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| The Accidental Favorite by Fran LittlewoodGathering to celebrate their mother's 70th birthday at a posh rented house in the English countryside, three middle-aged sisters, each with their own families and issues, are shocked when an unexpected event indicates who their father's favorite child is. Told from multiple points of view over various time periods, this is the moving latest by the author of Amazing Grace Adams. Read-alike: Catherine Newman's Sandwich. |
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| The Catch by Yrsa Daley-WardAfter their mother's belongings were found near the Thames River in 1995, young twins Clara and Dempsey were adopted by different families. Now 30, successful author Clara meets a woman who looks exactly as their mom did in the 1990s. While Clara thinks somehow this woman is their mom, administrative clerk Dempsey doesn't, leading to tension between the estranged sisters in this thought-provoking debut novel by a poet and memoirist. Read-alike: August Blue by Deborah Levy. |
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| Dungeon Crawler Carlby Matt DinnimanThe apocalypse will be televised! A man. His ex-girlfriend's cat. A sadistic game show unlike anything in the universe: a dungeon crawl where survival depends on killing your prey in the most entertaining way possible. An 18-level labyrinth filled with traps, monsters, and loot. Only a few dare venture inside. But once you're in, you can't get out. You have but days to find a staircase to the next level down, or it's game over. In this game, it's not about your strength or your dexterity. It's about your followers, your views. Your clout. It's about building an audience and killing those goblins with style. And if you do have that "it" factor, you may just find yourself with a following. They call it Dungeon Crawler World. But for Carl, it's anything but a game. Read-alike: How to become the Dark Lord and die trying by Django Wexler |
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| The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila MottleyIn the Florida Panhandle, young mothers support each other amid upheavals while others judge and put obstacles in their paths. Three of them narrate: de facto leader Simone, a 20-year-old mother of twins who's pregnant again; newcomer Adela, a champion teen swimmer from Indiana who's been sent to live with her grandmother; and determined Emory, who brings her infant to high school with her. Read-alikes: Sarai Johnson's Grown Women; Brit Bennett's The Mothers. Also available as an eBook on Libby. |
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| The Homemade God by Rachel JoyceNot long after their larger-than-life 76-year-old artist father suddenly marries a 27-year-old they've never met, the four Kemp siblings learn he has drowned in an Italian lake he'd swam in for decades. Descending on the vacation villa during a sweltering heatwave, they meet their enigmatic stepmother, question their dad's mysterious death, hunt for his unfinished masterpiece, and confront long-hidden familial wounds. Read-alike: Lynn Steger Strong's Flight. |
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| When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled up to their street. One boy got into the car, two did not, and something terrible happened -- something that ended their friendship and changed all three boys forever. Twenty-five years later, Sean Devine is a homicide detective. Jimmy Marcus is an ex-con who owns a corner store. And Dave Boyle is trying to hold his marriage together and keep his demons at bay -- demons that urge him to do terrible things. When Jimmy Marcus's daughter is found murdered, Sean Devine is assigned to the case. His personal life unraveling, he must go back into a world he thought he'd left behind to confront not only the violence, of the present but the nightmares of his past. A tense and unnerving psychological thriller, Mystic River is also an epic novel of love and loyalty, faith and family, in which people irrevocably marked by the past find themselves on a collision course with the darkest truths of their own hidden selves. Read-alike: John Connolly's The Burning Soul.
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| Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission--and if he fails, humanity and 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? Read-alike: Mickey7 by Edward Ashton. |
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| After forming a coalition of human resistance against the enemy invasion, Dalinar Kholin and his Knights Radiant have spent a year fighting a protracted, brutal war. Neither side has gained an advantage, and the threat of a betrayal by Dalinar's crafty ally Taravangian looms over every strategic move. Now, as new technological discoveries by Navani Kholin's scholars begin to change the face of the war, the enemy prepares a bold and dangerous operation. Adolin and Shallan must lead the coalition's envoy to the honorspren stronghold of Lasting Integrity and either convince the spren to join the cause against the evil god Odium, or personally face the storm of failure. |
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| Six Wild Crownsby Holly RaceAs tradition has it, the king of Elben must marry six queens and magically bind each of them to one of the island's palaces or the kingdom will fall. Clever, ambitious Boleyn is determined to be her beloved Henry's favorite queen. She relishes the games at court and the political rivalries with his other wives. Seymour is the opposite - originally sent to Boleyn's court as a reluctant spy and assassin, she ends up catching Henry's eye and is forced into a loveless marriage with the king. But when the two queens become the unlikeliest of things - friends and allies - the balance of power begins to shift. Together, they uncover a dark and deadly truth at the heart of the island's magic. Read-alike: The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri |
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The Stolen Life of Colette Marceauby Kristin HarmelA new historical novel features two jewel thieves, a priceless bracelet that disappears in 1940s Paris and a quest for answers in a decades-old murder. Read-alike: The Maid by Nita Prose Also available as an eBook on Libby.
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The Enchanted Greenhouse by Sarah Beth DurstTerlu Perna broke the law because she was lonely. She cast a spell and created a magically sentient spider plant. As punishment, she was turned into a wooden statue and tucked away into an alcove in the North Reading Room of the Great Library of Alyssium. This should have been the end of her story... Yet one day, Terlu wakes in the cold of winter on a nearly-deserted island full of hundreds of magical greenhouses. She's starving and freezing, and the only other human on the island is a grumpy gardener. When she learns that the magic that sustains them is failing—causing the death of everything within them—Terlu knows she must help. Even if that means breaking the law again. This time, though, she isn't alone. Assisted by the gardener and a sentient rose, Terlu must unravel the secrets of a long-dead sorcerer if she wants to save the island—and have a fresh chance at happiness and love. Available as an eBook or audiobook on Libby. |
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Etiquette for Lovers and Killers by Anna Fitzgerald HealyWhat are the chances of receiving a love letter and an engagement ring for a perfect stranger, only to see that same woman murdered the very next day? It’s 1964 in the tiny town of Eastport, Maine, and Billie McCadie is bored to death. She’s surrounded by dull people with more manners than sense, and no sign of the intrigue or romance that fill her beloved novels. That is, until an engagement ring and cryptic love letter turn up, addressed to "Gertrude." What follows is an intoxicating cocktail of stalking, blackmail, Jell-O salads, and champagne secrets, all served along the rocky Maine coastline. Everyone is a suspect. Everyone has a secret. And (strangely) everyone has a boat. But who is willing to kiss and tell? Available only as an Audiobook on Libby |
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A Fig for All the Devils by C. S. FritzAn abused, grief-stricken, and impoverished Sonny has all but given up on life. That is, until he meets death, by way of the Grim Reaper. The Reaper, a junk food loving, poetry reading, cigarette-addicted entity, has no time to waste as he searches for a suitable successor who would become "Death" for the next millennium. By training the boy in the ways of death and dying, Reaper grooms his young apprentice and through suspenseful and horror-laced events, he unknowingly gives Sonny something he never intended: A reason to live. Available only as an audiobook on Hoopla. |
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A thrill-seeking young woman joins a radical theater troupe in this taut, suspenseful novel of art, seduction, and the deadly limits of liberation.
New York, 1972. A cloistered college student slips out of the dorms to attend a performance by a legendary experimental performance troupe. Within months, she has left campus life behind and joined the company, infatuated by its charismatic leader and his promises of absolute freedom. California, 1997. A theater teacher at an exclusive private school receives an unsettling letter. With her job at risk and her past clawing at her carefully constructed present, what will she do to protect the life she has made?
Riveting and atmospheric, Flashout is a coruscating coming-of-age story and an immersive thriller exploring the enchantments and perils of art. Available only as an eBook on Libby. |
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Forged by Danielle TellerIn the Gilded Age, a time of abject poverty and obscene wealth, a desperate and ambitious young woman strikes out for a new life in the rising industrial cities of America. Naive Fanny is thrust into a Darwinian world where she is cast out and preyed upon, but she's a survivor and quickly learns from her struggles. Shedding her past, Fanny embarks on a darkly thrilling transformation. She becomes Kitty Warren—a forger, con artist, and thief. Exploiting the greed and self-regard of the powerful, Kitty builds her own castle in the sky, yet she finds real pleasure and fulfilment elusive, and soon her foundations start to crumble. Kitty Warren exposes the dark heart of the American dream, making Forged a gripping narrative and a parable for the ages. Available as an eBook or Audiobook on Libby.
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Paladin's Grace by T. Kingfisher Stephen's god died on the longest day of the year... Three years later, Stephen is a broken paladin, living only for the chance to be useful before he dies. But all that changes when he encounters a fugitive named Grace in an alley and witnesses an assassination attempt gone wrong. Now the pair must navigate a web of treachery, beset on all sides by spies and poisoners, while a cryptic killer stalks one step behind... From the Hugo and Nebula Award winning author of Swordheart and The Twisted Ones comes a saga of murder, magic, and love on the far side of despair. Available only as an eBook on Libby.
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Soup from a Sausage Skewerby Hans Christian Andersen"'We had such an excellent dinner yesterday,' said an old mouse of the female sex to another who had not been present at the feast. 'I sat number twenty-one below the mouse-king, which was not a bad place. Shall I tell you what we had? Everything was first rate.'" Available only as an audiobook on Hoopla. |
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| What Kind of Paradise by Janelle BrownTeenage Jane lives isolated from the outside world in a remote cabin with her beloved father, an enigmatic genius. After discovering disturbing information about him, she flees, finding herself in Silicon Valley in the 1990s. This twisty coming-of-age novel offers intriguing looks at extremism, technology, and humanity. Read-alikes: What Mother Won't Tell Me by Ivar Leon Menger; Godshot by Chelsea Jean Bieker. Available only as an audiobook on Libby. |
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Contact your librarian for more great books! |
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