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The Book of Doors
by Gareth Brown
When her favorite customer, a lonely yet charming old man, dies right in front of her, Cassie holds on to the last book he was reading, which turns out to be a rare volume that has great power and she is tasked with protecting it from those who will do evil.
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The Mighty Red
by Louise Erdrich
A Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author tells a story of love, natural forces, spiritual yearnings, and the tragic impact of uncontrollable circumstances on ordinary people's lives.
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The Wedding People
by Alison Espach
Mistaken for a wedding guest while staying at the grand Cornwall Inn, Phoebe Stone, at rock bottom, is determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself, and unexpectedly becomes the bride's confidant and, through her, meets a cast of surprising characters who help her start anew.
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The Hunter
by Tana French
Moving to rural Ireland, Cal Hooper, who took early retirement from Chicago PD, has built a relationship with Lena and is gradually turning teenager Trey Reddy into a good kid. But when Trey's long-absent father reappears with an English millionaire and a get-rich-quick scheme, Trey wants revenge.
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Sociopath: A Memoir
by Patric Gagne
Patric Gagne realized she made others uncomfortable before she started kindergarten. Something about her caused people to react in a way she didn't understand. She suspected it was because she didn't feel things the way other kids did. Emotions like fear, guilt, and empathy eluded her. For the most part, she felt nothing. And she didn't like the way that "nothing" felt. She did her best to pretend she was like everyone else, but the constant pressure to conform to a society she knew rejected anyone like her was unbearable. So Patric stole. She lied. She was occasionally violent. She became an expert lock-picker and home-invader. All with the goal of replacing the nothingness with... something. In college, Patric finally confirmed what she'd long suspected. She was a sociopath. But even though it was the very first personality disorder identified–well over 200 years ago–sociopathy had been neglected by mental health professionals for decades. She was told there was no treatment, no hope for a normal life. She found herself haunted by sociopaths in pop culture, madmen and evil villains who are considered monsters. Her future looked grim. But when Patric reconnects with an old flame, she gets a glimpse of a future beyond her diagnosis. If she's capable of love, it must mean that she isn't a monster. With the help of her sweetheart (and some curious characters she meets along the way) she embarks on a mission to prove that the millions of Americans who share her diagnosis aren't all monsters either.
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The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
by Jonathan Haidt
After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on most measures. Why? In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the "play-based childhood" began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the "phone-based childhood" in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this "great rewiring of childhood" has interfered with children's social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies. Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the "collective action problems" that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free.
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Phantom Orbit
by David Ignatius
Working in secret for years to solve the puzzle in the writings of the 17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler, Ivan Volkov, after the loss of his son and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, makes the fraught decision to contact the CIA, risking his life to help stop the Doomsday clock.
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The Seven O'Clock Club
by Amelia Ireland
Four strangers—Freya, Callum, Mischa and Victoria—navigate an unconventional group therapy designed to heal their deep losses. But as they share their stories, they uncover a surprising connection that reshapes their understanding of each other and their grief.
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The Lion Women of Tehran
by Marjan Kamali
When Homa, a girl from her childhood, reappears in her privileged world, Ellie, amidst Iran's political turmoil, joins her in pursuing their goals for meaningful futures until one earth-shattering betrayal has far-reaching consequences, altering the course of both their lives.
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How to End a Love Story
by Yulin Kuang
A best-selling author with writer's block heads to L.A. for the film adaptation of her book where she must collaborate with a screenwriter who was involved in the tragic accident that bound them together 13 years prior.
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Lies and Weddings
by Kevin Kwan
Forced to attend his sister's wedding to seduce a woman with money and get his family out of debt, Rufus, the future Earl of Greshambury, finds their plans—and their reputation—going up in flames when a secret tryst and tragedy become known, revealing a shocking twist.
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The Full Moon Coffee Shop
by Mai Mochizuki
In Japan, in an enchanting coffee shop run by talking cats, every person who visits there, including a down-on-her-luck screenwriter and a technologically challenged website designer, feels lost and these feline guides set them back on their fated paths, for there is a very special reason the shop appeared to each of them.
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The Bee Sting
by Paul Murray
The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie's once-lucrative car business is going under–but rather than face the music, he's spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home. Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil–can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written–is there still time to find a happy ending?
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Playground
by Richard Powers
The tiny atoll of French Polynesia has been chosen for humanity's next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island's residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away. By the New York Times bestselling author of The Overstory.
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Colored Television
by Danzy Senna
A brilliant dark comedy about second acts, creative appropriation, and the racial identity-industrial complex. Jane has high hopes her life is about to turn around. After years of living precariously, she, her painter husband, Lenny, and their two kids have landed a stint as house sitters in a friend's luxurious home high in the hills above Los Angeles, a gig that coincides magically with Jane's sabbatical. If she can just finish her latest novel, Nusu Nusu, the centuries-spanning epic Lenny refers to as her "mulatto War and Peace," she'll have tenure and some semblance of stability and success within her grasp. But things don't work out quite as hoped. In search of a plan B, like countless writers before her, Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. When she finagles a meeting with a hot young producer with a seven-figure deal to create "diverse content" for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a "real writer" to create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy ever to hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane–until they go terribly wrong.
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There Are Rivers in the Sky
by Elif Shafak
Sweeping across centuries, and stretching from Mesopotamia to London, this stunning novel follows a trio of characters living in the shadows of one of the greatest epic poems of all time—Nineveh and its Remains—as they become entwined by a single drop of water.
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