ROMANCE FICTION - MANHATTAN NEW YORK A unique love story set in the New York City theater world during the 1940s. Told from the perspective of an older woman as she looks back on her youth with both pleasure and regret (but mostly pleasure), this novel explores themes of female sexuality and promiscuity, as well as the idiosyncrasies of true love. In 1940, 19-year-old Vivian has just been kicked out of college, owing to her lackluster freshman-year performance. Her affluent parents send her to Manhattan to live with her aunt who owns a flamboyant, crumbling midtown theater. There Vivian is introduced to an entire cosmos of unconventional and charismatic characters. But when Vivian makes a personal mistake that results in professional scandal, it turns her new world upside down in ways that it will take her years to fully understand. Ultimately, though, it leads her to a new understanding of the kind of life she craves - and the kind of freedom it takes to pursue it. It will also lead to the love of her life, a love that stands out from all the rest. Now 89 years old and telling her story at last, Vivian recalls how the events of those years altered the course of her life - and the gusto and autonomy with which she approached it.
(13 copies)
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We meet Andrew Leland as he’s suspended in the liminal state of the soon-to-be blind: he’s midway through his life with retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that ushers those who live with it from sightedness to blindness over years, even decades. He grew up with full vision, but starting in his teenage years, his sight began to degrade from the outside in, such that he now sees the world as if through a narrow tube. Soon—but without knowing exactly when—he will likely have no vision left.
Full of apprehension but also dogged curiosity, Leland embarks on a sweeping exploration of the state of being that awaits him: not only the physical experience of blindness but also its language, politics, and customs. He negotiates his changing relationships with his wife and son, and with his own sense of self, as he moves from his mainstream, “typical” life to one with a disability. Part memoir, part historical and cultural investigation, The Country of the Blind represents Leland’s determination not to merely survive this transition but to grow from it—to seek out and revel in that which makes blindness enlightening.
Thought-provoking and brimming with warmth and humor, The Country of the Blind is a deeply personal and intellectually exhilarating tour of a way of being that most of us have never paused to consider—and from which we have much to learn.
(10 copies)
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HISTORICAL FICTION - INDIA Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India's Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning--and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala's long-existing Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl--and future matriarch, known as Big Ammachi--will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.
A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the difficulties undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. It is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.
(15 copies)
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DOMESTIC FICTION - RICH PEOPLE The outrageously funny debut novel about three super-rich, pedigreed Chinese families and the gossip, backbiting, and scheming that occurs when the heir to one of the most massive fortunes in Asia brings home his ABC (American-born Chinese) girlfriend to the wedding of the season.
(12 copies)
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AUTOBIOGRAPHY - MUSCICIAN An unflinching, powerful memoir about the author’s life, growing up Korean-American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.
She tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Oregon, of struggling with her mother's high expectations of her and of a painful adolescence but with treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul where she and her mother would bond over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band and meeting the man who would become her husband her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal pancreatic 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.
(5 copies)
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HISTORICAL FICTION - AFRICA Twin brothers are orphaned at childbirth in Addis Ababa. When they fall in love with the same woman, one brother goes to work in an underfunded New York hospital. Here his past catches up with him.
(15 copies)
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SCIENCE FICTION - THRILLER A mind-bending, relentlessly paced science-fiction thriller, in which an ordinary man is kidnapped, knocked unconscious--and awakens in a world inexplicably different from the reality he thought he knew.
(13 copies)
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SCIENCE FICTION - HORROR Claire Kovalik is days away from being unemployed-- made obsolete-- when her beacon repair crew picks up a strange distress signal. With nothing to lose and no desire to return to Earth, Claire and her team decide to investigate. What they find at the other end of the signal is a shock: the Aurora, a famous luxury space-liner that vanished on its maiden tour of the solar system more than twenty years ago. A salvage claim like this could set Claire and her crew up for life. But a quick trip through the Aurora reveals something isn't right. Whispers in the dark. Flickers of movement. Words scrawled in blood. Claire must fight to hold onto her sanity and find out what really happened on the Aurora, before she and her crew meet the same ghastly fate.
(10 copies)
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ROMANCE FICTION - WORLD WAR (1914-1918) A haunting story about the overarching power of love, set against the horrors of the First World War and its effect on the lives of two young Canadians.
(14 copies)
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ROMANCE FICTION - HOMECOMING A queer romantic comedy about taking chances and accepting love-- with all its complications. Delilah Green swore she would never go back to Bright Falls-- nothing is there for her but memories of a lonely childhood where she was little more than a burden to her cold and distant stepfamily. Her life is in New York, with her photography career finally gaining steam and her bed never empty. Sure, it's a different woman every night, but that's just fine with her. When Delilah's estranged stepsister, Astrid, pressures her into photographing her wedding with a guilt trip and a five-figure check, Delilah finds herself back in the godforsaken town that she used to call home. She plans to breeze in and out, but then she sees Claire Sutherland, one of Astrid's stuck-up besties, and decides that maybe there's some fun (and a little retribution) to be had in Bright Falls, after all. Having raised her eleven-year-old daughter mostly on her own while dealing with her unreliable ex and running a bookstore, Claire Sutherland depends upon a life without surprises. And Delilah Green is an unwelcome surprise-- at first. Though they've known each other for years, they don't really know each other-- so Claire is unsettled when Delilah figures out exactly what buttons to push. When they're forced together during a gauntlet of wedding preparations-- including a plot to save Astrid from her horrible fiancé-- Claire isn't sure she has the strength to resist Delilah's charms. Even worse, she's starting to think she doesn't want to
(12 copies)
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