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| Good Joy, Bad Joy by Mikki BrammerAt 89, widowed Joy Bridport lives alone, though she has daily check-ins with her longtime best friend Hazel to make sure they are both still kicking. When cancer leaves adventurous Hazel with just months to live, it makes Joy question her own sedate life, leading to risk taking, rule breaking, and petty crime in this moving and heart-warming story about friendship, grief, and second chances. Read-alikes: Hillary Yablon's Sylvia's Second Act; Marianne Cronin's Eddie Winston Is Looking for Love.
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| The Foursome by Christina Baker KlineUsing their tour earnings, famous cojoined twins Eng and Chang Bunker settle in 1839 North Carolina, buying land and enslaved people and making powerful friends. Sarah and Adelaide Yates, sisters from a once-prominent local family, become their wives and they have 21 children. Sarah, who doesn't always agree with the others, narrates several decades of their lives in this "remarkable" (Publishers Weekly) novel based on the author's family history. Try this next: Elizabeth Weiss' The Sisters Sweet.
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Summerland Cove
by Ellen Baker
Lindy has the summer of a lifetime planned at her family's beloved cottage in Summerland Cove, Maine, where she's spent summers all her life and where she and her husband David met as teenagers. She's slated big events three weekends in a row: David's fiftieth birthday party, her parents' fiftieth anniversary party, and her oldest daughter Hailey's wedding. But when David doesn't show up for his own party, everything about the life they've created together is thrown into question, as the shattered family sets out looking for him. Has he been in an accident? God forbid, been the victim of a crime? Or is it something more cliché--a midlife crisis, an affair? Surely, he'll show up for his beloved daughter's wedding--won't he? The agonizing days tick by and still no David. Lindy's four nearly grown children are panicked. Lindy struggles to remain calm, even as long-buried details of the family's past begin to surface, offering distressing clues. Meanwhile, her mother seems to be harboring secrets of her own, her father has grown alarmingly absent-minded, and Hailey wrestles with whether she should get married at all--even if her father does turn up.
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Arrivals and Departures
by Amanda Eyre Ward
The Perkins family has problems. They're scattered across the globe. Lee, a glamorous reality-TV star, is struggling with her mental health in the spotlight. Reagan, her younger sister, has fallen for a romance scammer. Cord, their charming brother, is one drink away from losing it all. And their mother, Charlotte, still longs for the love she let slip away a decade ago, a lover who sailed off with her heart to a remote island in Greece. When Reagan disappears, Lee flies first-class to Athens to save her family--again. There, against the glittering Mediterranean and the shadow of the Acropolis, Lee contends with emotional nieces, relentless paparazzi, and her own fragile heart. Lee is desperately searching--for her sister, and for the hope and joy she thought was gone forever. Across continents and crises, each member of the Perkins family must face the same question: is it ever too late to choose love?
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Everything Dead & Dying
by Tate Brombal
The Last of Us meets The Walking Dead in this haunting, rural character piece set during the aftermath of a zombie outbreak. Jack Chandler is the sole survivor of the zombie apocalypse in his rural farming community, but rather than eliminate them, he has chosen to continue living alongside the undead -- including the husband and adopted daughter he fought so hard to have. But when his town is discovered by outsiders, Jack suddenly becomes the one thing standing in the way of his family and those who hope to kill them for good. Eisner Award-nominated creators Tate Brombal (Barbalien, Batgirl) and Jacob Phillips (That Texas Blood, Newburn) team up for this unforgettable original story.
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| Operation Bounce House by Matt DinnimanWhen gamers from Earth are enlisted to "evict" the inhabitants of the isolated colony planet New Sonora with remote war machines, Oliver Lewis must take up arms against them to defend the only home he's ever known. From the author of the critically acclaimed Dungeon Crawler Carl series comes a new standalone, with biting humor and thought-provoking commentary on genocide, artificial intelligence, and fear of the other. |
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The Frenzy: Stories
by Joyce Carol Oates
In The Frenzy: Stories, Oates plunges us into the lives of her characters at moments of crisis and confusion, when much of what they understand about themselves and those they love comes undone. A young woman on a supposedly romantic weekend trip to Cape May, New Jersey, turns the tables on her older, married lover. A freak bicycle accident on a bridge haunts one family for decades. A girl jealous of her popular cousin discovers she is the lucky one. A widow waits at her riverside house for her dead husband's return. A young man hiking in the woods comes upon a couple in a heated, possibly violent argument--should he intervene? Suspenseful and psychologically astute, Oates's short stories enthrall and captivate as they dissect her character's deepest fears--revealing our own in turn. Literature is a texture of words, says Oates of her short fiction, evoking life in the most vivid ways--psychologically, physically. These new stories blazingly evoke life at its most vivid and perilous, when fate and free will intersect, and one ominous encounter or bad choice can be the difference between an ordinary day and the point of no return.
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| Happy Ending by Chloe LieseAfter discovering that their former spouses are in a relationship with each other, bookseller Thea Meyer and Michelin star chef Alex Bruscato fake a relationship of their own, but wind up catching real feelings while on a family beach vacation with their exes. For fans of: feel-good fake relationship romances starring relatable characters, like Funny Story by Emily Henry. |
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The Burning Side
by Sarah Damoff
When April and Leo's house burns in the middle of the night, they escape with their two young children and the quiet knowledge that the fire is not the only thing threatening their family. They retreat to April's childhood home in Dallas, where her spirited parents and siblings provide both comfort and complication. As the family reckons with the aftermath--grief, guilt, logistics, and memories scorched and intact--the fire exposes the cracks already forming in April and Leo's marriage. The novel unfolds in alternating perspectives: from April, who feels the crushing weight of motherhood, marriage, and self-blame; from Leo, a high school history teacher shaped by a lonely, fractured childhood; from Deb, April's generous and no-nonsense mother who has to contend with her husband's recent Alzheimer's diagnosis; and from flashbacks that trace April and Leo's relationship from its earliest days of connection to the devastating decisions that led them here. A family saga suffused with humor, longing, and heartbreak, The Burning Side is about what we inherit and what we choose, about forgiveness and the ache of being known. It is, above all, about the meaning of home and the costs of long love.
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All the Cameras in My Room
by Michael Deforge
Razor-sharp short stories from the greatest contemporary comics stylist Michael DeForge. In Figure Skating, a star athlete's impossible feats captivate the world, turning a simple skater's rotation into a catalyst for national paralysis. While in Holiday Special, a narrator tells us about his favorite Christian holiday special that bears an uncanny resemblance to a certain bald-headed-boy-and-his-dog classic. No matter the conceit, characters in All the Cameras in My Room stretch and flatten and spiral around each other and burrow deep into the folds of a reader's brain. Deforge's stories break down how we consume pop culture, interrogate our relationship to star power and recontextualize our nostalgia into a shared mythology, cementing his place as the most consistent and beguiling cartoonist working today.
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June Baby
by Shannon Garvey
Some summers never leave you. At seventeen, Ruth lost her mother to cancer, and her father, unable to handle his grieving daughter, shipped her off to Block Island with nothing but a name scribbled on the back of a receipt: Diana Beckett. Diana, a renowned photographer, took Ruth in for the summer, and Block Island became Ruth's refuge, a place of beauty and creativity, a place where she could nurture her dreams of being a writer, a place where she could fall in love for the first time--with Diana's nephew, Charlie. Now, at twenty-seven, Ruth has spent the last ten summers living and working among the lucky few who get to vacation in this wealthy beach town, and the rest of the year just scraping by, yearning to return to the place where she feels safe and unburdened. But then Ruth's world is upended by tragedy again. Desperate for an anchor, she reaches for the person she's been pining for since she met him--Charlie--who has his own startling revelation to share. And when another surprise comes in the form of a box left to Ruth by Diana, its contents raise questions about just how well she knew the two women who raised her. Torn between what to believe about her past, and what her future might hold, Ruth is faced with another choice: does she dare to rewrite her story entirely? Both a heartfelt coming-of-age story and a tender exploration of love and grief, set against a backdrop of golden dunes and seaside sunsets, June Baby shows us what it might look like to embrace a life shaped not by loss, but by possibility.
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Take Me with You
by Steven Rowley
College professor Jesse del Ruth has been abandoned. Thirty years into their relationship, Jesse witnesses his husband, Norman, get out of bed late one night, walk into their Joshua Tree backyard, step into a strange beam of light and . . . disappear. How could Norman desert him after a lifetime together? Where did he go? And, most confoundingly . . . will he ever return? Jesse knew they were both feeling stuck, longing for something they couldn't quite name. But was their rut so deep that Norman's only option was to leave Jesse behind? As Jesse struggles to understand Norman's disappearance, he tries to piece together his new reality. Is he expected to wait patiently for a partner who may never come back? Or is this an opportunity for reinvention? He is, after all, alone for the first time in his adult life. Should he return to the classroom? Put in a pool? Get a dog? Call his estranged mother? What does it mean to be alone when you've always been one half of a whole? When Norman's sister, Lally, lands on Jesse's doorstep with an urgent request, Norman's absence becomes even more profound. Add to Jesse's grief and confusion a conspiracy-theorist neighbor, a strange man following him, and suspicions that he may have had a hand in Norman's disappearance, and Jesse starts to crack under the pressure. With his husband missing and the world closing in, all eyes are on Jesse. Before he can understand how Norman could leave it all behind, Jesse must confront what it means to stay.
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The May House
by Jillian Cantor
Three adult sisters inherit a beach house on the condition they spend one week together every May, leading to the discovery of family secrets, unexpected romance, and a new understanding of each other. No matter what's going on in the May sisters' lives, the one thing they can rely upon is seeing each other for one week in May at their grandmother's beachside home in gorgeous Coronado. As adults, Julia, Emily, and Nora aren't particularly close, their homes spread out across the country and the sisters busy with careers, relationships, and the minutia of life, but their promise to return each year keeps them anchored together. Until one May when Julia, the oldest and most dependable sister, doesn't show. Suddenly Nora and Emily start to question how much they truly know about their sister's life. Told in alternating points of view, spanning from their time together with Grandma Vera as kids into their adult lives, The May House explores how a decades-long family secret has unknowingly shaped each sister and, ultimately, how it brings them closer together. Funny, poignant, and brimming with heart, The May House is an irresistible story about the special bond between sisters who are figuring out what matters most in life, in all its ups and downs.
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Whistler
by Ann Patchett
When Daphne Fuller and her husband Jonathan visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they notice an older, white-haired gentleman following them. The man turns out to be Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, who had been married to her mother for a little more than year when Daphne was nine. Now fifty-three, Daphne hasn't seen Eddie for many years, not since the fateful event that changed the direction of both their lives. Meeting again, time falls away; while their relationship was brief, it had a profound impact on them both, and now that they are reunited, they have no intention of ever being separated again. Whistler is a story about two adults looking back over the choices they made, and the choices that were made for them. It's a story about bravery, memory, the often small yet consequential moments that define our lives, and the endless stream of loss that in time comes for us all. Beautiful in its simplicity, it is ultimately about how love endures, and how the feeling of being known by one other person, even for a short period of time, can change everything.
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On Witness and Respair: Essays
by Jesmyn Ward
Respair (noun, obsolete), fresh hope after despair. Beginning with her upbringing in a multigenerational household in rural Mississippi, the cradle of both her youth and her gift for storytelling, Ward brings her keen wisdom and hauntingly lyrical prose to a range of topics, following in her grandmother Dorothy's footsteps when she promises always to Tell it straight. Tell it all. True to her word, in these pages Ward contemplates the writers and novels of her youth and adulthood--the transformative power of discovering Octavia Butler as a twenty-something, the mirror that Richard Wright's novels held up to her own childhood, and of course, her lifelong love for Toni Morrison. Ward ruminates on her approach to both fiction and life, reflecting on the power of the novel, how to raise a Black son in an era of rising divisiveness and cruelty, as well as her own personal tragedies--including the titular essay of the collection, which tells the story of her partner's sudden death on the eve of the COVID-19 epidemic. Every bit as piercing and moving as her fiction, On Witness and Respair is a testament to Ward's powers as one of America's finest living writers (San Francisco Chronicle) and is a monument to hope, beauty, and personal and collective resilience.
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Signals: The Hidden Power and Secret Language of Hormones
by Saira Hameed
Hormones write life's masterplan - building a new human being in utero, transforming a helpless newborn into a sturdy toddler, igniting the firestorm of puberty, conjuring the alchemy of fertilization and directing the transition into menopause and beyond.And all the while, day-to-day, minute-by-minute, hormones control our mood and stress levels, how hungry we feel and how much we weigh, changes in libido and blood sugar, the circadian rhythm of our energy balance and sleep-wake cycle.In Signals, Dr. Saira Hameed takes us on a journey through the endocrine system, the body's miraculous and often misunderstood communication network of endocrine glands and hormone signals. We barely notice these internal signals efficiently carrying messages from cell to cell because the power of hormones over our brains and bodies is so fundamental that their omnipotent control is simply felt as life itself. Yet when the body's signaling system breaks, we see with hindsight that be 'hormonal' is in fact to be human.Here Dr. Hameed combines expert experience, revelatory science, medical history, and cultural commentary with compelling compassionately recounted patient cases. In this special confluence of storytelling Dr. Hameed invites readers to share in the mysterious, magical inner world of the endocrine system, going beyond hormone hacks and hype to tune out the noise and instead listen into the signals - to the powerful endocrine life force of how the body talks to itself.
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| American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed by Isaac Fitzgerald Memoirist Isaac Fitzgerald (Dirtbag, Massachusetts) combines a love of walking and a fascination with pioneer Johnny Appleseed (aka John Chapman) in his traveling tale, in which he attempts to walk along Chapman’s historic route from Massachusetts to Indiana. Along his journey, Fitzgerald shares his curiosity about the Appleseed legend, myth-making, his own history, and small-town America in a "stirring, singular" (Publishers Weekly) memoir. Read-alike: This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History by Beverly Gage. |
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| Wombat Waiting by Katherine ApplegateCaught on the sidelines of a deadly California wildfire, stray pup Wombat and dog-shy human kid Henry each cope with disaster in their own way. Find out what happens when their paths cross in this gripping and heartwarming tale written in an easy-to-read, poem-like style.
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| Change of Plans by Sarah DessenFinley’s annual visit with her mom unexpectedly turns into a stay at a lake house with estranged family members. As Finley gets a job, makes new friends, and bonds with new-to-her family, she finds her whole outlook shifting. Fans of author Sarah Dessen’s big-hearted novels will appreciate this moving story. |
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Bad Kitty Gets a Job (Graphic Novel)
by Nick Bruel
Kitty must get a job to buy a new video game in this brand new graphic novel adventure by New York Times-bestselling creator Nick Bruel, for fans of DOG MAN and INVESTIGATORS.
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| Dad by Christian RobinsonThrough spare text and an inclusive lineup of animals and humans, this picture book highlights the many facets of fatherhood: present and absent, strong and vulnerable, caring and fallible. Creator Christian Robinson's signature collage art is bold and highly expressive, inviting readers of all ages into the sweetness and complexity of parent/child bonds. |
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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