Staff Reads - 2/17/23

After twelve-year-old Lebanese-American Shad Hadid discovershe is an Alchemist, he receives an invitation to the Alexandria Academy where he discovers not everything is as it seems and shadowy figures are lurking around every corner.

"From the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, a sweeping, multi-generational saga of displacement, loss, and love, set against the brutal colonization of east Africa. When he was just a boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents on the coast of east Africa by German colonial troops. After years away, fighting against his own people, he returns home to find his parents gone and his sister, Afiya, abandoned into de facto slavery. Hamza too, is...

"In March 2014, Gabriel García Márquez, one of the most internationally beloved writers of the 20th century, came down with a cold. He was almost 87 years old, and battling dementia. 'I don't think we'll get out of this one,' Mercedes Barcha, his wife of over fifty years, told Rodrigo, their son. As reality begins to sink in, Rodrigo asks himself, 'Is this how the end begins?' Instead of waiting for an answer, Rodrigo starts to write about the beginning...

"In 1981, a young father and son set out on a road trip across Argentina, devastated by the mysterious death of the wife and mother they both loved. United in grief, the pair travels to her family home near Iguazú Falls, where they must confront the horrific legacy she has bequeathed. For the woman they are grieving came from a family like no other--a centuries-old secret society called the Order that pursues eternal life through ghastly rituals....

Revisit the world of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, through the eyes of the woman who is determined to win Mr. Darcy’s affections, in this sumptuous and romantic novel.
To Jane Austen’s faithful readers, it is a truth universally acknowledged that the hearts of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy are forever entwined. But if Miss Caroline Bingley has her way, all will transpire very differently.
Ever...

"The much-beloved BookTok sensation from Travis Baldree, Legends & Lattes is a novel of high fantasy and low stakes. *The new paperback edition will include a very special, never-before-seen bonus story, 'Pages to Fill.'* Come take a load off at Viv's cafe, the first & only coffee shop in Thune. Grand opening! Worn out after decades of packing steel and raising hell, Viv, the orc barbarian, cashes out of the warrior's life with one final score. A...

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION

A New York Times "Ten Best Books of the Year" • An Oprah's Book Club Selection • An Instant New York Times Bestseller • An Instant Wall Street Journal Bestseller • A #1 Washington Post Bestseller

"Demon is a voice for the ages—akin to Huck Finn or Holden

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"A dazzling story of modern Nigeria and two people caught in the riptides of wealth, power, poverty, and corruption, by the celebrated author of Stay With Me"--

"Good Omens meets The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in Ryka Aoki's Light From Uncommon Stars, a defiantly joyful adventure set in California's San Gabriel Valley, with cursed violins, Faustian bargains, and queer alien courtship over fresh-made donuts. Shizuka Satomi made a deal with the devil: to escape damnation, she must entice seven other violin prodigies to trade their souls for success. She has already delivered six. When Katrina Nguyen,...

"An online obituary writer. A young mother with a dark secret. A woman waging a solo campaign against rodents -- neighbors, separated only by the thin walls of a low-cost housing complex in the once bustling industrial center of Vacca Vale, Indiana. Welcome to the Rabbit Hutch. Ethereally beautiful and formidably intelligent, Blandine shares her apartment with three teenage boys she neither likes nor understands, all, like her, now aged out of the...