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Book of Forbidden Words
by Louise Fein
In 1552, as the printing press spreads radical ideas across Europe, fear of heresy fuels censorship, book burnings, and brutal crackdowns. When a frightened former nun, Lysbette Angiers, brings her daring manuscript to the renowned Paris printer Charlotte Guillard, neither woman realizes how fiercely powerful forces will fight to silence it.
Four centuries later, in 1952, lonely housewife Milly Bennett struggles to find her place in suburban America amid the paranoia of the McCarthyism. When she’s asked to decipher a mysterious 400-year-old manuscript, she’s pulled into a dangerous legacy of suppressed ideas—one that links her fate to Lysbette and Charlotte across the centuries.
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The Astral Library
by Kate Quinn
Alexandria “Alix” Watson has learned one thing from growing up in foster care: books never betray you. Juggling three dead-end jobs and convinced college is out of reach, she escapes each night to the reading room of the Boston Public Library, losing herself in fantasy novels and dreams of somewhere better.
Everything changes when she discovers a hidden door leading to the Astral Library, a secret refuge where the desperate can begin new lives inside beloved stories. Guided by its mysterious Librarian, Alix soon finds herself fleeing a shadowy enemy through literary worlds—from the drawing rooms of Jane Austen to the streets of Sherlock Holmes. But the greatest threat may be to the library itself.
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The Optimists
by Brian Platzer
Mr. Keating is an extraordinary teacher: brilliant, dedicated, and possibly a few pages ahead in a book no one else is reading. He’s a magician able to enchant fourteen-year-olds into a love of writing and literature. Yet no student has lived up to the promise of their potential more than Clara Hightower. Over the course of three decades, Clara is a kindergarten thief, a high school genius, a Silicon Valley celebrity, and an animal rights activist turned terrorist.
To tell Clara’s story, Mr. Keating must tell his own, including his courtship and marriage, his dreams of writing and comedy, his days in the classroom in lower Manhattan along with the rivalry and friendship with his Head of School, and his eventual stroke and the isolation that follows.
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More Than Enough
by Anna Quindlen
High school English teacher Polly Goodman can talk about everything and anything with the women in her book club, which is why they’ve become her closest friends and, along with the support of her veterinarian husband, the bedrock of her life. Her private school students, her fraught relationship with mother, her struggles with IVF—Polly’s book club friends have heard it all.
But when they give Polly an ancestry test kit as a joke, the results match her with a stranger. Despite it seeming clear that this match is a mistake, Polly cannot help combing through her own family history for answers. Then, when it seems that the book club circle of four will become three, Polly learns how friendships can change your life in the most profound ways.
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Kin
by Tayari Jones
Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood, but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Atlanta at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and marries into an affluent family. Annie, abandoned by her dissolute mother as a child, and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, and culminate in a battle for her life.
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Lady Tremaine
by Rachel Hochhauser
A widow twice-over, Etheldreda is now saddled with the care of her two children, a priggish stepdaughter, and a razor-taloned peregrine falcon. Her entire life has become a ruse, just like the manor hall they live grand and ornate on the exterior, but crumbling, brick by brick, inside. Fierce in the face of her misfortune, Ethel clings to her family’s respectability, the lifeboat that will float her daughters straight into the secure banks of marriage.
When a royal ball offers the chance to secure the future she desperately desires, Etheldreda must risk her secrets, pride, and limited resources in pursuit of an invitation for her daughters—only to see her hopes fulfilled by the wrong one. As an engagement to the heir of the kingdom unfolds with unnerving speed, she discovers a sordid secret hidden in the depths of the royal family, forcing her to choose between the security she’s sought for years and the wellbeing of the feckless stepdaughter who has rebuffed her at every turn.
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A Far-Flung Life
by M. L. Stedman
Western Australia, 1958. A truck rumbles along a lonely outback road. A moment’s inattention, and in a few muddled seconds the lives of the MacBride family are shattered.
Instead of leaving them to heal, fate comes back for them in a twist of consequences that will cause one of them to lose their life, and another to sacrifice theirs for the sake of an innocent child.
Set in the expanse of a vast and flat landscape, where the weather is a capricious god and a million-acre sheep station is barely a dot on the map, A Far-flung Life explores the hearts of a handful of isolated souls and the secrets they shield in order to survive.
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Nonesuch
by Francis Spufford
It’s the summer of 1939, and the air in London is thick with the tension of impending war. Iris Hawkins, a fiery young financial secretary, has a chance encounter with Geoff, a genius engineer from the new technology of television. What was supposed to be one night of abandon draws her instead into a nightmare of otherworldly pursuit—into a reality where time bends, spirits can be summoned, and history hangs by a thread.
Soon there are Nazi planes droning overhead. In a time when death falls randomly from above each night, when the streets are darker than the wildest forest and all the men are away in uniform, the defense of the city is in the hands of its women. But Iris has more to contend with than just the terrors of the Blitz. Over the rooftops of burning London, in the twisted passages between past and present, through the vast night sky and across the tiny screens of early television, a fascist fanatic is travelling with a gun in her hand, and only Iris can stop her from altering the course of history forever
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Theo of Golden
by Allen Levi
His name is Theo. And he asks a lot more questions than he answers.
Theo visits the local coffeehouse, where ninety-two pencil portraits hang on the walls, portraits of the people of Golden done by a local artist. He begins purchasing them, one at a time, and putting them back in the hands of their “rightful owners.” With each exchange, a story is told, a friendship born, and a life altered.
A story of giving and receiving, of seeing and being seen, Theo of Golden is a beautifully crafted novel about the power of creative generosity, the importance of wonder to a purposeful life, and the invisible threads of kindness that bind us to one another.
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