The East Brunswick Public Library will be closed starting Monday, April 27th and reopening on Monday, May 18th. Read More

Staff Reading Picks

The End of the Day

Bill Clegg returns with a deeply moving, emotionally resonant novel about the complicated bonds and breaking points of female friendship, the corrosive forces of secrets, the heartbeat of longing, and the redemption found in forgiveness.

Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains

Arsenault reflects on her serene hometown and the cloaked environmental corruption plaguing it. The author, a National Books Critics Circle board member and book review editor at Orion, grew up in Mexico, Maine, a small town fortified by the Androscoggin River. She writes poignantly of growing up in a large nuclear family surrounded by the town’s dense forestlands. Her father and grandfather worked at the local paper mill, an entity that economically grounded the town and employed a large percentage of its residents, many of whom remained blind to the ever changing world around them.

Migrations

Franny Stone cannot be contained. In a bleak near-future, she is a wanderer and a sleepwalker, a swimmer and a bird lover. Born in Australia, raised in Ireland by her mother while knowing nothing of her father, she ends up back in Australia with her paternal grandmother. Returning as an adult to Ireland, she works as a cleaner at a university, where Niall Lynch, a famous professor of ornithology, willingly succumbs to her dangerous bewitchment. Their shared ardor for the wild turns tragic as the sixth extinction accelerates.

Survivor Song

When Massachusetts is overrun by a rabies-like virus that is incurable an hour after infection, a soft-spoken pediatrician navigates apocalyptic obstacles to get a vaccine to her eight-months pregnant friend.

Finlay Donovan is Killing It

A suburban Virginia divorcée struggles with that classic dilemma: What should she do when she’s offered a fat paycheck to kill a complete stranger? Struggling romantic suspense novelist Finlay Donovan doesn’t think much of her ex-husband, Steven, who’s been nickel-and-diming her ever since she dumped him over his affair with Theresa Hall, the realtor who’s since become his fiancee. So she’s not entirely surprised when Patricia Mickler, overhearing her chatting with her agent in the local Panera about her latest work in progress, indicates that her own husband is even worse.

Enter the Aardvark

Early one morning, Congressman Alexander Paine Wilson is planning his reelection campaign when a mysterious delivery arrives at his townhouse. Inside is a gigantic taxidermied aardvark. What does it mean? The story hurtles between present day Washington, DC, where Wilson tries to get rid of the unsightly beast before it destroys his career, and Victorian England, where listeners meet the aardvark's taxidermist and the naturalist who hunted her, and learn the secret that binds them all.

The Mercies

Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Twenty-year-old Maren Magnusdatter stands on the craggy coast, watching the skies break into a sudden and reckless storm. All forty of the village’s men were at sea, including Maren’s father and brother, and all forty are drowned in the otherworldly disaster.  
 

Down Along With That Devil's Bones : A Reckoning With Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

This timely, engaging book examines whiteness through controversial Confederate symbols and statues that have become a focal point in the national discussion about systemic racism and white supremacy. Producer of the podcast White Lies, O’Neill focuses on several statues and a building named after Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, who looms large in Confederate lore, being the only person to enlist as a private and work his way to general. But Forrest also made his money as a slave trader and was the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.