are not just objects, but doors to new worlds, new lives, and new futures.
Alexandria “Alix” Watson has learned one lesson from her barren childhood in the foster-care system: unlike people, books will never let you down. Working three dead-end jobs to make ends meet and knowing college is a pipe dream, Alix takes nightly refuge in the high-vaulted reading room at the Boston Public Library, escaping into her favorite fantasy novels and dreaming of far-off lands. Until the day she stumbles through a hidden door and meets the Librarian: the ageless, acerbic guardian of a hidden library where the desperate and the lost escape to new lives…inside their favorite books.
The Librarian takes a dazzled Alix under her wing, but before she can escape into the pages of her new life, a shadowy enemy emerges to threaten everyone the Astral Library has ever helped protect. Aided by a dashing costume-shop owner, Alix and the Librarian flee through the Regency drawing rooms of Jane Austen to the back alleys of Sherlock Holmes and the champagne-soaked parties of The Great Gatsby as danger draws inexorably closer. But who does their enemy really wish to destroy—Alix, the Librarian, or the Library itself?
The Crossroads: A Joe Pickett Novel by C.J. Box
Game warden Joe Pickett fights for his life as his daughters try to uncover who shot him and left him for dead in this riveting new novel from #1 New York Times bestseller C. J. Box.
Marybeth Pickett gets the call she has always dreaded: her husband Joe is in critical condition with a gunshot wound to the head.
Joe was found in his pickup at Antler Creek Junction, a crossroads connecting three ranches. Each road leading to a dangerous family. Each family with a different bone to pick with the local game warden. Marybeth and the new sheriff assume that Joe was ambushed by one of the families, but they have no idea which one since Joe didn’t say where he was going or why.
With Joe unconscious and fighting for his life with Marybeth at his side, Sheridan, April, and Lucy split up and investigate each of families to uncover the truth of what happened to their father, before it’s too late.
The Cyclist: A DS George Cross Mystery by Tim Sullivan
“A perfect detective for our time and for all time.”—Stephen Fry
“One of the most iconic British fictional detectives of the 21st century . . . a delight.”—Daily Mail
Detective Sergeant George Cross returns to solve the case of a mangled body on a construction site and uncover a life of illicit drugs in the second book in Tim Sullivan’s internationally bestselling series
DS George Cross has unique and unmatchable talents. He uses a combination of logic, determination and exacting precision to get answers where others have failed for families who have long given up hope. So when a ravaged body is found in a local demolition site, it’s up to Cross to piece together the truth from whatever fragments he can find.
From the faint tan lines and strange scars on the victim’s forearms, Cross meticulously unravels the young man’s life, delving into the world of amateur cycling, an illicit supply of performance enhancing drugs, jealousy, ambition and a family tearing itself apart.
Cross’s relentless pursuit of the truth and eccentric methods earn him few friends. But just as the police seem to be nearing a conclusion, he doubles back. Could it be the biggest mistake of his career?
Discontent by Beatriz Serrano
From a dazzling new international voice, an audacious, darkly funny novel about a young woman whose carefully crafted office persona threatens to crack when she’s forced to attend her company’s annual retreat
On the surface, Marisa’s life looks enviable. She lives in a beautiful apartment in the center of Madrid, she has a hot neighbor who is always around to sleep with her, and she’s quickly risen through the ranks at a successful advertising agency. And yet she’s drowning in a dark hole of existential dread induced by the banality of corporate life. Marisa hates her job and everyone at it. She spends her working hours locked in her office hiding from her coworkers, bingeing YouTube videos, and getting high on tranquilizers. When she has the time, she escapes to her favorite museum where she contemplates the meaning of life while staring at Hieronymus Bosch paintings, or trying to get hit by a car so she can go on disability.
But Marisa’s dubious success, which is largely built on lies and work she’s stolen from other people, is in danger of being exposed when she’s forced to go on her company’s team-building retreat. Isolated in the Segovia forests, haunted by the deeply buried memory of a former coworker, and surrounded by psychopathic bosses, overzealous coworkers, flirty retreat staff, and an excess of drugs, Marisa finds herself acting on her wildest impulses and is pushed to the brink of a complete spiral.
Family Drama by Rebecca Fallon
A vibrant debut and powerful meditation on family, motherhood, and the cost of holding on to your dreams, reminiscent of Ann Napolitano.
In New England, Susan Bliss is a young mother married to a professor.
In LA, Susan Byrne stars in a soap opera beloved coast to coast.
Decades after she’s gone, her twins have no idea of their mother’s fame. But the past can’t stay hidden forever.
It’s 1997, and snow is blanketing a New England beach. Two befuddled seven-year-olds watch as their mother’s body is tipped overboard a crumbling boat. A Viking funeral, followed by a raucous wake. A send-off fit for soap opera star: Susan Bliss.
Fifteen years earlier, Susan is a blazing, beautiful young woman, passionate about her art. It’s impossible not to fall in love with her, and so Alcott, a practical professor, does—hopelessly. And so begins the love story of Susan’s two-paneled life: an unconventional, jetlag-filled arrangement that takes her back and forth between her life in New England as a wife and mother to young twins to the bright lights of Los Angeles, where she becomes the beloved star of a daytime soap.
In the present, Susan’s twins grow up in the shadow of her all-consuming absence. Sebastian, a sensitive artist, cleaves to her memory, fascinated with the artifacts of her starry past. Viola, resentful of her mother’s torn allegiances, distances herself from the memories of her. But when Viola runs into her mother’s old costar Orson Grey—now a renowned Hollywood star—she finds herself falling deeply in love with him and begins to put together the pieces of a mother she never really knew.
Sharp, assured, and beautifully written, Family Drama is a story told in double-helix, with intertwined timelines that explore the different versions of ourselves we share with the world and with each other.
Her Last Breath by Taylor Adams
From the critically acclaimed author of No Exit and The Last Word comes a story of two friends who embark on an ill-fated caving expedition—and the dark truth of what happens deep underground.
After years of excuses, Tess has finally agreed to go caving with her best friend Allie. Their lives have diverged sharply since high school—Allie is a self-made travel influencer, while Tess is a shy (and claustrophobic) legal assistant struggling to pay for law school. Maybe she’s a little jealous of Allie’s globe-trotting life. Who wouldn’t be?
As Tess and Allie descend into the depths, they realize they’re not alone. A stranger who claims to be a fellow caver harasses them. Confident, take-no-shit Allie insults the guy—and he retaliates. Soon, Tess is trapped inside a narrow crawl space hundreds of feet underground, fighting to stay alive.
Twenty-four hours later, as a hospitalized Tess recounts her harrowing story of survival, the detective interviewing her shares new and shocking secrets about Allie’s true past. Together, they begin to suspect the brutal attack wasn’t so random after all.
Who was Allie, really? Why did this man target them? And did Tess really leave the danger behind when she escaped the cave?
Kin by Tayari Jones
A magnificent new novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage—Tayari Jones has written an unforgettable novel that sparkles with wit and intelligence and deep feeling about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy.
Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.
A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.
The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali
From nationally bestselling author Marjan Kamali, this perfect book club read is “evocative…and a powerful portrait of friendship, feminism, and political activism” (People) set against three transformative decades in Tehran, Iran.
In 1950s Tehran, seven-year-old Ellie lives in grand comfort until the untimely death of her father, forcing Ellie and her mother to move to a tiny home downtown. Lonely and bearing the brunt of her mother’s endless grievances, Ellie dreams for a friend to alleviate her isolation.
Luckily, on the first day of school, she meets Homa, a kind girl with a brave and irrepressible spirit. Together, the two girls play games, learn to cook in the stone kitchen of Homa’s warm home, wander through the colorful stalls of the Grand Bazaar, and share their ambitions of becoming “lion women.”
But their happiness is disrupted when Ellie and her mother are afforded the opportunity to return to their previous bourgeois life. Now a popular student at the best girls’ high school in Iran, Ellie’s memories of Homa begin to fade. Years later, however, her sudden reappearance in Ellie’s privileged world alters the course of both of their lives.
Together, the two young women come of age and pursue their own goals for meaningful futures. But as the political turmoil in Iran builds to a breaking point, one earth-shattering betrayal will have enormous consequences.
“Reminiscent of The Kite Runner and My Brilliant Friend, The Lion Women of Tehran is a mesmerizing tale” (BookPage) of love and courage, and a sweeping exploration of how profoundly we are shaped by those we meet when we are young.
The Midnight Taxi by Yosha Gunasekera
When the last fare of the night turns up dead in her backseat, a Sri Lankan American taxi driver works off the clock to clear her name in this mystery novel by debut author Yosha Gunasekera.
Siriwathi Perera doesn’t quite know where she’s going in life. She never expected to be a taxicab driver in New York City, struggling to make ends meet and still living with her parents at twenty-eight. The true-crime podcasts that keep Siri company as she drives don’t do much to make up for the legal career she imagined for herself, or the brother she’s grieving.
When public defender Amaya Fernando gets into her cab, they make a quick connection through their shared Sri Lankan roots. Siri, whose social circle is limited to her grade-school best friend, Alex, thinks things might finally be looking up with this new potential friendship. But she’s suddenly dropped into her own true crime when she discovers her next passenger murdered in the backseat, and she has to call Amaya sooner than she’d expected.
Pinned as the obvious and only suspect, and desperate to clear her name, Siri chases down leads across the boroughs of New York City with Amaya’s help. But with her court date looming, they have just five days to find out who really killed the midnight passenger—or Siri’s life will be over before she can even truly live it.
Adult Nonfiction
The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness by Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal, and Jon Kabat Zinn
The revolutionary book that has helped hundreds of thousands of readers find relief from chronic unhappiness is now in a revised and updated second edition. This authoritative, easy-to-use self-help program is grounded in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, a clinically proven approach. The expert authors explain why our usual attempts to “fix” sadness or “just stop thinking about it” can actually worsen depression, instead of relieving it. Through vivid stories and downloadable audio meditations encouragingly narrated by Jon Kabat-Zinn, the book shows how you can break the mental habits that lead to despair–and recover a sense of joy, aliveness, and possibility. Revised throughout to be even more reader friendly, the second edition features fresh insights on coping with the challenges of our ever-changing world, the latest scientific data, and four additional audio tracks. Includes a CD of guided meditations.
The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It’s Too Late by Judith Enck with Adam Mahoney
A powerful look at plastic’s impact on human health and the environment, and how we can fight back by putting people and the planet over plastics
Plastic is everywhere—wrapped around our food, stitched into our clothes, even coursing through our veins. Once a marvel of modern science, plastic has become so inextricably woven into our lives that imagining a world without it can seem impossible. Over the last seventy-five years, plastic has cradled our planet in a synthetic embrace.
The Problem with Plastic critically examines the paradox of this material, first celebrated for its innovations and now recognized for its devastating environmental and public health impacts. With clarity and urgency, the book reveals how plastic pollution contributes to poisoned oceans, polluted air, a warming planet, and overwhelming waste, disproportionately impacting marginalized communities who bear the brunt of petrochemical pollution.
Revealing the alarming extent of microplastics infiltrating both the natural world and the human body, this compelling narrative challenges the illusion that recycling alone will save us. It unpacks the mechanisms of environmental racism and the deceptive greenwashing strategies used by the plastics industry to maintain the status quo.
More than a critique, The Problem with Plastic emphasizes the urgent need for action against plastic’s toxic legacy. It highlights powerful stories of frontline resistance in places like Louisiana, Texas, and Appalachia, and equips readers with practical tools—including a “Household Waste Audit” to track and reduce plastic consumption, as well as model policy guides for driving legislative change.
Urgent, eye-opening, and ultimately empowering, The Problem with Plastic reminds us: plastic is a problem—but together, we can be the solution.
Graphic Nonfiction
The Cartoon History of the Modern World (Part 1: From Columbus to the US Constitution) by Larry Gonick
The Cartoon History of the Modern World is a wickedly funny take on modern history. It is essentially a complete and up–to–date course in college level Modern World History, but presented as a graphic novel. In an engaging and humorous graphic style, Larry Gonick covers the history, personalities and big topics that have shaped our universe over the past five centuries, including the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the evolution of political, social, economic, and scientific thought, Communism, Fascism, Nazism, the Cold War, Globalization––and much more.
Volume I of the Cartoon History of the Modern World picks up from Gonick’s award winning Cartoon History of the Universe series. That series began with the Big Bang and ended with Christopher Columbus sailing for the New World. This book starts off with peoples that Columbus “discovered” and ends with the U.S. Revolution.
Games
Cards Against Humanity: Family Edition is a new party game that’s just like Cards Against Humanity, except it’s written for kids and adults to play together. Each round, one player asks a question from a black card, and everyone else answers with their funniest white card.
- Comes with 600 all-new cards about toilets, butt spaghetti, and Mom’s friend Donna.
- Appropriate for all humans age 8 and up.
- Tested with thousands of families over many years.
- Sorry, not as fun as Xbox.
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Baxter Memorial Library 