| Universal Harvester by John DarnielleIn this intricate, disturbing novel, small town Iowa reveals its darker side when video store customers start complaining about creepy footage spliced into their VHS rentals (it's the late 1990s). Jeremy Heldt, working the counter while he waits for something better to come along, reluctantly starts looking into the footage, which draws him into a local, decades-old story of tragedy and loss. But plot isn't the important thing about Universal Harvester -- you'll want to read it for its strong sense of place, its compelling turns of phrase (author John Darnielle is a singer/songwriter), its menacing atmosphere, and for the way it explores the emotional consequences of loss. |
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| All Our Wrong Todays by Elan MastaiTom Barren lives in a world where clothes are recycled and refashioned onto your body each day, you yourself are micro-steam-cleaned as you sleep, driverless flying cars are the norm, and avocados are always perfect. It's 2016, and war is nonexistent, thanks to an unlimited power source created in 1965. But that all changes when Tom, a total underachiever, accidentally erases that picture-perfect version of reality in one very stupid, grief-fueled time-travel mishap that lands him in our less-than-ideal 2016, where he discovers an unexpected and wonderful version of his own life at the expense of the utopia he destroyed. A clever, witty take on time travel, this enjoyable debut sparkles with pop culture references and is more about love than science. |
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The Fifth Letter
by Nicola Moriarty
A lifelong friendship shared among four women is shattered when a wine-filled vacation game involving the confessions of dark secrets gives way to an anonymous rant about deeply held resentments.
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Everybody's Fool
by Richard Russo
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls returns readers to the setting of Nobody's Fool and finds Sully confronting a daunting health prognosis, which he hides from his loved ones—including his longtime mistress, an increasingly distant best friend and an obsessive chief of police.
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The Wicked City
by Beatriz Williams
A follow-up to A Certain Age traces a scandalous Jazz Age love triangle involving a rugged Prohibition agent, a saucy redheaded flapper and a debonair Princetonian from a wealthy family.
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The Young Wives Club
by Julie Pennell
As four close friends from Toulouse, Louisiana, get engaged or marry their high school sweethearts, they discover that people change and that not everyone is who you thought they were.
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The Clairvoyants
by Karen Brown
A young woman who wants to escape the challenges of being able to see ghosts pursues a college education and a budding romance before the apparition of a missing young woman prompts her to help. By the award-winning author of Little Sinners and Other Stories.
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The Odds Of You And Me
by Cecilia Galante
Just two weeks away from ending her probation, Bird discovers James, a former co-worker and current fugitive, hiding out in an abandoned church with a broken leg and tries to decide whether to help him or risk her future.
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Things We Have in Common
by Tasha Kavanagh
Lonely, overweight Yasmin Doner is a high school outcast who desperately wants to fit in but lacks the social skills to do so. Shunned at school and criticized at home, she's built an elaborate fantasy life, which revolves around the most popular girl at school, Alice. After noticing a man lurking near their school, she constructs a new fantasy -- one in which Yasmin becomes a hero after saving Alice from abduction by this man. So Yasmin starts following the stranger, eventually forming a friendship with him. And then Alice actually does disappear. Combining the creep factor and unreliable narrator of classic psychological suspense with the desperately lonely adolescence of a YA novel, this dark tale is a good choice for fans of Sebastian Faulks' Engleby.
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Class
by Lucinda Rosenfeld
Working full-time for a non-profit organization and sending her daughter to an integrated school, Karen is forced to rethink her liberal ideals in the face of her do-gooder husband's questionable priorities and her daughter's struggles with bullying.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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