Staff Reading Picks

Right After the Weather

It's the fall of 2016. Cate, a set designer in her early forties, lives and works in Chicago's theater community. She has stayed too long at the fair and knows it's time to get past her prolonged adolescence and stop taking handouts from her parents. She has a firm plan to get solvent and settled in a serious relationship. She has tentatively started something new even as she's haunted by an old, going-nowhere affair.

The Golden Couple

Avery, a maverick therapist who lost her license due to controversial methods, agrees to help golden couple Marissa and Mathew Bishop overcome Marissa's cheating, setting all three of them on a collision course because the biggest--and most dangerous--secrets have not yet been revealed.

The Local: A Legal Thriller

The town of Marshall, Texas is flooded with patent lawyers, all of whom find work being the local voice for the big-city legal teams that need to sway a small-town jury. One of the best is James Euchre. Euchre's new client is Amir Zawar, a  CEO forced to defend his life's work against a software patent infringement. Late one night, after a heated confrontation in a preliminary hearing, Judge Gardner is found murdered in the courthouse parking lot. All signs point to Zawar--he has motive, he has opportunity, and he has no alibi.

American Fire : Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land

The arsons started on a cold November midnight and didn't stop for months. Night after night, the people of Accomack County waited to see which building would burn down next, regarding each other at first with compassion, and later suspicion. Vigilante groups sprang up, patrolling the rural Virginia coast with cameras and camouflage. Volunteer firefighters slept at their stations. The arsonist seemed to target abandoned buildings, but local police were stretched too thin to surveil them all. Accomack was desolate--there were hundreds of abandoned buildings.

The Daughter of Auschwitz

In this powerful and moving memoir Highland Park, NJ resident Tova Friedman tells the story of her life. She  was one of the youngest people to emerge from Auschwitz. After surviving the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Central Poland Tova and her mother were sent to Auschwitz and her father to Dachau.,   After being liberated by the Russians they made their way back to their hometown in Poland. Eventually Tova's father tracked them down and the family was reunited.

The River

 

A masterful tale of wilderness survival in the vein of Into the Wild and The Call of the Wild. It is the story of two college friends on a wilderness canoe trip. A gripping tale of a friendship tested by fire, whitewater, starvation, and brutality.

Matrix

 

Cast out of the royal court, seventeen-year-old Marie de France, born the last in a long line of women warriors, is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey where she vows to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects.

Mrs. March

When someone suggests that the protagonist in her husband's latest book is based on her, Mrs. March questions everything she believes about her husband as she embarks on a harrowing journey that builds to near psychosis - one that may uncover a killer andthe long-buried secrets of her past.