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Retired Staff Picks December 2016 Retired staff Carmen, Char, Chris, Debbie, Ellen, Jane, Linda, Sara, and Trish offer their reading suggestions.
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And sometimes I wonder about you : a Leonid McGill mystery
by Walter Mosley
Investigating the murder of a client he initially refused to help, Leonid navigates difficult personal elements in his own life while uncovering dark secrets about the victim's old-money family and its missing heiress.
Call Number: M MOSLEY, WALTER
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Arcadia
by Lauren Groff
In a lush, haunting story of the American dream, Bit, born in a back-to-nature commune in 1970s New York State, must come to grips with the outside world when the commune eventually fails.
Call Number: F GROFF, LAUREN
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The art of racing in the rain : a novel
by Garth Stein
Evaluating his life on the eve of his death, atypical canine Enzo considers the sacrifices his master, Denny Swift, has made in his pursuit of becoming a professional race car driver; the painful custody battle between Denny and his in-laws, and the dog's own efforts to preserve the Swift family.
Call Number: F STEIN, GARTH
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The blazing world : a novel
by Siri Hustvedt
Hustvedt tells the provocative story of the artist Harriet Burden. After years of watching her work ignored or dismissed by critics, Burden conducts an experiment she calls Maskings: she presents her own art behind three male masks, concealing her female identity.
The three solo shows are successful, but when Burden finally steps forward triumphantly to reveal herself as the artist behind the exhibitions, there are critics who doubt her. The public scandal turns on the final exhibition, initially shown as the work of acclaimed artist Rune, who denies Burden’s role in its creation.
Call Number: F HUSTVEDT, SIRI
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The bone clocks : a novel
by David Mitchell
Interweaves six narratives spanning the period between 1984 and the 2030s to chronicle a secret war between a cult of soul-decanters and a small group of vigilantes who would take them down.
Call Number: F MITCHELL, DAVID
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Can't we talk about something more pleasant? : A Memoir
by Roz Chast
A graphic memoir by a long-time New Yorker cartoonist celebrates the final years of her aging parents' lives through four-color cartoons, family photos and documents that reflect the artist's struggles with caregiver challenges.
Call Number: B CHAST, ROZ
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Family furnishings : selected stories, 1995-2014
by Alice Munro
A selection of signature short fiction from the past two decades includes pieces set in small Ontario communities and stands as a companion to the Nobel Prize-winning author's Selected Stories: 1968-1994.
Subtly honed with the author's hallmark precision, grace, and compassion, these stories illuminate the ordinary but quite extraordinary particularity in the lives of men, women, and children as they discover sex, fall in love, part, quarrel, head out into the unknown, suffer defeat, and find a way to be in the world.
Call Number: F MUNRO, ALICE
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Family life
by Akhil Sharma
We meet the Mishra family in Delhi in 1978, where eight-year-old Ajay and his older brother Birju play cricket in the streets, waiting for the day when their plane tickets will arrive and they and their mother can fly across the world and join their father in America. America to the Mishras is, indeed, everything they could have imagined and more: when automatic glass doors open before them, they feel that surely they must have been mistaken for somebody important.
Life is extraordinary until tragedy strikes, the family s younger son, prays to a God he envisions as Superman, longing to find his place amid the ruins of his family s new life.
Call Number: LP F SHARMA, AKHIL
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The gilded hour
by Sara Donati
Haunted by childhood losses in spite of successful medical careers in 1883 New York City, surgeon Anna Savard and her obstetrician cousin, Sophie, consider taking in a child and helping a desperate woman who would escape a dangerous man.
Call Number: F DONATI, SARA
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Good kings bad kings : a novel
by Susan Nussbaum
The residents at a facility for disabled young people in Chicago build trust and make friends in an effort to fight against their living conditions and mistreatment. Good Kings Bad Kings challenges our definitions of what it means to be disabled in a story told with remarkable authenticity and in voices that resound with humor and spirit.
Call Number: F NUSSBAUM, SUSAN
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A hologram for the king : a novel
by Dave Eggers
In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure, pay his daughter's college tuition, and finally do something great.
Call Number: F EGGERRS, DAVE
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Home
by Toni Morrison
The story of embittered Korean War veteran Frank Money, who struggles against trauma and racism to rescue his medically abused sister and work through identity-shattering memories. As Frank revisits the memories from childhood and the war that leave him questioning his sense of self, he discovers a profound courage he thought he could never possess again.
Call Number: F MORRISON, TONI
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The Japanese lover : a novel
by Isabel Allende
This multi-generational epic follows the impossible romance between a World War II escapee from the Nazis and a Japanese gardener's son, whose story is discovered decades later by a care worker who would come to terms with her past.
Call Number: F ALLENDE, ISABEL
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Out of the Easy
by Ruta Sepetys
Josie, the 17-year-old daughter of a French Quarter prostitute, is striving to escape 1950 New Orleans and enroll at prestigious Smith College when she becomes entangled in a murder investigation.
She devises a plan to get out, but a mysterious death in the Quarter leaves Josie tangled in an investigation that will challenge her allegiance to her mother, her conscience, and Willie Woodley, the brusque madam on Conti Street. Josie is caught between the dream of an elite college and a clandestine underworld.
Call Number: TEEN SEPETYS, RUTA
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Welcome to Braggsville
by T. Geronimo Johnson
Struggling with culture shock after leaving his tiny old-Dixie town to attend UC Berkeley, D'aron makes friends with three idiosyncratic characters who challenge him to protest his home community's annual Civil War reenactment.
Call Number: F JOHNSON, T. GERONIMO
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