When it’s cold and snowy out, there’s nothing better than a good book (well maybe a hot beverage and some warm blankets). Check out our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections for some good reads to enjoy! Oh and if you’re not planning on leaving the house anytime soon, make sure to see what we have on Overdrive!
All the Beloved Ghosts by Alison MacLeod (a Booker-longlisted author) is a collection of short stories that blend fiction, biography, and memoir. MacLeod’s characters hover on the border of life and death, where memory is most vivid and the present most elusive. Moving from the London riots of 2011 to 1920s Nova Scotia, from Oscar Wilde’s grave to the Brighton Pier, these exquisitely formed stories capture the small tragedies and profound truths of existence. You can find a review here, and you can find an excerpt here.
Before the War by Fay Weldon. London, 1922. It’s a cold November morning, the station is windswept and rural, the sky is threatening snow, and the train is late. Vivien Ripple, 20 years old and an ungainly five foot eleven, waits on the platform at Dilberne Halt. She is wealthy and well-bred–only daughter to the founder of Ripple & Co, the nation’s top publisher–but plain, painfully awkward, and, perhaps worst of all, intelligent. But she has a plan. That very morning, Vivvie will ride to the city with the express purpose of changing her life forever. With one eye on the present and one on the past, Fay Weldon offers Vivien’s fate, along with that of London between World Wars I and II: a city fizzing with change, full of flat-chested flappers, shell-shocked soldiers, and aristocrats clinging to history.
Murder in the Manuscript Room is the second in Con Lehane’s 42nd Street Library mystery series. It is a smart, compelling mystery in which the characters themselves are at least as interesting as the striking sleuthing. When a murder desecrates the somber, book-lined halls of New York City’s iconic 42nd Street Library, Raymond Ambler, the library’s curator of crime fiction, has a personal interest in solving the crime. His quest to solve the murder is complicated by personal entanglements involving his friend–or perhaps more-than-friend–Adele Morgan. No one else sees the connections Ambler is sure are there–not an unusual state of affairs for Ambler.
Careers for Women: A Novel by Joanna Scott. New York in the late 1950s. A city, and a world, on the cusp of change…Careers for Women is a masterful novel about the difficulties of building a career, a dream, or a life–and about the powerful small mercies of friendship and compassion. There are reviews from the New York Times and the Boston Globe. Kate Atkinson described it as a “[…] spectacular novel about the dreams women chase, the choices we make and the power of those decisions to undo us at every turn. I loved it.”
The Prey of Gods by Nicky Drayden. From a new voice in the tradition of Lauren Beukes, Ian McDonald, and Nnedi Okorafor comes The Prey of Gods, a fantastic, boundary-challenging tale, set in a South African locale both familiar and yet utterly new, which braids elements of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and dark humor. Fun and fantastic, Nicky Drayden takes her brilliance as a short story writer and weaves together an elaborate tale that will capture your heart . . . even as one particular demigoddess threatens to rip it out. Listed as a Book Riot Best Books of 2017 Pick and a Vulture “The 10 Best Fantasy Books of 2017” Pick!