the Public Library Albuquerque Bernalillo County: Coming Soon!: December 2025

Fiction On Order

Adrift
by Will Dean

Peggy and Drew, both aspiring writers, move to an isolated canal boat with their fourteen-year-old son. Peggy is the glue that holds their family together, even as their son is bullied relentlessly for his physique and his family’s lack of money. But when Drew becomes frustrated by his wife’s sudden writing success, he moves their boat further and further from civilization. With their increasing isolation, personal challenges become harder to ignore, even as they desperately try to break toxic generational patterns. But when Drew’s gaslighting becomes too much for Peggy to take, it sets off a catastrophic series of events.

Crux
by Gabriel Tallent

Dan and Tamma are two teenagers in their last year of high school in the southern Mojave Desert. One is a gifted golden child, the other a mouthy burnout. Climbing boulders in trash-strewn parking lots during cold desert nights, they seal their unique bond and dream of a life of adventure. As the year progresses and adult reality looms, they are rocked by change and pulled apart by irreconcilable obligations. Differences of class, talent, and prospects take on new importance; options dwindle, and their decisions grow ever more consequential and perilous. It feels inevitable, finally, that something must give.

The Elsewhere Express
by Samantha Sotto Yambao

You can’t buy a ticket for the Elsewhere Express. Appearing only to those whose lives are adrift, it’s a magical train seeming to carry very rare and special cargo: a sense of purpose, peace, and belonging. Raya is one of those lost souls. She had dreamed of being a songwriter, but when her brother died, she gave up on her dream and started living his instead. One day on the subway, as her thoughts wander, she’s swept off to the Elsewhere Express. There she meets Q, an intriguing artist who, like her, has lost his place in the world. Together they find a train full of wonders, from a boarding car that’s also a meadow to a dining car where passengers can picnic on lily pads to a bar where jellyfish and whales swim through pink clouds. Over the course of their long, strange night on the train, they also discover that it harbors secrets—and danger: A mysterious stranger has stowed away and brought with him a dark, malignant magic that threatens to destroy the train. But in investigating the stowaway's identity, Raya also finds herself drawing closer to the ultimate question: What is her life's true purpose—and is it a destination the Elsewhere Express can take her to?

Escape!
by Stephen Fishbach

A propulsive debut novel following a has-been reality TV star and a disgraced producer who get one last shot at redemption on a show set on a remote island, only to discover that the plot twists are beyond what they ever imagined. Everyone gets the story arc they deserve. Kent Duvall, a faded reality show winner, just wants another chance at glory-to find his way out of his depressing life and back to his highlight reel. When a scandal is captured on camera at a charity event, he gets his shot, on a new jungle survival show with seven other contestants. Each of them has been cast as a type-Ruddy the bully, Miriam the nerd, Ashley the love interest-but everyone is more than they appear. The contestants' goals seem simple-survive the wild, build a raft, win treasure. But Beck Bermann, a reality producer who suffered her own public shaming, sees them as characters in her redemption arc. As the schemes and strategies spiral out, breakout camps sabotage each other and rival producers struggle to control the storyline. Soon the question becomes less about who will win than who will make it out in one piece.

The Last of Earth
by Deepa Anappara

1869. Tibet is closed to Europeans, an infuriating obstruction for the rapidly expanding British Empire. In response, Britain begins training Indians-permitted to cross borders that white men may not-to undertake illicit, dangerous surveying expeditions into Tibet. Balram is one such surveyor-spy, an Indian schoolteacher who, for several years, has worked for the British, often alongside his dearest friend, Gyan. But Gyan went missing on his last expedition and is rumored to be imprisoned within Tibet. Desperate to rescue his friend, Balram agrees to guide an English captain on a foolhardy mission: After years of paying others to do the exploring, the captain, disguised as a monk, wants to personally chart a river that runs through southern Tibet. Their path will cross fatefully with that of another Westerner in disguise, fifty-year-old Katherine. Denied a fellowship in the all-male Royal Geographical Society in London, she intends to be the first European woman to reach Lhasa. As Balram and Katherine make their way into Tibet, they will face storms and bandits, snow leopards and soldiers, fevers and frostbite. What's more, they will have to battle their own doubts, ambitions, grief, and pasts in order to survive the treacherous landscape. A polyphonic novel about the various ways humans try to leave a mark on the world-from the enduring nature of family and friendship to the egomania and obsessions of the colonial enterprise-The Last of Earth confirms Deepa Anappara as one of our greatest and most ambitious storytellers.

Meet the Newmans
by Jennifer Niven

For two decades, Del and Dinah Newman and their sons, Guy and Shep, have ruled television as America’s Favorite Family. Millions of viewers tune in every week to watch them play flawless, black-and-white versions of themselves. But now it’s 1964, and the Newmans’ idealized apple-pie perfection suddenly feels woefully out of touch. Ratings are in free fall, as are the Newmans themselves. Del is keeping an explosive secret from his wife, and Dinah is slowly going numb―literally. Steady, stable Guy is hiding the truth about his love life, and the charmed luck of rock ‘n roll idol Shep may have finally run out. When Del―the creative motor behind the show―is in a mysterious car accident, Dinah decides to take matters into her own hands. She hires Juliet Dunne, an outspoken, impassioned young reporter, to help her write the final episode. But Dinah and Juliet have wildly different perspectives about what it means to be a woman, and a family, in 1964. Can the Newmans hold it together to change television history? Or will they be canceled before they ever have the chance?

Paper Cut
by Rachel Taff

Lucy Golden is a true-crime icon, infamous for the murder she committed while escaping a California cult twenty years ago. But as everyone in Los Angeles knows, fame is fleeting, and Lucy and her story are always just one news cycle away from obscurity. Not to mention, she’s fending off a stalker and moderating an icy feud between her acclaimed photographer mother and her scandalous rock star sister. Worst of all, online trolls are asking increasingly threatening questions about the legendary crime. Questions that could tear her life apart. So when a hotshot documentarian makes her case the subject of his next film, Lucy sees a chance to silence any doubters once and for all. But as filming begins, she must return to the California desert and come face-to-face with a cast of players from her torrid history. Of course, the past is never what it seems, and long-buried secrets soon collide with present-day threats. Can Lucy stop her critics from digging up the truth before it’s too late? And how far will she go to protect the story she’s been telling—and selling—all along?

The Rest of Our Lives
by Ben Markovits

A triumphantly life-affirming road trip novel about a man at a crossroads in his life. When Tom Layward's wife had an affair twelve years ago, he resolved to leave her as soon as his youngest child left the nest. Now, while driving his college-bound daughter to Pittsburgh, he remembers his promise to himself. He is also on the run from his own health issues and a forced leave from work. So, rather than returning to his wife in Westchester, Tom keeps driving west, with the vague plan of visiting people from his past—an old college friend, his ex-girlfriend, his brother, his son—en route, maybe, to California. He's moving towards a future he hasn't even envisioned yet while he considers his past and the choices he's made that have brought him to this particular present. Pitch-perfect, tender, and keenly observed, The Rest of Our Lives is a story about what to do when the rest of your life is only just the beginning of your story.

Vigil
by George Saunders

Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion. She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn’t like the others. The powerful K. J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold, epic life, and the world is better for it. Isn’t it? Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of a complicated man. Visitors begin to arrive (worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead), clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room; a black calf grazes on the love seat; a man from a distant, drought-ravaged village materializes; two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone’s postdeath future.

We Who Have No Gods
by Liza Anderson

Vic Wood knows her priorities: scrape by on her restaurant wages, take care of her younger brother Henry, and forget their mother ever existed. But Vic's careful life crumbles when Henry reveals that their long-missing mother belonged to the Acheron Order - a secret society of witches tasked with keeping the dead at bay. What's worse, Henry inherited their mother's magical abilities while Vic did not, and Henry has been chosen as the Order's newest recruit. Determined to keep him safe, Vic accompanies Henry to the isolated woods in upstate New York that play host to the sprawling and eerie Avalon Castle. When she joins the academy despite lacking powers of her own, she risks not only the Order's wrath, but also her brother's. And then there is Xan, the head Sentinel - imposing, ruthless, and frustrating - in charge of protecting Avalon. He makes no secret that he wants Vic to leave. As she makes both enemies and allies in this mysterious realm, Vic becomes caught between the dark forces at play, with her mother at the heart of it all. What's stranger is Vic begins to be affected by the academy - and Xan - in ways she can't quite understand. But with war between witches threatening the fabric of reality, Vic must decide whether to risk her heart and life for a world where power is everything.

Non-Fiction On Order

Ancient Women Gardeners: Prelude to the Chacoan World
by David E. Stuart

An original look at the gardens and gardeners of the Chacoan World, internationally acclaimed ethno-anthropologist David E. Stuart's Ancient Women Gardeners: Prelude to the Chacoan World explores the ecological, demographic, and human dynamics that led to Chaco's rise and fall from its early beginnings in the 500s AD to its decline during the 1100s AD. The Chacoan system represents North America's earliest form of an emergent urban ecology. From its outset, Chacoan farm nodes consisted of widely scattered clusters of gardens connected by roads, way stations, and district granaries. Chaco's women gardeners fueled powerful growth that was eventually abandoned as unforeseen dynamics barred the path to long-term sustainability. Stuart considers the intersection of population growth, agricultural yields, crop and soil possibilities, the caloric cost of labor, the corrosive role of pellagra, iron-deficiency anemia, the power of dietary protein in population dynamics, and the limitations imposed by early growth in the San Juan Basin--a land of poor soils, unpredictable rainfall, and rapidly declining wild vegetal foods and game. Focusing on the Chacoan landscape, farming techniques, and a world in which clusters of individual gardening families played a key role in creating an incipient urbanism in the Southwest, Stuart argues that without these accomplished gardening families and their agricultural innovations, there never would have been a "Chaco Phenomenon."

Beyond the Glittering World: An Anthology of Indigenous Feminisms and Futurisms by null

Beyond the Glittering World: An Anthology of Indigenous Feminisms and Futurisms
by Book Author

Rooted in visions of Indigenous futurisms, Beyond the Glittering World proclaims and celebrates a rising generation of storytellers. The collection brings together twenty-two emerging and established women, two-spirit people, and people of marginalized genders who immerse readers in poems, stories, and worlds that challenge and delight. From a museum heist 177 years in the making, to lyrical explorations of love and loss, to a tale where language itself becomes the force that saves the land, this boundary-breaking, genre-bending anthology illuminates the power of Indigenous voices.

Episodes: The Diary of a Recovering Mad Man
by Gucci Mane

As one of hip-hop's legendary figures and an indispensable fixture in Atlanta's vibrant rap culture, Gucci was on an upswing in his career when he sold his debut memoir, The Autobiography of Gucci Mane in 2016. He had just been released from prison, sporting a slimmer physique and health-conscious diet; he announced his ninth album, the platinum-selling Everybody Looking; and became the face of a global campaign with the luxury Italian designer that inspired his name and persona. But underneath all that, he was hiding some of his darkest struggles from the world. Now he is ready to tell his full story. In Episodes, Gucci revisits his life and shares what was really going on for the first time. The mental anguish, the pitfalls, the triggers no one speaks about. Each episode is Gucci experiencing something--something you may remember from the news or even heard in his music--and giving you the background of where he was mentally. He reveals how his fascination with money got the worst of him, why he committed certain crimes, the story behind his ice cream cone tattoo, and how his wife felt watching him overdose. Along the way, he interviews medical professionals and mental health experts to provide insight into mental health awareness.

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife
by Francesca Wade

Drawing on never-before-seen interviews, a richly researched, sweeping examination of one of the most influential and mythologized literary figures of the 20th century and her partner's emergence from the shadows after her death, in the decades-long fight to ensure her legacy. Gertrude Stein's salon at 27 rue de Fleurus in the 6th arrondissement of Paris is the stuff of literary legend. Many have tried to capture the spirit and glamour of the place that once entertained and fostered the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, but perhaps none as determinedly, and self-consciously, as Stein herself. In this new biography of the polarizing, trailblazing author, collector, salonnière, and tastemaker, Francesca Wade rescues Stein from the tangle of contradictions that has characterized her legacy, expertly presenting us with this towering literary figure as we've never seen her before. A genius to her admirers, a charlatan to her detractors, Stein achieved international celebrity in 1933 with her bestselling memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of her devoted partner--a triumph which, ironically, only drew attention away from the avant-garde poetry she called her "real" writing. After Stein's death in 1946, Alice B. Toklas made it her mission to shepherd all of Stein's unpublished writing into print, all the while negotiating her own fraught role in the complex mythology they had built together. The biographers who flocked to Stein's newly opened archive found a surprising trove of secrets which would change Stein's image forever: a forgotten novel, a cache of love letters, and a series of notebooks which shed entirely new light on her early years in Paris. Pushing beyond the conventions of literary biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is a bold, innovative examination of the nature of legacy and memory itself, in which Wade uncovers the origins of Stein's radical writing and reveals new depths to the storied relationship that made it possible. A captivating, brilliant work of biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is a groundbreaking examination of a true literary giant.

Green Oranges: A Journey into Honduras to Find Redemption, Hope, and Transformation
by Shin Fujiyama

Shin Fujiyama grew up as an ordinary Japanese-American kid in the suburbs of Virginia. As a small-statured immigrant, he questioned his self-worth—until he found soccer. Cut after mere months on his college team, his sense of direction dissolved as quickly as it formed. When Shin saw a flyer for an international volunteer trip to Honduras, he took a chance. One week and his perspective was transformed. He returned to Honduras, determined to accomplish something no one believed he could do: end the cycle of generational poverty and gang violence in a riverbed shantytown. In Green Oranges, Shin tells the story of how he, a naive outsider in a world of murder, extortion, and crushing poverty, created a village for the orphaned and homeless. Starting with nothing in a country with the highest homicide rate in the world at the time, Shin confronted his deepest insecurities and repeated failures, building schools for children with no prior access to education and revitalizing a community.

Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy
by Julia Ioffe

Acclaimed journalist Julia Ioffe tells the story of modern Russia through the history of its women, from revolution to utopia to autocracy. In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow -- only to discover just how much Russian society had changed while she had been living in America. The Soviet women she had known growing up -- doctors, engineers, scientists -- seemed to have been replaced by women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms. How had Russia gone from portraying itself as the vanguard of world feminism to becoming a bastion of conservative Christian values? In Motherland, Ioffe turns modern Russian history on its head, telling it exclusively through the stories of its women. From her own physician great-grandmothers to Lenin's lover, a feminist revolutionary; from the hundreds of thousands of Soviet girls who fought in World War II to the millions of single mothers who rebuilt and repopulated a devastated country; from the members of Pussy Riot to Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of opposition leader Alexey Navalny, Ioffe chronicles one of the most audacious social experiments in history and documents how it failed the very women it was meant to liberate -- and how that failure paved the way for the revanche of Vladimir Putin. Part memoir, part journalistic exploration, part history, Motherland paints a portrait of modern Russia through the women who shaped it. With deep emotion, Ioffe reveals what it means to live through the cataclysms of revolution, war, idealism, and heartbreak -- and how the story of Russia today is inextricably tied to the sacrifices of its women.

Pink-Pilled: Women and the Far Right
by Lois Shearing

As the far right has gained popularity and acceptance around the world, its ranks have swelled with an unlikely category of members: women. Women play significant roles in far-right movements, acting as propagandists, prizes to be won and mother-warriors of the nation. But up to now their activities have been largely overlooked. In 'Pink-pilled,' Lois Shearing provides a riveting account of how the far right has used the internet to recruit women, while shedding light on what life is like for women within these movements, including their experiences of misogyny and violence. Understanding how and why women join movements that explicitly aim to restrict their autonomy is essential if we want to fight back. 'Pink-pilled' offers key insights for countering women's radicalisation and building communities resistant to far-right thought.

Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead
by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

For many years, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson took solace in skiing--in all kinds of weather, on all kinds of snow across all kinds of terrain, often following the trail beside a beloved creek near her home. Recently, as she skied on this path against the backdrop of uncertainty, environmental devastation, rising authoritarianism and ongoing social injustice, her mind turned to the water in the creek and an elemental question: What might it mean to truly listen to water? To know water? To exist with and alongside water? So began a quest to understand her people's historical, cultural, and ongoing interactions with water in all its forms (ice, snow, rain, perspiration, breath). Pulling together these threads, Leanne began to see how a "Theory of Water" might suggest a radical rethinking of relationships between beings and forces in the world today. In this inventive work, Simpson draws on Nishnaabeg origin stories while artfully weaving the work of influential writers and artists alongside her personal memories and experience--and in doing so, reimagines water as a catalyst for radical transformation, capable of birthing a new world. Theory of Water is a resonant exploration of an intricate, multi-layered relationship with the most abundant element on our planet--one that, as Simpson eloquently shows, is shaping our present even as it demands a radical rethinking of how we might achieve a just future.

Touch Me, I'm Sick: A Memoir in Essays
by Margeaux Feldman

The forms of intimacy and care that we’ve been sold are woefully inadequate and problematic. In a world that treats those who are sick and traumatized as problems in need of a cure, nonbinary writer, artist, educator, and Instagram creator Margeaux Feldman offers a different story. Trauma, which all too often manifests as chronic illness, tells us that there is something deeply wrong with the world we live in. A world that promotes individualism, fractures us from community through violence and systemic oppression, and leaves us traumatized. That is what we need to cure. While unveiling their own lived experiences caregiving for their sick father, losing their mother, surviving sexual abuse, and grappling with their own chronic illness, Feldman provides roadmaps for embracing queer modes of care, or “hysterical intimacies,” that reject the notion that those who have been labeled sick are broken. Feldman looks at the lengthy history of branding girls, women, and femmes–and their desires–as sick, from the treatment of hysterics by Jean-Martin Charcot and Sigmund Freud in the 19th and 20th centuries. What emerges is a valiant call for rethinking the ways we seek healing. This compelling blend of theory, personal narrative, and cultural criticism offers a path forward for reimagining the shapes and forms that intimacy, care, and interdependence can take.

The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien's Creation
by Michael DC Drout

In The Tower and the Ruin, Michael Drout explains what sets Tolkien's work apart from all other modern literature. Drout's argument starts with the observation that reading Tolkien's books, particularly The Lord of the Rings, feels more like having an experience than just reading another book. Along with more easily described characteristics-the richness and complexity of the world of Middle-earth, the aesthetic beauty of Tolkien's invented languages, the intricacy of the narrative, and the sophistication of the moral vision-this experiential quality is the foundation of his books' enduring popularity and cultural influence. It is also what makes them more personally significant to many readers than any other secular texts. Taking us into Tolkien's life and his many books-from The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion to lesser-known works such as The Fall of Gondolin and The Book of Lost Tales-Drout shows how Tolkien, over a period of decades, crafted a fully coherent world. But the greater achievement, Drout argues, was how he drew from Beowulf, the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, and other foundational myths to create of a set of stories that felt, to readers, as though they were much, much older than they actually were; that read as compilations of already existing material; and that appeared to be the product of many different authors. Throughout, Drout demonstrates how Tolkien has shaped his own life, helping him during periods of intense sorrow. As he writes, "The effects of the Ring on Frodo and Gollum are the most profound metaphorical exploration of addiction that has ever been written, capturing the experience so perfectly that when my father finally told me about his struggles with alcoholism, he said 'I could not take off the Ring,' and I understood." Sweeping and hugely perceptive, The Tower and the Ruin defines Tolkien anew.

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