Kits are loaned for six weeks. Kits may be placed on hold, but we cannot guarantee that they will be available for a specific day. The overdue fee is $1.00 a day.
1. The gendarme. By Mark T. Mustian
294 Pages
Contains: 10 regular print copies
To those around him, Emmet Conn is a ninety-two-year-old man on the verge of senility. But what becomes frighteningly clear to Emmet is that the sudden, realistic dreams he is having are memories of events he, and many others, have denied or purposely forgotten. The Gendarme is a unique love story that explores the power of memory- and the ability of people, individually and collectively, to forget. Depicting how love can transcend nationalities and politics, how racism creates divisions where none truly exist, and how the human spirit fights to survive even in the face of hopelessness, this is a transcendent novel.
2. This Must be the Place. By Kate Racculia
350 Pages
Contains: 10 regular print copies
The Darby-Jones boardinghouse in Ruby Falls, New York, is home to Mona Jones and her daughter, Oneida, two loners and self-declared outcasts who have formed a perfectly insular family unit: the two of them and the three eclectic boarders living in their house. But their small, quiet life is upended when Arthur Rook shows up in the middle of a nervous breakdown, devastated by the death of his wife, carrying a pink shoe box containing all his wife's mementos and keepsakes, and holding a postcard from sixteen years ago, addressed to Mona but never sent. Slowly the contents of the box begin to fit together to tell a story—one of a powerful friendship, a lost love, and a secret that, if revealed, could change everything that Mona, Oneida, and Arthur know to be true. Or maybe the stories the box tells and the truths it brings to life will teach everyone about love—how deeply it runs, how strong it makes us, and how even when all seems lost, how tightly it brings us together. With emotional accuracy and great energy, This Must Be the Place introduces memorable, charming characters that refuse to be forgotten.
3. Woodsburner. By John Pipkin
384 Pages
Contains: 10 regular print copies
Woodsburner springs from a little-known event in the life of one of America's most iconic figures, Henry David Thoreau. On April 30, 1844, a year before he built his cabin on Walden Pond, Thoreau accidentally started a forest fire that destroyed three hundred acres of the Concord woods. Against the background of Thoreau's fire, John Pipkin's debut penetrates the mind of the young philosopher while also painting a panorama of the young nation at a formative moment. Pipkin's Thoreau is a lost soul, plagued by indecision, resigned to a career designing pencils for his father's factory while dreaming of better things. On the day of the fire, his path will intersect with three very different local citizens, each of whom also harbors a secret dream. Oddmund Hus, a lovable Norwegian farmhand, pines for the wife of his brutal employer. Eliott Calvert, a prosperous bookseller, is also a hilariously inept aspiring playwright. And Caleb Dowdy preaches fire and brimstone to his congregation through an opium haze. Each of their lives, like Thoreau's, is changed forever by the fire.
4. People of the Book. By Geraldine Brooks
372 Pages
Contains: 10 regular print copies
In 1996, a rare book expert is offered the job of a lifetime: analysis and conservation of a mysterious, beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain and recently saved from destruction during the shelling of Sarajevo's libraries. When Hanna Heath discovers a series of tiny artifacts in the book's ancient binding - an insect-wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair - she begins to unlock the mysteries of the book's eventful past and to uncover the dramatic stories of those who created it and those who risked everything to protect it. In Bosnia during World War II, a Muslim risks his life to protect it from the Nazis. In the hedonistic salons of fin-de-siecle Vienna, the book becomes a pawn in the struggle against the city's rising anti-Semitism. In Venice in 1609, a Catholic priest saves the book from the Inquisition's fires. In Taragona in 1492, the scribe who wrote the text sees his family destroyed by the agonies of forced exile. And in Seville in 1480, the reason for the manuscript's extraordinary illuminations is finally disclosed. Hanna's investigations unexpectedly plunge her into the intrigues of fine art forgers and ultranationalist fanatics. Her experiences will test her belief in herself and in the man she has come to love.
5. Family Lore. By Elizabeth Acevedo
371 Pages
Contains: 7 regular print copies, 2 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides she wants a living wake --- a party to bring her family and community together to celebrate the long life she’s led --- her sisters are surprised. Has Flor foreseen her own death, or someone else’s? Does she have other motives? She refuses to tell her sisters: Matilde, Pastora and Camila.
But Flor isn’t the only person with secrets: her sisters are hiding things, too. And the next generation, cousins Ona and Yadi, face tumult of their own. Spanning the three days prior to the wake, FAMILY LORE traces the lives of each of the Marte women, weaving together past and present, Santo Domingo and New York City.
6. Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. By Helen Simonson
359 Pages
Contains: 10 regular print copies
You are about to travel to Edgecombe St. Mary, a small village in the English countryside filled with rolling hills, thatched cottages, and a cast of characters both hilariously original and as familiar as the members of your own family. Among them is Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired), the unlikely hero of Helen Simonson's wondrous debut. Wry, courtly, opinionated, and completely endearing, Major Pettigrew is one of the most indelible characters in contemporary fiction, and from the very first page of this remarkable novel he will steal your heart. The Major leads a quiet life valuing the proper things that Englishmen have lived by for generations: honor, duty, decorum, and a properly brewed cup of tea. But then his brother's death sparks an unexpected friendship with Mrs. Jasmina Ali, the Pakistani shopkeeper from the village. Drawn together by their shared love of literature and the loss of their respective spouses, the Major and Mrs. Ali soon find their friendship blossoming into something more. But village society insists on embracing him as the quintessential local and her as the permanent foreigner. Can their relationship survive the risks one takes when pursuing happiness in the face of culture and tradition?
7. The Good Daughters. By Joyce Maynard
288 Pages
Contains: 10 regular print copies
They were born on the same day, in the same small New Hampshire hospital—but Ruth Plank and Dana Dickerson are different in nearly every way. Ruth is an artist, a romantic with a rich, passionate, imaginative life—the fifth daughter born to a gentle, caring farmer and his stolid wife. Raised by a pair of capricious drifters, Dana is a scientist and realist whose faith is firmly planted in the natural world. From the 1950s to the present, the lives of the “birthday sisters” parallel and oddly intersect, as each struggles to find her place in a world in which she has never truly felt she belonged. Sharing little except a birth date—and a love for Dana’s wild and beautiful older brother, Ray—two virtual strangers will travel alternate paths winding through first love, first sex, marriage, parenthood, divorce, and tragic loss...until both are forced to reevaluate themselves and each other when past secrets and forgotten memories unexpectedly come to light.
8. Art of Racing in the Rain. By Garth Stein
336 Pages
Contains: 10 regular print copies
Enzo knows he is different from other dogs: a philosopher with a nearly human soul (and an obsession with opposable thumbs), he has educated himself by watching television extensively, and by listening very closely to the words of his master, Denny Swift, an up-and-coming race car driver. Through Denny, Enzo has gained tremendous insight into the human condition, and he sees that life, like racing, isn't simply about going fast. Using the techniques needed on the race track, one can successfully navigate all of life's ordeals. On the eve of his death, Enzo takes stock of his life, recalling all that he and his family have been through: the sacrifices Denny has made to succeed professionally; the unexpected loss of Eve, Denny's wife; the three-year battle over their daughter, Zoe, whose maternal grandparents pulled every string to gain custody. In the end, despite what he sees as his own limitations, Enzo comes through heroically to preserve the Swift family, holding in his heart the dream that Denny will become a racing champion with Zoe at his side. Having learned what it takes to be a compassionate and successful person, the wise canine can barely wait until his next lifetime, when he is sure he will return as a man
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12. World and Town. By Gish Jen
400 Pages
Contains: 10 regular print copies
Hattie Kong---the spirited offspring of a descendant of Confucius and an American missionary to China---has, in her fiftieth year of living in the United States, lost both her husband and her best friend to cancer. But now, two years later, it is time for Hattie to start over. She moves to the town of Riverlake, where she is soon joined by an immigrant Cambodian family on the road from their inner-city troubles, as well as---quite unexpectedly---by a just-retired neuroscientist ex-lover named Carter Hatch. All of them are, like Hattie, looking for a new start in a town that might once have represented the rock-solid base of American life but that is itself challenged, in 2001, by cell-phone towers and chain stores, struggling family farms and fundamentalist Christians. What Hattie makes of this situation is at the center of a novel that asks deep and absorbing questions about religion, home, America, What neighbors are, what love is, and, in the largest sense, what "Worlds" we make of the world.
13. I Still Dream about You. By Fannie Flagg
315 Pages
Contains: 4 regular print copies, 6 large print copies and 2 audio book CDs
Meet Maggie Fortenberry, a still beautiful former Miss Alabama. To others, Maggie’s life seems practically perfect—she’s lovely, charming, and a successful agent at Red Mountain Realty. Still, Maggie can’t help but wonder how she wound up living a life so different from the one she dreamed of as a child. But just when things seem completely hopeless, and the secrets of Maggie’s past drive her to a radical plan to solve it all, Maggie discovers, quite by accident, that everybody, it seems, has at least one little secret.
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15. The Zookeeper's Wife. By Diane Ackerman
368 Pages
Contains: 4 regular print copies, 6 large print copies and 2 audio book CDs
Tells the remarkable WWII story of Jan Zabinski, the director of the Warsaw Zoo, and his wife, Antonina, who, with courage and coolheaded ingenuity, sheltered 300 Jews as well as Polish resisters in their villa and in animal cages and sheds.
16. The Good American. By Alex George
381 Pages
Contains: 10 regular print copies
It is 1904. When Frederick and Jette must flee her disapproving mother, where better to go than America, the land of the new? Originally set to board a boat to New York, at the last minute, they take one destined for New Orleans instead ("What's the difference? They're both new"), and later find themselves, more by chance than by design, in the small town of Beatrice, Missouri. Not speaking a word of English, they embark on their new life together. Poignant, funny, and heartbreaking, A Good American is a novel about being an outsider-in your country, in your hometown, and sometimes even in your own family. It is a universal story about our search for home.
17. The Snow Child. By Eowyn Ivey
423 Pages
Contains: 10 regular print copies
Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.
18. Alice Bliss. By Laura Harrington
380 Pages
Contains: 10 regular print copies
Tomboy Alice Bliss is heartbroken when she learns that her father, Matt, is being deployed to Iraq. Matt will miss seeing Alice blossom into a full-blown teenager: she'll learn to drive, join the track team, go to her first dance, and fall in love—all while trying to be strong for her mother, Angie, and her precocious little sister. But the phone calls from her father are never long enough. At once universal and very personal, Alice Bliss is a profoundly moving story about those who are left at home during wartime and a small-town teenage girl bravely facing the future.
19. Reserved for future kit
20. Beautiful Ruins. By Jess Walter
337 Pages
Contains: 10 regular print copies
The acclaimed, award-winning author of the national bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets returns with his funniest, most romantic, and most purely enjoyable novel yet: the story of an almost-love affair that begins on the Italian coast in 1962, and is rekindled in Hollywood fifty years later.
21. The Chaperone. By Laura Moriarty
367 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
Only a few years before becoming a famous silent-film star and an icon of her generation, a fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks leaves Wichita, Kansas, to study with the prestigious Denishawn School of Dancing in New York. Much to her annoyance, she is accompanied by a thirty-six-year-old chaperone, who is neither mother nor friend. Cora Carlisle, a complicated but traditional woman with her own reasons for making the trip, has no idea what she's in for. Young Louise, already stunningly beautiful and sporting her famous black bob with blunt bangs, is known for her arrogance and her lack of respect for convention. Ultimately, the five weeks they spend together will transform their lives forever.
22. GI Brides: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love. By Duncan Barrett
592 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 2 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
Worn down by years of war and hardship, girls like Sylvia, Margaret, and Gwendolyn were thrilled when American GI's arrived in Britain with their exotic accents, handsome uniforms and aura of Hollywood glamour. Others, like Rae, who distrusted the Yanks, were eventually won over by their easy charm. So when VE Day finally came, for the 70,000 women who'd become GI brides, it was tinged with sadness--it meant leaving their homeland behind to follow their husbands across the Atlantic. And the long voyage was just the beginning of an even bigger journey. Adapting to a new culture thousands of miles from home, often with a man they barely knew, was difficult-but these women survived the Blitz and could cope with anything. GI Brides shares the sweeping, compelling, and moving true stories of four women who gave up everything and crossed an ocean for love.
23. Reserved for future kit
24. The Man Who Planted Trees. By Jean Giono
74 Pages
Contains: 10 regular print copies
Story of Elzeard Bouffier, a man of great simplicity and determination. He travels to Provence, in southeastern France and there alone with his sheep and dog, he builds a stone house and daily plants one hundred acorns.
25. The Boston Girl. By Anita Diamant
320 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
A story about family ties and values, friendship and feminism told through the eyes of a young Jewish woman growing up in Boston in the early twentieth century. Addie Baum is The Boston Girl, born in 1900 to immigrant parents who were unprepared for and suspicious of America and its effect on their three daughters. Growing up in the North End, then a teeming multicultural neighborhood, Addie's intelligence and curiosity take her to a world her parents can't imagine--a world of short skirts, movies, celebrity culture, and new opportunities for women. Addie wants to finish high school and dreams of going to college. She wants a career and to find true love. Eighty-five-year-old Addie tells the story of her life to her twenty-two-year-old granddaughter, who has asked her "How did you get to be the woman you are today."
26. A Man Called Ove, By Fredrik Backman
337 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
Meet Ove. He's a curmudgeon; the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his bedroom window. He has staunch principles, strict routines, and a short fuse. People call him 'the bitter neighbor from hell'. But must Ove be bitter just because he doesn't walk around with a smile plastered to his face all the time? Behind the cranky exterior there is a story and a sadness. So when one November morning a chatty young couple with two chatty young daughters move in next door and accidentally flatten Ove's mailbox, it is the lead-in to a comical and heartwarming tale of unkempt cats, unexpected friendship, and the ancient art of backing up a U-Haul. All of which will change one cranky old man and a local residents' association to their very foundations.
27. The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, By Gabrielle Zevin.
260 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
When his most prized possession, a rare collection of Poe poems, is stolen, bookstore owner A. J. Fikry begins isolating himself from his friends, family and associates before receiving a mysterious package that compels him to remake his life.
28. Orphan Train, By Christina Baker Kline
278 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
Close to aging out of the foster care system, Molly Ayer takes a position helping an elderly woman named Vivian and discovers that they are more alike than different as she helps Vivian solve a mystery from her past.
29. The Hamilton Affair. By Elizabeth Cobbs
408 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
The sweeping, tumultuous, true love story of Alexander Hamilton and Elizabeth Schuyler, from tremulous beginning to bittersweet ending; his at a dueling ground on the shores of the Hudson River, hers more than half a century later after a brave, successful life.
30. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. By Gail Honeyman
390 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
Smart, warm, uplifting, this book is the story of an out-of-the ordinary heroine whose deadpan weirdness and unconscious wit make for an irresistible journey as she realizes the only way to survive is to open your heart.
31. Lilac Girls. By Martha Hall Kelly
487 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
Inspired by the life of a real World War II heroine, this debut novel reveals a story of love, redemption, and secrets that were hidden for decades. In 1939, a young American socialite named Caroline Ferriday begins to take an interest in aiding the war effort in France. She eventually learns of the dire situation at Ravensbruck, an all female concentration camp, and starts a campaign of her own to assist its former prisoners.
32. The Alice Network. By Kate Quinn
503 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
Two women – a female spy recruited to the real-life Alice Network in France during World War I and an unconventional American socialite searching for her cousin in 1947 – are brought together in a mesmerizing story of courage and redemption.
33. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. By J.D. Vance
272 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.
34. An American Marriage. By Tayari Jones
308 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. This stirring love story is a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control.
35. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. By Cheryl Strayed
315 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe - and built her back up again. Strayed faces down rattlesnakes and black bears, intense heat and record snowfalls, and both the beauty and loneliness of the trail. Told with great suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild vividly captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.
36. Little Fires Everywhere. By Celeste Ng
338 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned—from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives it residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.
Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood—and the danger of believing that following the rules can overt disaster.
273 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
Who says you can’t run away from your problems?
You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can’t say yes—it would be too awkward—you can’t say no—it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world.
QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town?
ANSWER: You accept them all.
38. Before We Were Yours. By Lisa Wingate
342 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four siblings live a magical life aboard their family’s Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge—until strangers arrive in force.
Based on a notorious real-life scandal—in which the director of a Memphis-based adoption organization kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families—this riveting tale reminds us how, even when the paths we take can lead to many places, the heart never forgets where we belong.
39. A Gentleman in Moscow. By Amor Towles
462 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
When, in 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, he is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him a doorway into a much larger world of emotional discovery.
40. Ordinary Grace. By William Krueger
307 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
Told from Frank’s perspective forty years after the fateful summer of 1961, Ordinary Grace is a brilliantly moving account of a boy standing at the door of his young manhood, trying to understand a world that seems to be falling apart around him. It is an unforgettable novel about discovering the terrible price of wisdom and the enduring grace of God.
41. Unsheltered. By Barbara Kingsolver
480 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
Brilliantly executed and compulsively readable, Unsheltered is the story of two families, in two centuries, who live at the corner of Sixth and Plum, as they navigate the challenges of surviving a world in the throes of major cultural shifts.
42. Once Upon a River. By Diane Setterfield
464 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
On a dark midwinter’s night in an ancient inn on the river Thames, an extraordinary event takes place. The regulars are telling stories to while away the dark hours, when the door bursts open on a grievously wounded stranger. In his arms is the lifeless body of a small child. Hours later, the girls stirs, takes a breath and returns to life. Is it a miracle? Is it magic? Or can science provide an explanation? These questions have many answers, some of them quit dark indeed. Three families are keen to claim her. But the return of a lost child is not without complications and no matter how heartbreaking the past losses, no matter how precious the child herself, this girl cannot be everyone’s. Each family has mysteries of its own, and many secrets must be revealed before the girl’s identity can be known.
496 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan. So begins the sweeping saga of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history. Through desperate struggles and hard-won triumphs, its members are bound together by deep roots as they face enduring questions of faith, family, and identity.
44. The Dutch House. By Ann Patchett
337 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. Cyril’s son Danny and his older sister Maeve are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from and find that all they have to count on is one another.
45. Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II. By Liza Mundy
640 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
Recruited by the U.S. Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than ten thousand women served as code-breakers 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 them. A strict vow of secrecy nearly erased their efforts from history; now, through dazzling research and interviews with surviving code girls, best selling author Liza Mundy brings to life this riveting and vital story of American courage, service, and scientific accomplishment.
404 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
The story about the American Olympic triumph in Nazi Germany. Out of the depths of the Depression comes an irresistible story about beating the odds and finding hope in the most desperate of time – the improbable, intimate account of how nine working-class boys from the American West showed the world at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin what true grit really meant.
47. There There. By Tommy Orange
294 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
As we learn the reasons that each person is attending the Big Oakland Powwow—some generous, some fearful, some violent—momentum builds toward a shocking yet inevitable conclusion that changes everything. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life back together after his uncle’s death and has come to work at the powwow to honor his uncle’s memory.
Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil, who has taught himself traditional Indian dance through YouTube videos and will perform in public for the very first time. There will be glorious communion, and a spectacle of sacred tradition and pageantry. And there will be sacrifice, and heroism, and loss.
48. Where the Crawdads Sing. By Delia Owens
384 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life – until the unthinkable happens.
49. Becoming. By Michelle Obama
426 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America, she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history. And with unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both in public and private. A deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations.
50. The Yellow Bird Sings. By Jennifer Rosner
294 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
As Nazi soldiers round up the Jews in their town, Roza and her 5-year-old daughter, Shira, flee, seeking shelter in a neighbor’s barn. Hidden in the hayloft day and night, Shira struggles to stay still and quiet, as music pulses through her and the farmyard outside beckons. To soothe her daughter and pass the time, Roza tells her a story about a girl in an enchanted garden: the girl is forbidden from making a sound, so the yellow bird sings. He sings whatever the girl composes in her head: high-pitched trills of piccolo; low-throated growls of contrabassoon. Music helps the flowers bloom.
51. The Henna Artist. By Min Jin Lee
384 Pages
Contains: 7 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
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. Known for her original designs and sage advice, Lakshmi must tread carefully to avoid the jealous gossips who could ruin her reputation and her livelihood. As she pursues her dream of an independent life, she is startled one day when she is confronted by her husband, who has tracked her down these many years later with a high-spirited young woman in tow – a sister Lakshmi never knew she had. Suddenly the caution that she has carefully cultivated as protection is threatened. Still she perseveres, applying her talents and lifting up those that surround her as she does.
52. Death at Greenway. By Lori Rader-Day
448 Pages
Contains: 7 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
Bridey Kelly has come to Greenway House – the beloved holiday home of Agatha Christie – in disgrace. A terrible mistake at St. Prisca’s Hospital in London has led to her dismissal as a nurse trainee, and her only chance for redemption is a position in the countryside caring for children evacuated to safety from the Blitz. Greenway is a beautiful home full of riddles: wondrous curious not to be touched, restrictions on rooms not to be entered, and a generous library, filled with books about murder.
53. Dear Edward. By Ann Napolitano
340 Pages
Contains: 7 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
One summer morning, twelve-year-old Edward Adler, his beloved older brother, his parents, and 183 other passengers board a flight in Newark headed for Los Angeles. Among them are a Wall Street wunderkind, a young woman coming to terms with an unexpected pregancy, an injured veteran returning from Afghanistan, a business tycoon, and a free-spirited woman running away from her controlling husband. Halfway across the country, the plane crashes. Edward is the sole survivor. Edward’s story captures the attention of the nation, but he struggles to find a place in a world without his family. Dear Edward is at once a transcendent coming-of-age-story, a multidimensional portrait of an unforgettable cast of characters, and a breathtaking illustration of all the ways a broken heart learns to love again.
54. American Dirt. By Jeanine Cummins.
459 Pages
Contains: 7 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
Llydia and her son Luca must escape from the Mexican city of Acapulco after an unspeakable tragedy. They are forced to become migrants and then need to ride La Bestia – the train network that heads towards the United States. Several characters join her, but she needs to watch out for the head of a drug cartel, who wants her dead. It is a story of constant tension, desperation, luck and small glimpses of hope.
55. A Prayer for Owen Meany. By John Irving.
637 Pages
Contains: 7 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
Considered to be the best novel by the author of The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany serves as a eulogy to the main character, Owen Meany. Owen believes himself to be an “instrument of God,” and all of his actions and decisions seem to be pre-ordained. A moving portrayal of growing up in southern New Hampshire before the violent days of the sixties and the Vietnam War.
56. Caleb’s Crossing. By Geraldine Brooks.
306 Pages
Contains: 7 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
Betty Mayfield is a restless and curious young woman growing up on Martha’s Vineyard in the 1660s amid a small band of pioneering English settlers. At twelve, she meets Caleb, the young son of a chieftain, and the two forge a secret bond that draws each into the alien world of the other. Bethia’s father is a Calvinist minister who seeks to convert the native Wampanoag, and Caleb becomes a prize in the contest between old ways and new, eventually becoming the first Native American graduate of Harvard College. Inspired by a true story and narrated by the irrestible Bethia.
57. A Season Unknown. By Keith Cohen.
315 Pages
Contains: 10 regular print copies
From the time he is a small child, Malach reveals unique and unexplained connections with the animals that inhabit the wilderness surrounding him. As Malach grows, so too does his knowledge of the workings and mysteries of the natural world. His mother, Judith, fearful for him and struggling to understand the gift her son possesses, is determined to protect him at all costs. While grappling with the uncertainty of where Malach's future will lead, Judith must confront her own painful and secretive past. Approaching adulthood, joined by his brilliant and fiery girlfriend, Ginny, Malach brings a profound awareness of the earth to a world facing a precariously changing climate and existential perils. Together they begin to deliver a message of transformation, sacrifice, and even revolution in how we live our lives. Their story of love, and triumph over loss, is at the heart of this urgent coming-of-age story where time is no longer a luxury.
58. All the Light We Cannot See. By Anthony Doerr
531 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
A blind French girl on the run from the German occupation and a German orphan-turned-Resistance tracker struggle with respective beliefs after meeting on the Brittany coast.
59. Lessons in Chemistry. By Bonnie Garmus
390 Pages
Contains: 6 regular print copies, 3 large print copies and 1 audio book CD
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 as an average woman. But it's the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant, Nobel-prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with--of all things--her mind. True chemistry results. But like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America's most beloved cooking show Supper at Six. Elizabeth's unusual approach to cooking ('combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride') proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn't just teaching women to cook. She's daring them to change the status quo.