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Friday Fiction October 2018
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An Absolutely Remarkable Thing : A Novel
by Hank Green
The first to document the appearance of the Carls, giant robot-like statues popping up around the world, April May finds herself at the center of an intense international media spotlight that puts her relationships, identity and safety at risk.
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Bitter Orange
by Claire Fuller
An architect spending the summer of 1969 in a dilapidated English country mansion discovers a peephole that allows her to observe the increasingly sinister private lives of her hedonist neighbors. By the award-winning author of Our Endless Numbered Days.
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Friday Black
by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
In the stories of Adjei-Brenyah’s debut (starred by PW), an amusement park lets players enter augmented reality to hunt terrorists or shoot intruders played by minority actors, a school shooting results in both the victim and gunman stuck in a shared purgatory, and an author sells his soul to a many-tongued god. (P.W.)
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Hippie
by Paulo Coelho
A Brazilian man and a Dutch woman embark on an extraordinary journey of self-discovery as they travel by bus from Amsterdam to Kathmandu against a backdrop of the protests and sexual-liberation experiments of the Civil Rights era. By the best-selling author of The Alchemist
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Killing Commendatore
by Haruki Murakami
An epic novel of love, war and art stands as an imaginative homage to The Great Gatsby. By the award-winning author of Colorless Tsukuro Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
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Man With a Seagull on His Head
by Harriet Paige
“Ray Eccles, a nonentity, goes for a walk on his 40th birthday. He seems almost reassured by the thought that he is past the age when something interesting is likely to happen to him. He assumes he is all alone on a deserted beach, but then, in quick succession, a woman appears, they lock eyes, and Ray is knocked cold by a seagull plummeting from the sky. Is it Ray’s salvation or doom? Is Ray’s ensuing story, told in Harriet Paige’s gem-like prose, the stuff of tragedy or farce? Or are we all Ray, placid and longing, dreaming of rising into the sky?” — Ezra Goldstein, Community Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY
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Night Moves
by Jessica Hopper
“Like reading the diary of your best friend from the best time of your life, Night Moves is a music-as-literature, literature-as-music bildungsroman set in Chicago's indie music underground, but it's everywhere, the moment the gentrification and glass luxury condos began to take over everything original in this country, a fading glimpse at youth gone by in the slow burn into adulthood that we've all shared, all of us who've ever ridden a bike through our town late at night, watching the lights glowing, to a playlist of our own creation inside our own heads.” — Will Evans, Deep Vellum Books, Dallas, TX
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The Proposal
by Jasmine Guillory
"When someone asks you to spend your life with him, it shouldn't come as a surprise--or happen in front of 45,000 people. When freelance writer Nikole Paterson goes to a Dodgers game with her actor boyfriend, his man bun, and his bros, the last thing sheexpects is a scoreboard proposal. Saying no isn't the hard part--they've only been dating for five months, and he can't even spell her name correctly. The hard part is having to face a stadium full of disappointed fans... At the game with his sister, Carlos Ibarra comes to Nik's rescue and rushes her away from a camera crew. He's even there for her when the video goes viral and Nik's social media blows up--in a bad way. Nik knows that in the wilds of LA, a handsome doctor like Carlos can't be looking foranything serious, so she embarks on an epic rebound with him, filled with food, fun, and fantastic sex. But when their glorified hookups start breaking the rules, one of them has to be smart enough to put on the brakes.."
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Virgil Wander
by Leif Enger
Emerging from an accident with damaged memories and compromised language skills, a movie-house owner from a small Midwestern town pieces together his story against a backdrop of community history, which is shaped by a prodigal son's return.
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A Well-Behaved Woman : A Novel of the Vanderbilts
by Therese Anne Fowler
Marrying into the newly rich but socially scorned Vanderbilt clan, a formerly impoverished Alva navigates society snubs and dark undercurrents in the lives of her in-laws and friends while testing the limits of her ambitious rule-breaking. By the New York Times best-selling author of Z.
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All You Can Ever Know : A Memoir
by Nicole Chung
A Korean adoptee who grew up with a white family in Oregon discusses her journey to find her identity as an Asian American woman and a writer after becoming curious about her true origins.
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A Borrowing of Bones
by Paula Munier
Introduces a retired MP and her bomb-sniffing dog, who become embroiled in an investigation involving an abandoned baby, a missing mother and a cold-case murder. By the best-selling author of Plot Perfect.
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Dear America : Notes of An Undocumented Citizen
by Jose Antonio Vargas
The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, filmmaker and immigration-rights activist presents a debut memoir about how he unknowingly entered the United States with false documents as a child.
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The Dinner List
by Rebecca Serle
In a novel imbued with magical realism, when Sabrina Nielsen arrives at her 30th birthday dinner in New York City, she finds at the table not just her best friend, but also her favorite professor from college; her father; her ex-fiance, Tobias; and Audrey Hepburn.
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The Dream Daughter
by Diane Chamberlain
“In 1970, young and recently widowed Carly learns that the baby she is carrying has a fatal birth defect. Enter her quirky but lovable brother-in-law, who proposes a highly improbable solution: travel to the future where a medical procedure exists to save her unborn child. This twisty story with well-developed characters is highly recommended, but with a trigger warning for mothers. A good crossover title for domestic fiction and science fiction readers, and fans of Kristin Hannah, Jodi Picoult, and Chris Bohjalian.” --Erica Naranjo for LibraryReads.
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John Woman
by Walter Mosley
A young man reinvents himself as a professor to share his late father's wisdom at an unorthodox university, only to encounter fellow intellectuals who have insights into his father's hidden past. By the award-winning author of the Easy Rawlins mysteries.
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Hey, Kiddo
by Jarrett J. Krosoczka
A powerful graphic memoir by the award-winning author of Lunch Lady and the Cyborg Substitute traces the author's unconventional coming of age with a drug-addict mother, an absent father and two lovingly opinionated grandparents.
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November Road : A Novel
by Lou Berney
A street lieutenant for a New Orleans mob boss flees when his knowledge about JFK's assassination makes him a target, a situation that is dangerously complicated by his relationship with a fugitive housewife. By the best-selling author of The Long and Faraway Gone.
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Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return
by Martin Riker
A Summer/Fall 2018 Indies Introduce Debut Fiction Selection When Samuel Johnson dies, he finds himself in the body of the man who killed him, unable to depart this world but determined, at least, to return to the son he left behind. Moving from body to body as each one expires, Samuel's soul journeys on a comic quest through an American half-century, inhabiting lives as stymied, in their ways, as his own. A ghost story of the most unexpected sort, Martin Riker's extraordinary debut is about the ways experience is mediated, the unstoppable drive for human connection, and the struggle to be more fully alive in the world.
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A Spark of Light
by Jodi Picoult
This harrowing and insightful novel unwinds backwards in time over the course of a day during a tense hostage situation at a Mississippi women's clinic and is told through multiple points of view: the gunman, the hostage negotiator, patients, clinic staff, and a right to life advocate. All sides of the abortion issue are explored with compassion through the characters' stories, helping readers empathize and connect. Fans of Picoult's issue-driven novels will not be disappointed. -- Catherine Coyne for LibraryReads.
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Washington Black : A Novel
by Esi Edugyan
Unexpectedly chosen to be a family manservant, an 11-year-old Barbados sugar-plantation slave is initiated into a world of technology and dignity before a devastating betrayal propels him throughout the world in search of his true self.
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