Category: Books

The Final Victory: Shattered Bodies, Broken Dreams, the Race to Win Back Hope
by Roger Jones
Tripp Avery, who is diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer, coaches a team of 12 men and 8 women hoping to qualify for the mixed masters Dragon Boat National Championship. The team members each have their own cancer diagnoses and are looking to defy their prognoses as well as win the competition. But the physical and emotional strain of training soon takes a toll, and as the team begins to fall apart, Tripp must question his own motives and methods. (2024; F)

Time of the Child
by Niall Williams
Doctor Jack Troy was born and raised in Faha, but his responsibilities for the sick and his care for the dying mean he has always been set apart from the town. His eldest daughter, Ronnie, has grown up in her father’s shadow, and remains there, having missed one chance at love — and passed up another offer of marriage from an unsuitable man. But in the Advent season of 1962, Ronnie and Doctor Troy’s lives are turned upside down when a baby is left in their care. (2024; F)

The Grey Wolf
by Louise Penny
A missing coat, an intruder alarm, a note for Gamache reading ‘this might interest you’, a puzzling scrap of paper with a mysterious list–and then a murder. All propel Chief Inspector Gamache and his team toward a terrible realization. Something much more sinister than any one murder or any one case is fast approaching. The 19th mystery in the bestselling Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series. (2024; F)

The Summer Wives
Beatriz Williams
In the summer of 1951, Miranda Schuyler arrives on elite, secretive Winthrop Island as a schoolgirl from the margins of high society, still reeling from the loss of her father in the Second World War. When her beautiful mother marries Hugh Fisher, whose summer house on Winthrop overlooks the famous lighthouse, Miranda is catapulted into a heady new world of pedigrees and cocktails, status and swimming pools. (2018; F)

Jackie
by Dawn Tripp
“Three times that day someone pushed roses into her arms – yellow roses each time, until they reached Dallas. There, the roses were red. (November 22, 1963)” And so begins Jackie, a spellbinding, deeply researched novel which goes back in time to imagine Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is telling us the first-person story of her life. At the center of this book is the love story of Jackie and Jack, beginning when Jackie is 21 and meets the charismatic Congressman at a dinner party in Georgetown. She thinks he is not her kind of adventure: ‘Too American. Too good-looking. Too boy.’ She dreams of living in France, as she did as a student. And yet: there is the intelligence, the energy, the chemistry between them. (2024; F)

All the Colors of the Dark
by Chris Whitaker
1975 is a time of change in America. The Vietnam War is ending. Muhammad Ali is fighting Joe Frazier. And in the small town of Monta Clare, Missouri, girls are disappearing. When the daughter of a wealthy family is targeted, the most unlikely hero emerges–Patch, a local boy, who saves the girl, and, in doing so, leaves heartache in his wake. Patch and those who love him soon discover that the line between triumph and tragedy has never been finer. And that their search for answers will lead them to truths that could mean losing one another. (2024; F)

Lost & Found
by Kathryn Schulz
Eighteen months before her beloved father died, Pulitzer-prize-winning author Kathryn Schulz met Casey, who would become her wife. Lost & Found weaves together their love story with the story of losing Kathryn’s father in a brilliant exploration of how all our lives are shaped by loss and discovery- from the maddening disappearance of everyday objects to the sweeping devastations of war, pandemic, and natural disaster; from finding new planets to falling in love. (2022; NF)

The Sunflower House
by Adriana Allegri
In a sleepy German village, Allina Strauss’s life seems idyllic: she works at her uncle’s bookshop, makes strudel with her aunt, and spends weekends with her friends and fiancé́. But it’s 1939, Adolf Hitler is Chancellor, and Allina’s family hides a terrifying secret- her birth mother was Jewish, making her a Mischling. One fateful night after losing everyone she loves, Allina is forced into service as a nurse at a state-run baby factory called Hochland Home. There, she becomes both witness and participant to the horrors of Himmler’s ruthless eugenics program. (2024; F)

Three Dreamers: A Memoir of a Family
by Lorenzo Carcaterra
At sixty-six, Lorenzo Carcaterra finds it easier to reflect on the past than ruminate on the future. “By the time you reach my age,” he writes, “you have witnessed too much loss to not be aware of what lies ahead.” This turn to the past inspired a poignant memoir about the women who made him the man he is today. His Italian grandmother, Nonna Maria, gave him his first taste of a loving home during the summers he spent with her as a teenager on Ischia, an island off the coast of Naples. His mother, Raffaela, dealt with daily hardships: a loveless and abusive marriage, the burden of debt, and a life of dread. Though the lessons she taught were harsh, they would drive Lorenzo from the world they shared to the better one she always prayed he would find. The third woman is his wife, Susan, a gifted editor and his professional champion. Their marriage lasted three decades before her death from lung cancer in 2013. (2021; NF)

The German Heiress
by Anika Scott
For readers of The Alice Network and The Lost Girls of Paris, this is an immersive, heart-pounding debut about a German heiress on the run from British authorities, who discovers dark secrets about her family’s past in post-World War II Germany. (2020; F)

Never
by Ken Follett
“Every catastrophe begins with a little problem that doesn’t get fixed.” So says Pauline Green, president of the United States. A shrinking oasis in the Sahara Desert; a stolen US Army drone; an uninhabited Japanese island; and one country’s secret stash of deadly chemical poisons: all these play roles in a relentlessly escalating crisis. Struggling to prevent the outbreak of a world war are a young woman intelligence officer; a spy working undercover with jihadists; a brilliant Chinese spymaster; and Pauline herself, beleaguered by a populist rival in the next presidential election. (2021; F)

The Girl in His Shadow
by Audrey Blake
When Dr. Croft takes in orphan Eleanor Beady, he doesn’t realize that he’s gained an apprentice. Raised amidst his experiments, “Nora” becomes his most trusted assistant- an unthinkable and unlawful pursuit for a woman. Nora helps Croft’s research and his clinic gain recognition, and she finds she doesn’t mind working in the background, as long as she can continue to hone her skills. But the arrival of a new surgical resident threatens to undo all that Nora has strived for. (2021; F)

Homecoming
by Kate Morton
Called home to care for her grandmother after a fall, Jess, a journalist, discovers a book chronicling the police investigation into an old unsolved murder that has a shocking connection to her family. (2023; F)

The Boys: A Memoir of Hollywood and Family
by Ron Howard
By turns confessional, nostalgic, heartwarming and harrowing, the award-winning filmmaker and his brother, an audience-favorite actor, share their unusual family story of navigating and surviving life as sibling child actors. (2021; NF audiobook)

Being Henry
by Henry Winkler
Henry Winkler, launched into prominence as “The Fonz” in the beloved Happy Days, has transcended the role that made him who he is. Brilliant, funny, and widely regarded as the nicest man in Hollywood (though he would be the first to tell you that it’s simply not the case, he’s really just grateful to be here), Henry shares in this achingly vulnerable memoir the disheartening truth of his childhood, the difficulties of a life with severe dyslexia, the pressures of a role that takes on a life of its own, and the path forward once your wildest dream seems behind you. (2023; NF audiobook)

The Wife Upstairs
by Rachel Hawkins
A delicious twist on a Gothic classic, The Wife Upstairs pairs Southern charm with atmospheric domestic suspense. Meet Jane. Newly arrived to Birmingham, Alabama, Jane is a broke dog-walker in Thornfield Estates- a gated community. With delicious suspense, incisive wit, and a fresh, feminist sensibility, Hawkins flips the script on a timeless tale of forbidden romance, ill-advised attraction, and a wife who just won’t stay buried. (2021; F)