To find these selections and many other new titles, see the NMC library catalog.
New Non-Fiction
Human Nature by Kate Marvel
Scientist Kate Marvel has seen the world end before, sometimes several times a day. In the computer models she uses to study climate change, it’s easy to simulate rising temperatures, catastrophic outcomes, and bleak futures. But climate change isn’t just happening in those models. It’s happening here… It’s happening to us… This book is an inquiry into our rapidly changing Earth. In each chapter, Marvel uses a different emotion to explore the science and stories behind climate change. As expected, there is anger, fear, and grief–but also wonder, hope, and love. With her singular voice, Marvel takes us on a soaring journey, one filled with mythology, physics, witchcraft, bad movies, volcanoes, Roman emperors, sequoia groves, and the many small miracles of nature we usually take for granted.
Little Bosses Everywhere by Bridget Read
Multilevel marketing companies like Amway, Mary Kay, and Herbalife advertise the ultimate business opportunity: the chance to be your own boss. In exchange for peddling their wares, they offer a world of pink Cadillacs, white-columned mansions, tropical vacations, and–most precious of all–financial freedom. If, that is, you’re willing to shell out for expensive products, recruit everyone you know to buy them, and make them recruit everyone they know to do the same–thus creating the ‘multiple levels’ of multilevel marketing, or MLM. In this work, journalist Bridget Read tells the gripping story of multilevel marketing in full for the first time, winding from sunny post-war California, where a failed salesman started a vitamin business, through the suburbs of Michigan and North Carolina, where MLM bought its political protection, to the stadium-sized conventions where top sellers today preach to die-hard recruits.
The Synthetic Eye by Fred Ritchin
An essential investigation into the murky ethics of AI, one that calls into question the future of photography. Artificial Intelligence is driving a fourth industrial revolution and, as this book shows, the centre will not hold. How can we believe or trust the images we are being shown? What role do photographers, the media and technology companies have in upholding the authenticity of photographs? Can synthetic imagery be utilized to enhance our understanding of our world? A revelatory roadmap of today’s image universe, this work explores how Artificial Intelligence has fundamentally transformed our sense of the real, the possible and the actual. Arranged into seven distinct chapters, it interrogates AI’s engagement with history, how it has changed our understanding of reality, and the positive opportunities and dystopian scenarios that lurk beneath the surface of artificially generated images.
Summer of Fire and Blood by Lyndal Roper
The German Peasants’ War was the greatest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. In 1524 and 1525, it swept across Germany with astonishing speed as well over a hundred thousand people massed in armed bands to demand a new and more egalitarian order. The peasants took control of vast areas of southern and middle Germany, torching and plundering the monasteries, convents, and castles that stood in their way. But they proved no match for the forces of the lords, who put down the revolt by slaying somewhere between seventy and a hundred thousand peasants in just over two months. In this book, the first history of the German Peasants’ War in a generation, historian Lyndal Roper exposes the far-reaching ramifications of this rebellion. Though the war’s victors portrayed the uprising as naive and inchoate, Roper reveals a mass movement that sought to make good on the radical potential of the Protestant Reformation.
Dinner by Meera Sodha
Drawing on a wide range of Asian cuisines, this cookbook offers up 100 vegan and vegetarian recipes, all created to answer the question: “What’s for dinner?” in an exciting and delicious way. From quick-cook recipes, to one-pan wonders and delectable dishes you can bung in the oven and leave to look after themselves, you’ll discover vibrant, easy-to-make main dishes that burst with flavor – including Whole Roast Cauliflower Pilaf with Almonds and Pistachios, Fennel and Dill Dal and Miso Eggplant with Salt and Vinegar Kale. There are also mouth-watering desserts, like Coconut and Cardamom Dream Cake and Bubble Tea Ice Cream, plus versatile and surprising side dishes, including Asparagus and Cashew Thoran and Kimchi Tofu and Carrot Salad. Inspiring, nourishing, practical and beautiful, this book is the essential companion for the most important meal of the day.
New Fiction
In Her Defense by Philippa Malicka
As a sensational celebrity libel trial unfolds, a young woman at the periphery secretly wields the power to make or break the case. But with her own hidden past, will she dare to speak up? Everyone is watching. Only one person knows the truth. The whole country has been riveted by the trial: Beloved TV star and national treasure Anna Finbow, standing in court, accusing her daughter’s therapist Jean Guest of brainwashing her daughter Mary for her own financial gain. Jean insists Mary’s traumatic memories arise from her upbringing and her time studying at a prestigious art school in Rome; wounds only Jean’s therapy can heal. But as the trial unfolds, it’s Augusta “Gus” Bird, Anna’s former employee—a seemingly insignificant bystander, a nobody—who holds the key to unraveling the tangled web of lies and deceit.
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the Republican equivalent of a Kennedy? What Natalie’s followers – all 8 million of them – don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal – and just so happens to be building an empire from it. Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children – they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer.
Go Gentle by Maria Semple
Adora Hazzard has it all figured out. A Stoic philosopher and divorcee, she lives amongst friends and culture on New York’s Upper West Side, and works for the ultra-wealthy and secretive Lockwood family as a private ethics tutor for their tween boys. Her main life hack, and the key to her own enviable happiness, is to desire only what you have. Everything else life throws at you? Don’t just accept it; love it. Amor Fati. Adora believes it so deeply she has it tattooed on her wrist. But when Adora meets Digby, a handsome stranger at the ballet, she finds herself loving fate indeed. But soon, she’s pulled into a world of secret rendezvous, black-market art deals, and international intrigue. Driven by an unexpected and maddening desire, Adora risks reputation, job and hard-won serenity for the feelings Digby has awoken in her.
On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle
Tara Selter has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November 18th repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts it: “That’s how little the activities of one person matter on the 18th of November.”) Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects.
Python’s Kiss by Louise Erdrich
Written over the past two decades, Louise Erdrich’s magnificent story collection features a range of characters—a tribal newsletter editor whose son tells her a story that nothing in her experience can encompass, immigrant farmers whose tenuous hold on the earth, and sanity, is challenged, and ordinary people, bird lovers, artists, grade-school teachers, and romantics. A girl decides to spend her life with a stone. A man is confronted with a folk-singing thief. A woman enters a corporately owned afterlife to seek revenge on her father. Accompanied by specially commissioned artwork by Aza Erdrich Abe—an intimate and revelatory creative collaboration between mother and daughter—these stories offer an opportunity to celebrate the wisdom and brilliant, wide-ranging imagination of one of America’s most important writers.
Summaries and images adapted from publishers.