Staff Picks
July 2025
FICTION we've enjoyed
Salvación
by Sandra Proudman

With rising tension in Alta California after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, seventeen-year-old Lola de La Pena becomes the masked vigilante Salvación to protect her family and town from a man wielding deadly magic, but her mission is complicated when she begins falling for Alejandro, a member of his dangerous entourage. 
The Emperor of Gladness
by Ocean Vuong

In the struggling town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai is saved from despair by Grazina, an elderly widow with dementia, forging an unexpected bond that reshapes their lives and reveals dynamics of love, memory, and resilience on the margins of society. This powers a story of friendship, loss, and how much we're willing to risk to claim one of life's most treasured mercies; a second chance. 
Gabrièle
by Anne Berest and Claier Berest

The year is 1908, and a brilliant, young French woman named Gabriële, newly graduated from the most elite music school in Europe, meets a volcanic Spanish artist named Francis. Following a whirlwind romance, they marry and fall headlong into a Paris that is experimenting with new forms of living, thinking, and creating. Soon after marrying Francis, Gabriële meets Marcel, another young artist, five years her junior. Soon, Francis, Marcel, and Gabriële are all involved in a fervent affair that will change the course of art history and redefine the avant-garde. 
The Between
by Tananarive Due

A man risks his soul and his sanity to save his family from malevolent forces in this brilliant novel of horror and the supernatural from the award-winning pioneer of speculative fiction and author of the classic My Soul to Keep. Thirty years after his grandmother sacrificed her life to save him, Hilton becomes alarmed when his prosecutor wife begins receiving racist hate mail and Hilton starts experiencing troublesome nightmares. It's the haunting story of a man desperately trying to hold on to the people and life he loves as he slowly loses himself.  
Eve
by William P. Young

When a shipping container with a broken young woman washes up on his island between worlds, John the Collector oversees the woman's recovery and discovers her genetic importance. By the best-selling author of The Shack, it's a bold, unprecedented exploration of the Creation narrative, true to the original texts and centuries of scholarship, yet with breathtaking discoveries that challenge traditional beliefs about who we are and how we're made.
Things We Lost to the Water
by Eric Nguyen

A captivating novel about an immigrant Vietnamese family who settles in New Orleans and struggles to remain connected to one another as their lives are inextricably reshaped. Their search for identity--as individuals and as a family--threatens to tear them apart, until disaster strikes the city they now call home and they are suddenly forced to find a new way to come together and honor the ties that bind them. 
The Man Made of Smoke
by Alex North

Dan Garvie's life has been haunted by the crime he witnessed as a child, narrowly escaping an encounter with a notorious serial killer. He has dedicated his life since to becoming a criminal profiler, eager to seek justice for innocent victims. So when his father passes away under suspicious circumstances, Dan revisits his small island community, determined to uncover the truth about his death. Is it possible that the monster he remembers from his childhood nightmares has returned after all these years? 
Pale Shadows
by Dominique Fortier

Delicate like lacework with dark threads running through it, Pale Shadows picks up the story of Emily Dickinson where Paper Houses left off, to explore the place of women in history, their creativity, and the enduring power of Dickinson's poetry. Grieving the loss of her sister, Lavinia goes through Emily's things and wonders what to do with her sister's poems. She enlists the help of Susan, Emily's best friend and brother Austin's wife, who rouses herself from a deep depression to put the poems into some order to approach a publisher.  
Out on a Limb
by Hannah Bonam-Young

Winnifred "Win" McNulty has always been wildly independent and not one to be coddled for her limb difference. Win has spent most of her life trying to prove that she can do it all on her own. Then Win finds herself pregnant and decides to keep it. Together, Win and the incredibly charming Bo decide to get to know one another as friends and nothing more while they embark on this parenting journey together. But as they both should know by now, life rarely goes according to plan. 
The Listeners
by Maggie Stiefvater

January 1942. War has begun, and June is trying to shield the Avallon Hotel & Spa from it, but when the owner's son makes a deal with the State Department to house dozens of Axis diplomats, June must convince her staff--many of whom have sons and husbands heading to battle--to offer luxury to Nazis. Meanwhile, FBI agent Tucker Minnick is searching for a spy among the detainees. As tension grows between locals and the detainees, Tucker's spy games disturb the peace, and the eerie sweetwater proves more dangerous than once thought. 
NONFICTION we've enjoyed
City Boy
by Edmund White

A memoir based on the author's experiences as a cultural and intellectual insider in 1970s New York, Edmund White arrived from the Midwest in 1962, worked at Time-Life Books, haunted the Gotham Book Mart, and went street cruising. In 1970, he quit his job to live in Rome, returning to find “sexual abundance” in New York. White knew artists, writers and poets, yet his own writing remained at the starting gate. How he overcame setbacks and confronted his insecurities to eventually write 23 books makes for fascinating reading.
Where Are Your Boys Tonight?
by Chris Payne

Journalist Payne has skillfully woven together more than 150 in-depth interviews to illustrate the rise and massive popularity of emo, a rock genre that merged hardcore punk with pop melodies and heartfelt, emotion-laden lyrics. He begins in 1999, when "third-wave emo" bands surfaced in basement shows, up until the national teenage craze surrounding the mostly male bands which performed at the 2005 Warped Tour. Payne's oral history does a remarkable job of defining and showing the meteoric boom of emo that music fans will find fascinating. 
Hearts West
by Chris Enss

Complete with actual advertisements from both women seeking husbands and males seeking brides, Hearts West includes twelve stories of courageous mail order brides and their exploits. Some were fortunate enough to marry good men and live happily ever after; still others found themselves in desperate situations that robbed them of their youth and sometimes their lives.
Cabin
by Patrick Hutchison

A memoir of the author's journey from an office job to restoring a cabin in the Pacific Northwest. Wit's End is a run-down off-the-grid cabin, 120 shabby square feet of fixer-upper Patrick Hutchison purchased on a whim. This is the story of seven years of renovations, but it's also a love story; of a place, of possibilities, and of the process of renovation, of seeing what could be instead of what is. It is a book for those who know what it's like to bite off more than you can chew or who desperately wish to. 
It Rhymes With Takei
by George Takei

George Takei's new full-color graphic memoir reveals his most personal story of all. He has shown the world many faces: actor, author, outspoken activist, helmsman of the starship Enterprise, living witness to the internment of Japanese Americans, and king of social media. But until 2005, there was always one face he did not show the world. Now George shares the full story of his life in the closet, his decision to come out as gay at the age of 68, and the way that moment transformed everything.