Staff Reading Picks

1629: A newly orphaned young girl named Mayken is bound for the Dutch East Indies on the Batavia, one of the greatest ships of the Dutch Golden Age. Curious and mischievous, Mayken spends the long journey going on misadventures above and below the deck, searching for a mythical monster. But the true monsters might be closer than she thinks. 1989: A lonely boy named Gil is sent to live off the coast of Western Australia among the seasonal fishing community where his late mother once resided. There, on the tiny reef-shrouded island, he discovers the story of an infamous shipwreck.

An Indian-American serio-comic and magical realist epic love story about the perils of ambition, tracing the mysterious alchemy of its characters' transformation from high school in an Atlanta suburb through young adulthood in the Bay Area.

Coming of age as a free-born Black girl in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie Sampson was all too aware that her purposeful mother, a practicing physician, had a vision for their future together: Libertie would go to medical school and practice alongside her. But Libertie, drawn more to music than science, feels stifled by her mother's choices and is hungry for something else. When a young man from Haiti proposes to Libertie and promises she will be his equal on the island, she accepts, only to discover that she is still subordinate to him and all men.

1942. Sadie is living in the Kraków Ghetto when she meets Ella, an affluent Polish girl. The two become close, but their lives are set on a collision course that will test them in the face of overwhelming odds.

A century after daredevil female aviator Marian Graves's disappearance in Antarctica, actress Hadley Baxter is cast to play her and immerses herself in the role as their fates--and their dreams--become intertwined.

Three generations of a boisterous Irish family are upended by a matriarch's shoplifting activities and an upbeat American home aide whose initial support catapults the family into the worst crisis they have ever faced.

At age four, Molly Shannon's world was shattered when she lost her mother, baby sister, and cousin in a car accident with her father at the wheel. Held together by her tender and complicated relationship with her grieving father, Molly was raised in a permissive household where her gift for improvising and role-playing blossomed alongside the fearlessness that would lead her to become a celebrated actress.

On the Fourth of July, Hallie Evers dies at a rooftop party in Las Vegas.Hours later, she wakes up in the hospital, disoriented but alive. Why can't she find the doctor who revived her? Why does her head feel crowded and loud? Why do her memories feel both foreign and familiar? Her self-doubt spirals into crippling paranoia.Hallie knows that mental illness runs in her family--her mother suffered from delusions that led to an early death.

Forest ecologist Simard has been studying intricate, mutually sustaining forms of communication and interconnectivity among trees and fungi for decades, initially as a determined and controversial researcher for the Canadian Forest Service, then as a professor who attained TED Talk fame. In her galvanizing first book, she interleaves her family’s history as British Columbia homesteaders and loggers with detailed accounts of her innovative and exacting fieldwork and paradigm-altering discoveries.

Felix Pink is a retired widower leading a boring life and hoping to die a boring death. He volunteers as an Exiteer--someone who sits with terminally ill people as they die by suicide, assisting with logistics and lending moral support, then removing theevidence to take the burden off their loved ones. When Felix lets himself in to Number 3 Black Lane, he's there to perform an act of kindness and charity: to keep a dying man company as he takes his final breath. But just fifteen minutes later Felix is on the run from the police after making the biggest mistake of his life.