 Supporting COMMUNITY. Inspiring DISCOVERY. Promoting LITERACY. |
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| Leave Your Mess at Home by Tolani AkinolaEstranged eldest daughter Sola is back in Chicago after her influencer life implodes thanks to her now ex-boyfriend. Meanwhile, Sola's golden child brother worries about impending fatherhood, her physician sister isn't sure about her career or her love life, and her college student baby sister ponders who she is. This moving, funny debut takes place over two months and culminates at Thanksgiving with the siblings' Nigerian immigrant parents. Try this next: Terah Shelton Harris' Long After We Are Gone. |
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Dead Weight
by Hildur Knútsdóttir
An Icelandic night may hide secrets and affairs - or even bodies - in this gruesomely cathartic horror thriller from the author of The Night Guest. Unnur was living a normal, if lonely, life until a black cat showed up at her door. When she tracks down the cat's wayward owner, she finds a young woman just as lost and in need of help. Like a gust of cold air in a Reykjav k night, sta and her pet slip into Unnur's life. It's unexpected, but welcome. Unnur likes the company, and she begins to rely on sta in turn. But like a black cat, trouble has been tailing her new friend, and Unnur is the only one there for sta when things take a violent turn. The two women quickly learn: nothing tests a friendship like blood on your hands. Also by Hildur Kn tsd ttir: The Night Guest
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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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| Bumblebee Season by Eileen GarvinJake, who's paralyzed below his waist, can't gather all the honey from his dozens of hives alone. With locals uninterested, he takes on Flaco, an undocumented teen fleeing violence. In Oregon studying bumblebees, neurodivergent doctoral student Abigail and her research team members also agree to help with the harvest. Then, after a local politician causes trouble, they all band together in this sweet tale. Though Bumblebee Season continues Jake's story from The Music of Bees, it works well as a standalone. |
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Babylon, South Dakota
by Tom Lin
When Saul Keng Hsiu and his wife, Mei Lee, move from China to the United States to take possession of a 160-acre homestead bequeathed to them by a distant relative, all they have are the possessions on their back, some hidden gold, and a pocketful of chrysanthemum seeds. After a rocky start and a long, harsh winter, the couple find themselves successfully raising chrysanthemums and livestock, and soon after, a daughter, Mara. But when representatives from the US Army Corps of Engineers buy an acre of the Hsiu's farmland and begin building a missile silo, the inexplicable starts to occur: Mara can commune with the animals on the farm, Mei develops a hidden talent for augury, and the chrysanthemums become impervious to everything. When the Hsius learn that the project on their farm is an effort to make America's nuclear deterrent invulnerable, they see firsthand the long arm of power and empire. In the years and generations that follow, increasingly impacted by the silo and its residue, the Hsius experience strange, wondrous, and tragic events on their farm. It is a daring novel about how choices reverberate across generations and asks us what we owe to one another.
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| Mercy Hill by Hannah ThurmanThe four Cross sisters, aged ten to 13, grow up in a cottage on the sprawling grounds of a North Carolina state mental hospital run by their formidable psychiatrist mother. Their mom expects them to eventually take over, so she pushes them academically and to volunteer at the understaffed hospital. But events threaten her grand plan in this debut narrated by the youngest sister and set between 1999 and 2004. For fans of: reflective, character-driven coming-of-age novels. |
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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? 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. 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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| All Them Dogs by Djamel WhiteAfter killing a rival and hiding in England for a few years, brash young Tony Ward is back in Dublin. Working as a local crime boss’s enforcer, he's paired up with Flute Walsh, whom he knew in school, and when they develop a strong connection, their already violent lives get more dangerous. "A debut novel of rare force and control" (Kirkus Reviews), All Them Dogs is both brutal and tender. For fans of: Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo; Karl Geary's Juno Loves Legs. |
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| The Take by Kelly YangFrustrated young writer Maggie Wang finds a path forward when veteran Hollywood producer Ingrid Parker offers a surprising deal: $3 million and a mentorship to participate in ten experimental blood transfusions, which will reverse Ingrid's aging but accelerate Maggie's. This satirical first adult book from award-winning children's author Kelly Yang serves Hollywood drama while shining a spotlight on sexism, racism, and ageism. For fans of: the 2024 film The Substance; Matthew Pearl's The Award. |
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Before I Knew I Loved You
by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
The sixth book in the multi-million-copy bestselling Before the Coffee Gets Cold series about a cozy Japanese cafe that offers its visitors the chance to travel back in time.In a special seat in a fabled Tokyo cafe, you're offered something irresistible - not just a warm, comforting coffee, but the chance to go back in time to revisit the ones you love...In Before I Knew I Loved You, Toshikazu Kawaguchi takes us back to the warm heart of the mysterious Funiculi Funicula Cafe, with another four guests whose luminous stories of love, lost and won again, will reaffirm your belief in its eternal potential. In this book, we meet: The girl who couldn't call her mother, and yearns to reconnect with her The man who waited for a reply from his girlfriend, and never heard from her The woman anxious to travel ahead to know what her future holds The student who travels back to meet his father again, who passed away many years before.Yet the same rules always apply - you must return before the coffee gets cold. And while it does, memories are revisited, people are changed for ever, and the enduring power of love transcends the boundaries of time.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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Mary Riley Styles Public Library
120 N. Virginia Ave, Falls Church, Virginia 22046 703-248-5030 (TTY 711) mrspl.org
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