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The protagonist in this story, Antonia Vega, is an immigrant writer facing hard times. Her husband has died suddenly just as they were about to enjoy his retirement, one of her three sisters disappears, and she finds herself caring about an undocumented pregnant teenager who needs a place to live. On top of all that, she is trying to adjust to retirement from a satisfying teaching career. “Who am I going to be anymore?” she asks a sister. “Who am I?” |
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Lydia Quixano Perez is jolted from her comfortable middle-class existence in Acapulco when she becomes the target of a drug cartel boss's wrath. His reach is far and his influence is wide. Mexico is no longer safe for Lydia. She's left with no choice but to flee for her life and that of her eight-year-old son, Luca. So they head for the United States and the hope of refuge. |
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This sweeping novel of historical fiction is inspired by the true rags-to-riches story of Arabella Huntington—a woman whose great beauty was surpassed only by her exceptional business acumen, grit, and artistic eye, and who defied the constraints of her era to become the wealthiest self-made woman in America. |
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Newlyweds Celestial and Roy, the living embodiment of the New South, are settling into the routine of their life together when Roy is sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit. An insightful look into the lives of people who are bound and separated by forces beyond their control. |
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Wealthy bank director Zara visits open houses to feel normal. Roger and Anna-Lena obsess over fixer-uppers because they cannot manage their own marriage. Expecting lesbian parents Julia and Ro want something to agree on. And cool and collected 80-year-old Estelle has her own reasons for house hunting. They are all trapped at an open house by a masked gunman eventually less scared of the police outside than the nutty people within. |
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An unforgettable cast of small-town characters copes with love and loss in this new work of fiction by #1 bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout. |
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Geeta's no-good husband disappeared five years ago from their small Indian village. She didn't kill him, but everyone thinks she did--no matter how much she protests. But she soon discovers that being known as a "self-made" widow has some surprising perks. No one messes with her, no one threatens her, and no one tries to control her. It's even been good for her business; no one wants to risk getting on her bad side by not buying her jewelry. Soon other women in the village start asking for her help to get rid of their own no-good husbands...but not all of them are asking nicely. Now that Geeta's fearsome reputation has become a double-edged sword, she must decide how far to go to protect it, along with the life she's built. Because even the best-laid plans of would-be widows tend to go awry. |
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On a remote island in Quebec, a monastery stands. But now the outside world has affected the monks' peaceful existence. A body is found in the abbot's garden. One of the monks has been killed, and presumably by someone within the monastery. Chief Inspector Gamache and Inspector Beauvoir come to the island to investigate. |
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This unforgettable novel puts human faces on the Syrian war with the immigrant story of a beekeeper, his wife, and the triumph of spirit when the world becomes unrecognizable. Nuri is a beekeeper and Afra, his wife, is an artist. Mornings, Nuri rises early to hear the call to prayer before driving to his hives in the countryside. On weekends, Afra sells her colorful landscape paintings at the open-air market. They live a simple life, rich in family and friends, in the hills of the beautiful Syrian city of Aleppo—until the unthinkable happens. |
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It’s New Zealand in 2017. There is a small collective of people that call themselves “Birnam Wood”, who act as guerilla gardeners, planting vegetable crops in spare unused land. Sometimes it’s with permission, and sometimes it’s illegal.
But when an offer to go bigger means they may be in bed with an American billionaire who represents everything their anti-capitalist group stands for, the members question how far will they go to make ends meet. Can idealistic green dreams go hand in hand with capitalism, or is that combination doomed from the start? |
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(Non-Fiction)
In the years before the Second World War, a small group of renegade pilots put forth a radical idea. What if we made bombing so accurate that wars could be fought entirely from the air?
This book tells the story of what happened when that dream was put to the test. The Bomber Mafia follows the stories of a reclusive Dutch genius and his homemade computer, Winston Churchill's forbidding best friend, a team of pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard, a brilliant pilot who sang vaudeville tunes to his crew, and the bomber commander, Curtis Emerson LeMay. |
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Nora is a ruthlessly ambitious literary agent who identifies more with the villains in romance movies than the heroines. Swayed by her sister to spend the summer together in a picturesque small-town, the last person she expects to run into is Charlie—the surly editor she’s avoided ever since their disastrous first meeting. Modern and fresh, this is a must-read for rom-com lovers. |
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Everything changes in a single moment for Dawn Edelstein. She’s on a plane when the flight attendant makes an announcement: Prepare for a crash landing. She braces herself as thoughts flash through her mind. The shocking thing is, the thoughts are not of her husband but of a man she last saw fifteen years ago: Wyatt Armstrong. |
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Cussy Mary Carter is the last of her kind, her skin the color of a blue damselfly in these dusty hills. But that doesn't mean she's got nothing to offer. As a member of the Pack Horse Library Project, Cussy delivers books to the hill folk of Troublesome, hoping to spread learning in these desperate times. But not everyone is so keen on Cussy's family or the Library Project, and the hardscrabble Kentuckians are quick to blame a Blue for any trouble in their small town. The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek is a story of raw courage, fierce strength, and one woman's determination to bring a little bit of hope to the darkly hollers. |
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A mysterious portrait ignites an antiquarian bookseller's search through time and the works of Shakespeare for his lost love. |
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Britt-Marie can’t stand mess. A disorganized cutlery drawer ranks high on her list of unforgivable sins. She is not one to judge others—no matter how ill-mannered, unkempt, or morally suspect they might be. It’s just that sometimes people interpret her helpful suggestions as criticisms, which is certainly not her intention. But hidden inside the socially awkward, fussy busybody is a woman who has more imagination, bigger dreams, and a warmer heart that anyone around her realizes. |
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(NON-Fiction) The breakout poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman. |
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(NONFICTION) Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity. |
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Archivist Elodie Winslow gets shivers when she discovers the photograph of a woman in Victorian garb with a sketchbook featuring a twin-gabled house. What's her connection to Oxfordshire's Birchwood Manor, where in 1862 Edward Radcliffe gathered young artists for a summer of creative fun that ended tragically? |
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(NONFICTION) Recruited by the U.S. Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than ten thousand women served as codebreakers during World War II. While their brothers and boyfriends took up arms, these women moved to Washington and learned the meticulous work of code-breaking. Their efforts shortened the war, saved countless lives, and gave them access to careers previously denied to them. A strict vow of secrecy nearly erased their efforts from history; now, through dazzling research and interviews with surviving code girls, bestselling author Liza Mundy brings to life this riveting and vital story of American courage, service, and scientific accomplishment. |
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By the author of the “News of the World”. A soaring work of the imagination based on oral histories of the post-Civil War years in North Texas. |
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Two American women dutifully followed their soldier husbands to the U.S. embassy in Jordan. After two years, Cassie's become an expert on the rules, but newly arrived Margaret sees only her chance to explore. So when a fender-bender sends Margaret to the local police station, Cassie reluctantly agrees to watch Margaret's toddler son. But as the hours pass, snooping around Margaret's apartment, Cassie begins to question not only her friend's whereabouts but also her own role in Margaret's disappearance. |
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(NONFICTION) Rapaille decodes fundamental archetypes ranging from sex to money to health to America itself to provide a revolutionary way of understanding and dealing with the world--how the culture code one grows up in influences how he acts, buys, and loves. |
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The highly anticipated sequel to Moloka'i. The book follows young Ruth from her arrival at the Kapi'olani Home for Girls in Honolulu, to her adoption by a Japanese couple who raise her on a strawberry and grape farm in California, her marriage and unjust internment at Manzanar Relocation Camp during World War II--and then, after the war, to the life-altering day when she receives a letter from a woman who says she is Ruth's birth mother, Rachel. |
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An Appalachian David Copperfield...Demon Copperhead reimagines Dickens’s story in a modern-day rural America contending with poverty and opioid addiction...Kingsolver and Dickens overlap: both of them exuberant writers of social novels with a strong political message and a concern for the lower classes. |
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Funny and disturbing eco-novel by a recent Nobel Prize winner. In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. |
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(NONFICTION) Raised in the Idaho mountains by survivalist parents who eschewed schooling and doctors, Westover hungered so powerfully for education that she taught herself, getting to Brigham Young University and eventually Cambridge University for a PhD. |
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Very unusual mystery set in Saudi Arabia. When sixteen-year-old Nouf goes missing and is found drowned in the desert outside Jeddah, Nayir--a desert guide hired by her prominent family to search for her--feels compelled to find out what really happened. |
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In this book the author of many fictitious biographies of artists traces the courageous life and career of Emily Carr, who--more than Georgia O'Keeffe or Frida Kahlo--blazed a path for modern women artists. Overcoming the confines of Victorian culture, Carr became a major force in modern art by capturing an untamed British Columbia and its indigenous peoples just before industrialization changed them forever. From illegal potlatches in tribal communities to artists' studios in pre-World War I Paris, Vreeland tells her story with gusto and suspense, giving us a glorious novel that will appeal to lovers of art, native cultures, and lush historical fiction. |
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Elsa is a 25 year old woman who is considered an old maid at the age of 25; however, her luck changes when she meets Rafe, they get married, and settle on a farm. Fast forward a decade. Elsa now has two children, Ant and Loreda, but finds herself in the middle of The Great Depression and suffering from a series of back-to-back lackluster farm6+ years. Should she stay on the land she loves, the legacy that she has built for her children, or should she go West to California for more opportunities? |
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When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her grief is intensified by the suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the loss of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building. While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them. |
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A Russian aristocrat, Count Alexander Rostov, narrowly escapes execution during the Russian Revolution. A poem he wrote in University made him an early revolutionary hero so his life is spared, but he is sentenced to house arrest at the famed Metropol Hotel in Moscow. He is confined within the walls of the Metropol while the world outside changes. With humor, energy and charm, the book follows the Count's life at the Metropol as he tries to eke out an existence and make sense of his circumstances. |
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In Depression-era America, five extraordinary women embark on a remarkable journey through the mountains of Kentucky and beyond. Inspired by the history of the actual Pack Horse Librarians, Moyes depicts the courage and resourcefulness of these women in loving detail. This book is a tribute not just to the brave women who brought the light of knowledge in dark times, but also to the rejuvenating bond of women’s friendship. |
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Fern Castle works in her local library. She has dinner with her twin sister Rose three nights a week. And she avoids crowds, bright lights and loud noises as much as possible. Fern has a carefully structured life and disrupting her routine can be...dangerous. When Rose discovers that she cannot get pregnant, Fern sees her chance to pay her sister back for everything Rose has done for her. Fern can have a baby for Rose. She just needs to find a father. Simple. |
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Patrick, or Gay Uncle Patrick (GUP, for short), has always loved his niece, Maisie, and nephew, Grant. That is, he loves spending time with them when they come out to Palm Springs for weeklong visits, or when he heads home to Connecticut for the holidays. But in terms of caretaking and relating to two children, no matter how adorable, Patrick is, honestly, overwhelmed. |
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Harlem Shuffle’s ingenious story plays out in a beautifully recreated New York City of the early 1960s. It’s a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem. |
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Escaping from an abusive marriage, seventeen-year-old Lakshmi makes her way alone to the vibrant 1950s pink city of Jaipur. There she becomes the most highly requested henna artist--and confidante--to the wealthy women of the upper class. But trusted with the secrets of the wealthy, she can never reveal her own. |
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Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery. Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi's extraordinary novel illuminates slavery's troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed--and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation. |
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(NONFICTION) Before May was five, her parents' tumultuous marriage ended in divorce, and her mother moved her two children from the East Coast to California's Carmel Valley, to live with her parents. May gravitated to her Grandpa's workshop, a World War II Army bus outfitted with beekeeping equipment, stacks of honeycombs and barrels and pipes for honey-collecting. |
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A modern classic, first published in 1981, a story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother. The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. |
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(NONFICTION) For more than ten years, a mysterious and violent predator committed fifty sexual assaults in Northern California before moving south, where he perpetrated ten sadistic murders. Then he disappeared, eluding capture by multiple police forces and some of the best detectives in the area. Three decades later, Michelle McNamara, a true-crime journalist who created the popular website TrueCrimeDiary.com, was determined to find the violent psychopath she called "the Golden State Killer." Michelle pored over police reports, interviewed victims, and embedded herself in the online communities that were as obsessed with the case as she was. |
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(NONFICTION) When Justin was diagnosed with a neuromuscular disease that robbed him of the use of his arms and legs, Patrick was there, helping to feed and care for him in ways he'd never imagined. Determined to live life to the fullest, the friends refused to give into despair or let physical limitations control what was possible for Justin. So when Justin heard about the Camino de Santiago, a 500-mile trek through Spain, he wondered aloud to Patrick whether the two of them could ever do it. Patrick's immediate response was: 'I'll push you' |
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(NONFICTION) A memoir about the staggering family secret uncovered by a genealogy test: an exploration of the urgent ethical questions surrounding fertility treatments and DNA testing, and a profound inquiry of paternity, identity, and love. |
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The Montoyas are used to a life without explanations. They know better than to ask why the pantry never seems to run low, or why their matriarch won’t ever leave their home in Four Rivers—not for graduations, weddings, or baptisms. But when Orquídea Divina invites them to her funeral and to collect their inheritance, they hope to learn the secrets that she has held onto so tightly their whole lives. |
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The story follows Hetty 'Handful' Grimke, a Charleston slave, and Sarah, the daughter of the wealthy Grimke family. The novel begins on Sarah's eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership over Handful, who is to be her handmaid. "The Invention of Wings" follows the next thirty-five years of their lives. Inspired in part by the historical figure of Sarah Grimke (a feminist, suffragist and, importantly, an abolitionist), Kidd allows herself to go beyond the record to flesh out the inner lives of all the characters, both real and imagined. |
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France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever--and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world. But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name. |
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Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls living on the Korean island of Jeju, are best friends that come from very different backgrounds. When they are old enough, they begin working in the sea with their village's all-female diving collective, led by Young-sook's mother. As the girls take up their positions as baby divers, they know they are beginning a life of excitement and responsibility but also danger. |
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Andrew Peardew collects things dropped or left behind by others and writing stories about them. He does this as a tribute to the fiancée who died the day he lost one of her keepsakes. When a dying Andrew bequeaths his estate to his assistant, Laura, she begins to bond with new neighbors while attempting to reunite the objects with their owners. |
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(NONFICTION) Grann revisits a series of crimes in which dozens of people were murdered in cold blood. Based on years of research and new evidence, the book outlines the steps that reveal a series of sinister secrets and reversals. But more than that, it is an indictment of the callousness and prejudice toward American Indians that allowed the murderers to operate with impunity for so long. |
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LARGE PRINT Nobel laureate Ishiguro takes readers to a vaguely futuristic, technologically advanced setting reminiscent of his Never Let Me Go for a surprising parable about love, humanity, and science. Klara is an Artificial Friend (AF), a humanlike robot designed to be a child's companion. She is solar-powered and reveres the sun for the "nourishment" and upholds "him" as a godlike figure. Klara is bought by teenager Josie and continues to learn about humans through her interactions with Josie's family and childhood friend. |
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(NONFICTION) Geobiologist Hope Jahren has spent her life studying trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Lab Girl is her revelatory treatise on plant life--but it is also a celebration of the lifelong curiosity, humility, and passion that drive every scientist. In these pages, Hope takes us back to her Minnesota childhood, where she spent hours in unfettered play in her father's college laboratory. She tells us how she found a sanctuary in science, learning to perform lab work "with both the heart and the hands." She introduces us to Bill, her brilliant, eccentric lab manager. And she extends the mantle of scientist to each one of her readers, inviting us to join her in observing and protecting our environment. Warm, luminous, compulsively readable, Lab Girl vividly demonstrates the mountains that we can move when love and work come together. |
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A remarkable and inspiring true story that "stuns with raw beauty" about one woman's resilience, her courageous journey to America, and her family's lost way of life. Salh was sent at age six to live with her nomadic grandmother in the desert and found herself chasing warthogs, climbing termite hills, herding goats, and moving constantly in search of water and grazing lands with her nomadic family. Salh grew to love the freedom of roaming with her animals and the community found in nomadic rituals and the oral storytelling of her ancestors. Taken from the desert by her strict father and then displaced along with millions of others by the Somali Civil War, Salh fled first to a refugee camp on the Kenyan border and ultimately to North America to learn yet another way of life. |
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The book features newly married Hannah who discovers that her husband has disappeared. He leaves her a note, “Protect her.” What could it mean? One thing. His daughter, Bailey, the 16 year old, who is high on attitude and likes her stepmother as much as the typical 16 year old. What happened to Owen? How will things turn out for Bailey and Hannah? |
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An interrupted family vacation, unexpected visitors, a mysterious blackout--something is happening, and the world may never be the same. Amanda, Clay and their children, Archie, 15, and Rose, 13, make their way from Brooklyn to a luxury home in a remote area of Long Island they have rented for a family vacation. Shortly after they arrive, however, the family's holiday is interrupted by a knock on the door: The house's owners, a prosperous older black couple--George Washington and his wife, Ruth--have shown up unannounced because New York City has been plunged into a blackout and their Park Avenue high-rise apartment did not feel safe. |
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Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing. But her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute take a very unscientific view of equality. Except Calvin Evans, the lonely, brilliant, Nobel-prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with – of all things – her mind. True chemistry results. Like science, life is unpredictable, and a few years later, Elizabeth finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show, Supper at Six. |
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(NONFICTION) On April 29, 1986, the Los Angeles Public Library went up in a blaze that would be the worst library fire in America's history, destroying more than 400,000 books. Who set the fire, and why? After moving to Los Angeles, New Yorker staff writer decides to seek answers. |
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She took 1930s New York by storm, working her way up writing copy for R.H. Macy's to become the highest paid advertising woman in the country. It was a job that, she says, 'in some ways saved my life, and in other ways ruined it.' Now it's the last night of 1984 and Lillian, 85 years old but just as sharp and savvy as ever, is on her way to a party ... On a walk that takes her over 10 miles around the city, she meets bartenders, bodega clerks, security guards, criminals, children, parents, and parents-to-be, while reviewing a life of excitement and adversity, passion and heartbreak, illuminating all the ways New York has changed--and has not. |
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Monsieur Perdu calls himself a literary apothecary. From his floating bookstore in a barge on the Seine, he prescribes novels for the hardships of life. Using his intuitive feel for the exact book a reader needs, Perdu mends broken hearts and souls. The only person he can't seem to heal through literature is himself; he's still haunted by heartbreak after his great love disappeared. She left him with only a letter, which he has never opened. |
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Olivia leaves an abusive marriage and retreats with her son, Asher, to the small town where she grew up. She takes over caring for her father’s bees, while Asher fits in nicely at the local high school and finds a girlfriend in another new kid in town, Lily. Then one day, Olivia receives a phone call: Lily is dead, and Asher is being questioned by the police. Olivia is worried that Asher has inherited some of his father’s temper, despite the fact that she got him away from his father at a young age. As with most Picoult books, there’s a trial where small-town secrets come to light. Mad Honey is a riveting novel of suspense, an unforgettable love story, and a moving and powerful exploration of the secrets we keep and the risks we take in order to become ourselves. |
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No one expects the police to knock on the million-dollar, two-story Santa Cruz home of the perfect cul-de-sac housewife. But soccer mom Lara Love Hardin has been hiding a shady she is funding her heroin addiction by stealing her neighbors’ credit cards.
The Many Lives of Mama Love is a heartbreaking and tender journey from shame to redemption, despite a system that makes it almost impossible for us to move beyond the worst thing we have ever done. |
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A forbidden love story set on the tropical island of St. Thomas about the extraordinary woman who gave birth to painter Camille Pissarro the Father of Impressionism. |
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Dave is fourteen years old, living with his family in a cabin on Oregon's Mount Hood (or as Dave prefers to call it, like the Native Americans once did, Wy'east). He is entering high school, adulthood on the horizon not far off in distance, and contemplating a future away from his mother, father, and his precocious younger sister. And Dave is not the only one approaching adulthood and its freedoms on Wy'east that summer. Martin, a pine marten (a small animal of the deep woods, of the otter/mink family), is leaving his own mother and siblings and setting off on his own as well. Eco-Fiction, by the author of "Mink River". |
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(Non-Fiction)This is the true story of William and Ellen Craft. In 1848, William and Ellen decided to make a daring, almost impossible, escape from slavery. Ellen, who was 3/4 white, disguised herself as a disabled white man while her husband William posed as her slave. The Crafts traveled over 1000 miles from Georgia to the north to secure their freedom. The couple took trains, steamboats and carriages until they finally reached their destination. The Craft’s escape from slavery made major headlines with people cheering them on as well as enemies that wanted them returned to their owners. |
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The Measure follows eight people after they, like the rest of the world, receive a box containing a string that designates their lifespan. The book explores how these people’s lives and relationships change as a result of knowing the length of their lives or choosing not to know at all.
As society comes together and pulls apart, everyone faces the same shocking choice: Do they wish to know how long they’ll live? And, if so, what will they do with that knowledge? |
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Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. |
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An epic story of family secrets, love, and betrayal set in Imperial India, a magnificent English country house in the 1920's, and that same house today. Riley's multi-generational saga opens in 2000, with 100-year-old Anahita reminiscing about the events of her storied life--her friendship with an Indian princess, her wartime journey to England as the princess's companion, and her thwarted romance with an English noble. Paralleling Anahita's story is the tale of Rebecca Bradley, an American actress who meets Anahita's great-grandson while filming in England. The two discover a tragic secret, hidden for generations, that could change their lives. |
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From the bestselling author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry comes an uplifting, irresistible novel about two women on a life-changing adventure, where they must risk everything, break all the rules, and discover their best selves - together. |
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The moving true story of a group of young men growing up on Chicago's West side who form the first all-Black high school rowing team in the nation, and in doing so not only transform a sport, but their lives. |
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(NONFICTION) From the beet fields of North Dakota to the National Forest campgrounds of California to Amazon's CamperForce program in Texas, employers have discovered a new, low-cost labor pool, made up largely of transient older Americans. Finding that Social Security comes up short, often underwater on mortgages, these invisible casualties of the Great Recession have taken to the road by the tens of thousands in late-model RVs, travel trailers, and vans, forming a growing community of nomads: migrant laborers who call themselves 'workampers'. |
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A simultaneously sad and joyous story of a unique eleven-year-old boy and the legacy he leaves behind. Known only as -the boy,- he has no friends, and spends his time obsessively compiling mental lists and memorizing countless Guinness world records. As part of his work to earn a Boy Scout badge, the boy does yard work for 104-year-old Ona Vitkus, a Lithuanian immigrant living nearby. They forge a close bond over the course of seven Saturdays, then the boy dies. His mostly absent musician father, Quinn, volunteers to finish the last three of the boy's weekends. Quinn becomes aware of his son's and Ona's plan to get her into a Guinness records book--hopefully, as the oldest licensed driver--and this leads first to a road trip to find Ona's only living son, now ninety, and eventually to a visit to her homeland at age 109. |
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Katy is left reeling when her mother Carol dies; nothing makes sense anymore, least of all her marriage. Seeking clarity, she makes a last-minute decision to embark on the Italian trip she and Carol had planned — only, she’ll be traveling solo. At the charming Hotel Poseidon (a real place), Katy starts to come back to life with the aid of the Italian sun, the food, and the incredible sights. She meets a handsome man who’s also staying at the hotel — but she also makes a curious friendship: With the 30-year-old version of her own mother. |
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Her beauty almost certainly saved her from the rising Nazi party and led to marriage with an Austrian arms dealer. Underestimated in everything else, she overheard the Third Reich's plans while at her husband's side, understanding more than anyone would guess. She devised a plan to flee in disguise from their castle, and the whirlwind escape landed her in Hollywood. She became Hedy Lamarr, screen star. But she kept a secret more shocking than her heritage or her marriage: she was a scientist. And she knew a few secrets about the enemy. She had an idea that might help the country fight the Nazis...if anyone would listen to her. |
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The Other Americans, is about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant in a small California town. The repercussions of his death bring together a diverse cast of characters whose invisible connections—even while they remain deeply divided by race, religion, or class—are slowly revealed. It is at once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story, infused with questions about America’s treacherous legacy of violent discrimination |
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Our Missing Hearts follows two protagonists, Bird and his mother Margaret, as they navigate an oppressive society that victimizes them due to their Asian identity. Margaret, a poet, goes into hiding to help advocate against the government, while Bird, a child, follows messages encoded in stories to find his mother. The novel celebrates librarians, storytellers, and readers as champions of truth. |
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When Vianne Rocher receives a letter from beyond the grave, she has no choice but to return to Lansquenet, where she once owned a chocolate shop and learned the meaning of home. But returning to one's past can be a dangerous pursuit, and Vianne and her daughters find the beautiful French village changed in unexpected ways: women veiled in black, the scent of spices in the air, and facing the church, a minaret. Most surprising of all, her old nemesis, Francis Reynaud, desperately needs her help. Can Vianne work her magic once again? |
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LARGE PRINT The remarkable, little-known story of Belle da Costa Greene, J. P. Morgan's personal librarian-who became one of the most powerful women in New York despite the dangerous secret she kept in order to make her dreams come true, She is the daughter of Richard Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard and well-known advocate for equality. |
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The discovery of a dead infant in an Amish barn shakes Lancaster County to its core. But the police investigation leads to a more shocking disclosure: circumstantial evidence suggests that eighteen-year-old Katie Fisher, an unmarried Amish woman believed to be the newborn's mother, took the child's life. When Ellie Hathaway, a disillusioned big-city attorney, comes to Paradise, Pennsylvania, to defend Katie, two cultures collide -- and for the first time in her high-profile career, Ellie faces a system of justice very different from her own. |
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A beautifully observed and deeply funny novel of May Attaway, a university gardener who sets out on an odyssey to reconnect with four old friends over the course of a year. |
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A desperate, gritty story set against a backdrop of hard knocks and hard times, Donna Everhart’s historically researched The Saints of Swallow Hill is the triumphant story of unlikely bonds fatefully formed among the turpentine camps in the rural, Depression era South. |
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Sisters Sylvie and Amy Lee have the same Chinese immigrant parents but different childhoods. Amy was raised in New York, while Sylvie grew up in the Netherlands with their grandmother and cousins. Sylvie returns to the small Dutch village to care for her grandmother, but after she dies, Sylvie disappears. Amy swallows her fears and travels abroad, determined to find her sister. As she unravels the mystery of Sylvie’s disappearance, Sylvie tells her own version of the story in flashbacks, and the girls’ mother weighs in with her own perspective. Reading Kwok’s third novel is like watching an artist create a pencil drawing; she lays down the initial outline, then builds on it with shading and nuance until everything comes together at the stunning end. |
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This book combines a legendary literary love story--the decades-long affair between Pasternak and his mistress and muse, Olga Ivinskaya, who was sent to the Gulag and inspired Doctor Zhivago's heroine, Lara--with a narrative about two women empowered to lead lives of extraordinary intrigue and risk. |
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Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. |
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Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she's high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie's children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise. |
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(NONFICTION) A young poet tells the inspiring story of his migration from El Salvador to the United States at the age of nine in this “gripping memoir” (NPR) of bravery, hope, and finding family. |
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Set during the Greek Heroic Age, it is a retelling of the Trojan War as told from the perspective of Patroclus. The novel follows Patroclus' relationship with Achilles, from their initial meeting to their exploits during the Trojan War, with focus on their romantic relationship. |
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Samuel “Sooley” Sooleymon is a raw, young talent with big hoop dreams—and even bigger challenges off the court. In the summer of his seventeenth year, Samuel Sooleymon gets the chance of a lifetime: a trip to the United States with his South Sudanese teammates to play in a showcase basketball tournament. |
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(NONFICTION) In pursuit of the wild, solitary, predatory octopus, popular naturalist Sy Montgomery has practiced true immersion journalism. This fascinating touching informative entertaining (Daily Beast) book explores the emotional and physical world of the octopus a surprisingly complex, intelligent, and spirited creature and the remarkable connections it makes with humans. |
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Tristran Thorn begins a wondrous journey into the land of Faerie, looking for a fallen star to win the hand of his love, Victoria Forrester. Though no one is allowed outside the wall that borders Wall, Tristran is granted passage due to the unusual circumstances of his birth. The product of a chance meeting between his father and the slave of a witch, Tristran had been delivered to Wall in a basket eighteen years ago. In love with Victoria Forester, Tristran promises to retrieve a fallen star in order to win her hand. Tristran travels to Faerie, meeting many magical characters and creatures on his quest. |
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A provocative novel of morality and miracles, science and sacrifice set in the Amazon rainforest--a gripping adventure story and a profound look at the difficult choices we make in the name of discovery and love. |
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(NONFICTION) A Strangely fascinating tale of modern-day hermit Christopher Knight, who spent 27 years living in a hidden tent in the frigid central Maine woods. In 1986, then 20-year-old Knight disappeared. He was not seen again until 2013, when he was arrested for theft. Knight later admitted to stealing food and other supplies frequently from frustrated locals, who dealt with years of repeated break-ins. |
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The story of a young Black woman who is wrongly accused of kidnapping while babysitting a white child, and the events that follow the incident. |
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In the spirit of The Known World and The Underground Railroad, a profound debut about the unlikely bond between two freedmen who are brothers and the Georgia farmer whose alliance will alter their lives, and his, forever. |
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(NONFICTION) Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and #1 bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, David and Goliath, and What the Dog Saw, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers--and why they often go wrong. |
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In a remote mountain village, the survival of an Akha tribe, one of China's 55 ethnic minorities, depends on tea. Rigid traditions prohibit Li-yan from keeping her newborn. She saves her daughter by leaving her in a nearby town, wrapped in blankets with a tea cake that hints at her distinctive heritage. Over the course of decades, See (China Dolls, 2014) reveals Li-yan's exceptional story of departure and eventual return. Interspersed with Li-yan's peripatetic experiences are those of her daughter, the titular tea girl, divulged by medical reports, letters, even the transcript of a group therapy session for adopted Chinese teens. |
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The beloved New York Times bestselling author reflects on home, family, friendships and writing in this deeply personal collection of essays. |
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In the luxury facility, four elderly residents--each retired, sharp, and energetic--meet once a week in the Jigsaw Room, where they covertly gather to crack actual cold case murders. The group was founded by resident Elizabeth, a shrewd and devious former spy, and Penny, a retired police detective inspector who provided the cases to solve. With Penny now in a coma, however, Elizabeth keeps the club in session, continuing to work cold cases with other fellow residents and mystery aficionados. They include dapper Ibrahim, a psychiatrist; brassy, tattooed Ron, a former trade union official; and unassuming Joyce, a nurse whose interspersed diary commentary enlighten readers to the often-zany inner workings of the club. |
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In this quirky debut thriller, a delightfully oddball team of academics relies as much on brains as brawn in challenging a powerful "Society" with mysterious aims. Princeton mathematics professor Albert Puddles finds his blissfully ordered life thrown into confusion after he helps the police make sense of a clue at a murder scene: a "game tree" used in logic theory. |
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Ariel accompanies her new husband John on a brief business trip to Lisbon. When he goes missing she frantically tries to enlist the help of the local police and the American embassy. Initially, they don’t take her concerns too seriously, but they keep an eye her - just in case - and find out more about Ariel and John than they bargained for. |
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A collection of seventeen wonderful short stories showing that two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks is as talented a writer as he is an actor. |
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This book chronicles the unconventional love affair of Scottish literary giant Robert Louis Stevenson and American divorcée Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne. They meet in rural France in 1875, when Fanny, having run away from her philandering husband back in California, takes refuge there with her children. Stevenson too is escaping from his life, running from family pressure to become a lawyer. And so begins a turbulent love affair that will last two decades and span the world. |
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This follow-up to Beartown is about hockey--and everything else. Backman explores violence, political maneuvering, communities, feminism, sexuality, criminality, the role of sports in society, and what makes us all tick. |
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Spanning 30 years and two generations, the book follows twin sisters Desiree and Stella as they run away from home in Mallard, LA, a tiny town populated by light-skinned African Americans, to New Orleans, and follow dramatically different paths in life. |
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For fourteen years, Letty Espinosa has worked three jobs around San Francisco to make ends meet while her mother raised her children--Alex, now fifteen, and Luna, just six--in their tiny apartment on a forgotten spit of wetlands near the bay. But now Letty's parents are returning to Mexico, and Letty must step up and become a mother for the first time in her life. Navigating this new terrain is challenging for Letty, especially as Luna desperately misses her grandparents and Alex, who is falling in love with a classmate, is unwilling to give his mother a chance By a local author. |
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The story Owen tells in Where the Water Goes is crucial to our future: how a patchwork of engineering marvels, byzantine legal agreements, aging infrastructure, and neighborly cooperation enables life to flourish in the desert —and the disastrous consequences we face when any part of this tenuous system fails. |
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When you read this book, you will make many assumptions. You will assume you are reading about a jealous ex-wife. You will assume she is obsessed with her replacement - a beautiful, younger woman who is about to marry the man they both love. You will assume you know the anatomy of this tangled love triangle. Assume nothing. |
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A groundbreaking thriller about a vigilante on a Native American reservation who embarks on a dangerous mission to track down the source of a heroin influx. |
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(NONFICTION) An intimate, revelatory book exploring the ways we can care for and repair ourselves when life knocks us down. Sometimes you slip through the cracks: unforeseen circumstances like an abrupt illness, the death of a loved one, a break-up, or a job loss can derail a life. These periods of dislocation can be lonely and unexpected. For May, her husband fell ill, her son stopped attending school, and her own medical issues led her to leave a demanding job. Wintering explores how she not only endured this painful time, but embraced the singular opportunities it offered. A moving personal narrative shot through with lessons from literature, mythology, and the natural world, May's story offers instruction on the transformative power of rest and retreat. |
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'Wish You Were Here' is a novel about life during the pandemic. Picoult's pandemic-inspired story focusing on a character stranded in the Galápagos Islands highlights how events can change us — and offer perspective. |
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The Women is the story of one woman going to war. A story about deep friendships and bold patriotism, the novel delves into the life of Frances, “Frankie,” McGrath, who suddenly dares to imagine a different future for herself than her sunny, sheltered California existence. She joins the Army Nurse Corp when her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, and the story chronicles a memorable heroine whose idealism and courage come to define an era. |
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Three women, haunted by the past and the secrets they hold. Set at the end of World War II, in a crumbling Bavarian castle that once played host to all of German high society, a powerful and propulsive story of three widows whose lives and fates become intertwined--an affecting, shocking, and ultimately redemptive novel. |
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An English nurse brought to a small Irish village to observe what appears to be a miracle-a girl said to have survived without food for months-soon finds herself fighting to save the child's life. Tourists flock to the cabin of eleven-year-old Anna O'Donnell, who believes herself to be living off manna from heaven, and a journalist is sent to cover the sensation. Lib Wright, a veteran of Florence Nightingale's Crimean campaign, is hired to keep watch over the girl. |
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