“But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.” –
FICTION
Opioid, Indiana by Brian Allen Carr
Seventeen-year-old Riggle is living in rural Indiana with his uncle and uncle’s girlfriend after the death of both of his parents. Now his uncle has gone missing, probably on a drug binge. It’s Monday, and $800 in rent is due Friday. Riggle, who’s been suspended from school, has to either find his uncle or get the money together himself. His mission exposes him to a motley group of Opioid locals—encounters by turns perplexing, harrowing, and heartening. Meanwhile, Riggle marks each day by remembering the mythology his late mother invented for him about how the days got their names.
With amazing directness and insight, Carr explores what it’s like to be a high school kid in the age of Trump, a time of economic inequality, addiction, confederate flags, and mass shootings. A work of empathy and insight that pierces to the heart of our moment through an unforgettable protagonist.
Description from Goodreads.
“Hilarious, heartbreaking… Carr’s style is delightfully straightforward, and he takes special pleasure in absurdity. The climax of the story is so strange, horrifying and darkly hilarious that you may have to put the book down because you’re laughing so hard.” – BookPage
“The landscape of Middle America is grim but has glimmers of hope in this outstanding novel from Carr… Both gripping and timely.” – Publishers Weekly
“Wonderfully crafted and artfully poignant in its reflection of our times.” – Kirkus Reviews
Available Formats:
Hoopla eAudiobook
MYSTERY
Heaven, My Home by Attica Locke ★
9-year-old Levi King knew he should have left for home sooner; now he’s alone in the darkness of vast Caddo Lake, in a boat whose motor just died. A sudden noise distracts him – and all goes dark.
Darren Mathews is trying to emerge from another kind of darkness; after the events of his previous investigation, his marriage is in a precarious state of re-building, and his career and reputation lie in the hands of his mother, who’s never exactly had his best interests at heart. Now she holds the key to his freedom, and she’s not above a little maternal blackmail to press her advantage.
An unlikely possibility of rescue arrives in the form of a case down Highway 59, in a small lakeside town where the local economy thrives on nostalgia for antebellum Texas – and some of the era’s racial attitudes still thrive as well. Levi’s disappearance has links to Darren’s last case, and to a wealthy businesswoman, the boy’s grandmother, who seems more concerned about the fate of her business than that of her grandson.
Darren has to battle centuries-old suspicions and prejudices, as well as threats that have been reignited in the current political climate, as he races to find the boy, and to save himself.
Attica Locke proves that the acclaim and awards for Bluebird, Bluebird were justly deserved, in this thrilling new novel about crimes old and new.
Description from Goodreads.
“With her usual aplomb, Locke tackles history and its all-too-real emotional fallout in this splendid follow-up.” – Boston Globe
“In addition to her gifts for tight pacing and intense lyricism, Locke shows with this installment of her Highway 59 series a facility for unraveling the tangled strands of the Southwest’s cultural legacy and weaving them back together with the volatile racial politics and traumatic economic stresses of the present day… Locke’s advancement here is so bracing that you can’t wait to discover what happens next along her East Texas highway.” – Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW
“Locke’s new novel is a mystery ripe for this age… What makes Locke’s mysteries so good is her ability to conjure up a mood with vivid prose. Her depiction of Texas is so evocative you can practically hear the beer cans cracking open and smell the swamp water.” – Buzzfeed
“Locke is brilliant at creating tense mysteries where the setting is as alive, and important, as the characters without distracting-but rather enhancing-the mystery element. You get history, a great mystery, smart twists, rich characters, and a deep exploration of the justice-and injustice-system of our country.” – BookRiot
Available Formats:
eBook
Land of Wolves by Craig Johnson
Attempting to recover from his harrowing experiences in Mexico, in Land of Wolves Wyoming Sheriff Walt Longmire is neck deep in the investigation of what could or could not be the suicidal hanging of a shepherd. With unsettling connections to a Basque family with a reputation for removing the legs of Absaroka County sheriffs, matters become even more complicated with the appearance of an oversize wolf in the Big Horn Mountains to which Walt finds himself feeling more and more empathetic.
Description from Goodreads.
“Witty dialogue, an endearing lead, and distinctive supporting characters all add up to a winner.” – Publishers Weekly
“…a rewarding journey to Absaroka County.” – Kirkus Reviews
“…Johnson’s best work in over a decade. Not only is the writing sharp and the dialogue witty, but the plotting is on point…” – The Real Book Spy
Available Formats:
Print Book
What Rose Forgot by Nevada Barr
Rose Dennis wakes up in a hospital gown, her brain in a fog, only to discover that she’s been committed to an Alzheimer’s Unit in a nursing home. With no memory of how she ended up in this position, Rose is sure that something is very wrong. When she overhears one of the administrators saying about her that she’s “not making it through the week,” Rose is convinced that if she’s to survive, she has to get out of the nursing home. She avoids taking her medication, putting on a show for the aides, then stages her escape.
The only problem is—how does she convince anyone that she’s not actually demented? Her relatives were the ones to commit her, all the legal papers were drawn up, the authorities are on the side of the nursing home, and even she isn’t sure she sounds completely sane. But any lingering doubt Rose herself might have had is erased when a would-be killer shows up in her house in the middle of the night. Now Rose knows that someone is determined to get rid of her.
With the help of her computer hacker/recluse sister Marion, thirteen-year old granddaughter Mel, and Mel’s friend Royal, Rose begins to gather her strength and fight back—to find out who is after her and take back control of her own life. But someone out there is still determined to kill Rose, and they’re holding all the cards.
Description from Goodreads.
“Thrilling action, madcap humor, and a larger-than-life cast energize this cleverly plotted take on a traditional mystery. Barr surprises and entertains from start to finish.” – Publishers Weekly
“…one-of-a-kind… A tour de force that thickens its thriller plot with a razor-sharp view of its heroine’s unreliable but perceptive mind.” – Kirkus Reviews
“The ultimate villain is unexpected, and the larger scheme a chilling vision of how aging people can lose control over their lives. Will we see more of Rose? Fine by me.” – Star Tribune
Available Formats:
Print Book
SUSPENSE
The Stranger Inside by Lisa Unger
Even good people are drawn to do evil things…
Twelve-year-old Rain Winter narrowly escaped an abduction while walking to a friend’s house. Her two best friends, Tess and Hank, were not as lucky. Tess never came home, and Hank was held in captivity before managing to escape. Their abductor was sent to prison but years later was released. Then someone delivered real justice–and killed him in cold blood.
Now Rain is living the perfect suburban life, her dark childhood buried deep. She spends her days as a stay-at-home mom, having put aside her career as a hard-hitting journalist to care for her infant daughter. But when another brutal murderer who escaped justice is found dead, Rain is unexpectedly drawn into the case. Eerie similarities to the murder of her friends’ abductor force Rain to revisit memories she’s worked hard to leave behind. Is there a vigilante at work? Who is the next target? Why can’t Rain just let it go?
Introducing one of the most compelling and original killers in crime fiction today, Lisa Unger takes readers deep inside the minds of both perpetrator and victim, blurring the lines between right and wrong, crime and justice, and showing that sometimes people deserve what comes to them.
Description from Goodreads.
“[A] complex psychological thriller [that] digs deep into the layers of trauma that linger long after a terrible crime… astute, engrossing…” – Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW
“…cleverly plotted… Unger’s well-honed craft shows in her unmasking the avenger early on and using the reveal to ratchet up suspense. She also squirrels away several startling trump cards for later. Fans of serial killer novels won’t be disappointed.” – Publishers Weekly
“…has the reader on the edge of their seat with one shocking reveal after another that you don’t see coming.” – Red Carpet Crash
Available Formats:
eBook | eAudiobook | Hoopla eAudiobook
The Night of Rome by Carlo Bonini & Giancarlo de Cataldo
In the night of Rome, nothing is what it seems.
It’s all change in Rome. The new Pope, determined to bring radical reform to the Vatican, proclaims an extraordinary Jubilee year of Mercy. A new centre-left government replaces its disgraced predecessor, and sets about to rejuvenate the language of politics. And with crime lynchpin Samurai in jail, his protégé Sebastiano Laurenti attempts to establish himself as his designated successor. But he must reckon not only with a new generation of enterprising gangsters and racketeers—out to carve for themselves a slice of the profits and opportunities offered by the major public works planned for the Jubilee—but also with ambitious newly elected politician Chiara Visoni, and his own heart.
Betrayals, alliances forged and broken, ambushes and infighting will inevitably alter the fragile political balance. As the sharks circle and the street-dogs fight, some tenuous hope endures, in the unlikely alliance of an incorruptible politician of the old left, all but forgotten, and a young bishop who refuses to play the Vatican’s power games. But it remains to be seen whether the long night of Rome can make room for redemption. Sharp and fast-paced, dark and taut, The Night of Rome is fiction that sails dangerously close to the wind of current events.
“Bonini and de Cataldo bring a new sense of urgency to this tale of corruption, power vacuums, and the new Italy. Against the backdrop of a hopeful Rome, celebrating a new Pope and the incarceration of a mafia don, rising politicians clash with ambitious gangsters in what’s bound to be one of the most heavy-hitting noirs of the year.” – CrimeReads
“[A] razor-sharp political thriller set in Berlusconi’s Rome.” – The New Statesman
Description from Goodreads.
Available Formats:
Hoopla eBook
HISTORICAL FICTION
Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson ★
Moving forward and backward in time, Jacqueline Woodson’s taut and powerful new novel uncovers the role that history and community have played in the experiences, decisions, and relationships of these families, and in the life of the new child.
As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody’s coming of age ceremony in her grandparents’ Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier, that very dress was measured and sewn for a different wearer: Melody’s mother, for her own ceremony– a celebration that ultimately never took place.
Unfurling the history of Melody’s parents and grandparents to show how they all arrived at this moment, Woodson considers not just their ambitions and successes but also the costs, the tolls they’ve paid for striving to overcome expectations and escape the pull of history. As it explores sexual desire and identity, ambition, gentrification, education, class and status, and the life-altering facts of parenthood, Red at the Bone most strikingly looks at the ways in which young people must so often make long-lasting decisions about their lives–even before they have begun to figure out who they are and what they want to be.
Description from Goodreads.
“[A] remarkable and moving portrait of a family in a changing Brooklyn… There’s not a single unnecessary word.” – Refinery29
“Red at the Bone breaks down the ways in which parenthood changes people for both better and worse and what it means to find your true identity.” – Parade
“A novel you won’t soon forget, one that begs to be discussed.” – PopSugar
“[A] beautifully imagined novel… Woodson’s nuanced voice evokes the complexities of race, class, religion, and sexuality in fluid prose and a series of telling details. This is a wise, powerful, and compassionate novel.” – Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
Available Formats:
Print Book | eBook | eAudiobook
A Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier
1932. After the Great War took both her beloved brother and her fiancé, Violet Speedwell has become a “surplus woman,” one of a generation doomed to a life of spinsterhood after the war killed so many young men. Yet Violet cannot reconcile herself to a life spent caring for her grieving, embittered mother. After countless meals of boiled eggs and dry toast, she saves enough to move out of her mother’s place and into the town of Winchester, home to one of England’s grandest cathedrals. There, Violet is drawn into a society of broderers–women who embroider kneelers for the Cathedral, carrying on a centuries-long tradition of bringing comfort to worshippers.
Violet finds support and community in the group, fulfillment in the work they create, and even a growing friendship with the vivacious Gilda. But when forces threaten her new independence and another war appears on the horizon, Violet must fight to put down roots in a place where women aren’t expected to grow. Told in Chevalier’s glorious prose, A Single Thread is a timeless story of friendship, love, and a woman crafting her own life.
Description from Goodreads.
“It’s a time and a place that is perfectly suited to Chevalier’s meticulous scene-setting, gentle pacing and gimlet eye for hidden hurts and secret longings. As for the embroidery, with its repetitive stitches that slowly, almost inconspicuously add up to something dazzling, she couldn’t have picked a more satisfying metaphor. After all, Violet and her fellow broderers are women building not only themselves, but the very idea of independent single womanhood in a world that does its best to ignore their existence.” – The Guardian
“…it vividly and meticulously shows how vision, teamwork, and persistence raise needlecraft from routine stitching to an inspirational and liberating art.” – Publishers Weekly
“A compelling portrait of women not lost but thriving against the odds.” – Kirkus Reviews
Available Formats:
Print Book | eBook | eAudiobook
HORROR
A Cosmology of Monsters by Shaun Hamill
Noah Turner see monsters.
His father saw them–and built a shrine to them with The Wandering Dark, an immersive horror experience that the whole family operates.
His practical mother has caught glimpses of terrors but refuses to believe–too focused on keeping the family from falling apart.
And his eldest sister, the dramatic and vulnerable Sydney, won’t admit to seeing anything but the beckoning glow of the spotlight… until it swallows her up.
Noah Turner sees monsters. But, unlike his family, Noah chooses to let them in…
Description from Goodreads.
“A magnificent tribute to Lovecraft’s vexing achievement, A Cosmology of Monsters redeems… the master’s flaws. Hamill’s heart-stopping debut novel features exceptionally graceful language and a set of characters we come to worry about, take delight in, grieve for and love. Saturated with endless wonder and horrific consequences… Bites horror to its core.” – BookPage
“[A] very scary coming-of-age tale that lives in the same space as Stranger Things, Stand By Me, and Stephen King’s It… The way Hamill weaves his way between the phantasmagorical elements and Noah’s everyday dramas is nimble in a way reminiscent of King… An accomplished, macabre horror saga and a promising debut from an imaginative new author.” – Kirkus Reviews
“Told with tenderness and brimming with darkness, Hamill’s debut is sure to please readers who have a special literary craving for monsters.” – The Millions
Available Formats:
Print Book
NONFICTION
Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser ★
No writer is as emblematic of the American twentieth century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture. She was there when the Cuban Revolution began, and when the Berlin Wall came down; in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel, in besieged Sarajevo. She was in New York when artists tried to resist the tug of money—and when many gave in. No writer negotiated as many worlds; no serious writer had as many glamorous lovers. Sontag tells these stories and examines the work upon which her reputation was based. It explores the agonizing insecurity behind the formidable public face: the broken relationships, the struggles with her sexuality, that animated—and undermined—her writing. And it shows her attempts to respond to the cruelties and absurdities of a country that had lost its way, and her conviction that fidelity to high culture was an activism of its own.
Utilizing hundreds of interviews conducted from Maui to Stockholm and from London to Sarajevo—and featuring nearly one hundred images—Sontag is the first book based on the writer’s restricted archives, and on access to many people who have never before spoken about Sontag, including Annie Leibovitz. It is a definitive portrait—a great American novel in the form of a biography.
Description from Goodreads.
“Utterly riveting and consistently insightful… The book takes this larger-than-life intellectual powerhouse—formidable, intimidating, often stubbornly impersonal in her work—and makes her life-size again… fascinating.” – The New Republic
“Brilliant… We need [Sontag] now, more than ever, and this biography keeps her defiantly alive: argumentative, willful, often right, always interesting, encouraging us to up our game as we watch her at the top of hers.” – The Guardian
“Moser has managed the near-impossible feat of capturing Sontag in all of her dark brilliance and pointed contradictions.” – Interview
“A towering figure like Susan Sontag deserves a towering tome, and Moser’s 700-plus-page biography of the iconic cultural critic delivers… this blockbuster à la Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra is both granular and grand—an opus fit for the writer-philosopher who ‘created the mold, and then she broke it.’” – O, The Oprah Magazine
Available Formats:
Forthcoming
The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care by Anne Boyer ★
A week after her forty-first birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver rather than the one needing care, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness.
A twenty-first-century Illness as Metaphor, as well as a harrowing memoir of survival, The Undying explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, corporate lies, John Donne, pro-pain ”dolorists,” the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism. It excoriates the pharmaceutical industry and the bland hypocrisies of ”pink ribbon culture” while also diving into the long literary line of women writing about their own illnesses and ongoing deaths: Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker, Susan Sontag, and others.
A genre-bending memoir in the tradition of The Argonauts, The Undying will break your heart, make you angry enough to spit, and show you contemporary America as a thing both desperately ill and occasionally, perversely glorious.
Description from Goodreads.
Available Formats:
Forthcoming
Permanent Record by Edward Snowden
Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government’s system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down.
In 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden shocked the world when he broke with the American intelligence establishment and revealed that the United States government was secretly pursuing the means to collect every single phone call, text message, and email. The result would be an unprecedented system of mass surveillance with the ability to pry into the private lives of every person on earth. Six years later, Snowden reveals for the very first time how he helped to build this system and why he was moved to expose it.
Spanning the bucolic Beltway suburbs of his childhood and the clandestine CIA and NSA postings of his adulthood, Permanent Record is the extraordinary account of a bright young man who grew up online—a man who became a spy, a whistleblower, and, in exile, the Internet’s conscience. Written with wit, grace, passion, and an unflinching candor, Permanent Record is a crucial memoir of our digital age and destined to be a classic.
Description from Goodreads.
“A riveting account… Reads like a literary thriller… Snowden pushes the reader to reflect more seriously on what every American should be asking already. What does it mean to have the data of our lives collected and stored on file, ready to be accessed – not just now, by whatever administration happens to be in office at the moment, but potentially forever?… When it comes to privacy and speech and the Constitution, his story clarifies the stakes.” – New York Times
“Once you’re through the formative parts of his life, which aim to contextualise his ultimate decision to take documents from the NSA facility in Hawaii where he was working, the title becomes akin to a spy thriller. If the revelations that came from Snowden were explosive, his recounting of their disclosure is a crescendo. Everything builds to the moments where he anxiously waited for journalists to arrive at his hotel room to hand over the top secret documents and the subsequent rush to find a safe location, involving a brush with Russia’s FSB, in the aftermath of their disclosure… Although it is unlikely to change anyone’s mind about Snowden’s actions, Permanent Record is the whistleblower’s own attempt to tell his story.” – Wired
“…well-written, frequently funny… in a world much more attuned to the downsides of digitisation than it was in 2013, it offers a useful reminder of the god-like omniscience that digital data can bestow on those with the power to collect it all… Mr Snowden’s critique of government overreach is powerful.” – The Economist
Available Formats:
Print Book | Playaway
We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast by Jonathan Safran Foer
Some people reject the fact, overwhelmingly supported by scientists, that our planet is warming because of human activity. But do those of us who accept the reality of human-caused climate change truly believe it? If we did, surely we would be roused to act on what we know. Will future generations distinguish between those who didn’t believe in the science of global warming and those who said they accepted the science but failed to change their lives in response?
In We Are the Weather, Jonathan Safran Foer explores the central global dilemma of our time in a surprising, deeply personal, and urgent new way. The task of saving the planet will involve a great reckoning with ourselves—with our all-too-human reluctance to sacrifice immediate comfort for the sake of the future. We have, he reveals, turned our planet into a farm for growing animal products, and the consequences are catastrophic. Only collective action will save our home and way of life. And it all starts with what we eat—and don’t eat—for breakfast.
Description from Goodreads.
“Deeply contemplative and artfully creative… In his desire to convince others to take action, Foer raises the philosophical bar, which is, perhaps, the most effective way of fomenting sincere and long-lasting commitment to this life-threatening crisis.” – Booklist
“Foer’s message is both moving and painful, depressing and optimistic, and it will force readers to rethink their commitment to combating ‘the greatest crisis humankind has ever faced.'” – Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
“Foer is not likely to sway climate-change skeptics, but his lucid, patient, and refreshingly short treatise is as good a place to start as any.” – Kirkus Reviews