To find these selections and many other new titles, see the NMC library catalog.
NON-FICTION
Been Outside: Adventures of Black Women, Nonbinary, and Gender Nonconforming People in Nature edited by Amber Wendler and Shaz Zamore
Encompassing identity, inspiration, ancestry, and stewardship, the essays and poems by leading Black women and nonbinary scientists in Been Outside explore how experiences in the natural world and life sciences shape the self.
The Hidden Company That Trees Keep: Life from Treetops to Root Tips by James B. Nardi
This book takes a deep dive into the complex and endlessly fascinating relationships between trees and the many organisms that rely on them throughout their entire life cycles. Nardi’s immense knowledge is captured in fully accessible text alongside his own copious and wonderful drawings, rendered in both black-and-white and color. The result is a masterly overview that will guide the reader through the co-evolutionary history of organisms and their tree hosts.
Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum by Antonia Hylton
In Madness, award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton tells the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Maryland. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. During its peak years, the hospital’s wards were overflowing with almost 2,700 patients. It is a captivating and heartbreaking meditation on how America decides who is sick or criminal, and who is worthy of our care.
How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler by Peter Pomerantsev
This inventive biography of the rogue WWII propagandist Thomas Sefton Delmer confronts hard questions about the nature of information war: What if you can’t fight lies with truth? Can a propaganda war ever be won? This book is the story of Delmer and Pomerantsev, his modern investigator, to turn the tide of an information war. An extraordinary history that is informing the present before our eyes.
Pilgrimage: Journeys of Meaning by Peter Stanford
In this compelling history Peter Stanford reflects on the reasons people have walked along the same sacred paths across the ages. How do the experiences of the first pilgrims to Jerusalem, Mecca and Santiago de Compostela compare to the millions of people who embark upon life-changing physical and spiritual journeys today? Pilgrimage explores sacred landscapes across the world, the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, to the monolithic rock-cut churches of Lalibela, Ethiopia and the riverbanks of the Kumbh Mela in India.
Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything by Dr. Michio Kaku
An exhilarating tour of humanity’s next great technological achievement – quantum computing – which may eventually unravel the deepest mysteries of science and solve some of humanity’s biggest problems, like global warming, world hunger, and incurable disease. Told with Kaku’s signature clarity and enthusiasm, Quantum Supremacy is the story of this exciting frontier and the race to claim humanity’s future. By the bestselling author of The God Equation.
FICTION
Nigeria Jones by Ibi Zoboi
Warrior Princess. That’s what Nigeria’s father calls her. He’s raised her as part of the Movement, a Black separatist group based in Philadelphia. But when her mother–the perfect matriarch to their Movement–disappears, Nigeria’s world is upended. Nigeria’s mother wished for a different life for her children, which included sending her daughter to a private Quaker school outside of their strict group. Despite her father’s disapproval, Nigeria attends the school and expands her universe. As Nigeria searches for her mother, she begins to question everything she thought she knew about her life and her family.
[YA fiction; Coretta Scott King Author Award Winner]
The Mars House by Natasha Pulley
In the wake of an environmental catastrophe, January has become a refugee in Tharsis, the terraformed colony on Mars. There, January’s life is dictated by his second-class status as an Earthstronger – a person whose body is not adjusted to lower gravity and so poses a danger to those born on, or naturalized to, Mars. A xenophobic politician named Aubrey Gale is running on a platform that would force all Earthstrongers to naturalize, a process that is always disabling and sometimes deadly. While posing as romantic partners, January and Gale discover they have an enemy willing to destroy all of Tharsis.
Real Americans by Rachel Khong
Y2K in New York City: Twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily is flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love. In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can’t shake the sense she’s hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers.
The Unwedding by Ally Condi
Ellery Wainwright and her husband were supposed to spend their twentieth wedding anniversary at the luxurious Resort at Broken Point in Big Sur. But now she’s traveling solo. To add insult to injury, there’s a wedding at Broken Point scheduled during her stay. But Ellery discovers the body of the groom floating in the pool and before the police can reach Broken Point, a mudslide takes out the road to the resort, leaving all the guests trapped. When another guest dies, it’s clear something horrible is brewing. Everyone at Broken Point has a secret. And everyone has a shadow. Including Ellery.
The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez
When celebrated writer Alma Cruz inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, she turns it into a place to bury her untold stories – literally. She creates a graveyard for manuscript drafts and revisions and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her. Alma wants her characters to rest in peace, but they have other ideas, and the cemetery becomes a mysterious sanctuary for their true narratives.
This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud
From 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state―separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family’s strangeness; of François’s union with Barbara; of Chloe, the result of that union, who believes that telling these buried stories will bring them all peace.