Monday, October 31, 2022

The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley

Everyone's invited...everyone's a suspect...

For fans of Ruth Ware and Tana French, a shivery, atmospheric, page-turning novel of psychological suspense in the tradition of Agatha Christie, in which a group of old college friends are snowed in at a hunting lodge . . . and murder and mayhem ensue.

All of them are friends. One of them is a killer.

During the languid days of the Christmas break, a group of thirty-something friends from Oxford meet to welcome in the New Year together, a tradition they began as students ten years ago. For this vacation, they’ve chosen an idyllic and isolated estate in the Scottish Highlands—the perfect place to get away and unwind by themselves.

They arrive on December 30th, just before a historic blizzard seals the lodge off from the outside world.

Two days later, on New Year’s Day, one of them is dead.

The trip began innocently enough: admiring the stunning if foreboding scenery, champagne in front of a crackling fire, and reminiscences about the past. But after a decade, the weight of secret resentments has grown too heavy for the group’s tenuous nostalgia to bear. Amid the boisterous revelry of New Year’s Eve, the cord holding them together snaps.

Now one of them is dead . . . and another of them did it.

Keep your friends close, the old adage goes. But just how close is too close?

406 pages (February 2019)

 
Lit Guide from LitLovers.
To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)
 
 
 

follow Lucy on facebook and Twitter
 
Lucy Foley talks about The Hunting Party (BOOKIT):


This title is available for download as an eBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.

Title Read-alikes: Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie; Reckless Girls by Rachel Hawkins; 1222 by Anne Holt; Go to My Grave by Catriona McPherson; One by One by Ruth Ware; They Did Bad Things by Lauren A. Forry; The French Girl by Lexie Elliott; The Long Weekend by Gilly Macmillan; The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse; Black Rabbit Hall by Eve Chase; The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewel; and The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides.

Saturday, October 29, 2022

Crying in H Mart: a memoir by Michelle Zauner

From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the title of this book, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.

256 pages (April 2021)

 
 
To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)
 
 
Review from npr
 

Inside the Book Michelle Zauner (from Penguin Random House):

H Mart x Michelle Zauner Collab | Author Interview (from H Mart):

This title is available for download as an eBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.

Thursday, October 27, 2022

The Library of Legends by Janie Chang

From the author of Three Souls and Dragon Springs Road comes a captivating historical novel in which a convoy of student refugees travel across China, fleeing the hostilities of a brutal war with Japan

 “Myths are the darkest and brightest incarnations of who we are . . .”

China, 1937. When Japanese bombs begin falling on the city of Nanking, nineteen-year-old Hu Lian and her classmates at Minghua University are ordered to flee. Lian and a convoy of students, faculty and staff must walk 1,000 miles to the safety of China’s western provinces, a journey marred by the constant threat of aerial attack. And it is not just the refugees who are at risk; Lian and her classmates have been entrusted with a priceless treasure: a 500-year-old collection of myths and folklore known as the Library of Legends.

The students’ common duty to safeguard the Library of Legends creates unexpected bonds. Lian becomes friends and forms a cautious romance with the handsome and wealthy Liu Shaoming. But after one classmate is arrested and another one is murdered, Lian realizes she must escape before a family secret puts her in danger too. Accompanied by Shao and his enigmatic maidservant, Sparrow, Lian makes her way to Shanghai in the hopes of reuniting with her mother.

During the journey, Lian learns of the connection between her two companions and a tale from the Library of Legends, The Willow Star and the Prince. This revelation comes with profound consequences, for as the ancient books travel across China, they awaken immortals and guardian spirits who embark on an exodus of their own, one that will change the country’s fate forever.

400 pages (May 2020)

 
 
 
To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)
 
 
 

New novel mixes Chinese folklore and historical fiction | CTV Your Morning:

Janie Chang on the process of writing The Library of Legends |Toronto International Festival of Authors 2020:

This title is available for download as an eBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.
 
Title Read-alikes: The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern; The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow; Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia; I Give It to You by Valerie Martin; The Sisters of the Winter Wood by Rena Rossner; The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker; The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden; Beasts of a Little Land by Juhea Kim; The Immoratalists by Chloe Benamin; White Ghost Girls by Alice Greenway; Tree of Heaven of R.C. Binstock; The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li; and Riding the Tiger by Milena Banks.

Wednesday, October 26, 2022

Memorial Drive: a daughter’s memoir by Natasha D. Trethewey

A chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy.

At age nineteen, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma and now explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became.

With penetrating insight and a searing voice that moves from the wrenching to the elegiac, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Natasha Trethewey explores this profound experience of pain, loss, and grief as an entry point into understanding the tragic course of her mother's life and the way her own life has been shaped by a legacy of fierce love and resilience. Moving through her mother's history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a "child of miscegenation" in Mississippi, Trethewey plumbs her sense of dislocation and displacement in the lead-up to the harrowing crime that took place on Memorial Drive in Atlanta in 1985.

Memorial Drive is a compelling and searching look at a shared human experience of sudden loss and absence but also a piercing glimpse at the enduring ripple effects of white racism and domestic abuse. Animated by unforgettable prose and inflected by a poet's attention to language, this is a luminous, urgent, and visceral memoir from one of our most important contemporary writers and thinkers.

211 pages (July 2020)

 
 
To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)
 
 
 

Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey faces her mother’s murder in Memorial Drive | Amanpour and Company:
 
The 'existential wound' that fueled poet Natasha Trethewey's acclaimed career (PBS NewsHour):


This title is available for download as an eBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.

Tuesday, October 25, 2022

The Mother Code by Carole Stivers

What it means to be human-–and a mother-–is put to the test in Carole Stivers' debut novel set in a world that is more chilling and precarious than ever.

It's 2049, and the survival of the human race is at risk. Earth's inhabitants must turn to their last resort: a plan to place genetically engineered children inside the cocoons of large-scale robots—to be incubated, birthed, and raised by machines. But there is yet one hope of preserving the human order—an intelligence programmed into these machines that renders each unique in its own right—the Mother Code.

Kai is born in America's desert southwest, his only companion his robot Mother, Rho-Z. Equipped with the knowledge and motivations of a human mother, Rho-Z raises Kai and teaches him how to survive. But as children like Kai come of age, their Mothers transform too—in ways that were never predicted. When government survivors decide that the Mothers must be destroyed, Kai must make a choice. Will he break the bond he shares with Rho-Z? Or will he fight to save the only parent he has ever known?
 
In a future that could be our own, The Mother Code explores what truly makes us human—and the tenuous nature of the boundaries between us and the machines we create.

336 pages (May 2020)

 
 
 
To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)
 
 
 

Vlog with Carole Stivers (from Jean BookNerd):


This title is available for download as an eBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.

Title Read-alikes: The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez; Immunity Index by Sue Burke; Year One by Nora Roberts; Nexus by Ramez Naam; The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty; Lock In by John Scalzi; It Takes Death to Reach a Star by Stu Jones; One Second After by William R. Forstchen; White Horse by Alex Adams; Reset by Sarina Dahlan; The Companions by Katie M. Flynn; Seed by Rob Ziegler; and Goldilocks by Laura Lam.

Monday, October 24, 2022

Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano

A twelve-year-old boy struggles with the worst kind of fame - as the sole survivor of a notorious plane crash - in a heart-wrenching and life-affirming novel for readers of Small Great Things, Little Fires Everywhere, and The Immortalists.

What does it mean not just to survive, but to truly live? 

One summer morning, twelve-year-old Edward Adler, his beloved older brother, his parents, and 183 other passengers board a flight in Newark headed for Los Angeles. Among them are a Wall Street wunderkind, a young woman coming to terms with an unexpected pregnancy, an injured vet returning from Afghanistan, a business tycoon, and a free-spirited woman running away from her controlling husband. Halfway across the country, the plane crashes. Edward is the sole survivor.

Edward's story captures the attention of the nation, but he struggles to find a place for himself in a world without his family. He continues to feel that a piece of him has been left in the sky, forever tied to the plane and all of his fellow passengers. But then he makes an unexpected discovery—one that will lead him to the answers of some of life's most profound questions: When you've lost everything, how do find yourself? How do you discover your purpose? 

Dear Edward is at once a transcendent coming-of-age story, a multidimensional portrait of an unforgettable cast of characters, and a breathtaking illustration of all the ways a broken heart learns to love again.

340 pages (January 2020)

 
 
To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)
 
 
Review from npr
 

Ann Napolitano | PRH Author Lunch ALA 2019 (prhlibrary):

This title is available for download as an eBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.

Title Read-alikes: The Two Lives of Lydia Bird by Josie Silver; The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt; History Lesson for Girls by Aurelie Sheehan;  Before the Fall by Noah Hawley; The Hondbook for Lightning Strike Survivors by Michele Young-Stone; Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter; Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg; Afterlife by Julia Alvarez; Still Life with Monkey by Katharine Weber; Here Until August: Stories by Josephine Rowe; The Dependents by Katharine Dion; The Dive from Clausen's Pier by Ann Packer; and My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

Friday, October 21, 2022

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

Susan Orlean's thrilling journey through the stacks reveals how these beloved institutions provide much more than just books—and why they remain an essential part of the heart, mind, and soul of our country.

On the morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. The fire was disastrous: it reached two thousand degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who?

Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a "delightful…reflection on the past, present, and future of libraries in America" (New York magazine) that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before.

In the "exquisitely written, consistently entertaining" (The New York Times) The Library Book, Orlean chronicles the LAPL fire and its aftermath to showcase the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives; delves into the evolution of libraries; brings each department of the library to vivid life; studies arson and attempts to burn a copy of a book herself; and reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the blond-haired actor long suspected of setting fire to the LAPL more than thirty years ago.

317 pages (October 2018)

 
 
To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)
 
 
 

Behind the Book with Susan Orlean (from North Richland Hills Library):


So Many Questions: Susan Orlean (from Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity) :

This title is available for download as an eBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.

Title Read-alikes: The Library: a catalogue of wonders by Stuart S. Kells; The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt; A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: from Ancient Sumer to Modern to modern-day Iraq by Fernando Báez; The Professor and the Madman: a tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the Oxford English dictionary by Simon Winchester; American Lightning: terror, mystery, movie-making, and the crime of the century by Howard Blum; City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles reimagined by Peter Lunenfeld; New York, New York, New York: four decades of success, excess, and transformation by Tom Dyja; Paradise: one town's struggle to survive an American wildfire by Lizzie Johnson; Katrina: after the flood by Gary Rivlin; Killers of the Flower Moon: the Osage murders and the birth of the FBI by David Grann; Educated: a memoir by Tara Westover; Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction by Rebecca Knuth; and Apostles of Culture: The Public Librarian and American Society, 1876-1920 by Dee Garrison

Thursday, October 20, 2022

All the Forgivenesses by Elizabeth Hardinger

Set in Appalachia and the Midwest at the turn of the twentieth century, this exquisite debut novel paints an intimately rendered portrait of one resilient farm family's challenges and hard-won triumphs--helmed by an unforgettable heroine.

Growing up on their hardscrabble farm in rural Kentucky, fifteen-year-old Albertina "Bertie" Winslow has learned a lot from her mama, Polly. She knows how to lance a boil, make a pie crust, butcher a pig, and tend to every chore that needs doing. What she doesn't know, but is forced to reckon with all too soon, is how to look after children as a mother should ...

When Polly succumbs to a long illness, Bertie takes on responsibility for her four younger siblings and their dissolute, unreliable daddy. Yet no matter how hard she tries to hold the family together, the task is overwhelming. Nine-year-old Dacia, especially, is resentful and stubborn, hinting at secrets in their mama's life. Finally, Bertie makes the only choice she can--breaking up the family for its own survival, keeping the girls with her, sending the boys off to their grown brothers, long gone from home.

Ever pragmatic, Bertie marries young, grateful to find a husband willing to take on the care of her sisters, and eventually moves to the oil fields of Kansas. But marriage alone cannot resolve the grief and guilt she carries over a long-ago tragedy, or prepare her for the heartaches still to come. Only by confronting wrenching truths can she open herself to joy--and learn how to not only give, but receive, unfettered love.

Inspired by stories told by the author's mother and aunts, All the Forgivenesses is as authentic as it is lyrical--a captivating novel of family loyalty, redemption, and resilience.

358 pages (August 2019)

 
 
 
To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)
 
 
 

This title is available for download as an eBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.

Title Read-alikes: The Book Woman's Daughter by Kim Michele Richardson; Zorrie by Laird Hunt; Some Luck by Jane Smiley; The Sisters of Summit Avenue by Lynn Cullen; Perish by LaToya Watkins; Goshen Road by Bonnie Proudfoot; Ruby and Roland by Faith Sullivan; Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips; The Sisters by Nancy Jensen; The Floor of the Sky by Pamela Carter Joern; In the Garden of Stone by Susan Tekulve; Stars Go Blue by Laura Pritchett; and During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase.

Wednesday, October 19, 2022

Virga & Bone: essays from dry places by Craig Childs

Writer and adventurer Craig Childs dwells upon desert icons—human, animal, and otherwise—in these contemplative and visceral essays.

From the author of The Secret Knowledge of Water and Atlas of a Lost World comes a deeply felt essay collection focusing upon a vivid series of desert icons—a sheet of virga over Monument Valley, white seashells in dry desert sand, boulders impossibly balanced.

Craig Childs delves into the primacy of the land and the profound nature of the more-than-human.

122 pages (October 2019)

Check availability

To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)

Book Bites, Episode 8: Craig Childs (from City of Longmont, CO)

This title is available for download  as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.

Title Read-alikes: A Desert Harvest by Bruce Berger; Walking the High Desert: encounters with rural America along the Oregon Desert Trail by Ellen Waterston; Seasons: desert sketches by Ellen Meloy; The Nature of Desert Nature: meditations on the nature of deserts by Gary Paul Nabhan ; Deep Creek: finding hope in the high country by Pam Houston; In Earshot of Water: Notes from the Columbia Plateau by Paul J. Lindholdt; High Sierra: a love story by Kim Stanley Robinson; The Immeasurable World: journeys in desert places by William Atkins; Refuge: an unnatural history of family and place by Terry Tempest Williams; Braiding Sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants by Robin Kimmerer; Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People by Elizabeth A. Fenn; Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology by David Abram; and Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard.

Tuesday, October 18, 2022

The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri

This unforgettable novel puts human faces on the Syrian war with the immigrant story of a beekeeper, his wife, and the triumph of spirit when the world becomes unrecognizable.

Nuri is a beekeeper and Afra, his wife, is an artist. Mornings, Nuri rises early to hear the call to prayer before driving to his hives in the countryside. On weekends, Afra sells her colorful landscape paintings at the open-air market. They live a simple life, rich in family and friends, in the hills of the beautiful Syrian city of Aleppo—until the unthinkable happens. When all they love is destroyed by war, Nuri knows they have no choice except to leave their home. But escaping Syria will be no easy task: Afra has lost her sight, leaving Nuri to navigate her grief as well as a perilous journey through Turkey and Greece toward an uncertain future in Britain.

Nuri is sustained only by the knowledge that waiting for them is his cousin Mustafa, who has started an apiary in Yorkshire and is teaching fellow refugees the art of beekeeping. As Nuri and Afra travel through a broken world, they must confront not only the pain of their own unspeakable loss but dangers that would overwhelm even the bravest souls. Above all, they must make the difficult journey back to each other, a path once so familiar yet rendered foreign by the heartache of displacement.

Moving, intimate, and beautifully written, The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a book for our times: a novel that at once reminds us that the most peaceful and ordinary lives can be utterly upended in unimaginable ways and brings a journey in faraway lands close to home, never to be forgotten.

317 pages (August 2019)

 
 
 
To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)
     
 
Review from Time
 

Book Trailer:

Christi Lefteri on the importance of telling migrants' stories (from SkyNews):


This title is available for download as an eBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.

Title Read-alikes: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid; And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini; Nujeen: one girl's incredible journey from war-torn Syria in a wheelchair by Nujeen Mustafa; No Land to Light On by Yara Zgheib; Legends of the North Cascades by Jonathan Evison; The Doctor of Aleppo by Dan Mayland; A Feather on the Water by Lindsay Jayne Ashford; Where You Come From by Saša, Stanišić; Someone You Love is Gone by Gurjinder Basran; People Want to Live by Ali Farah; Ishmael's Oranges by Claire Hajaj; City of Jasmine by Olga Grjasnowa; and Midwinter by Fiona Melrose.