Staff Reading Picks

Publishers Weekly

February 18, 2019

During England's seventeenth-century civil war, Alinor, a woman without a husband and skilled with herbs, helps a young man on the run and unwittingly brings disaster into the heart of her life.

An unexpected relationship between a frontierswoman riding out the Arizona Territory drought of 1893 and a former outlaw, who has the ability to see ghosts, inspires an epic journey across the West.

This eye-opening account of numerous immigrants tells a diverse story of what refugees go through in their search for freedom and protection when fleeing a dangerous country.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born -- a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam -- and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity.

Trailblazing Constance's hard-won job as deputy sheriff is on the line in Miss Kopp Just Won't Quit, the fourth installment of Amy Stewart's Kopp Sisters series. After a year on the job, New Jersey's first female deputy sheriff has collared criminals, demanded justice for wronged women, and gained notoriety nationwide for her exploits. But on one stormy night, everything falls apart. While transporting a woman to an insane asylum, Deputy Kopp discovers something deeply troubling about her story.

Phoebe Siegler first meets Charles Heist in a shabby trailer on the eastern edge of Los Angeles. She's looking for her friend's missing daughter, Arabella, and hires Heist to help. A laconic loner who keeps his pet opossum in a desk drawer, Heist intrigues the sarcastic and garrulous Phoebe. Reluctantly, he agrees to help. The unlikely pair navigate the enclaves of desert-dwelling vagabonds and find that Arabella is in serious trouble--caught in the middle of a violent standoff that only Heist, mysteriously, can end.

The story of two families, in two centuries, who live at the corner of Sixth and Plum in Vineland, NJ, as they navigate the challenges of surviving a world in the throes of major cultural shifts. In this mesmerizing story told in alternating chapters, Willa and Thatcher come to realize that though the future is uncertain, even unnerving, shelter can be found in the bonds of kindred, whether family or friends, and in the strength of the human spirit.

"A brilliant new work of suspense from "the most important crime novelist to emerge in the past 10 years." (Washington Post) Toby is a happy-go-lucky charmer who's dodged a scrape at work and is celebrating with friends when the night takes a turn that will change his life - he surprises two burglars who beat him and leave him for dead. Struggling to recover from his injuries, beginning to understand that he might never be the same man again, he takes refuge at his family's ancestral home to care for his dying uncle Hugo.

When his dream of the perfect marriage, the perfect son, and the perfect life implodes, a Wall Street millionaire takes a cross country bus trip in search of his college sweetheart and ideals of youth