Author: enelson

New Nonfiction for April

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We live in an upside-down culture. We wink at our vices as coping strategies while restricting our virtues to our online personas, where they won’t interfere with our real lives. And we wonder why we feel empty, exhausted, and directionless. But why do we do things that we know are harmful for us? Jonathan “JP” Pokluda wants you to know there’s a better, more fulfilling way to live, and it doesn’t involve looking inside yourself for the answers–because that’s not where you’ll find them.

Nobody sits us down and teaches us how to love. So we’re often thrown into relationships with nothing but romance movies and pop culture to help us muddle through. Until now. Instead of presenting love as an ethereal concept or a collection of clichés, Jay Shetty lays out specific, actionable steps to help you develop the skills to practice and nurture love better than ever before. By living Jay Shetty’s eight rules, we can all love ourselves, our partner, and the world better than we ever thought possible.

What makes a life fulfilling and meaningful? The simple but surprising answer is: relationships. The stronger our relationships, the more likely we are to live happy, satisfying, and overall healthier lives. In fact, the Harvard Study of Adult Development reveals that the strength of our connections with others can predict the health of both our bodies and our brains as we go through life. With warmth, wisdom, and compelling life stories, The Good Life shows us how we can make our lives happier and more meaningful through our connections to others.

For twelve years the Golden State Killer terrorized California, stalking victims and killing without remorse. Then he simply disappeared, for the next until an amateur DNA sleuth opened her laptop. In Barbara Rae-Venter reveals how she went from researching her family history as a retiree to hunting for a notorious serial killer—and how she became the nation’s leading authority on investigative genetic genealogy, the most dazzling new crime-fighting weapon to appear in decades.

 The Angel Makers is a true-crime story like no other–a 1920s midwife who may have been the century’s most prolific killer leading a murder ring of women responsible for the deaths of at least 160 men. The horror occurred in a rustic farming enclave in modern-day Hungary. To look at the unlikely lineup of murderesses–village wives, mothers, and daughters–was to come to the shocking realization that this could have happened anywhere, and to anyone.

A witty, provocative look inside the tumultuous marriages of five famous writers, illuminating the creative process as well as the role of money, fame, and power in these complex and fascinating relationships. The history of wives is largely one of silence, resilience, and forbearance. Toss in celebrity, male privilege, ruthless ambition, narcissism, misogyny, infidelity, alcoholism, and a mood disorder or two, and it’s easy to understand why the marriages of so many famous writers have been stormy, short-lived, and mutually destructive.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced us to rethink everything. Now, when it comes to envisioning a post-pandemic future, noted financial expert Jill Schlesinger hears one question over and over: How far should I really go to change my life? The Great Money Reset is your guide to getting serious and building your best life. A road map for navigating our present era, this book shows us how to take advantage of the seismic changes unfurling all around us to make big life improvements.

It is a moment shrouded in horror and mystery. Edgar Allan Poe died on October 7, 1849, at just forty, in a painful, utterly bizarre manner that would not have been out of place in one of his own tales of terror. What was the cause of his untimely death, and what happened to him during the three missing days before he was found on the streets of Baltimore, wearing ill-fitting clothes that were not his own? In a compelling dual-timeline narrative, Mark Dawidziak sheds new light on the enigmatic master of macabre.

When veteran war reporter Benjamin Hall woke up in Kyiv on the morning of March 14, 2022, he had no idea that, within hours, Russian bombs would nearly end his life. As a journalist for Fox News, Hall had worked in dangerous war zones like Syria and Afghanistan, but with three young daughters at home, life on the edge was supposed to be a thing of the past. Saved is a powerful memoir of family and friends, of life and healing, and of how to respond when you are tested in ways you never thought possible.

New DVDs Available at Your Library

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Based on the bestseller “A Man Called Ove,” A Man Called Otto tells the story of Otto Anderson (Tom Hanks), a grump who no longer sees purpose in his life following the loss of his wife. Otto is ready to end it all, but his plans are interrupted when a lively young family moves in next door, and he meets his match in quick-witted Marisol. She challenges him to see life differently, leading to an unlikely friendship that turns his world around.

A reclusive English teacher, living alone in the wake of a tragedy, attempts to reconnect with his teenage daughter for one last chance at redemption in filmmaker Darren Aronofsky’s transcendent, emotional epic. Nominated for three Academy Awards and featuring a career-defining performance from Brendan Fraser, The Whale is a deeply moving story of heartache, empathy, and grace.

From director-writer-producer Todd Field comes TÁR, starring Cate Blanchett as the iconic musician, Lydia Tár. The film examines the changing nature of power, its impact and durability in our modern world. Set in the international world of Western classical music, the film centers on Lydia Tár, widely considered one of the greatest living composer-conductors and the very first female director of a major German orchestra.

A young couple (Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicholas Hoult) travels to an exclusive island restaurant where the chef (Ralph Fiennes) has prepared a pricey, lavish menu. But it soon becomes clear that the dinner guests are about to be served some shocking surprises in this dark comedy written by Seth Reiss & Will Tracy, and directed by Mark Mylod.

Brad Pitt stars as Ladybug, an unlucky assassin determined to do his job peacefully after one too many gigs gone off the rails. Fate, however, may have other plans, as Ladybug’s latest mission puts him on a collision course with lethal adversaries from around the globe – all with connected, yet conflicting, objectives – on the world’s fastest train…and he’s got to figure out how to get off. 

Till is a profoundly emotional and cinematic film about the true story of Mamie Till-Mobley’s relentless pursuit of justice for her 14-year-old son, Emmett Till, who, in 1955, was lynched while visiting his cousins in Mississippi. In Mamie’s poignant journey of grief turned to action, we see the universal power of a mother’s ability to change the world.  The pursuit of justice became a galvanizing moment that helped lead to the creation of the civil rights movement.

From acclaimed filmmaker James Gray and featuring an all-star cast including Anthony Hopkins, Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong comes Armageddon Time. Set in 1980s Queens, New York, it is a deeply personal story about the strength of family, the complexity of friendship and the generational pursuit of the American Dream.

Idris Elba stars in this pulse-pounding thriller as Dr. Nate, a recently widowed husband who returns to South Africa on a long-planned trip to a game reserve. What begins as a journey of healing turns into a fearsome fight for survival as Dr. Nate and his daughters find themselves hunted by a massive, rogue lion intent on proving that the savannah has but one apex predator.

Veteran bounty hunter Max Borlund heads deep into Mexican territory to find and return Rachel Kidd, the wife of a wealthy businessman. After learning she actually fled from the abusive marriage, Max faces a choice: finish the job he’s been hired to do, or stand aside while ruthless mercenary outlaws and his longtime rival close in on a town that’s been his temporary sanctuary.

New Fiction for April

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Summer, 2021. Nell has come home at her family’s insistence to celebrate an anniversary. Fifty years ago, her father wrote The Golden Bones. Part picture book, part treasure hunt, Sir Frank Churcher created a fairy story about Elinore, a murdered woman whose skeleton was scattered all over England. Clues and puzzles in the pages of The Golden Bones led readers to seven sites where jewels were buried – gold and precious stones, each a different part of a skeleton. One by one, the tiny golden bones were dug up until only Elinore’s pelvis remained hidden.

It begins in an unnamed city nicknamed “the Fairest”, it is distinguished by many things from the river fair to the mountains that split the municipality in half; its theaters and many museums; the Morgue Ship; and, like all cities, but maybe especially so, by its essential unmappability. Dora, a former domestic servant at the university has a secret desire—to find where her brother went after he died, believing that the answer lies within The Museum of Psykical Research, where he worked when Dora was a child.

Following the success of her debut novel, American writer Althea James receives an invitation from Joseph Goebbels himself to participate in a culture exchange program in Germany. For a girl from a small town in Maine, 1933 Berlin seems to be sparklingly cosmopolitan, blossoming in the midst of a great change with the charismatic new chancellor at the helm. Then Althea meets a beautiful woman who promises to show her the real Berlin, and soon she’s drawn into a group of resisters who make her question everything she knows about her hosts–and herself.

When a prominent University of Wyoming professor goes missing, authorities are stumped. That is, until Joe Pickett makes two surprising discoveries while hunting down a wounded elk on his district as an epic spring storm descends upon him. First, Joe finds the professor’s vehicle parked on a remote mountainside. Then he finds the professor’s frozen and mutilated body. When he attempts to learn more, his investigation is obstructed by Federal agents, extreme environmentalists, and Governor Colter Allen.

Author and single mom Finlay Donovan has been in messes before―after all, she’s a pro at removing bloodstains for various unexpected reasons―but none quite like this. When Finlay and her nanny/partner-in-crime Vero accidentally destroyed a luxury car that they had “borrowed” in the process of saving the life of Finlay’s ex-husband, the Russian mob did her a favor and bought the car for her. And now Finlay owes them. Mob boss Feliks is still running the show from behind bars, and he has a task for Finlay: find and identify a contract killer before the cops do.

At a busy festival site on a warm spring night, a baby lies alone in her pram, her mother vanishing into the crowds. A year on, Kim Gillespie’s absence casts a long shadow as her friends and loved ones gather deep in the heart of South Australian wine country to welcome a new addition to the family. Joining the celebrations is federal investigator Aaron Falk. But as he soaks up life in the lush valley, he begins to suspect this tight-knit group may be more fractured than it seems.

Nisha Cantor lives the globetrotting life of the seriously wealthy, until her husband announces a divorce and cuts her off. Nisha is determined to hang onto her glamorous life. But in the meantime, she must scramble to cope–she doesn’t even have the shoes she was, until a moment ago, standing in. That’s because Sam Kemp – in the bleakest point of her life – has accidentally taken Nisha’s gym bag. But Sam hardly has time to worry about a lost gym bag–she’s struggling to keep herself and her family afloat.

Maya was a high school senior when her best friend, Aubrey, mysteriously dropped dead in front of the enigmatic man named Frank whom they’d been spending time with all summer. Seven years later, Maya lives in Boston with a loving boyfriend and is kicking the secret addiction that has allowed her to cope with what happened years ago, the gaps in her memories, and the lost time that she can’t account for. But her past comes rushing back when she comes across a recent YouTube video in which a young woman suddenly keels over and dies in a diner…

In the wake of an insignificant battle between two long-forgotten kingdoms in fourteenth-century southern India, a nine-year-old girl has a divine encounter that will change the course of history. After witnessing the death of her mother, the grief-stricken Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for a goddess, who tells her that she will be instrumental in the rise of a great city called Bisnaga – literally ‘victory city’ – the wonder of the world. Over the next two hundred and fifty years, Pampa Kampana’s life becomes deeply interwoven with Bisnaga’s.

New Audiobooks Available on the Libby App

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In May 1971, Pam Jackson and Sherri Miller were two seventeen-year-olds driving to an end-of-the-school-year party in a rundown Studebaker Lark when they seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth. Police back then didn’t do enough to try and find them. Investigators thirty years later did too much. Two families endure decades of pain as they await answers of what happened to their girls. When a third family is pulled into the mystery, they quickly learn their nightmare is just beginning.

Someone inside your house wants you dead, but no one believes you…Joanne knows how lucky she is. Richard is a wonderful husband, Evie is the most gorgeous baby girl couldn’t be better. Until Richard’s twenty-year-old daughter Chloe turns up. Chloe hasn’t spoken to her father since the day he married Joanne two years ago. But Chloe wants to make peace. She’ll even move in for a few weeks to help Joanne with the new baby. It sounds perfect, but when things happen that make Joanne feel like she’s losing her mind, she begins to wonder: Is Chloe really here to help?

It’s 1980, and Lillian Waters is hitting the road for the very last time. Jaded from her years in the music business, perpetually hungover, and diagnosed with career-ending vocal problems, Lillian cobbles together a nationwide farewell tour featuring some old hands from her early days playing honky-tonk bars in Washington State and Nashville, plus a few new ones. Exploring one unforgettable woman’s creativity, ambition, and sacrifices in a world—and an art form—made for men, The Farewell Tour asks us to consider how much of our past we can ever leave behind.

Toxic thoughts, depression, anxiety–our mental mess is frequently aggravated by a chaotic world and sustained by an inability to manage our runaway thoughts. But we shouldn’t settle into this mental mess as if it’s just our new normal. There’s hope and help available to us–and the road to healthier thoughts and peak happiness may actually be shorter than you think. Dr. Caroline Leaf provides a scientifically proven five-step plan to find and eliminate the root of anxiety, depression, and intrusive thoughts in your life.

A submerged car is pulled from the bottom of the lake. The driver has been shot in the back of the head and no other bodies are found. Only the legendary Dragon’s Heart remains inside. When it rises to the surface, greedy collectors from around the world gather. They’ll stop at nothing to gain possession of the priceless artifact. Only flower-breeder Zoey Phoenix stands in their way… Forget what you know…yet the past remembers.

1873. At an abandoned château on the outskirts of Paris, a dark séance is about to take place, led by acclaimed spiritualist Vaudeline D’Allaire. Known worldwide for her talent in conjuring the spirits of murder victims to ascertain the identities of the people who killed them, she is highly sought after by widows and investigators alike. Lenna Wickes has come to Paris to find answers about her sister’s death, but to do so, she must embrace the unknown and overcome her own logic-driven bias against the occult.

Production for the tenth season of Bake Week is ready to begin at the gothic estate of host and celebrity chef Betsy Martin, and everything seems perfect. The tent is up, the top-tier ingredients are aligned, and the crew has their cameras at the ready. The six contestants work to prove their culinary talents over the course of five days, while Betsy is less than thrilled to share the spotlight with a new cohost—the brash and unpredictable Archie Morris. But as the baking competition commences, things begin to go awry.

Hazel Rothbury is traveling all alone from her home in England aboard the celebrated ship Titanic. Following the untimely death of her father, Hazel’s mother is sending her to the US to work in a factory, so that she might send money back home to help her family make ends meet. But Hazel harbors a secret dream: She wants to be a journalist, and she just knows that if she can write and sell a story about the Titanic’s maiden voyage, she could earn enough money to support her family and not have to go to a sweatshop.

Carla Black’s life motto is “here for a good time, not for a long time.” She’s been travelling the world on her own in her vintage Jeep Wrangler for nearly a decade, stopping only long enough to replenish her adventure fund. Eamon Sullivan is a modern-day cartographer who creates digital maps. Fate throws them together when Carla arrives in Dublin for her best friend’s wedding and Eamon is tasked with picking her up from the airport. But what should be a simple drive across Ireland quickly becomes a chance at love – if only they choose it.

Books to Read to Commemorate Women’s History Month

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Ambassador Nikki R. Haley offers inspiring examples of a range of women who worked against obstacles and opposition to get things done – including Haley herself. As a brown girl growing up in Bamberg, South Carolina, no one would have predicted she would become the first minority female governor in America, the first female and the first minority governor in South Carolina, or the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Woven with stories from Haley’s own childhood and political career, this book will inspire the next generation of female leaders.

The Curies’ newly discovered element of radium makes gleaming headlines across the nation as the fresh face of beauty, and wonder drug of the medical community. Meanwhile, hundreds of girls toil amidst the glowing dust of the radium-dial factories. The glittering chemical covers their bodies from head to toe; they light up the night like industrious fireflies. With such a coveted job, these “shining girls” are the luckiest alive — until they begin to fall mysteriously ill.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her enslaved ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.

Toronto, 1926. Knowing that he will die without an heir, childless millionaire Charles Millar leaves behind a controversial will: the recipient of his fortune will be decided in a contest that will become a media sensation and be known as the Great Stork Derby. His money will go to the winner: the woman who bears the most children in the ten years after his death. Prize Women is an evocative and engrossing novel of motherhood, survival, and the heartbreaking decisions we make to protect the ones we love–even when it hurts those we care for most.

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. Liza Mundy brings to life this story of American courage, service, and scientific accomplishment.

Rosalind Franklin has always been an outsider―brilliant, but different. Whether working at the laboratory she adored in Paris or toiling at a university in London, she feels closest to the science, those unchanging laws of physics and chemistry that guide her experiments. When she is assigned to work on DNA, she believes she can unearth its secrets.  Marie Benedict’s powerful novel shines a light on a woman who sacrificed her life to discover the nature of our very DNA.

Set on the Korean island of Jeju, The Island of Sea Women follows Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls from very different backgrounds, as they begin working in the sea with their village’s all-female diving collective. This beautiful, thoughtful novel illuminates a unique and unforgettable culture, one where the women are in charge, engaging in dangerous physical work, and the men take care of the children. The Island of Sea Women introduces readers to the fierce female divers of Jeju Island and the dramatic history that shaped their lives.

Who says women don’t go to war? From Vikings and African queens to cross-dressing military doctors and WWII Russian fighter pilots, these are the stories of women for whom battle was not a metaphor. The woman warrior is always cast as an anomaly–Joan of Arc, not G.I. Jane. But women, it turns out, have always gone to war. In this fascinating, lively, and wide-ranging book, historian Pamela Toler draws from a lifetime of scouring books for mentions of women warriors to tell their stories and to consider why women go to war.

The true-life story of women’s experiences in the ‘Wild West’ is more gripping, more heart-rending, and more stirring than all the movies, novels, folk-legends and ballads that popular imagination has been able to create. Reading the extraordinary accounts they have left behind them, their experiences seem as strange to us today as it must have been to have lived through them, perhaps even stranger. They were put to the test, in terms of sheer survival, in ways that we can only dimly imagine.

New Nonfiction for March

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Sorrowful widows, vengeful jezebels, innocent maidens, wronged lovers, former slaves, even the occasional axe-murderess–America’s female ghosts differ widely in background, class, and circumstance. Yet one thing unites them: their ability to instill fascination and fear, long after their deaths. Here are the full stories behind some of the best-known among them, as well as the lesser-known–though no less powerful.

In life, moments arise when you have to decide your next move. When choosing whether to accept a new job, purchase a house, attend a school, or start a relationship, how do you settle on which direction to take? Trey Gowdy has found that most consequential decisions boil down to three simple options: start, stay, or leave. Over the years, Gowdy has made some great decisions and some lousy ones (and he admits to both). In Start, Stay, or Leave, he shares his hard-earned wisdom.

They risk their lives every day to protect and serve our homes, families and communities. Here are their most dramatic true stories, in their own unforgettable words. From the police academy to the precinct, Walk the Blue Line is a first-person tour through the days and nights of American policing. Those who wear a badge, doing their best to help people. These patrol officers and K9 handlers, sheriffs and detectives, reveal what it’s really like to wear the uniform, to carry the weight of the responsibility they’ve been given.

In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only sixty-five seconds at a time, and office workers average only three minutes. Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding that constantly switching from device to device and tab to tab was a diminishing and depressing way to live. He tried all sorts of self-help solutions–even abandoning his phone for three months–but nothing seemed to work. So Hari went on an epic journey –and he discovered that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong.

The summer before his senior year in college, Greg Melville worked at the cemetery in his hometown, and thanks to hour upon hour of pushing a mower over the grassy acres, he came to realize what a rich story the place told of his town and its history. Thus was born Melville’s lifelong curiosity with how, where, and why we bury and commemorate our dead. Melville’s Over My Dead Body is a wide-ranging history of cemeteries, places that have mirrored the passing eras in history but have also shaped it.

Anthony Bourdain’s death by suicide in June 2018 shocked people around the world. Bourdain seemed to have it all: an irresistible personality, a dream job, a beautiful family, and international fame. The reality, though, was more complicated than it seemed. Down and Out in Paradise is the first book to tell the full Bourdain story, and to show how Bourdain’s never-before-reported childhood traumas fueled both the creativity and insecurities that would lead him to a place of despair.

In 1943, as the war against Nazi Germany raged abroad, President Franklin Roosevelt had a critical goal: a face-to-face sit-down with his allies Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill. This first-ever meeting of the Big Three in Tehran, Iran, would decide some of the most crucial strategic details of the war. Yet when the Nazis found out about the meeting, their own secret plan took shape—an assassination plot that would’ve changed history.

Before losing his mother, twelve-year-old Prince Harry was known as the carefree one, the happy-go-lucky Spare to the more serious Heir. Grief changed everything. He struggled at school, struggled with anger, with loneliness—and, because he blamed the press for his mother’s death, he struggled to accept life in the spotlight. For the first time, Prince Harry tells his own story, chronicling his journey with raw, unflinching honesty. A landmark publication, Spare is full of insight, revelation, self-examination, and hard-won wisdom about the eternal power of love over grief.

Band of Brothers meets Argo in this dramatic and heartfelt dual memoir of the war in Afghanistan told by two men from opposite worlds. Always Faithful entwines the stories of Marine Major Tom Schueman, and his friend and Afghan interpreter, Zainullah “Zak” Zaki, as they describe their parallel lives, converging paths, and unbreakable bond in the face of overwhelming danger, culminating in Zak and his family’s harrowing escape from Kabul. The end result is an intensely personal and uniquely ground-level account of Tom and Zak’s experience.

New Fiction for March

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For Scott Hatcher, a former television writer turned struggling novelist with a failing marriage to boot, social-distancing and mask-wearing feel like fitting additions to his already surreal life. When his wife Marie and neighbor John Bergman disappear in the middle of the raging COVID-19 pandemic, Scott is naturally mystified and disturbed, but he is also about to learn that his picturesque neighborhood hides more than just the mundane routines of suburban life.

A methodical killer is targeting multigenerational families in and around Washington, DC—striking under cover of darkness, triggering no alarms, leaving no physical evidence of any kind. Alex isn’t the only one investigating. Also on the case is a charismatic true-crime author who sees patterns the detectives miss. The writer calls “The Family Man” a perfect crime story. Alex knows there is no perfect crime—the investigation should never become the story. Unless the ending falls somewhere between fact and fiction.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Twelve months after her younger sister Anahita’s death, Mitra Jahani reluctantly returns to her parents’ home in suburban New Jersey to observe the Iranian custom of “The One Year.” Ana is always in Mitra’s heart, though they chose very different paths. While Ana, sweet and dutiful, bowed to their domineering father’s demands and married, Mitra rebelled, and was banished. In the Time of Our History is laced with the richness of ancient and modern Persian culture and politics, in a tale that is both timeless and profoundly relevant.

When a sudden crime wave hits several small Midwestern towns, the U.S. Attorney for the region calls on Harry Duncan to investigate. An ex-cop known for his unorthodox methods, Duncan is reluctant to go up against a widespread criminal organization—but the attorney in question is Ellen Leicester, the wife who left him fifteen years earlier, and to her, he can’t say no. Murder Book is signature Thomas Perry, with characters you won’t soon forget, crisply-described action sequences, and breathlessly-tense plotting that will keep you racing through the pages.

To stop the coming apocalypse, a fellowship was formed. A soldier, a thief, a lost prince, and a young girl bonded by fate and looming disaster. Each step along this path has changed the party, forging deep alliances and greater enmities. All the while, hostile forces have hunted them, fearing what they might unleash. Armies wage war around them. For each step has come with a cost—in blood, in loss, in heartbreak. Now, they must split, traveling into a vast region of ice and to a sprawling capital of the world they’ve only known in stories.

A romance novel–obsessed social media influencer revisits her exes on her hunt for true love in this romantic comedy from author Amy Lea. Romance-novel connoisseur Tara Chen has had her heart broken ten times by ten different men–all of whom dumped her because of her “stage-five clinger” tendencies. Nevertheless, Tara is determined to find The One. The only problem? Classic meet-cutes are dead thanks to modern dating apps. So Tara decides to revisit her exes in hopes of securing her very own trope-worthy second-chance romance.

When Louise finds out her parents have died, she dreads going home. She doesn’t want to deal with her family home, stuffed to the rafters with the remnants of her father’s academic career and her mother’s lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. Most of all, she doesn’t want to deal with her brother, Mark. Unfortunately, she’ll need his help to get the house ready for sale. But some houses don’t want to be sold, and their home has other plans for both of them.

Florida is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels gradually wreak havoc on the state’s infrastructure, a powerful hurricane approaches a small town on the southeastern coast. Kirby Lowe, his pregnant wife, Frida; and their two sons, Flip and Lucas, prepare for the worst. When the boys go missing, Kirby heads out into the high winds to search for them. Left alone, Frida goes into premature labor and gives birth to an unusual child, Wanda, whom she names after the storm that ushers her into a society closer to collapse than ever before.

Books Set in Nebraska to Commemorate Our State’s 156th Anniversary of Statehood

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Musician Peter Bailey is the reluctant son of a cattle rancher living in Orion, Nebraska. When a prairie fire destroys his family’s ranch and half the town, he flees to the West Coast to finally chase his own dreams. San Diego artist Hope Rosenberg lives an idyllic life as a doctor’s daughter, until the day her mother disappears. When Peter arrives on the scene, he seems ready to offer her the one thing she’s always wanted: a happy family.

On the eve of the 1898 Omaha World’s Fair, Ferret Skerritt, ventriloquist by trade, con man by birth, isn’t quite sure how it will change him or his city. Omaha still has the marks of a filthy Wild West town, even as it attempts to achieve the grandeur and respectability of nearby Chicago. But when he crosses paths with the beautiful and enigmatic Cecily, his whole purpose shifts and the fair becomes the backdrop to their love affair.

Set over one school year in 1986, Eleanor & Park is the story of two star-crossed misfits – smart enough to know first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try. The story follows dual narratives by Eleanor and Park, two misfits living in Omaha, Nebraska from 1986 to 1987. Eleanor, a chubby 16-year-old girl with curly red hair, and Park, a half-Korean, 16-year-old boy, meet on a school bus on Eleanor’s first day at the school and gradually connect through comic books and mix tapes of ’80s music, sparking a love story.

Ten years after the 7th Calvary massacred more than 200 Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, J. B. Bennett, a white rancher, and Star, a young Native American woman, are murdered in a remote meadow on J. B.’s land. The deaths bring together the scattered members of the Bennett family. As the mystery of these twin deaths unfolds, the history of the dysfunctional Bennett’s and their damning secrets are revealed exposing the conflicted heart of a nation caught between past and future.

The family farm lies at the heart of our national identity, and yet its future is in peril. Rick Hammond grew up on a farm, and for forty years he has raised cattle and crops on his wife’s fifth-generation homestead in Nebraska, in hopes of passing it on to their four children. But as the handoff nears, their family farm is under siege on many fronts, from shifting trade policies, to encroaching pipelines, to climate change. Following the Hammonds from harvest to harvest, Ted Genoways explores the rapidly changing world of small, traditional farming operations.

Set in 1918 in the farm country at the heart of America, The Meaning of Names is the story of an ordinary woman trying to raise a family during extraordinary times. Estranged from her parents because she married against their will, confronted with violence and prejudice against her people, and caught up in the midst of the worst plague the world has ever seen, Gerda Vogel, an American of German descent, must find the strength to keep her family safe from the effects of a war that threatens to consume the whole world.

In the wake of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt called for the largest arms buildup in our nation’s history. A shortage of steel, however, quickly slowed the program’s momentum, and arms production fell dangerously behind schedule. The country needed scrap metal. Henry Doorly, publisher of the Omaha World-Herald, had the solution. Prairie Forge tells the story of the great Nebraska scrap drive of 1942—a campaign that swept the nation and yielded five million tons of scrap metal, literally salvaging the war effort itself.

In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the work farm where he has just served a year for involuntary manslaughter. Emmett’s intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother and head west where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden’s car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett’s future.

It’s the opening weekend of deer season in Gunthrum, Nebraska, in 1985, and Alma Costagan’s intellectually disabled farmhand, Hal Bullard, has gone hunting with some of the locals, leaving her in a huff. That same weekend, a teenage girl goes missing, and Hal returns with a flimsy story about the blood in his truck and a dent near the headlight. When the situation escalates from that of a missing girl to something more sinister, Alma and her husband are forced to confront what Hal might be capable of, as rumors fly and townspeople see Hal’s violent past in a new light.

Nine Books to Commemorate Black History Month

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In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals. She captures their first cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies, as well as how they changed these cities and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work.

Sara King has nothing, save for her secrets and the baby in her belly, as she boards the bus to Memphis, hoping to outrun her past in Chicago. She is welcomed with open arms by Mama Sugar, owner of the popular boardinghouse The Scarlet Poplar. Like many cities in early 1960s America, Memphis is still segregated, but change is in the air. Across the country, people like Martin Luther King Jr. are leading the fight for equal rights. The Two Lives of Sara is an emotional and unforgettable story of hope, resilience, and unexpected love.

First published in 1952 and hailed as a masterpiece, Invisible Man is one of those rare novels that have changed the shape of American literature. For not only does Ralph Ellison’s journey across the racial divide tell unparalleled truths about the nature of bigotry and its effects on both victims and perpetrators, it gives us an entirely new model of what a novel can be. As he journeys from the Deep South to the streets and basements of Harlem, Ellison’s nameless protagonist ushers readers into a parallel universe that throws our own into harsh and even hilarious relief.

Mildred Dee Brown (1905–89) was the cofounder of Nebraska’s Omaha Star, the longest running black newspaper founded by an African American woman in the United States. Known for her trademark white carnation corsage, Brown was the matriarch of Omaha’s Near North Side and an iconic city leader. Within the context of African American and women’s history studies, Forss’s Black Print with a White Carnation examines the impact of the black press through the narrative of Brown’s life and work.

Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment. At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age—and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned.

Fair and long-legged, independent and articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person—no mean feat for a black woman in the ’30s. Janie’s quest for identity takes her through three marriages and into a journey back to her roots. Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years, Hurston’s classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read novel in the canon of African-American literature.

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood–where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey–hers is an odyssey through time as well as space.

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined.

Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. Yaa Gyasi’s magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time.

Love Your Library? Check Out These Books to Celebrate Library Lovers Month

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In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J. P. Morgan to curate a collection for his newly built Pierpont Morgan Library. But Belle has a secret, one she must protect at all costs. She is the daughter of Richard Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard and a well-known advocate for equality. The Personal Librarian tells the story of an extraordinary woman, famous for her intellect, style, and wit, and shares the lengths to which she must go to preserve her carefully crafted white identity in the racist world in which she lives.

Eva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, is shelving books one morning when she sees a photograph in a magazine lying open nearby. It’s an image of a book she hasn’t seen in sixty-five years—The Book of Lost Names. The article discusses the looting of libraries by the Nazis across Europe during World War II and the search to reunite people with the texts taken from them. The book contains some sort of code, but researchers don’t know what the code means. Only Eva holds the answer. Will she have the strength to revisit old memories and help reunite those lost during the war?

On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual fire alarm. The fire was disastrous: by the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, Orlean delivers a compelling book that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before.

In 1936, tucked deep into the woods of Troublesome Creek, KY, lives blue-skinned 19-year-old Cussy Carter, the last living female of the rare Blue People ancestry. The lonely young Appalachian woman joins the historical Pack Horse Library Project of Kentucky and becomes a librarian, riding across slippery creek beds and up treacherous mountains on her faithful mule to deliver books and other reading material to the impoverished hill people of Eastern Kentucky.

From a patron’s missing wetsuit to the scent of crab cakes wafting through the stacks, I Work at a Public Library showcases the oddities that have come across Gina Sheridan’s circulation desk. Throughout these pages, she catalogs her encounters with local eccentrics as well as the questions that plague her, such as, “What is the standard length of eyebrow hairs?” Whether she’s helping someone scan his face onto an online dating site or explaining why the library doesn’t have any dragon autobiographies, Sheridan’s tales prove that she’s truly seen it all.

Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices. Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets? Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

The ornate reading room at the Boston Public Library is quiet, until the tranquility is shattered by a woman’s terrified scream. Security guards take charge immediately, instructing everyone inside to stay put until the threat is identified and contained. While they wait for the all-clear, four strangers, who’d happened to sit at the same table, pass the time in conversation and friendships are struck. Each has his or her own reasons for being in the reading room that morning—it just happens that one is a murderer.

Lindsey Norris is finally getting married to the man of her dreams–but it’s not all roses for Briar Creek’s beloved library director, as gardening enthusiast and town newcomer Aaron Grady gives the term “book lover” a whole new meaning. Inappropriate looks and unwelcome late-night visits to Lindsey’s house have everyone, on edge. When Grady’s dead body is found staged outside the library and all the clues point to her fiancé Sully, Lindsey knows it’s up to her to dig through the hidden chapters of Grady’s previous life to find the real culprit and clear Sully’s name.

Lonely librarian June Jones has never left the sleepy English village where she grew up. She would rather spend her time buried in books than venture out into the world. But when her library is threatened with closure, June is forced to emerge from behind the shelves to save the heart of her community. To save the place and the books that mean so much to her, June must finally make some changes to her life. For once, she’s determined not to go down without a fight. And maybe, in fighting for her cherished library, June can save herself, too.