February 2017 list by Trish Hull
"The proper definition of a man is an animal that writes letters."
~ Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), English writer
 
Recent Releases
Difficult Women
by Roxane Gay

Telling the stories of strong, imperfect, fully realized women, award-winning author Roxane Gay offers diverse protagonists and settings and unusual, often troubling situations in which women are haunted by pain and loss. In "The Mark of Cain," a woman pretends not to know that her abusive husband and his gentler identical twin have switched places; women participate in fight clubs in another story, while a priest refuses to feel bad about an affair in a third. With complex characters and straightforward writing, this "fantastic collection is challenging, quirky, and memorable." 

The Impossible Fortress
by Jason Rekulak

A 14-year-old boy pretends to seduce a girl to steal a copy of Playboy before discovering that she is his computer-loving soulmate against a backdrop of late-1980s teen pop-culture trends.

Lincoln in the Bardo 
by George Saunders

A long-awaited first novel by the National Book Award-nominated, New York Times best-selling author of Tenth of December traces a night of solitary mourning and reflection as experienced by the 16th President after the death of his 11-year-old son at the dawn of the Civil War.

Swimming Lessons
by Claire Fuller

Returning home to care for her aging father 12 years after her mother's disappearance, Flora discovers that before she went missing, her mother wrote letters to her father about their marriage and hid them among his thousands of books. 

Pachinko
by Min Jin Lee

In early 1900s Korea, prized daughter Sunja finds herself pregnant and alone, bringing shame on her family until a young tubercular minister offers to marry her and bring her to Japan, in the saga of one family bound together as their faith and identity are called into question.

The Games
by James Patterson

Two years after averting disaster while overseeing security for the World Cup, Jack Morgan, the head of international investigation firm Private, returns to Rio to secure the Olympics, only to confront a Brazilian saboteur who is hatching a lethal plot

Different Class
by Joanne Harris

The technological ambitions of a new headmaster at an insolvent prep school reignite old demons for a curmudgeonly Latin teacher who remembers a sociopathic young outcast from decades earlier who knows the teacher's dangerous secret. 

No Witness But the Moon
by Suzanne Chazin

A tense stand-off between Hispanic police officer Jimmy Vega and an undocumented immigrant leads to a horrible mistake, and the discovery of links between the immigrant and the brutal unsolved murder of Vega's mother.

History of Wolves
by Emily Fridlund

Fourteen-year-old Linda was raised in a commune, so she's particularly attuned to the differences between "normal" life and "other." This is true of herself, but it's also true of the young family who has just moved in down the road, and for whom Linda has started babysitting. Something is not quite right there, and as Linda looks back, as an adult, at the events of this cold Minnesota winter, the foreboding, menacing atmosphere closes in. 

The Bookshop on the Corner
by Jenny Colgan

Nina Redmond loves nothing more than matching readers with the perfect book. So when the shy librarian is made redundant from her job in Birmingham, England, she decides to open up her own bookshop -- and it's one on wheels! Relocating to a converted barn in a small Scottish village, she starts getting to know her neighbors through the books she sells them on market day. And there's even some romantic possibilities, including with a train engineer who leaves her love letters at a railway crossing. Like Katarina Bivald's The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommends (which likewise features a shy reader opening a book shop), this charming novel is made for book lovers.

Contact your librarian for more great books!