FICTION
A Hundred Small Lessons by Ashley Hay
When Elsie Gormley falls and is forced to leave her Brisbane home of 62 years, Lucy Kiss and her family move in, with their new life – new house, new city, new baby. Lucy and her husband Ben struggle to navigate their transformation from adventurous lovers to new parents and both seek to smooth the rough edges of their present with memories of their past as they try to discover who their future selves might be.
But the house has a secret life as well, and the rooms seem to share Elsie’s memories and moments with Lucy.
In her nearby nursing home, Elsie revisits the span of her life – the moments she can’t bear to let go; the haunts to which she might return. Her memories of wifehood, motherhood, love and death are intertwined with her old house, and as the boundary between present and past becomes more porous for her, this seems to manifest in the lives now held inside that house as well.
Through one hot, wet Brisbane summer, seven lives – and two different slices of time – wind along with the flow of the river, as two families chart the ways in which we come, sudden and oblivious, into each other’s stories, and the unexpected ripples that flow out from those chance encounters.
A Hundred Small Lessons is about the many small decisions – the invisible moments – that come to make a life. These richly intertwined lives spin a warm and intricate story of how to feel – deeply and profoundly – what it is to be human; how to touch the shared experience of being mother or daughter; father or son. It’s a story of love, and of life.
Description from Goodreads.
“This contemplative novel explores the emotions of saying goodbye to a life of familiarity and embracing the unknown…Readers who loved the quiet introspection of Anita Shreve’s The Pilot’s Wife and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge will enjoy the detailed emotional journeys of Hay’s characters. Their stories will linger long after the final page is turned.” – Library Journal
“Her intricately layered story, bolstered by perspectives of an old mother and a young one, tackles the thorny questions of what it means to become a parent and how it feels to be no longer needed as one. Lyrical and tenderhearted, this will delight fans of Liane Moriarty and Kate Hewitt.” – Booklist
Available Formats:
MYSTERY & SUSPENSE
The Man in the Crooked Hat by Harry Dolan
One cryptic clue leads a desperate man into a labyrinthine puzzle of murder in the electrifying new novel from national bestselling author Harry Dolan.
There’s a killer, and he wears a crooked hat.
Private investigator Jack Pellum has spent two years searching for the man who he believes murdered his wife–a man he last saw wearing a peacoat and a fedora. Months of posting fliers and combing through crime records yield no leads. Then a local writer commits suicide, and he leaves a bewildering message that may be the first breadcrumb in a winding trail of unsolved murders . . .
Michael Underhill is a philosophical man preoccupied by what-ifs and could-have-beens, but his life is finally coming together. He has a sweet and beautiful girlfriend, and together they’re building their future home. Nothing will go wrong, not if Underhill has anything to say about it. The problem is, Underhill has a dark and secret past, and it’s coming back to haunt him.
These two men are inexorably drawn together in a mystery where there is far more than meets the eye, and nothing can be taken for granted. Filled with devious reversals and razor-sharp tension, The Man in the Crooked Hat is a masterwork from “one of America’s best new crime writers” (Lansing State Journal).
Description from Goodreads.
“Relentless . . . Superior prose, plotting, and characterization put Dolan in the top rank of crime novelists.” – Publishers Weekly Starred Review
“An unpredictable mystery with an off-kilter plot and distinctive characters . . . with deft dialogue propelling its plot.” – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Available Formats:
Under Water by Casey Barrett
Duck Darley should have been a winner. Once a competitive swimmer destined for Olympic gold, he drank away his gilded youth and followed his fraudster father’s footsteps into prison. Barely scraping by as an unlicensed private investigator, Duck now chases down cheating spouses for the same Manhattan elite who once viewed him as equal, and drowning bitter memories with whatever fills his glass.
Duck’s lost glory days resurface when he’s tasked with finding the teenaged sister of a former teammate turned Olympic champion. Privileged Madeline McKay vanished over Labor Day weekend, leaving behind a too-perfect West Village apartment and a promising athletic career of her own. Duck thinks he’s hunting for a self-destructive runaway–until Madeline’s film student ex is savagely murdered, and the media spins her as the psycho who killed him.
As Duck searches for Madeline, he’s plunged back into the dark underbelly of Olympic swimming–a world rife with wild lies and terrible violence. And he soon learns that no matter how hard he tries to escape his past, demons still lurk beneath every surface . . .
Description from Goodreads.
“Casey Barrett should find himself in the big pool of crime writers with this deftly conceived, crisply written debut. Slick and brash, with a little New York hip thrown in, it does for competitive swimming what Megan Abbott did for gymnastics, exposing the poison at the heart of a coach’s and a family’s need to win.” —New York Times bestselling author Andrew Gross
“Casey Barrett, an ex-Olympian, knows what he’s writing about in this sordid tale of murder and sport. This one has it all: mystery, suspense, secrets, and a longing for new adventure. It should be mandatory reading for all thriller aficionados.” —New York Times bestselling author Steve Berry
Available Formats:
ROMANCE
Wrong to Need You by Alisha Rai
He wasn’t supposed to fall in love with his brother’s widow…
Accused of a crime he didn’t commit, Jackson Kane fled his home, his name, and his family. Ten years later, he’s come back to town: older, wiser, richer, tougher—and still helpless to turn away the one woman he could never stop loving, even after she married his brother.
Sadia Ahmed can’t deal with the feelings her mysterious former brother-in-law stirs, but she also can’t turn down his offer of help with the cafe she’s inherited. While he heats up her kitchen, she slowly discovers that the boy she adored has grown into a man she’s simply unable to resist.
An affair is unthinkable, but their desire is undeniable. As secrets and lies are stripped away, Sadia and Jackson must decide if they’re strong enough to face the past…and step into a future together.
Description from Goodreads.
“Another emotional, passionate, and psychologically complex love story in a gripping series that follows the fates of two warring families.” – Kirkus Reviews Starred Review
“It’s not an easy journey, but watching Sadia and Jackson overcome each obstacle in order to claim their HEA is incredibly rewarding!” – RT Book Reviews Top Pick
Available Formats:
Past Perfect by Danielle Steel
A magical tale of a modern family sharing a gorgeous Pacific Heights mansion with their ghostly, elegant predecessors.
Sybil and Blake Gregory are the quintessential 21st century power couple: she a cutting-edge interior designer; he a forward-thinking top business analyst. They revel in the privileged, ordered life they lead in Manhattan with their children, teenagers Andrew and Caroline and 6-year-old Charlie. But when Blake accepts a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become the CEO of a visionary social media start-up in San Francisco—and then buys a magnificent turn-of-the-20th-century Pacific Heights mansion on impulse—all that will change. Built by the Butterfields, a prominent banking family, abandoned for decades, the grand house retains its exquisite furnishings and aura of long ago elegance. And that’s not all it retains. The modern Gregorys are about to meet their ghostly long ago counterparts….
Description from Goodreads.
Available Formats:
NONFICTION
1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder by Arthur Herman
In 1917, Arthur Herman examines one crucial year and the two figures at its center who would set the course of modern world history: Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin. Though they were men of very different backgrounds and experiences, Herman reveals how Wilson and Lenin were very much alike. Both rose to supreme power, one through a democratic election; the other through violent revolution. Both transformed their countries by the policies they implemented, and the crucial decisions they made. Woodrow Wilson, a champion of democracy, capitalism, and the international order, steered America’s involvement in World War I. Lenin, a communist revolutionary and advocate for the proletariat, lead the Bolsheviks’ overthrow of Russia’s earlier democratic revolution that toppled the Czar, and the establishment of a totalitarian Soviet Union. Men of opposing ideals and actions, each was idolized by millions-and vilified and feared by millions more. Though they would never meet, these two world leaders came to see in the other the evils of the world each sought to eradicate. In so doing, both would unleash the forces that still dominate our world, and that continue to shape its future from nationalism and Communism to today’s maps of the Middle East, Asia, and Eastern Europe. In this incisive, fast-paced history, Herman brilliantly explores the birth of a potent rivalry between two men who rewrote the rules of geopolitics-and the moment, one hundred years ago, when our contemporary world began.
Description from Goodreads.
“The pairing of these two diametrically opposed figures into one biography makes this an illuminating read for anybody interested in World War I, the new political order it spawned, and the failures that led to the rise of Nazism and the horrors of World War II.” – Library Journal
“Arthur Herman’s parallel biography of Lenin and Wilson will make the reader stop and think — about the great man theory of history and the cataclysmic events of 1917. Analyzing their legacies, Herman issues a clarion call for us to cast a wary eye on ideologues who want to remake the world, in 2017 as in 1917.” – Nicholas Reynolds, author of Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway’s Secret Adventures, 1935-1961