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FICTION
Night Watch
by Jayne Anne Phillips
In 1874, in the wake of the Civil War, eleven-year-old ConaLee and her mother arrive at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia. They're delivered to the hospital's entrance by Papa—
an abusive veteran who forces himself into their lives—
after ConaLee's mother, who hasn't spoken in a year, grows even more withdrawn. Before he departs, Papa assigns them new identities and demands that ConaLee introduce herself as her mother's nurse—
not her daughter—
so they'll both be admitted and allowed to stay. There, far from family, their beloved neighbor, Dearbhla, and the home they know, ConaLee will care for her mother and try to reclaim their lives. Years earlier, ConaLee's father left for the war before she was born and never returned. After suffering a life-threatening head wound in battle, he couldn't remember his name, his family, or where he came from. Forced to start over, he takes the name of the doctor who gave him a second life, and ventures back into the world looking for work and the truth about his past.
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NONFICTION
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy
by Nathan Thrall
Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for the school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer in a horrific accident. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos—
the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad's fate. It is every parent's worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem. Abed's quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge: a kindergarten teacher and a mechanic who rescue children from the burning bus; an Israeli army commander and a Palestinian official who confront the aftermath at the scene of the crash; a settler paramedic; ultra-Orthodox emergency service workers; and two mothers who each hope to claim one severely injured boy. Immersive and gripping,
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
is an indelibly human portrait of the Jewish-Palestinian struggle that offers a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth.
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FICTION
Demon Copperhead
by Barbara Kingsolver
The son of an Appalachian teenager uses his good looks, wit and instincts to survive foster care, child labor, addiction, disastrous loves and crushing losses, in the new novel from the best-selling author of
Unsheltered.
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FICTION
The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family
"Corbin College, not-quite-upstate New York, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian-but not an historian of the Jews-is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host, to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with non-fiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics-"An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family" that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers"
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NONFICTION
Invisible child : poverty, survival, & hope in an American city
by Andrea Elliott
In Invisible Child, Pulitzer Prize winner Andrea Elliott follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani, a girl whose imagination is as soaring as the skyscapers near her Brooklyn shelter. In this sweeping narrative, Elliott weaves the story of Dasani's childhood with the history of her ancestors, tracing their passage from slavery to the Great Migration north. As Dasani comes of age, New York City's homeless crisis has exploded, deepening the chasm between rich and poor. She must guide her siblings through a world riddled by hunger, violence, racism, drug addiction, and the threat of foster care. Out on the street, Dasani becomes a fierce fighter "to protect those who I love." When she finally escapes city life to enroll in a boarding school, she faces an impossible question: What if leaving poverty means abandoning your family, and yourself? A work of luminous and riveting prose, Andrea Elliott's Invisible Child is an astonishing story about the power of resilience, the importance of family, and the cost of inequality--told through the crucible of one remarkable girl"--Back cover
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FICTION
The Night Watchman
by Louise Erdrich
A historical novel based on the life of the National Book Award-winning author’s grandfather traces the experiences of a Chippewa Council night watchman in mid-19th-century rural North Dakota who fights Congress to enforce Native American treaty rights.
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FICTION
The Nickel Boys
by Colson Whitehead
A follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning,
The Underground Railroad, follows the harrowing experiences of two African-American teens at an abusive reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.
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The Undying : Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care
by Anne Boyer
The author presents a meditation on pain and economics that draws on her experiences as a single parent with a catastrophic illness to explore emerging ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of healthcare.
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FICTION
The Overstory
by Richard Powers
The National Book Award-winning author of The Overstory presents an impassioned novel of activism and natural-world power that is comprised of interlocking fables about nine remarkable strangers who are summoned in different ways by trees for an ultimate, brutal stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest.
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FICTION
Less
by Andrew Sean Greer
Receiving an invitation to his ex-boyfriend's wedding, Arthur, a failed novelist on the eve of his fiftieth birthday, embarks on an international journey that finds him falling in love, risking his life, reinventing himself, and making connections with the past.
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NON-FICTION
Locking Up Our Own : Crime and Punishment in Black America
by James Forman
A consequential argument about race, crime and law in today's America by a Yale legal scholar and former public defender examines the urgent debates surrounding the criminal justice system and its activities involving mass incarceration, aggressive police tactics and their impact on at-risk people of color and beleaguered law-enforcement officers.
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FICTION
The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
The award-winning author of
The Noble Hustle
chronicles the daring survival story of a cotton plantation slave in Georgia, who, after suffering at the hands of both her owners and fellow slaves, races through the Underground Railroad with a relentless slave-catcher close behind.
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NON-FICTION
Evicted : Poverty and Profit in the American City
by Matthew Desmond
A Harvard sociologist examines the under-represented challenge of eviction as a formidable cause of poverty in America, revealing how millions of people are wrongly forced from their homes and reduced to cycles of extreme disadvantage that are reinforced by dysfunctional legal systems.
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FICTION
The Sympathizer
by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Follows a Viet Cong agent as he spies on a South Vietnamese army general and his compatriots as they start a new life in 1975 Los Angeles.
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NON-FICTION
Black Flags : the Rise of ISIS
by Joby Warrick
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
The Triple Agent
traces how the strain of militant Islam behind ISIS first arose in a remote Jordanian prison and spread with the unwitting aid of two American presidents.
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FICTION
All the Light We Cannot See : A Novel
by Anthony Doerr
A blind French girl on the run from the German occupation and a German orphan-turned-Resistance tracker struggle with their respective beliefs after meeting on the Brittany coast.
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NON-FICTION
The Sixth Extinction : An Unnatural History
by Elizabeth Kolbert
Drawing on the work of geologists, botanists, marine biologists and other researchers, an award-winning writer for The New Yorker discusses the five devastating mass extinctions on earth and predicts the coming of a sixth.
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FICTION
The Goldfinch
by Donna Tartt
Taken in by a wealthy family friend after surviving an accident that killed his mother, thirteen-year-old Theo Decker tries to adjust to life on Park Avenue in this new novel by the author of
The Secret History.
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NON-FICTION
Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation
by Dan Fagin
A
Newsday
investigative reporter presents a narrative account of the 1971 industrial waste dumping incident in Toms River, New Jersey, that led to a cluster of childhood cancers and culminated in decades of legal fights, a record settlement and an unprecedented government study linking pollution to illness.
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FICTION
The Orphan Master's Son: A Novel
by Adam Johnson
The son of a singer mother whose career forcibly separated her from her family and an influential father who runs an orphan work camp, Pak Jun Do rises to prominence using instinctive talents and eventually becomes a professional kidnapper and romantic rival to Kim Jong Il.
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NON-FICTION
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
by Stephen Greenblatt
A humanities professor describes the impact had by the translation of the last remaining manuscript of On the Nature of Things by Roman philosopher Lucretius, which fueled the Renaissance and inspired artists, great thinkers and scientists.
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FICTION
A Visit From the Goon Squad
by Jennifer Egan
Working side-by-side for a record label, former punk rocker Bennie Salazar and the passionate Sasha hide illicit secrets from one another while interacting with a motley assortment of equally troubled people from 1970's San Francisco to the post-war future.
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NON-FICTION
A historical assessment of cancer addresses both the courageous battles against the complex disease and the misperceptions and hubris that have compromised modern understandings, providing coverage of such topics as ancient-world surgeries and the developments of present-day treatments.
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