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Destination Funeral
by Paige Harbison
When Babe--the complicated, magnetic matriarch of their teenage summers--dies, four estranged friends return to sleepy Mercy Island, a storm-swept stretch of coastal Georgia, summoned by the reading of her will. Didion arrives at the timeworn pink house to find the friends she never thought she'd see again--along with the tensions, attractions, and unfinished business that once bound them together and broke them apart. What should be a brief weekend of small talk quickly unravels when they wake up and discover...it's Saturday. Again. And again. And again. Trapped in a time loop with no end and no instructions, they're forced to confront the betrayals, breakups, and buried truths that shattered them all those years ago. Because maybe, just maybe, an endless weekend is exactly what they all need to save their own lives.
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Furious Violet
by Sarai Walker
Violet West Shelley, a self-described low-brow crime journalist, has unwillingly spent her life in the spotlight, as the only daughter of a legendary poet and feminist icon who died tragically young. Now as West approaches fifty--burned out, creatively blocked, and far older than her mother ever was--she retreats to her desolate Colorado hometown to finish a long-overdue book about the Crying Killer, a serial killer who sobs for his mother after committing his crimes.But what begins as a bid for solitude quickly spirals into something far more sinister. A stalker emerges--mysterious, relentless, and disturbingly intimate--claiming that West is their mother; yet West knows this is impossible. As threatening messages escalate and her carefully constructed life starts to unravel, West is drawn into a chilling psychological web where the boundaries between fiction and reality collapse.Is she being watched? Hunted? Or is her own mind turning against her?Gripping, provocative, and laced with pitch-black humor, Furious Violet is a psychological thrill ride and a fierce exploration of motherhood, fame, and the question of who can lay claim to women's legacies. Sarai Walker delivers a heroine unlike any other: damaged, defiant, and utterly unforgettable.
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The Frenzy: Stories
by Joyce Carol Oates
In The Frenzy: Stories, Oates plunges us into the lives of her characters at moments of crisis and confusion, when much of what they understand about themselves and those they love comes undone. A young woman on a supposedly romantic weekend trip to Cape May, New Jersey, turns the tables on her older, married lover. A freak bicycle accident on a bridge haunts one family for decades. A girl jealous of her popular cousin discovers she is the lucky one. A widow waits at her riverside house for her dead husband's return. A young man hiking in the woods comes upon a couple in a heated, possibly violent argument--should he intervene? Suspenseful and psychologically astute, Oates's short stories enthrall and captivate as they dissect her character's deepest fears--revealing our own in turn. Literature is a texture of words, says Oates of her short fiction, evoking life in the most vivid ways--psychologically, physically. These new stories blazingly evoke life at its most vivid and perilous, when fate and free will intersect, and one ominous encounter or bad choice can be the difference between an ordinary day and the point of no return.
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Everything to the Sea
by Alicia Upano
Home for one final summer, Jane is working and saving cash for her senior year of college before she leaves her island town behind forever. At first, she doesn't remember Kenji, but he quickly becomes someone she can't forget: square jaw, a dimple in his cheek. A Hilo boy. To Kenji, she's Janie, nose perpetually buried in her old high school sketchbooks. Jane tells herself it's only a fling--one perfect, carefree summer, on her way to achieving her dream of becoming an architect and moving to the continent.Then a tsunami sweeps their families out to sea, and their all-consuming affair breaks with the weight of grief, pulling them in opposite directions. Kenji remains in Hawai'i, bound by duty to rebuild their hometown. Jane, shattered by the loss, follows her best friend to California. For seven years, an ocean lies between them, until Jane and Kenji meet on another coast . . .In prose that sparkles like sun on the water, Upano's debut novel tells the unforgettable story of two young people as they come of age, fall in love, forge new families, and try to find their way back together, again and again. Everything to the Sea is a moving portrait of our ability to overcome even the most devastating tragedies, when everything else is washed away.
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The Top of the World
by Ethan Joella
June 1975. Maggie Bishop has just graduated high school, the future hers to embrace--but she's still reeling from the death of her older brother, Chip. A devastating diagnosis the summer before prompted Chip to leave home for a few months, never revealing where he went. Maggie's search for clues leads her to The Red Maple Inn, a mountaintop resort in the Poconos. At the Red Maple, Maggie is welcomed into a tight-knit community. As she unravels secrets about her brother's final days, she begins to connect with the people he loved, and whose lives he touched. Through the warmth of strangers, Maggie begins to heal and is able to help others cope with loss. Set in a nostalgic resort town over two transformative summers, this dual-narrative novel explores sibling relationships, coming of age, and the quiet power of human connection. Perfect for fans of emotional storytelling and small-town summer books, The Top of the World is a timeless story about memory, grief, second chances, and hope.
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Habits of the Sea
by Shea Ernshaw
The night Clay Lockhart's wife dies, a violent storm tears their home--and the eight hectares of land beneath it--away from the Scottish coast, sending it adrift into the Atlantic. Thirty years later, twelve-year-old Ellie Mills discovers the fabled floating island off the coast of Nova Scotia and finds Clay still living in the weather worn farmhouse perched on its highest hill. When the island vanishes overnight, Ellie is left questioning whether it ever existed at all. But decades later, the island resurfaces--and Ellie, now in her thirties, returns, determined to uncover the truth. What she finds is even stranger: Clay hasn't aged a single day. Faced with the impossible, Ellie learns that some mysteries aren't meant to be solved--and that a life shaped by wonder may hold more promise than one bound by certainty. Spanning centuries and coastlines, Habits of the Sea is a haunting, romantic journey through time, memory, and the invisible tides that pull us home.
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Make Nice
by Ryan Effgen
When the Pickford siblings arrive at The Grand Hotel--a nostalgic tourist paradise of horse-drawn carriages, muddled cocktails, and white sweaters on the tennis court--they have every intention of spending the long weekend making nice. Pete, the nation's foremost expert on gastropods (mollusks), is keen to wade around the lake in search of a rare and exciting Carthusian snail. Viv, reeling from the secret revelation that her husband is gay, is determined to put on a brave face for her daughter. And Corey, a charming, handsome grifter, has lucked into five pounds of cocaine he plans to sell to the first dumb rich guy he can find. But when Pete falls for the alluring mother of a local kid, when Viv's daughter gets up to teenage trouble, and when Corey finds the wealthy guests less interested in party drugs than golf clubs and waffle cones, the long weekend of family bonding veers into disaster. Why did their father bring them to this cushy island resort in the first place? And why does Corey, the biggest screw up of them all, seem to be the only one who knows the truth? As secrets spill, old flames are fanned, and an innocent snail is crushed beneath the unrelenting heel of a hiking boot. In a story that is as sneakily wise as it is absurdly funny, Ryan Effgen's debut shows how sometimes the people who bring out your worst--your family--can also be the ones to bring you out of your shell.
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Tenderness
by Rowan Beaird
On a remote island off the coast of Virginia, family and friends gather to celebrate the wedding of Shay O'Connor and Andrew Pruitt. From the moment the guests arrive, all they can whisper about is the bride, who recently left the headline-making cult Synanon. Why would someone like Shay, an Ivy League graduate with a wealthy, doting fianc e, join Synanon? And has she really escaped their grasp? Told from the interwoven perspectives of Shay's brother William, her longtime friend Joel, and Shay herself, Tenderness is a slow-burn mystery that excavates dark family histories and romantic regrets. As the wedding day approaches, Joel and William pull at the loose threads of Shay's story, and it becomes clear there is an even greater threat on the island than the secrets each character is keeping from one another. Set in the tinderbox of the 1970s, Tenderness is a lit match, bringing hidden truths to light and asking if we can ever see ourselves or the people we love for who they truly are.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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