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Retired Staff Picks January 2017 Retired staff Carmen, Char, Chris, Debbie, Ellen, Jane, Linda, Sara, and Trish offer their reading suggestions.
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Behind closed doors
by B. A. Paris
The friends of a seemingly perfect socialite couple begin to see cracks in the facade when they realize that the husband and wife are never apart and that there are bars on one of their upstairs windows.
Call Number: F PARIS, B.A.
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Domestic affairs
by Eileen Goudge
Twenty-five years after being kicked out of the home of Ina Merriweather with her mother as a teenager, Abigail, feeling deeply betrayed by Ina's daughter Lila, her best friend, finally gets the chance to settle old scores as she, now a self-made woman, is reunited with Lila, but Concepción, mother of a girl who died in a fire at her Mexico factory, has her own score to settle.
Call Number: F GOUDGE, EILEEN
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Faceless killers : a mystery
by Henning Mankell
Inspector Kurt Wallander, a local Swedish police officer whose own personal life is falling apart, finds himself coping with a wave of anti-foreigner sentiment when he is put in charge of the investigation into the brutal murders of an elderly couple.
Call Number: M MANKELL, HENNING
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The girl with all the gifts
by Mike Carey
Not every gift is a blessing. Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant Parks keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don't like her. She jokes that she won't bite. But they don't laugh. Melanie is a very special girl. Emotionally charged and gripping from beginning to end, The girl with all the gifts is the most powerful and affecting thriller you will read this year.
Call Number: SF CAREY, MIKE
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How lucky you are
by Kristyn Kusek Lewis
Three women struggle to keep their long-time friendship strong in the face of difficult pressures, including baker Waverly, who worries about her mounting debt; gubernatorial candidate's wife Kate, who is unsettled by her deteriorating marriage; and stay-at-home mom Amy, who hides a wrenching secret.
Call Number: LP LEWIS, KRISTYN K.
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In a dark, dark wood
by Ruth Ware
Reluctantly accepting an old friend's invitation to spend a weekend on the English countryside, reclusive writer Leonora awakens in a hospital badly injured, unable to recall what happened and confronting a growing certainty that someone involved has died.
F WARE, RUTH
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Messy : the power of disorder to transform our lives
by Tim Harford
From the award-winning columnist and author of the national best-seller The Undercover Economist comes a provocative big idea book about the genuine benefits of being messyùat home, at work, in the classroom and beyond.
Call Number: 153.35 HAR
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A prayer for Owen Meany : a novel
by John Irving
Eleven-year-old Owen Meany, playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire, hits a foul ball and kills his best friend's mother. Owen doesn't believe in accidents; he believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul is both extraordinary and terrifying. At moments a comic, self-deluded victim, but in the end the principal, tragic actor in a divine plan.
Call Number: F IRVING, JOHN
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Prodigal summer : a novel
by Barbara Kingsolver
Wildlife biologist Deanna is caught off guard by an intrusive young hunter, while bookish city wife Lusa finds herself facing a difficult identity choice, and elderly neighbors find attraction at the height of a long-standing feud. Over the course of one humid summer, these characters find their connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with whom they share a place.
Call Number: F KINGSOLVER, BARBARA
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The remains of the day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
An English butler reflects--sometimes bitterly, sometimes humorously--on his service to a lord between the two world wars and discovers doubts about his master's character and about the ultimate value of his own service to humanity.
Call Number: F ISHIGURO, KAZUO
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Siracusa
by Delia Ephron
Secrets and relationships unravel for two couples vacationing on coastal Sicily in a tale told from alternating points of view that gradually reveal an affair and a precocious 10-year-old's role in the group's psychological undoing.
Call Number: F EPHRON, DELIA
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The story sisters : a novel
by Alice Hoffman
Elv, Claire, and Meg are the Story Sisters, and each has a fate she must meet alone. One on a country road, one in the streets of Paris, and one in the corridors of her own imagination. At once a coming-of-age tale, a family saga, and a love story of erotic longing. The Story Sisters sifts through the miraculous and the mundane as the girls become women and their choices haunt them, change them and, finally, redeem them.
Call Number: F HOFFMAN, ALICE
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To capture what we cannot keep
by Beatrice Colin
A tale set against a backdrop of the late-19th-century construction of the Eiffel Tower follows the romantic relationship between a widow whose precarious financial situation forces her to chaperone two wealthy Scottish charges and a bourgeois family businessman who must marry a suitable wife.
Call Number: F COLIN, BEATRICE
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Turn right at Machu Picchu : rediscovering the lost city one step at a time
by Mark Adams
July 24, 1911, the young Yale professor Hiram Bingham III climbed into the Andes Mountains of Peru and encountered an ancient city in the clouds: the now famous citadel of Machu Picchu. Nearly a century later, news reports have recast the hero explorer as a villain who smuggled out priceless artifacts and stole credit for finding one of the world's greatest archaeological sites. This book traces the author's recreation of Hiram Bingham III's discovery of an ancient Andes Mountains cloud city, describing the author's struggles with rudimentary survival tools and his experiences at the sides of local guides.
Call Number: 985.37 ADA
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Women of the silk
by Gail Tsukiyama
In "Women of the Silk" Gail Tsukiyama takes her readers back to rural China in 1926, where a group of women forge a sisterhood amidst the reeling machines that reverberate and clamor in a vast silk factory from dawn to dusk. Leading the first strike the village has ever seen, the young women use the strength of their ambition, dreams, and friendship to achieve the freedom they could never have hoped for on their own.
Call Number: F TSUKIYAMA, GAIL
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