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2025 Staff Picks Check out what the Lewes Library staff read and enjoyed in 2025. |
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Crooks: A Novel about Crime and Family
by Lou Berney
From award-winning author Lou Berney comes an electrifying new novel that follows a uniquely American crime family on an unforgettable journey across four decades.You've never met a family like the Mercurios.They say the American dream is going farther in life than your parents ever did. But how does that work if your parents are criminals?
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The Book Club for Troublesome Women
by Marie Bostwick
The Book Club for Troublesome Women is a humorous, thought provoking, and nostalgic romp through one pivotal and tumultuous American year--as well as an ode to self-discovery, persistence, and the power of sisterhood.
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The Correspondent
by Virginia Evans
Sybil is seventy-three years old, in the winter of her life. She has always made sense of the world through writing letters and through this epistolary novel we see how she comes to terms with her past and present and learns forgiveness.
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The Heart of Winter
by Jonathan Evison
Abe Winter and Ruth Warneke were never meant to be together--at least if you ask Ruth. Yet their catastrophic blind date in college evolved into a seventy-year marriage and a life on a farm on Bainbridge Island with their hens and beloved Labrador Megs. Through the years, the Winters have fallen in and out of lockstep, and out of their haunting losses and guarded secrets, a dependable partnership has been forged. But when Ruth's loose tooth turns out to be something much more malicious, the beautiful, reliable life they've created together comes to a crisis.
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Kate & Frida: A Novel of Friendship, Food, and Books
by Kim Fay
Twenty-something Frida Rodriguez comes to Paris in 1991, relishing the city's butter-soaked cuisine and seeking her future as a war correspondent. But when she writes to a bookshop in Seattle, she receives more than just the book she requests. A friendship begins that will redefine the person she thought she wanted to become. Seattle bookseller Kate Fair is transformed by Frida's free spirit. Through the most tumultuous years of their young lives-personally and globally-Kate and Frida's friendship sustains and nourishes them.
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Victorian Psycho
by Virginia Feito
In Grim Wolds, England, Winifred Notty takes on the role of governess at Ensor House, where she must navigate the twisted dynamics of the dysfunctional Pounds family while suppressing her own violent past; as Christmas approaches, she plans sinister gifts for her charges, revealing her true nature.
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Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice
by Virginia Roberts Giuffre
The world knows Virginia Roberts Giuffre as Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell's most outspoken victim: the woman whose decision to speak out helped send both serial abusers to prison, whose photograph with Prince Andrew catalyzed his fall from grace. But her story has never been told in full, in her own words--until now. In April 2025, Giuffre took her own life. She left behind a memoir written in the years preceding her death and stated unequivocally that she wanted it published.
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Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
by John Green
In 2019, John Green met Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone while traveling with Partners in Health. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal and dynamic advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, treatable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing 1.5 million people every year. In Everything is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry's story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.
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A Dog in Georgia
by Lauren Grodstein
In this beautiful story of connection and self-reflection, a missing dog in Georgia sets Amy Webb on an adventure away from her tumultuous marriage and lack-luster personal life and towards a journey of self-discovery and joy.
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Broken Country
by Clare Leslie Hall
When Beth's brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn't realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives, for the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager--the man who broke her heart years ago. Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died in a tragic accident. As Beth is pulled back into Gabriel's life, tensions around the village rise and dangerous secrets and jealousies from the past resurface, this time with deadly consequences.
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The Women
by Kristin Hannah
In 1965 the world is changing, and 20-year old nursing student, Frankie, imagines different choices for her life. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she impulsively joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path. As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is overwhelmed by the chaos and destruction of war, as well as the unexpected trauma of coming home to a changed and politically divided America.
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A Discovery of Witches
by Deborah Harkness
In this tale of passion and obsession, Diana Bishop, a young scholar and a descendant of witches, discovers a long-lost and enchanted alchemical manuscript, Ashmole 782, deep in Oxford's Bodleian Library. Its reappearance summons a fantastical underworld, which she navigates with her leading man, vampire geneticist Matthew Clairmont.
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The Road to Tender Hearts
by Annie Hartnett
At sixty-three years old, million-dollar lottery winner PJ Halliday would be the luckiest man in Pondville, Massachusetts, if it weren't for the sudden death of his eldest daughter and the way his marriage fell apart after that. Since then, PJ spends both his money and his time at the bar. But when PJ reads the obituary of his old romantic rival, he realizes his high school sweetheart, Michelle Cobb, is finally single again. PJ decides he's going to drive across the country to the Tender Hearts Retirement Community in Arizona to win Michelle back. Before PJ can hit the road, tragedy strikes, leaving PJ the sudden guardian of his brother's grandchildren. Anyone else would be deterred from the planned trip, but PJ figures the orphaned kids might benefit from getting out of town.
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Random Harvest (Tr, Reissue)
by James Hilton
Charles Rainier, a prosperous Briton, loses his memory as a result of shellshock in the First World War.
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The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife
by Anna Johnston
Frederick Fife was born with an extra helping of kindness in his heart. If he borrowed your car, he'd return it washed with a full tank of gas. The problem is there's nobody left in Fred's life to borrow from. At eighty-two, he's desperately lonely, broke, and on the brink of homelessness. Fred's luck changes when, in a bizarre case of mistaken identity, he takes the place of Bernard Greer at the local nursing home. Now he has a roof over his head, three meals a day, and, most importantly, the chance to be part of a family again. All he has to do is hope that his poker face is in better shape than his prostate and that his look-alike never turns up.
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Together Tea
by Marjan Kamali
Darya has discovered the perfect gift for her daughter's twenty-fifth birthday: an ideal husband. Mina, however, is fed up with her mother's endless matchmaking and grading of available Iranian American bachelors. After Darya's last ill-fated attempt to find Mina a husband, mother and daughter embark on a journey to Iran, where the two women gradually begin to understand each other. But after Mina falls for a young man who never appeared on her mother's spreadsheets and Darya is tempted by an American musician, will this mother and daughter's tender appreciation for each other survive?
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Before the Coffee Gets Cold
by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
If you could go back, who would you want to meet? In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a cafe that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers something else besides coffee--the chance to travel back in time. Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the cafe in the hopes of making that journey. But time travel isn't so simple, and there are rules that must be followed. Most important, the trip can last only as long as it takes for the coffee to get cold.
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Foster
by Claire Keegan
It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas' house, she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this new household--where everything is so well tended to--and this summer must soon come to an end.
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Euphoria
by Lily King
English anthropologist Andrew Banson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in the Territory of New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers' deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when a chance encounter with colleagues, the controversial Nell Stone and her wry and mercurial Australian husband, Fen, pulls him back from the brink. Nell and Fen have just fled the bloodthirsty Mumbanyo and, in spite of Nell's poor health, are hungry for a new discovery. When Bankson finds them a new tribe nearby, the artistic, female-dominated Tam, he ignites an intellectual and romantic firestorm between the three of them that burns out of anyone's control.
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Heart the Lover
by Lily King
In the fall of her senior year of college, our narrator meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit class: Sam and Yash. The boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. She discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. She soon finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. Decades later, a surprise visit and unexpected news bring the past crashing into the present and she returns to a world she left behind and must confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self.
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Assistant to the Villain
by Hannah Nicole Maehrer
With ailing family to support, Evie Sage's employment status isn't just important--it's vital. So when a mishap with Rennedawn's most infamous Villain results in a job offer, naturally she says yes. No job is perfect, of course, but even less so when you develop a teeny crush on your terrifying, temperamental, and undeniably hot boss. ... But just when she's getting used to severed heads suspended from the ceiling and the odd squish of an errant eyeball beneath her heel, Evie suspects this dungeon has a huge rat--
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A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping
by Sangu Mandanna
Sera Swan used to be one of the most powerful witches in Britain. Then she resurrected her great-aunt Jasmine from the (very recently) dead, lost most of her magic, befriended a semi-villainous talking fox, and was exiled from her Guild. Now she (slightly reluctantly and just a bit grumpily) helps her great-aunt run an enchanted inn in Lancashire, where she deals with her quirky guests' shenanigans, tries to keep said talking fox in check, and longs for the future that seems lost to her. But then she finds out about an old spell that could hold the key to restoring her power.
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The Last Bookshop in London: A Novel of World War II
by Madeline Martin
August 1939: London prepares for war as Hitler's forces sweep across Europe. Grace Bennett has always dreamed of moving to the city, but the bunkers and drawn curtains that she finds on her arrival are not what she expected. And she certainly never imagined she'd wind up working at Primrose Hill, a dusty old bookshop in the heart of London.Through blackouts and air raids as the Blitz intensifies, Grace discovers the power of storytelling to unite her community in ways she never dreamed--a force that triumphs over even the darkest nights of the war.
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North Woods
by Daniel Mason
When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths a mass grave--only to discover that the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a sinister conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle: as each inhabitant confronts the wonder and mystery around them, they begin to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.
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The Last Chinese Chef
by Nicole Mones
When Maggie McElroy, a widowed American food writer, learns of a Chinese paternity claim against her late husband's estate, she has to go immediately to Beijing. She asks her magazine for time off, but her editor counters with an assignment: to profile the rising culinary star Sam Liang.
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Sandwich
by Catherine Newman
For the past two decades, Rocky has looked forward to her family's yearly escape to Cape Cod. Their humble beach-town rental has been the site of sweet memories, sunny days, great meals, and messes of all kinds: emotional, marital, and -- thanks to the cottage's ancient plumbing -- septic too. This year's vacation, with Rocky sandwiched between her half-grown kids and fully aging parents, promises to be just as delightful as summers past -- except, perhaps, for Rocky's hormonal bouts of rage and melancholy. (Hello, menopause!)
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Hamnet
by Maggie O'Farrell
The bestselling author of The Marriage Portrait delivers a deeply moving novel about the death of Shakespeare's eleven-year-old son, Hamnet, and the years leading up to the production of his great play.
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Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt's Ancient Temples from Destruction
by Lynne Olson
In the 1960s, the world's attention was focused on a nail-biting race against time: the international campaign to save a dozen ancient Egyptian temples from drowning in the floodwaters of the gigantic new Aswan High Dam. But the coverage completely overlooked the daring French archaeologist who made it all happen. Without the intervention of Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, the temples would currently be at the bottom of a vast reservoir.
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The Berry Pickers
by Amanda Peters
A Mi'kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie vanishes mysteriously. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on her favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain deeply affected by his sister's disappearance for years to come. In Boston, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma comes to realize there is something her parents aren't telling her.
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The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one in the journalism community is more astounded than Monique herself. Why her? Why now?--Amazon.com.
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The Missing Pages
by Alyson Richman
Harry Widener boards the Titanic holding tight to a priceless book--and his last known words are that he must return to his cabin for his treasure. Neither the young man nor the book will ever be seen again. In his honor, his mother builds the Harry Widener Memorial Library at Harvard to memorialize her son and house his extensive book collection. Decades later, Violet Hutchins, a Harvard sophomore recovering from her own great loss, is working as a page at the Widener Library. When strange things begin happening at the library, Violet wonders if Harry Widener's ghost is trying to communicate the missing pieces of his story from beyond the grave.
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Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy
by Mary Roach
The body is the most complex machine in the world, and the only one for which you cannot get a replacement part from the manufacturer. For centuries, medicine has reached for what's available--sculpting noses from brass, borrowing skin from frogs and hearts from pigs, crafting eye parts from jet canopies and breasts from petroleum by-products. Today we're attempting to grow body parts from scratch using stem cells and 3D printers. How are we doing? Are we there yet?
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Daughter of the Moon Goddess
by Sue Lynn Tan
A captivating and romantic debut epic fantasy inspired by the legend of the Chinese moon goddess, Chang'e, in which a young woman's quest to free her mother pits her against the most powerful immortal in the realm.
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Ginseng Roots: A Memoir
by Craig Thompson
Follows Craig Thompson and his siblings--who spent the summers of their youth weeding and harvesting rows of coveted American ginseng on rural Wisconsin farms for one dollar an hour--and interweaves this lost youth with the three-hundred-year history of the global ginseng trade and the many lives it has tied together. Stretching from Marathon, Wisconsin, to northeast China, [the book] charts the rise of industrial agriculture, the decline of American labor, and the search for a sense of home in a rapidly changing world.
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The Emperor of Gladness
by Ocean Vuong
A year in the life of a wayward young man in New England who, by chance, becomes the caretaker for an eighty-two-year-old widow living with dementia, powering 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.
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Project Hail Mary
by Andy Weir
The sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission to save both humanity and the earth, Ryland Grace is hurtled into the depths of space when he must conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.
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Spells for Forgetting
by Adrienne Young
Emery Blackwood's life changed forever the night her best friend was found dead and the love of her life, August Salt, was accused of murdering her. Years later, she is doing what her teenage self swore she never would: living a quiet existence on the misty, remote shores of Saoirse Island and running the family's business, Blackwood's Tea Shoppe Herbal Tonics & Tea Leaf Readings. But when the island, rooted in folklore and magic, begins to show signs of strange happenings, Emery knows that something is coming.
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