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Commemorative Fiction May 2020
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May--Asian-American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month
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Lucky
by Henry Chang
When Chinatown gang leader “Lucky” Louie wakes on Easter Sunday after being in a coma for 88 days, Detective Jack Yu, Lucky’s boyhood brother, fears that his friend’s luck is about to run out after he orchestrates a daring series of crimes against the Chinatown criminal underground that garners the attention of some unwanted adversaries.
Available on RBDigital
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The Queen of the Night
by Alexander Chee
A legendary opera singer tries to discover who betrayed her secret past as a courtesan when she is offering her a chance at immortality through a libretto that tells her tale in the new novel from the author of Edinburgh.
Available on Overdrive
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Song of the Exile
by Kiana Davenport
Continuing to explore the history of her native Hawaii, the author of Shark Dialogues traces the saga of a Hawaiian jazz musician and a Korean-Hawaiian beauty who narrowly survive the punishments of World War II.
Available on Overdrive
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Girls Burn Brighter
by Shobha Rao
Forging a deep friendship with impoverished but passionate fellow weaver Savitha, motherless Poornima leaves behind everything she knows to search for her friend after an act of cruelty drives Savitha away.
Available on Overdrive
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The Descendants : A Novel
by Kaui Hart Hemmings
A descendant of royalty and one of the largest landowners in Hawaii, Matthew King struggles to deal with his out-of-control daughters, ten-year-old Scottie and seventeen-year-old Alex, as well as his comatose wife, whom they are about to remove from life support.
Available on Overdrive
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I Hotel
by Karen Tei Yamashita
"Dazzling and ambitious, this hip, multivoiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy spins an epic tale of America's struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco's Chinatown from 1968-1977. As Yamashita's motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, their stories come to define the very heart of the American experience.
Available on RBDigital
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Adam in Eden
by Carlos Fuentes
A respected Mexican businessman finds his idyllic life crumbling in the face of his wife's infidelity with a corrupt director of national security, his brother-in-law's worship of a child preacher and his mistress' break with reality. By the acclaimed author of Terra Nostra.
Available on Hoopla
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Lost Children Archive
by Valeria Luiselli
"From the two-time NBCC Finalist, a fiercely imaginative novel about a family's summer road trip across America--a journey that, with breathtaking imagery, spare lyricism, and profound humanity, probes the nature of justice and equality in America today."
Available on Overdrive
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Signs Preceding the End of the World
by Yuri Herrera
"Yuri Herrera does not simply write about the border between Mexico and the United States and those who cross it. He explores the crossings and translations people make in their minds and language as they move from one country to another, especially whenthere's no going back. Traversing this lonely territory is Makina, a young woman who knows only too well how to survive in a violent, macho world. Leaving behind her life in Mexico to search for her brother, she is smuggled into the US carrying a pair of secret messages--one from her mother and one from the Mexican underworld."
Available on Overdrive
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Sudden Death
by Alvaro Enrigue
In a mind-bending novel in which a myriad of worlds collide, time bends and traditions break down, a tennis match in the 16th century between the Italian artist Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Quevado, played with a ball made from beheaded Anne Boleyn's hair, decides the fate of the world.
Available on Overdrive
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The Body Where I Was Born : A Novel
by Guadalupe Nettel
From the comfort of her therapist's couch, a woman reflects on the challenging events that defined her childhood and shaped her identity.
Available on Overdrive
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The House of Broken Angels : A Novel
by Luis Alberto Urrea
Across one bittersweet weekend in their San Diego neighborhood, revelers mingle among the palm trees and cacti, celebrating the lives of family patriarch Miguel "Big Angel" De La Cruz and his mother, and recounting the many tales that have passed into family lore. By the Pulitzer Prize-finalist author of The Hummingbird's Daughter.
Available on Overdrive
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Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
by Ben Fountain
Asked to be part of the Dallas Cowboys' Halftime Show, Specialist William Billy Lynn, one of the eight surviving men of the Bravo Squad, finds his life forever changed by this all-American event that causes him to better understand difficult truths about himself and those around him.
Available on Overdrive
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A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
Featuring a previously published author introduction, a personal foreword by his son and a new introduction by his grandson, a definitive edition of the lauded World War I classic collects all 39 of the Nobel Prize-winning author's alternate endings to offer new insights into his creative process.
Available on Overdrive
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The Thin Red Line
by James Jones
A powerful and realistic novel details the men of C-for-Charlie company, before, during, and after the Allied effort at Guadalcanal and is the basis for the Academy Award-nominated film by Terrence Malick.
Available on Overdrive
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The Things They Carried : A Work of Fiction
by Tim O'Brien
Heroic young men carry the emotional weight of their lives to war in Vietnam in a patchwork account of a modern journey into the heart of darkness.
Available on Overdrive
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The Yellow Birds : A Novel
by Kevin Powers
Two friends, both U.S. soldiers in Iraq, cling to life and each other as a bloody fight to take control of the city of Al Tafar rages around them and they stave off fatigue, mental stress and insurgents.
Available on Overdrive
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The Killer Angels
by Michael Shaara
Portraits of Lee, Longstreet, and other Civil War leaders are interwoven with historical detail to provide a fictional recreation of the bloody battle at Gettysburg.
Available on Overdrive
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June--LGBTQ+ Pride Month--2020 Lambda Literary Finalists
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Mostly Dead Things : A Novel
by Kristen N. Arnett
Taking over her family's failing taxidermy shop in the wake of her father's suicide, a grief-stricken woman pursues less-than-legal ways of generating income while struggling to figure out her place among her eccentric loved ones.
Available on Overdrive
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Patsy : A Novel
by Nicole Dennis-Benn
Receiving her long-coveted visa to America, Patsy leaves behind her family in Jamaica only to discover that life as an undocumented immigrant is not what her best friend had described. By the award-winning author of Here Comes the Sun.
Available on Overdrive
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A People's History of Heaven : A Novel
by Mathangi Subramanian
Five abandoned women in contemporary Bangalore support each other through the hardships of a hand-to-mouth existence while protecting their slum community from redevelopment by a city that does not care what happens to them. A first adult novel.
Available on Hoopla
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On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous : A Novel
by Ocean Vuong
A first novel by the award-winning author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds is written in the form of a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read about the impact of the Vietnam war on their family.
Available on Overdrive
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In West Mills : A Novel
by De'Shawn Charles Winslow
A woman in mid-20th-century rural North Carolina, determined to live on her own terms in spite of community gossip, finds unexpected support from a veteran fixer who struggles with an inability to correct his own troubled past.
Available on Overdrive
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Red at the Bone
by Jacqueline Woodson
As Melody celebrates a coming of age ceremony at her grandparents’ house in 2001 Brooklyn, her family remembers 1985, when Melody’s own mother prepared for a similar party that never took place in this novel about different social classes.
Available on Overdrive
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If Beale Street Could Talk : A Novel
by James Baldwin
When a pregnant Tish's boyfriend Fonny, a sculptor, is wrongfully jailed for the rape of a Puerto Rican woman, their families unite to prove the charge false.
Available on Overdrive
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The Water Dancer : A Novel
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
A Virginia slave narrowly escapes a drowning death through the intervention of a mysterious force that compels his escape and personal underground war against slavery. By the National Book Award-winning author of Between the World and Me.
Available on Overdrive
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Washington Black
by Esi Edugyan
Unexpectedly chosen to be a family manservant, an 11-year-old Barbados sugar-plantation slave is initiated into a world of technology and dignity before a devastating betrayal propels him throughout the world in search of his true self.
Available on Overdrive
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Juneteenth : A Novel
by Ralph Ellison
Shot on the Senate floor by a young black man, a dying racist senator summons an elderly black Baptist minister from Oklahoma to his side for a remarkable dialogue that reveals the deeply buried secrets of their shared past and the tragedy that reunites them.
Available on Overdrive
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Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi
Two half-sisters, unknown to each other, are born into different villages in 18th-century Ghana and experience profoundly different lives and legacies throughout subsequent generations marked by wealth, slavery, war, coal mining, the Great Migration and the realities of 20th-century Harlem.
Available on Overdrive
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Sethe, an escaped slave living in post-Civil War Ohio with her daughter and mother-in-law, is haunted persistently by the ghost of the dead baby girl whom she sacrificed, in a new edition of the Nobel Laureate's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
Available on Overdrive
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The Underground Railroad : A Novel
by Colson Whitehead
Chronicles the daring survival story of a cotton plantation slave in Georgia, who, after suffering at the hands of both her owners and fellow slaves, races through the Underground Railroad with a relentless slave-catcher close behind.
Available on Overdrive
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Contact Your Librarian For More Great Reads!
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Centerville Library 111 W. Spring Valley Rd. Centerville, OH 45458 (937) 433-8091
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Woodbourne Library 6060 Far Hills Avenue Centerville, OH 45459 (937) 435-3700
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