Books in a Bag: Current List

Click any title to find this entry in the Library’s online catalog:

 

The Address Book by Deirdre Mask
When most people think about street addresses, if they think of them at all, it is in their capacity to ensure that the postman can deliver mail or a traveler won’t get lost. But street addresses were not invented to help you find your way; they were created to find you. In many parts of the world, your address can reveal your race and class… Filled with fascinating people and histories, this book illuminates the complex and sometimes hidden stories behind street names and their power to name, to hide, to decide who counts, who doesn’t—and why. (non-fiction)

 

The Agitators by Dorothy Wickenden
Harriet Tubman was one of the most important conductors on the Underground Railroad and hid the enslaved men, women and children she rescued in the basement kitchens of Martha Wright, Quaker mother of seven, and Frances Seward, wife of Governor, then Senator, then Secretary of State William H. Seward…This book begins two decades before the Civil War, when Harriet Tubman was still enslaved and Martha and Frances were young women bound by law and tradition, and ends two decades after the war, in a radically changed United States. (non-fiction)

 

All Adults Here by Emma Straub
When Astrid Strick witnesses a school bus accident in the center of town, it jostles loose a repressed memory from her young parenting days, decades, years earlier. Suddenly, Astrid realizes she was not quite the parent she thought she’d been to her three, now-grown children. But to what consequence? …Who decides which apologies really count? It might be that only Astrid’s 13-year-old granddaughter and her new friend really understand the courage it takes to tell the truth to the people you love the most.

 

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
When her new husband is arrested and imprisoned for a crime she knows he did not commit, a rising artist takes comfort in a longtime friendship, only to encounter unexpected challenges in resuming her life when her husband’s sentence is suddenly overturned. This novel takes an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward — with hope and pain — into the future.

 

Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez
Who gets to leave a legacy? 1985. Anita de Monte, a rising star in the art world, is found dead in New York City; her tragic death is the talk of the town. Until it isn’t. By 1998 Anita’s name has been all but forgotten – certainly by the time Raquel, a third-year art history student is preparing her final thesis. On College Hill, surrounded by progeny of film producers, C-Suite executives, and international art-dealers… Raquel feels herself an outsider. Students of color, like Raquel, are the minority there… But when Raquel becomes romantically involved with a well-connected older art student, she finds herself unexpectedly rising up the social ranks. As she attempts to straddle both worlds, she stumbles upon Anita’s story, raising questions about the dynamics of her own relationship, which eerily mirrors that of the forgotten artist.

 

The Astronaut Wives Club by Lily Koppel
As America’s Mercury Seven astronauts were launched, cameras focused on their wives. They had tea with Jackie Kennedy, appeared on the cover of Life, and grew into fashion icons. Annie Glenn was the envy of the other wives; Rene Carpenter was proclaimed JFK’s favorite; and licensed pilot Trudy Cooper arrived on base with a secret. They and others formed the Astronaut Wives Club, supporting each other as divorce and death touched their lives. (non-fiction)

 

Biased by Jennifer L. Eberhardt
With a perspective that is at once scientific, investigative, and informed by personal experience, Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt offers us the language and courage we need to face one of the biggest and most troubling issues of our time. She exposes racial bias at all levels of society…Yet she also offers us tools to address it. (non-fiction)

The Bookseller by Cynthia Swanson
Loving her unconventional single life in 1962 Denver, a bookshop owner begins experiencing powerful dreams of an alternate life where she is a wife and mother. With each dream, the more irresistibly real the other life becomes. As lines between her worlds begin to blur, she must figure out what is real and what is imagined. Can she choose which life she wants? If so, at what cost?

 

Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah
Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure… embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle. (non-fiction)

 

The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant
Addie is the spirited daughter of an immigrant Jewish family, born in 1900 to parents who were unprepared for America’s effect on their daughters. Addie’s intelligence and curiosity take her into a world of new opportunities for women. From the family’s tenement apartment – to her first, disastrous love affair – to finding the love of her life, eighty-five-year-old Addie recounts her adventures with humor and compassion for the naïve girl she once was.

 

Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan
One day Susannah Cahalan woke up in a hospital room, unable to move or speak. Just weeks before she had been a healthy twenty-four-year old with a career as a cub reporter. She tells of the swift path of her illness and a last-minute intervention led by one of the few doctors able to save her life. He asked Susannah to draw a simple sketch which became the key to diagnosing her with an illness now thought to be the cause of “demonic possessions” throughout history. (non-fiction)

 

Carnegie’s Maid by Marie Benedict
Clara Kelley is a poor farmer’s daughter with nowhere to go and nothing in her pockets. Serving as a lady’s maid in the household of Andrew Carnegie requires skills she doesn’t have, but what she does have is a resolve as strong as the steel Pittsburgh is becoming famous for. This novel tells the story of a brilliant woman who might have spurred Andrew Carnegie’s transformation from ruthless industrialist into the world’s first true philanthropist.

 

The Cliffs by J. Courtney Sullivan
On a secluded bluff overlooking the ocean sits a Victorian house…that contains a century’s worth of secrets. By the time Jane Flanagan discovers the house as a teenager, it has long been abandoned. The place is an irresistible mystery to Jane…The house becomes a hideaway for Jane, a place to escape her volatile mother. Twenty years later, now a Harvard archivist, she returns home to Maine following a terrible mistake that threatens both her career and her marriage. Jane is horrified to find the Victorian is now barely recognizable. The new owner…has gutted it, transforming the house into a glossy white monstrosity straight out of a shelter magazine…She hires Jane to research the history of the place and the women who lived there. The story Jane uncovers…is even older than Maine itself.

 

The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Brammer
From the day she watched her kindergarten teacher drop dead during a dramatic telling of Peter Rabbit, Clover Brooks has felt a stronger connection with the dying than she has with the living. After the beloved grandfather who raised her dies alone while she is traveling, Clover becomes a death doula in New York City, dedicating her life to ushering people peacefully through their end-of-life process. Clover spends so much time with the dying that she has no life of her own, until the final wishes of a feisty old woman send Clover on a trip across the country to uncover a forgotten love story–and perhaps, her own happy ending. As she finds herself struggling to navigate the uncharted roads of romance and friendship, Clover is forced to examine what she really wants, and whether she’ll have the courage to go after it.

 

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
A science-fiction thriller about how far we’ll go to claim the lives we dream of. “Are you happy with your life?” Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before a masked abductor knocks him unconscious. In the world he’s woken up to, Jason’s life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife, his son was never born. Is it this world or the other that’s the dream and if the home he remembers is real, how can Jason make it back to the family he loves?

 

Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano
One summer morning, twelve-year-old Edward Adler, his beloved older brother, his parents, and 183 other passengers board a flight in Newark headed for Los Angeles. Among them are a Wall Street wunderkind, a young woman coming to terms with an unexpected pregnancy, an injured veteran returning from Afghanistan, a business tycoon, and a free-spirited woman running away from her controlling husband. Halfway across the country, the plane crashes. Edward is the sole survivor.

 

Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg
June Reid’s life is upended when disaster takes the lives of her daughter, her daughter’s fiancé, her ex-husband, and her boyfriend, Luke—her entire family, all are gone in a moment. Unable to see beyond her grief, June drives across the country and away from her small Connecticut town, unaware that the tragedy has touched many other people. In her wake, a community emerges, weaving a beautiful and surprising web of connections through shared heartbreak.

 

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
In a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio, Lydia is the favorite, and middle, child. Parents Marilyn and James Lee are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue – in Marilyn’s case that her daughter become a doctor, in James’s case that Lydia be popular at school. When Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the Lee family must confront long-kept secrets that have been slowly pulling them apart.

 

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet and embark on a furtive love affair, surrounded by the unrest roiling their city. Then, they hear about doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. Deciding to leave their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. They emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are.

 

A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny
CC de Poitiers managed to alienate everyone in the hamlet of Three Pines. When Chief Inspector Armand Gamache begins his investigation, it seems like an impossible murder: CC was electrocuted on a frozen lake, in front of the entire town. With compassion and courage, Gamache digs beneath the idyllic surface of village life to find long buried secrets, while his own enemies threaten to bring something more chilling than bitter winter winds to Three Pines.

 

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
When, in 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, he’s sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors.

 

The Giver of Stars by JoJo Moyes
Englishwoman Alice, newly married to the son of a local small-town coal baron, feels like an unwelcome outsider in her new home. When the opportunity to join the Packhorse Librarians arises, she is eager to sign up despite her husband’s and father-in-law’s protestations. But Alice’s new role gives her more than a temporary escape from her troubled marriage—she quickly finds a friend and mentor in Margery, who defies all social expectations even at the risk of her own freedom…As Alice, Margery and the other women find the courage to go after what they need, they realize they hold the power to transform their small community—and their own futures—with the one thing they all desperately love: books.

 

The Gown: a Novel of the Royal Wedding by Jennifer Robson
Heather Mackenzie seeks to unravel the mystery of a set of embroidered flowers, a legacy from her late grandmother. How did her beloved Nan, a woman who never spoke of her old life in Britain, come to possess the priceless embroideries that so closely resemble the motifs on the stunning gown worn by Queen Elizabeth II at her wedding almost seventy years before? And what was her Nan’s connection to a celebrated textile artist and holocaust survivor?

 

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
A novel set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris follows the director of a Chicago art gallery and a woman looking for her estranged daughter in Paris who both struggle to come to terms with the ways AIDS has affected their lives. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the ‘80s and the chaos of the modern world, as they both struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.

 

Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley
For most of her adult life, Sloane and Russell worked together and played together as they navigated the corridors of office life, the literary world, and the dramatic cultural shifts in New York City. One day, Sloane’s apartment is broken into. Along with her most prized possessions, the thief makes off with her sense of security, leaving a mystery in its place. When Russell dies exactly one month later, his suicide propels Sloane on a wild quest to right the unrightable, to explore what constitutes family and possession as the city itself faces the staggering toll of the pandemic. (non-fiction)

 

Heart: A History by Sandeep Jauhar
For centuries, the human heart seemed beyond our understanding: an inscrutable shuddering mass that was somehow the driver of emotion and the seat of the soul. Tells the colorful and little-known story of the doctors who risked their careers and the patients who risked their lives to know and heal our most vital organ. Daniel Hale Williams is the African American doctor who performed the world’s first open heart surgery in Gilded Age Chicago. We meet C. Walton Lillehei, who connected a patient’s circulatory system to a healthy donor’s, paving the way for the heart-lung machine. And we encounter Wilson Greatbatch, who saved millions by inventing the pacemaker―by accident. (non-fiction)

 

The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud by Bob Drury & Tom Clavin
Sioux warrior Red Cloud was the only American Indian ever to defeat the United States Army in a war. Bob Drury and Tom Clavin tell the story of Red Cloud’s rise to power against the backdrop of an exciting, dangerous, and tragic epoch, when American Indian warriors like Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull battled for the lushest hunting grounds while the prospect of gold and adventure lured men like John Bozeman and Nelson Story to the West. (non-fiction)

 

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly
The phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America’s greatest achievements in space. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country’s future. (non-fiction)

 

H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
When Helen Macdonald’s father died suddenly, she was devastated. An experienced falconer, she’d never before been tempted to train one of the most vicious predators, the goshawk. But in her grief, she knew the goshawk’s fierce and feral temperament mirrored her own. Resolving to raise the deadly creature as a means to cope with her loss, she adopted Mabel, and turned to the guidance of T.H. White’s chronicle The Goshawk to begin her endeavor. (non-fiction)

 

How to Be a Patient by Sana Goldberg
Nurse and public health advocate Sana Goldberg walks readers through the complicated and uncertain medical landscape, illuminating a path to better care…With sections like When All is Well, When It’s An Emergency, When It’s Your Person, and When You Have to Stand Up to the Industry, along with appendices to help track family history, avoid pointless medical tests, and choose when and where to undergo a procedure. 8 copies in kit. (non-fiction)

 

How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir by Saeed Jones
Jones tells the story of a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence—into tumultuous relationships with his family, into passing flings with lovers, friends, and strangers. Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another—and to one another—as we fight to become ourselves. (non-fiction)

 

I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai
When Taliban took control her home in Pakistan, Malala refused to be silenced. Fighting for her right to an education, she was shot while riding the bus home from school. Few expected her to survive, but her miraculous recovery has taken her from Pakistan to the United Nations. At sixteen, she has become a symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest nominee ever for the Nobel Peace Prize, demonstrating how one person’s voice can inspire change in the world. (non-fiction)

 

I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy about her struggles as a former child actor — including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother — and how she retook control of her life. (non-fiction)

 

Intimations by Zadie Smith
Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas, feelings and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation, in which Zadie Smith clears a generous space for thought, open enough for each reader to reflect on what has happened — and what should come next. (non-fiction, essays)

 

James by Percival Everett
When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place, Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.

 

Less: a novel by Andrew Sean Greer
A scintillating satire of the American abroad, Arthur Less will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Saharan sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and encounter, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to face.

 

The Library Book by Susan Orlean
Susan Orlean, an esteemed journalist and author, turns her keen powers of observation and narrative gifts to the overlooked, underreported saga of the 1986 fire that ravaged the Los Angeles Public Library. Part detective story, part history, The Library Book serves as a meditation on and an ode to libraries, librarians, and their role in our communities. (non-fiction)

 

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
Fighting an ugly custody battle with an artistic tenant who has little regard for the strict rules of their progressive Cleveland suburb, a straitlaced family woman who is seeking to adopt a baby becomes obsessed with exposing the tenant’s past, only to trigger devastating consequences for both of their families.

 

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive by Stephanie Land
Maid explores the underbelly of upper-middle class America and the reality of what it’s like to be in service to them. “I’d become a nameless ghost,” Stephanie writes about her relationship with her clients, many of whom do not know her from any other cleaner, but who she learns plenty about. As she begins to discover more about her clients’ lives-their sadness and love, too-she begins to find hope in her own path. (non-fiction)

 

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
In this delightfully quirky debut novel from Sweden, a grumpy yet loveable man finds his solitary world turned on its head when a boisterous young family moves in next door. Fredrik Backman’s novel about the angry old man next door is a thoughtful and charming exploration of the profound impact one life has on countless others.

 

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
After receiving a frantic letter from her newly-wed cousin begging for someone to save her from a mysterious doom, Noemí Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. She’s not sure what she will find—her cousin’s husband, a handsome Englishman, is a stranger, and Noemí knows little about the region… And Noemí, mesmerized by the terrifying yet seductive world of High Place, may soon find it impossible to ever leave this enigmatic house behind.

 

My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
Lucy Barton is recovering from surgery. Her mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gossip about people from Lucy’s childhood seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have defined Lucy’s life: escape from her troubled family, a desire to become a writer, her marriage and her love for her daughters.

 

The Newcomers by Helen Thorpe
Follows the lives of twenty-two immigrant teenagers throughout the course of a year at South High School in Denver, Colorado. These newcomers come from nations convulsed by drought, famine, or war. At the center of their story is their dedicated and endlessly resourceful teacher of English Language Acquisition. If he does his job right, they will leave his class with basic English skills and new confidence, their foundation for finding a place in their new home. (non-fiction)

 

Nothing Daunted: the Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West by Dorothy Wickenden
In 1916 Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood left their families in New York to teach school in northwestern Colorado. They lived with homesteaders in the mountains and rode to school on horseback. The young cattle rancher who lured them west promised them the adventure of a lifetime. Decades later, the author and granddaughter of Dorothy Woodruff, found the teachers’ letters, which captured the voices of the unforgettable people the women got to know. (non-fiction)

 

On Immunity Eula Biss
Upon becoming a new mother, Eula Biss addresses a chronic condition of fear: fear of the government, the medical establishment, and what is in children’s food, mattresses, medicines, and vaccines. Biss investigates the metaphors and myths surrounding the conception of immunity and its implications for the individual and the social body. As she hears more and more fears about vaccines, Biss researches what they mean for her own child, her immediate community, America, and the world. (non-fiction)

 

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
In the early 1900s the teenaged daughter of a fisherman falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant, and that her lover is married, she refuses to be bought. Instead, she marries a gentle minister passing through on his way to Japan. Her decision to abandon her home and to reject her son’s powerful father sets off a saga that will echo down through generations.

 

Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond
The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages? In this landmark book, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. (non-fiction)

 

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company. His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species. And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone. Or does he?

 

Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson
It is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody’s birthday celebration in her grandparent’s Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, escorted by her father to the soundtrack 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 sixteenth birthday party and a celebration which ultimately never took place.

 

Rough Beauty by Karen Auvinen
Determined to live an independent life on her own terms, Karen Auvinen flees to a primitive cabin in the Rockies to live in solitude as a writer and to embrace all the beauty and brutality nature has to offer. When a fire incinerates every word she has ever written and all of her possessions—except for her beloved dog Elvis, her truck, and a few singed artifacts—Karen embarks on a heroic journey to reconcile her desire to be alone with her need for community. (non-fiction)

 

Running with Sherman by Christopher McDougall
When Chris McDougall agreed to take in a donkey from an animal hoarder, he thought it would be no harder than the rest of the adjustments he and his family had made after moving from Philadelphia to the heart of Pennsylvania Amish country. But when he arrived, Sherman was in such bad shape he could barely move and his hair was coming out in clumps. Chris decided to undertake a radical rehabilitation program designed not only to heal Sherman’s body, but to heal his mind as well. (non-fiction)

 

Sabrina and Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado—a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite—these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force.

 

Severance by Ling Ma
Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she’s had her fill of uncertainty. She’s content just to carry on… Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob…But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

 

Sing for Your Life by Daniel Bergner
A chronicle of a young black man’s journey from violence to the world’s elite opera circles. The author describes Ryan Speedo Green’s abuse-marked upbringing and struggles with racism and imprisonment before winning a New York Metropolitan Opera competition. Today, Ryan is a rising star performing major roles at the Met and Europe’s most prestigious opera houses. (non-fiction)

 

Soil by Camille Dungy
Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens. In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it. (non-fiction)

 

Starling House by Alix E. Harrow
Eden, Kentucky, is just another dying, bad-luck town, known only for the legend of E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth-century author and illustrator who wrote The Underland–and disappeared. Before she vanished, Starling House appeared. But everyone agrees that it’s best to let the uncanny house–and its last lonely heir, Arthur Starling–go to rot. Opal knows better than to mess with haunted houses or brooding men, but an unexpected job offer might be a chance to get her brother out of Eden. Too quickly, though, Starling House starts to feel dangerously like something she’s never had: a home. As sinister forces converge on Starling House, Opal and Arthur are going to have to make a dire choice: to dig up the buried secrets of the past and confront their own fears, or let Eden be taken over by literal nightmares.

 

Still Coming Home: Denver Veterans Writing edited by Jason Arment, Steven Dunn, & Bethany Strout
Born out of a workshop led by a group of volunteer veterans who are also writers, Still Coming Home is a collection of essays, poems, and short stories. The anthology was published by Colorado Humanities and Center for the Book and written by Denver area veterans in an effort to describe their varied military experiences in an honest and vulnerable way. (fiction and non-fiction)

 

The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
A.J. Fikry, irascible owner of Island Books, has recently endured some tough years: his wife has died, his bookstore is experiencing the worst sales in its history, and his prized possession — a rare edition of Poe poems — has been stolen. He has given up on people, and even the books in his store are another reminder of a world that is changing too rapidly. Then a most unexpected occurrence gives him the chance to make his life over and see things anew.

 

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains’ toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar…When the video of Emira goes public and unearths someone from Alix’s past, both women find themselves on a crash course which will upend everything they think they know about themselves and each other.

 

Swift River by Essie Chambers
It’s the summer of 1987 in Swift River, and Diamond Newberry is learning how to drive. Ever since her Pop disappeared seven years ago, she and her mother hitchhike everywhere they go. But that’s not the only reason Diamond stands out: she’s teased relentlessly about her weight, and since Pop’s been gone, she is the only Black person in all of Swift River. This summer, Ma is determined to declare Pop legally dead so that they can collect his life insurance money, get their house back from the bank, and finally move on. But when Diamond receives a letter from a relative she’s never met, key elements of Pop’s life are uncovered, and she is introduced to two generations of African American Newberry women, whose lives span the 20th century and reveal a much larger picture of prejudice and abandonment, of love and devotion.

 

Swing Time by Zadie Smith
In a story about friendship and music and stubborn roots, two brown girls dream of being dancers—but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black music, what constitutes a tribe, or what makes a person truly free. Their childhood friendship ends abruptly in their early twenties, but is never quite forgotten. Moving from northwest London to West Africa, it is an exuberant dance to the music of time.

 

There There by Tommy Orange
As we learn the reasons that each person is attending the Big Oakland Powwow, momentum builds toward a shocking conclusion that changes everything. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober, Dene Oxendene is pulling his life back together after his uncle’s death, and Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil perform the traditional Indian dance in public for the first time. Together, they tell us of the plight of the urban Native American.

 

They Called Us Enemy by George Takei
Long before [George Takei] braved new frontiers in STAR TREK, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father’s – and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future. In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten “relocation centers,” hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard. THEY CALLED US ENEMY is Takei’s firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the terrors and small joys of childhood in the shadow of legalized racism, his mother’s hard choices, his father’s tested faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future. (graphic novel, non-fiction)

 

This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel
When Rosie and Penn and their four boys welcome the newest member of their family, no one is surprised it’s another baby boy. At least their large, loving, chaotic family knows what to expect. But Claude is not like his brothers. One day he puts on a dress and refuses to take it off. He wants to bring a purse to kindergarten. He wants hair long enough to sit on. When he grows up, Claude says, he wants to be a girl. Rosie and Penn aren’t panicked at first. Kids go through phases, after all, and make-believe is fun. But soon the entire family is keeping Claude’s secret.

 

Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room to discuss unsolved crimes; together they call themselves The Thursday Murder Club. There’s Red Ron, the infamous former socialist firebrand, still causing trouble; gentle Joyce, widowed, pining for another resident, but surely not as innocent as she seems; Ibrahim, a former therapist who understands the darker side of human nature; and Elizabeth? Well, no one is quite sure who she really is, but she’s definitely not a woman to underestimate. When a local developer is found dead, the Thursday Murder Club suddenly find themselves in the middle of their first live case.

 

Uncommon Type by Tom Hanks
A collection of seventeen wonderful short stories showing that two-time Oscar winner, Tom Hanks, is as talented a writer as he is an actor. His stories are surprising, intelligent, and heartwarming. They each hold together a myriad of emotions, settings, and time periods with two common threads: the typewriter and uncommonly normal men and women.

 

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
After Cora, a pre-Civil War Georgia slave, escapes with another slave, Caesar, they seek the help of the Underground Railroad as they flee from state to state and try to evade a slave catcher, Ridgeway, who is determined to return them to the South. A magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave’s adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.

 

The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
In California, wildfires now rage year-round, destroying thousands of homes. Across the US, “500-year” storms pummel communities month after month, and floods displace tens of millions annually. This is only a preview of the changes to come. And they are coming fast…The Uninhabitable Earth is both a meditation on the devastation we have brought upon ourselves and an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation. (non-fiction)

 

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce
Harold Fry lives in a small English village with his wife. Little differentiates one day from the next. Then one morning a letter arrives, addressed to Harold in a shaky scrawl, from a woman he hasn’t heard from in twenty years. Queenie Hennessy is in hospice and has written to say goodbye. Before Harold mails off his quick reply, a chance encounter convinces him that he must deliver his message to Queenie in person. Then he sets off on a six hundred mile walk.

 

The Wager by David Grann
On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive…They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain….The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing 2500 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes. But then … six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they had a very different story to tell. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes — they were mutineers.

 

Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil
A former Wall Street quant sounds an alarm on the mathematical models that pervade modern life. The models being used today are opaque, unregulated, and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination. O’Neil calls on modelers to take more responsibility for their algorithms and urges policy makers to regulate their use. This important book empowers us to ask the tough questions, uncover the truth, and demand change. (non-fiction)

 

West With Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge
Woodrow Wilson Nickel, age 105, feels his life ebbing away. But when he learns giraffes are going extinct, he finds himself recalling the unforgettable experience he cannot take to his grave. It’s 1938. The Great Depression lingers. Hitler is threatening Europe, and world-weary Americans long for wonder. They find it in two giraffes who miraculously survive a hurricane while crossing the Atlantic. What follows is a twelve-day road trip in a custom truck to deliver Southern California’s first giraffes to the San Diego Zoo. Inspired by true events.

 

What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons
Raised in America, the multiracial daughter of a mother from Johannesburg struggles with her mother’s terminal cancer and her own need to find love and a place to belong, quests shaped by losses, changes in her sense of identity and unexpected motherhood. This novel is a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, family and country.

 

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
Viewed with suspicion in the aftermath of a tragedy, a beautiful hermit who has survived for years in a marsh becomes targeted by unthinkable forces.

 

Who Is Government? by Michael Lewis
The government is a vast, complex system that Americans pay for, rebel against, rely upon, dismiss, and celebrate. It’s also our shared resource for addressing the biggest problems of society. And it’s made up of people, mostly unrecognized and uncelebrated, doing work that can be deeply consequential and beneficial to everyone. Michael Lewis invited his favorite writers to find someone doing an interesting job for the government and write about them in a special in-depth series for the Washington Post. The stories they found are unexpected, riveting, and inspiring, including a former coal miner devoted to making mine roofs less likely to collapse, saving thousands of lives; an IRS agent straight out of a crime thriller; and the manager who made the National Cemetery Administration the best-run organization, public or private, in the entire country. Each essay shines a spotlight on the essential behind-the-scenes work of exemplary federal employees. Whether they’re digitizing archives, chasing down cybercriminals, or discovering new planets, these public servants are committed to their work and universally reluctant to take credit. (non-fiction)

 

Women Rowing North by Mary Pipher
In Women Rowing North, Pipher offers a timely examination of the cultural and developmental issues women face as they age. Drawing on her own experience as daughter, sister, mother, grandmother, caregiver, clinical psychologist, and cultural anthropologist, she explores ways women can cultivate resilient responses to the challenges they face. 8 copies in kit. (non-fiction)

 

You’ll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey by Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar
Now a writer, performer, and host of The Amber Ruffin Show, Amber Ruffin lives in New York…But Amber’s sister Lacey? She’s still living in their home state of Nebraska, and trust us, you’ll never believe what happened to Lacey….Lacey is a lightning rod for hilariously ridiculous yet all-too-real anecdotes. She’s the perfect mix of polite, beautiful, petite, and Black that apparently makes people think “I can say whatever I want to this woman.” And now, Amber and Lacey share these entertainingly horrifying stories through their laugh-out-loud sisterly banter. Painfully relatable or shockingly eye-opening (depending on how often you have personally been followed by security at department stores), this book tackles modern-day racism with the perfect balance of levity and gravity. (non-fiction)

 

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart
Born under different stars–Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic–they should be sworn enemies if they’re to be seen as men at all. Their environment is a hyper-masculine and sectarian one, for gangs of young men and the violence they might dole out dominate the Glaswegian estate where they live. And yet against all odds Mungo and James become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds. As they fall in love, they dream of finding somewhere they belong, while Mungo works hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his big brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. But the threat of discovery is constant and the punishment unspeakable. And when several months later Mungo’s mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland, together with two strange men whose drunken banter belies murky pasts, he will need to summon all his inner strength and courage to try to get back to a place of safety…