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American Fantasy by Emma Straub An irresistible story about what happens when your teenage fantasy comes true after you're already an adult. When the American Fantasy cruise ship sets sail for a four-day themed voyage, aboard are all five members of a famous, nineties-era boy band and three thousand screaming women who have worshipped them since childhood. Feeling slightly out of place amid this crowd is Annie, here on a lark to appease her sister. Yet when the lights come up and the idols of her youth begin to sing, something is unlocked. Call it memory. Call it nostalgia. Call it the chemical reaction of hormones, hope, and sexual reawakening. Between the slushy alcoholic drinks, the familiar music, and the throngs of middle-aged women acting like lovesick teenagers, Annie finally reconnects to a long-submerged part of herself. By the time she meets one of the band members--not just a celebrity but someone in need of a friend--she has accessed a new sense of possibility. In a smart and incisive book packed with laugh-out-loud reflections on fame, aging, and marriage, Emma Straub delivers a richly textured story that shows us real passion is never truly lost, that what we love makes us who we are, and that deep meaning can sometimes be found in a sea of screaming fans.
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Bumblebee Season
by Eileen Garvin
From Eileen Garvin, nationally bestselling author of The Music of Bees and Crow Talk, a heartwarming new story that returns to the vibrant world of beekeeping-- Provided by publisher.
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Ghost Town
by Tom Perrotta
From New York Times bestselling author Tom Perrotta, hailed by critics as the Steinbeck of Suburbia (Time), our Balzac of the burbs (Chicago Sun-Times), and an American Chekhov (The New York Times), comes a gripping and darkly nostalgic tale about a tumultuous summer in 1970s suburban New Jersey, from the perspective of a middle-aged writer, looking back on a series of events that changed his life--and the story he finally has the courage to tell. Jimmy Perrini lives in 1970s suburban New Jersey, a few miles from Manhattan, but a world apart. At the end of eighth grade, after tragedy strikes, Jimmy finds himself lost in a fog of grief that alienates him from friends and family, drifting instead into troubling friendships with two older teenagers: one a notorious local burnout with a fast car, an endless supply of weed, and a shaky grasp of reality; the other a smart, eccentric girl, whom Jimmy finds himself drawn to as they become entranced by her Ouija board, which may just offer the only salve to their grief. As a fateful public drama unfolds, Jimmy is torn between the occult beyond and the cold realities of the place he has called home. Narrated by a much older Jimmy, a literary-turned-commercial novelist, Ghost Town reveals how the past haunts the present--the way our ghosts are always with us, even when we think we've left them behind.
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A Gift Before Dying
by Malcolm Kempt
In a gripping and hauntingly atmospheric novel set against the unforgiving landscape of the Arctic Circle, a disgraced police investigator discovers that his path to redemption is paved with ice-and blood-- Provided by publisher.
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Go Gentle by Maria SempleMaria Semple is a treasure. --Los Angeles Times The New York Times bestselling author of Where'd You Go, Bernadette returns to form in her most exuberant and life-affirming novel yet with the story of one woman's cheerful determination to live a life of the mind only to have the heart force its way in. Adora Hazzard has it all figured out. A Stoic philosopher and divorcée, she lives a contented life on New York City's Upper West Side. Having discovered that the secret to happiness is to desire only what you have, she's applied this insight to blissful effect: relishing her teenage daughter, the freedom of being solo, and her job as a moral tutor for the twin boys of an old-money family. She's even assembled a coven--like-minded women who live on the same floor in the legendary Ansonia--and is making active efforts to grow its membership. Adora's carefully curated life is humming along brilliantly until a chance meeting with a handsome stranger. Soon, her ordered world is upended by black-market art deals, secret rendezvous, and international intrigue . . . and her past--which she has worked so hard to bury--lands like a bomb in her present. Romantic, hilarious, intelligent, and bursting with the stuff of life, Go Gentle is a thrilling story of one woman's mid-life transformation, cementing Maria Semple in the pantheon of our most exciting and important contemporary writers.
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Last Night in Brooklyn by Xochitl GonzalezNew York Times bestselling author Xochitl Gonzalez delivers a captivating story about a young woman whose life becomes ensnared in her glamorous neighbor's secret past SPRING, 2007 At twenty-six, Alicia Canales Forten feels smothered by her future. She's in a long-distance relationship, living at home with her mother's beliefs, saving up for her wedding to a future doctor. But after Alicia ventures out one night in the neighborhood of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, she finds herself lured by the siren song of youth and possibility that the striving crowd of creatives holds, and moves in. No one embodies this milieu more than La Garza, a larger-than-life, up-and-coming fashion designer whose epic house parties fuel neighborhood lore. La Garza's life, observed by Alicia from her apartment across the street, seems to hold the allure and fearlessness Alicia has never dared to imagine for herself. But when Alicia's wealthy banker cousin moves to the neighborhood, she finds herself increasingly drawn into both his and La Garza's precarious lives. Against the backdrop of a potentially life-changing presidential election and a looming once-in-a-generation fiscal crisis, Last Night in Brooklyn explores the dark compromise of the American Dream for people of color living, unknowingly, in the twilight of a cultural moment. It is a story about everything money can buy--and the destruction of what it can't.
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Leave Your Mess at Home
by Tolani Akinola
Warm, smart, hilarious, delicious, riveting.--Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Times bestselling author of Romantic Comedy Powerful... There are multiple messes in Leave Your Mess At Home; I loved reading about every one of them.--Rachel Khong, New York Times bestselling author of Real Americans The Longe siblings are really botching their parents' American Dream. Sola Longe, eldest daughter, estranged from the family, is secretly back home in Chicago for the first time in a decade. She's a newly single and recently disgraced influencer trying to quietly put her life back together again. The other three Longe siblings aren't doing much better. Anjola is in love with her best friend, who just got engaged to someone else; Karen, a college junior and the baby of the family, is grappling with her sexuality and self-image; and Ola, the golden child with a baby of his own on the way, is questioning his marriage and how to raise a Black son in America. Sola's unexpected return sets them on a crash course towards each other, and when the four siblings find themselves together again at their Nigerian immigrant parents' Thanksgiving table, a decade's worth of secrets and a lifetime of resentments explode to the fore. In the wreckage of their fateful reunion, each Longe is forced to reckon with the past, take stock of what really matters, and find a way back to each other. Big-hearted, hilarious, and wise, Leave Your Mess At Home is a poignant exploration of forgiveness, unconditional love, and becoming who you want to be, asking the question: what do we owe to our families, and what do we owe to ourselves?
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Lidie: The Further Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton: A Novel
by Jane Smiley
From the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, a rousing novel that follows two young women fleeing a divided America: one running toward a dazzling future and the other running from a troubled past Christmas, 1857. America's future is precarious; civil war looms on the horizon. After her abolitionist husband is murdered in the lawless Kansas Territory, Lidie Newton returns, in mourning, to her hometown of Quincy, Illinois. But her sisters have little comfort to offer, and Lidie is haunted by the memories of her failures--until she takes an interest in her niece, Annie. Beautiful, self-assured, and mischievous, Annie sticks out in Quincy. She becomes an actress at the local theater, and when she is offered the opportunity to perform abroad, she decides to run away. But travel is dangerous for a young unmarried woman, so Lidie, armed with her pistol and her wit, goes with her. The two women embark on a perilous journey across the Atlantic, rushing toward an unknown future in England. Once they arrive in Liverpool, they vanish into new roles in the household of Annie's benefactor, Mr. Mallory Cunningham. Annie takes a stage name and finds her way to a career, while Lidie becomes her lady's maid. But will either of them be content with her new lot in life? Exuberant and riveting, a sly commentary on truth and beauty and fulfillment that resonates with our times, Lidie delivers a panoramic portrait of a volatile era and the headstrong women trying to live an honest life in it.
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Love by the Book
by Jessica George
The New York Times bestselling author of Maame is back with a funny, moving story about the friendship between two women at a crossroads in their thirties.
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| Where the Wildflowers Grow by Terah Shelton HarrisWhen a South Carolina prison bus crashes into a surging river, everyone is presumed dead. But Leigh Wilde survives and eventually makes her way to a rural Alabama flower farm where Jackson, the owner, takes her in. Working the land, Leigh finds strength, friends, and hope for the future, but the past is never far away. With strong romantic elements, this lyrical and moving novel explores survival, grief, and healing. Read-alike: Cade Bentley's Where Wild Peaches Grow. |
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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