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Portrait of a Witch Undone
by K. S. Shay
Once, Maeve Ryan was the strongest witch of her generation. But Maeve messed up a spell to contact the Lady of the Fens, an eerie Revenant who lures the unwary to their deaths in the brackish marshlands of the North Shore. Maeve destroyed her reputation, hurt her best friend Ash, and tainted herself with unbound, wild magic that transforms witches into insane Revenants. With unbound power eating away at Maeve's mind, all she wants is to get rid of her magic. Forever. But Ash's research into how the spell went awry leads in an unexpected direction: the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and a link between the Lady and a decades-old art theft worth $500 million. When Ash disappears through a stolen painting's empty frame, Maeve has to follow. Inside is the Other Marsh, a haunting, deadly realm where only the Lady's rules apply. Within this half-world lie secrets about North Shore's history, Maeve's failure, and the fate of the masterpieces that disappeared over three decades ago. But as Maeve fights toward the truth, she risks her friendship, her coven, and her life against enemies hiding in plain sight.
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Under Story: A GMA Book Club Pick
by Chloe Benjamin
We wake up to tomorrow, never yesterday. At the edge of the world, biologist Laurel Salter is hiding from everything she's ever known. For ten hours a day, six days per week, she works as a dishwasher at McMurdo Station, an isolated research base in Antarctica. She tells no one that before she arrived, she was a renowned young scientist with a promising career and a family. But even in this remote outpost, Laurel can't escape her past. When a strange light appears across the ice--and draws a group of physicists to McMurdo--her former husband, Eli, won't be far behind. Laurel is captivated by the Arc: its surreal glow; the way it seems almost alive. And though Eli is reluctant to test her wildest theory, Laurel is convinced that the Arc leads down a rabbit hole and into a world they can barely imagine. Can she persuade him to risk everything to fix the burden that hangs between them--to turn back the clock and live their story a second time? A breathless page-turner and a love letter to our planet, Under Story grapples with the great questions of our time: human hubris, the precarity of the natural world, and the mysterious webs of consciousness that bind us. A modern epic of science and soul, of bravery and redemption, it offers a vision of the future that demands we reckon with what we owe to one another, and to the earth itself.
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The Knave and the Moon
by Rachel Gillig
Aisling Cathedral is in ruins. Rodrick Myndacious, Bartholomew, and Maude Bauer are rumored to be dead--and the king has taken Sybil Delling as his bride. To show off their union and solidify his power over Traum, Benji proposes a series of tournaments throughout the hamlets. Captive and drugged, Sybil remains determined to vanquish him as she once did the Omens, even if she destroys the kingdom's faith--and herself--in the process. But then a mysterious knave rises to the top of the tournament lists, a man with no name and no memory who may just be Sybil's ticket to undoing Benji's power. For in a land where stories repeat themselves, where a king can prove as cruel as a god, the only way to truly destroy the Stonewater Kingdom's faith is to save it.
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Exit Party
by Emily St John Mandel
Los Angeles, 2031: The first spring after the collapse of the United States, peacekeeping troops withdraw from the city, the Jacaranda trees blossom, and the curfew is finally lifted. Ari Waker and her roommate pass the gauntlet of bomb-sniffing dogs, the shanty towns, and the Red Cross tents as they walk across Silverlake to a party. The mood is ecstatic inside the apartment, people drink and dance, a woman wears a silver dress, pleated like tinfoil. And then: A shift. A bewildered twin, an uncanny doppelganger stumbles through the crowd and out into the night, and Kareem, the party's host, vanishes into thin air. As Ari Waker unravels the mystery of this inexplicable night, Emily St. John Mandel unfurls a story that takes us from a future America splintered by civil war to the seaside cliffs of Greece where weapons dealers hide in an elegant resort, and from the domed city of Paris to a colony on the moon. An unforgettable literary feat, Exit Party is a novel about the price of safety, the perils of the surveillance state, a requiem for a world not unlike our own, and a breathtaking story of resilience in the face of cataclysmic change.
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Massif by Garth NixIt's business as usual for Ship Leader Parnell Shi-Sawahla and the crew of the corvette Sassafras. Ride a Massif to a new system, fight the enemy, repeat. For more than two hundred years humans have been hitching rides on these sentient, star-faring mountain ranges, colonizing planets and exporting an on and off again war between Earth and Mars. But the big questions are always there, behind every battle, every new colony, every new star system discovery. Why do the Massifs carry humans to the stars? Why do they help us export our wars? What's in it for the Massifs? Ship crews aren't supposed to ask these questions, they aren't supposed to think about these questions, and they definitely aren't supposed to go deep and talk to Massif avatars. But now Parnell and his tight-knit crew must try to find the answers, to save not only themselves but the future of humanity.
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The Paradox Club
by Charlie Lovett
Tess Maxwell grew up fascinated by the stars and her father Harry's stories and his scientific lessons. But ever since Harry's death ten years ago, Tess has felt out of sync with the world and suspects that there's more to her father's work--and death--than anyone has let on. When she discovers a cryptic puzzle he left behind, she's thrust into the hidden world of the Paradox Club, a covert organization operating out of an unremarkable Manhattan brownstone where scholars guard knowledge with the power to reshape human history. But the club is fracturing, a rogue member is moving to exploit its most dangerous secrets, and Tess's family is at the center of it all. As she races to uncover the truth about her father's work, Tess becomes a pawn in a battle for control of the society and the world-altering information it protects. Can she confront the paradox at the heart of her father's work and her difficult past to solve the mysteries of her identity, Harry's death, and the universe? The Paradox Club blends scientific intrigue, buried histories, and escalating danger into a propulsive mystery perfect for readers who love secret societies, intellectual puzzles, and revelations that upend everything we think we know.
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Dead Beat
by Leigh Bardugo
Alex Stern made it to hell and back more than once, but this time she left the door open behind her. Demons are creeping through the streets of New Haven and the Yale campus, feeding on the souls of the living, terrifying the dead. Alex and her allies can hunt them, but it's only a matter of time before the gates to the underworld open and they face a war they cannot win. To stop it, they'll have to reach deep into the secrets of Yale and its societies, and discover the truth hidden in Alex's own blood. While she struggles to hold onto the dream of a future Yale once offered, Alex must contend with the machinations of a corrupt Lethe Board and a deadly vampire with his own connection to the societies. But for the first time in her life, she won't have to face the fight alone. Dawes, Turner, Mercy, and even Tripp will have a role to play, none more so than Alex's mentor Darlington, the golden boy who lived so long in her head, now back in the flesh and cursed with dangerous powers of his own. Hell itself is stalking the delegates of Lethe House, and they're all about to learn that demons don't play by human rules.
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Brona: The First Druids of Shannara
by Terry Brooks
Years have passed since Galaphile Joss and his life partner, Nirianne, established Paranor as a way to bring harmony to the Four Lands. Now their two sons are becoming men in a land of peace and plenty. Admittedly, it is a land that their eldest child, Abronja, finds rather boring. At sixteen, he longs for a way to prove himself--a chance to show he is every bit the equal of his famous father. But when the excitement he has been longing for materializes, it is in the form of an old evil: a dark sorcerer whom his father had defeated but not destroyed. And who is now back, stronger and deadlier than ever. Galaphile has always dreaded this wicked resurgence--and not just because of what it means for the wider world. Abronja was conceived while the dark sorcerer had control of Nirianne, and Galaphile has always feared that a spark of malevolence lives on in his beloved child. Abronja, for his part, is certain he will never be corrupted by evil. He is fully committed to his fathers vision for peace and is determined to make his name by finally destroying the monster that has targeted his family. But tangling with dark magic is not a thing to be taken lightly--especially for a young man as yet untested in the ways of the world. And when the repercussions of this encounter could have consequences for centuries to come . . .
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Bodies of Magic
by Freya Marske
At the Academie of the Grand Duchy of Sieuxerr, every mage with the healer's gift has five years to master their power and to prepare for the infamous Grand Exam--a five-day trial whose results will determine their entire future. The list of exam rules includes: - You will perform five practical cases.- Your exam group is chosen at random.- You pass together, or fail together. It does not include: - On the first day, your exam group will find a classmate's dead body in the exam hall. And as they will soon discover, this particular group all have something to hide... and all have a connection with the dead girl, a brilliant scholar who would have been first in their class. Five scholars. Five secrets. Five days in which to solve a murder, pass the most important exam of their lives, and uncover a secret larger than all of their own combined. One with the potential to change the world. Are you ready? Let's begin.
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Scion
by James Islington
My job, when you think about it, isn't so different from a lot of people's. The more old-fashioned crowd do still get hung up on the killing people part of it, I guess, but that's a them problem: it's been perfectly legal to take out lifers for ages. Besides, once ultrawealthy morons realised they had a way to live forever--limited resources be damned--there was only ever going to be one genuinely practical deterrent. So, sure, I have to deal with a ton of boring planning. Inconvenient hours. Some pretty awkward face-to-face interactions. And like most of us, I'm really only clocking in to try to crawl out from beneath my debts. But someone's got to do it. Luckily, my genetic compatibilities make me really, really good at doing it. Still. This next job...I don't know. It's something I haven't had to deal with in years. Kind of the opposite of my regular duties. Strange, that it got thrown my way. I'm sure it'll all go totally fine though.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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