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Pick 5 Starred Books Only for Adults |
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The Water Dancer: A Novel
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
A Virginia slave narrowly escapes a drowning death through the intervention of a mysterious force that compels his escape and personal underground war against slavery. By the National Book Award-winning author of Between the World and Me. Read by the author.
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The Passage: A Novel
by Justin Cronin
A test subject in a secret government experiment, abandoned 6-year-old Amy is hidden by an FBI agent in the Oregon hills, from which Amy emerges a century later to save the human race from a terrifying virus.
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Rebecca
by Daphne Du Maurier
The novel begins in Monte Carlo, where our heroine is swept off her feet by the dashing widower Maxim de Winter and his sudden proposal of marriage. Orphaned and working as a lady's maid, she can barely believe her luck. It is only when they arrive at his massive country estate that she realizes how large a shadow his late wife will cast over their lives - presenting her with a lingering evil that threatens to destroy their marriage from beyond the grave.
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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 1970s San Francisco to the post-war future.
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The Night Watchman: A Novel
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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American Assassin: A Thriller
by Vince Flynn
Deeply angered by the deaths of thirty-five friends in a terrorist attack, student Mitch Rapp joins a group of clandestine operatives trained by the CIA whose first task is to kill the Turkish arms dealer who sold the bomb that killed his friends.
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Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine: A Novel
by Gail Honeyman
A socially awkward, routine-oriented loner teams up with a bumbling IT guy from her office to assist an elderly accident victim, forging a friendship that saves all three from lives of isolation and secret unhappiness.
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The Secret Life of Bees: Sue Monk Kidd
by Ruth Ramsey Vukovich
Lessons examine the plot, character analysis, and setting, as well as provide background information on Sue Monk Kidd. The unit also explores themes, draws comparisons to today's society, stresses underlying values, and much more.
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Remember Me?
by Sophie Kinsella
Awakening in the hospital after a car crash believing that it is 2004 and that she is a twenty-five-year-old, disorganized, single sales associate, Lexi is stunned to find that she has lost three years in her life, she is the boss of her department, and she is married to a handsome millionaire, but her perfect new life begins to go awry, especially when a man shows up claiming to be her secret lover.
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A Burning
by Megha Majumdar
A Muslim girl accused of being a terrorist, a gym teacher who becomes a fanatic of a right-wing political party and an outcast with aspirations of Bollywood glory find their lives entangled after a catastrophe in contemporary India.
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Song of Solomon
by Toni Morrison
Macon Dead, Jr., called "Milkman," the son of the wealthiest African American in town, moves from childhood into early manhood, searching, among the disparate, mysterious members of his family, for his life and reality. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Reader's Guide available.
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Little Fires Everywhere
by Celeste Ng
When a custody battle divides her placid town, straitlaced family woman Elena Richardson finds herself pitted against her enigmatic tenant and becomes obsessed with exposing her past, only to trigger devastating consequences for both families.
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The Overstory: A Novel
by Richard Powers
A novel of activism and natural-world power presents 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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The Guest Book
by Sarah Blake
The bereaved matriarch of a powerful early-twentieth-century American family makes a fateful decision that reverberates throughout two subsequent generations further impacted by racism, reversed circumstances, and disturbing revelations.
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The Last Kingdom
by Bernard Cornwell
Captured and raised by Danes in the ninth century, dispossessed nobleman Uhtred witnesses the unexpected defeat of his adoptive Viking clan by Alfred of Wessex and longs to recover his father's land.
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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
by Mary Ann Shaffer
In 1946, writer Juliet Ashton finds inspiration for her next book in her correspondence with a native of Guernsey, who tells her about the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a book club born as an alibi during German occupation. A first novel.
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The Summer Before the War: A Novel
by Helen Simonson
Arriving in the 1914 village of Rye, England, Beatrice Nash, a young woman of good family, becomes a first female teacher of Latin at the local school and falls in love with her sponsor's nephew. By the best-selling author of Major Pettigrew's Last Stand.
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A Gentleman in Moscow
by Amor Towles
Deemed unrepentant by a Bolshevik tribunal in 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced to house arrest in a hotel across the street from the Kremlin, where he lives in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history unfold.
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The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
by C. Alan Bradley
Eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison, begins her adventure when a dead bird is found on the doorstep of her family's mansion in the summer of 1950, thus propelling her into a mystery that involves an investigation into a man's murder where her father is the main suspect.
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The Cat who Talked to Ghosts
by Lilian Jackson Braun
Determined to discover what frightened his ex-housekeeper to death, detective Qwilleran and his two feline assistants move into the house to search for the offending spirits.
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The Bone Collector
by Jeffery Deaver
Once the nation's foremost criminologist and the ex-head of NYPD forensics, quadriplegic Lincoln Rhyme abandons his forced retirement and joins forces with rookie cop Amelia Sachs to track down a vicious serial killer.
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Cocaine Blues
by Kerry Greenwood
Phyrne Fisher heads for Melbourne, Australia, where she encounters a mystery involving poisoned wives, cocaine smuggling, corrupt cops, and communism.
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The Department of Sensitive Crimes
by Alexander McCall Smith
Tasked with their Swedish police department's most unusual cases, lead detective Ulf Varg and his colorful associates investigate a bizarre stabbing, a missing imaginary boyfriend, and a haunted spa.
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Still Life
by Louise Penny
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of Canada's Sûreté du Quebec is called to the tiny hamlet of Three Pines to investigate the suspicious hunting "accident" that claimed the life of Jane Neal, a local fixture in the village.
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Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy
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The Goblin Emperor
by Katherine Addison
Reluctantly elevated to the throne when his father and brothers are killed in a suspicious accident, an exiled half-goblin is rapidly overwhelmed by ambitious sycophants, imperial burdens and dangerous plots while searching for friendship and love. A first novel.
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Paladin of Souls
by Lois McMaster Bujold
A sequel to The Curse of Chalion finds Ista dy Baocia, the Dowager Royina of Chalion, struggling with painful memories and undertaking a pilgrimage to make a personal atonement to the gods, a quest that is threatened by an evil force.
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Parable of the Sower
by Octavia E Butler
In 2025 California, an eighteen-year-old African American woman, suffering from a hereditary trait that causes her to feel others' pain as well as her own, flees northward from her small community and its desperate savages.
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The Name of the Wind
by Patrick Rothfuss
An illustrated, 10th anniversary edition of the New York Times best-selling fantasy novel describes how the magically gifted orphan, Kvothe, brazenly attends a legendary school of magic and must live as a fugitive after the murder of a king.
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Wildflower
by Drew Barrymore
The popular actress shares funny and heartfelt memories from her life and career, from her emancipation in her mid-teens, to the unique farewell she shared with her father, to her experiences as a mother.
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Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman
by Lindy West
The Guardian columnist and This American Life social commentator presents a series of essays about the qualities of a comedic feminist and her experiences of coming of age in a popular culture that is hostile to plus-sized women who speak their minds.
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Educated: A Memoir
by Tara Westover
Traces the author's experiences as a child born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, describing her participation in her family's paranoid stockpiling activities and her resolve to educate herself well enough to earn acceptance into a prestigious university and the unfamiliar world beyond.
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