The library has recently purchased many new books. You can view a handful of them here along with descriptions or go to the library catalog to see the full listing.
Non-fiction
Bring Your Baggage and Don’t Pack Light: Essays by Helen Ellis
A viciously funny collection of literary essays on love, family, and friendship. When Helen and her lifelong friends arrive for a reunion on the Redneck Riviera, they unpack more than their suitcases: stories of husbands and kids; lost parents and lost jobs; dirty jokes and sunscreen with SPF higher than they hair-sprayed their bangs senior year; and a bad mammogram. It’s a diagnosis that scares them, but could never break their bond. Because women pushing fifty won’t be pushed around.
Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality by Frank Wilczek
Nobel Prize winner presents ten insights that illuminate what every thinking person needs to know about what the world is and how it works.Through an exploration of space, time, matter, and ideas–and equipped with facts, questions, and brilliant speculations–Wilczek guides us through the past, present, and future of fundamental science. Readers will emerge with an expanded vision of our universe.
The Conversation: How Seeking and Speaking the Truth about Racism Can Radically Transform Individuals and Organizations by Robert Livingston
Livingston’s lifework is showing people how to turn difficult conversations about race into productive instances of real change. The Conversation is a road map for uprooting entrenched biases and sharing candid, fact-based perspectives on race that will lead to increased awareness, empathy, and action.
Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz
Acclaimed science journalist explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy’s southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia. Cutting-edge research in archaeology reveals the mix of environmental changes and political turmoil that doomed these ancient settlements.
Fiction
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
In this stunning and timely novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story–a tale of passion, of a complex marriage, and of a woman’s relentless errors. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store’s most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls’ Day, but she simply won’t leave the store.
We Were Never Here by Andrea Bartzl
An annual backpacking trip has deadly consequences. Emily is in the mountains of Chile with her best friend, Kristen, on their annual reunion trip. But on the last night of their trip, Emily enters their hotel suite to find blood and broken glass on the floor. Kristen says the cute backpacker she’d been flirting with attacked her, and she killed him in self-defense. Even more shocking: The scene is horrifyingly similar to last year’s trip, when another backpacker wound up dead. Emily can’t believe it’s happened again–can lightning really strike twice?
Legends of the North Cascades by Jonathan Evison
After his wife’s death, a man brings his young daughter to live in a cave he has found in the Cascade mountains. Once there, his daughter begins to sense the presence of other people in the cave, a mother and son who retreated there during the last ice age in an effort to survive.
Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
Driven by an intricate plot about an upstanding furniture salesman who has to cater to a new clientele of shady cops on the take, vicious minions of the local crime lord, and numerous other lowlifes. It’s a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem of the early 1960s. But mostly, it’s a joy to read, another dazzling novel from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning Colson Whitehead.
Matrix by Lauren Groff
Cast out of the royal court, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey. At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her mercurial sisters. Equally alive to the sacred and the profane, Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in a mesmerizing portrait of consuming passion, aberrant faith, and a woman that history moves both through and around. Lauren Groff’s new novel is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world.
Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty
Stan and Joy Delaney are killers on the tennis court, but they’ve finally sold their famed tennis academy and are ready to start what should be the golden years of their lives. When Joy goes missing, the police question Stan. Two of the Delaney children think their father is innocent, two are not so sure–but as the two sides square off against each other in perhaps the biggest match ever, all of the Delaneys will start to reexamine their shared family history in a very new light.
Summaries adapted from publishers.