By Paulo Coelho
Recommended By Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian
With Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, September 10, 2013. 7:30 PM.

A fable about undauntingly following one's dreams, listening to one's heart, and reading life's omens features dialogue between a boy and an unnamed being.

By Barbara Kingsolver

When Taylor Greer hits the road she has no real destination, only to get as far from Kentucky as possible. By the time she ends up in Arizona, she has inherited a three–year–old Cherokee girl from an Indian woman she met in a bar.

By Tana French

In the aftermath of a brutal attack that left a woman in intensive care and her husband and young children dead, brash cop Scorcher Kennedy and his rookie partner, Richie, struggle with perplexing clues and Scorcher's haunting memories of a shattering incident from his childhood.

By Jeanne Ray

Feeling unattractive and unappreciated as she enters her fifties, wife and mother Clover wakes up one morning and discovers that she has actually become invisible, a condition that goes unnoticed by her family.

By Laura Moriarty
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

A young girl tries to make sense of an unruly world spinning around her. Growing up with a single mother who is chronically out of work and dating a married man, 10-year old Evelyn Bucknow learns early how to fend for herself.

By Laura Moriarty
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

Accompanying a future famous actress from her Wichita home to New York, chaperone Cora Carlisle shares a life-changing five-week period with her ambitious teenage charge during which she discovers the promise of the twentieth century and her own purpose in life.

By David R. Gillham
Recommended By Jean Buchholtz, Library Clerk, Jackie, Head of Readers' Services
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

Tuesday, January 28, 2014.  1:30 PM.

Hiding her clandestine activities behind the persona of a model Nazi soldier's wife at the height of World War II, Sigrid Schroeder dreams of her former Jewish lover and risks everything to hide a mother and two young children who she believes might be her lover's family. 

By Susan Vreeland

Hoping to honor his father and the family business with innovative glass designs, Louis Comfort Tiffany launches the iconic Tiffany lamp as designed by women's division head Clara Driscoll, who struggles with the mass production of her creations.

By John Grisham
Recommended By Susan L., Library Page, John Shea, Library Page

“An innocent man is about to be executed. Only a guilty man can save him (From the Publisher).”

By Ann M. Martin

The summer that Hattie Owen turns twelve, she meets the childlike Uncle Adam she never knew and becomes friends with a girl who works at the carnival that comes to Hattie's small town.

By Jim Gaffigan
Recommended By Amy B., Children's Librarian

The popular comedian shares his misadventures as an unlikely father of five, from his formative years in a large Irish-Catholic family, to his middle-of-the-night diaper-changing foibles, to his struggles to lull tyrannical tots to sleep.

By David Sedaris

“Sedaris has a knack for turning heartbreaking antics into moments of outrageous humor… In one tale that features his mother, she cozies up to a rich old aunt in anticipation of an inheritance, and in another she locks her children outside on the fifth snow day home from school (Library Journal).”

By Pete Hamill

The journalist and author recreates the hard-drinking Brooklyn-Irish lifestyle that informed every aspect of his childhood and early career, and eventually destroyed his marriage.

By Tana French
Series Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddox Mysteries
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk

“Detective Frank Mackey finds himself straight back in the dark tangle of relationships he left behind twenty-two years ago when the suitcase belonging to his first love, Rosie Daly, shows up behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place (From the Publisher).”

By John Green
Recommended By Sharon Long, Assistant Library Director, Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian

Sixteen-year-old Hazel, a stage IV thyroid cancer patient, has accepted her terminal diagnosis until a chance meeting with a boy at cancer support group forces her to reexamine her perspective on love, loss, and life.

By Kate Morton
Recommended By Brenda Cherry, Reference Librarian, Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

Abandoned on a 1913 voyage to Australia, Nell is raised by a dock master and his wife who do not tell her until she is an adult that she is not their child, leading Nell to return to England and eventually hand down her quest for answers to her granddaughter.

By Jojo Moyes
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk, Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk, Jean Buchholtz, Library Clerk, Betty Petreshock, Reference Librarian

Unwillingly rendered an object of obsession by the Kommandant occupying her small French town in World War I, Sophie risks everything to reunite with her husband a century before a widowed Liv tests her resolve to claim ownership of Sophie's portrait.

By Amy Sedaris
Recommended By Sharon Long, Assistant Library Director

“Comedic actress Sedaris shares with readers her collection of quirky, idiosyncratic tips on entertaining garnered from her mom, Girl Scouts, waiting tables, bartending school, and other eclectic sources (Library Journal).”

By Kim Barnes

Traces the experiences of an impoverished 1960s Oklahoma native who follows her husband to glamorous Saudi Arabia, where the death of a young Bedouin woman causes her to question the decadence and corruption of her new home.

By Tana French
Series Dublin Murder Squad

Detective Rob Ryan invesigates the murder of a twelve year old girl in the same Dublin woods, in which 20 years ago, he was found gripping a tree trunk in terror, wearing blood–filled sneakers and unable to recall the fate of his three friends. The memories and the current case take its toll on Ryan and his partner Cassie Maddox.

By Laura Schroff
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

This inspirational true story of a friendship that has spanned three decades recounts how the author, a harried sales executive, befriended an eleven-year-old panhandler, changing both of their lives forever.

By Jeanne Ray

Julie and Romeo had been born to rival florist families in Boston, but it is love at first sight when they spot each other across a crowded lobby.

By Anita Hughes
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

After walking in on her fiancée cheating on her with her boss, Hallie Elliot escapes to Lake Como in Italy where she becomes involved with a mysterious estate caretaker with a dark and secretive past.

By Vanessa Diffenbaugh
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk
With Lisa Jones, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, February 25, 2014. 1:30 PM.

The story of a woman whose gift for flowers helps her change the lives of others even as she struggles to overcome her own past.

By Carlos Eire

A stranger in a strange land, the author, one of 14,000 children airlifted out of Cuba in Operation Peter Pan in 1962, describes the classic American immigrant experience in Miami, Fla., with a mix of insightful observation, humor, and heartfelt emotion.

By Ernest J. Gaines
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

Tuesday, September 24, 2013. 1:30 PM.

A frustrated teacher in a southern town, whose education is being underutilized, finds his own purpose in helping bring meaning to the last days of a young man due to be executed. In teaching one person to die with dignity, he redeems himself.

By David Sedaris

A collection of essays by the humorist author traces his offbeat world travel experiences, which involved surreal encounters with everything from French dentistry and Australian kookaburra eating habits to Beijing squat toilets and a wilderness Costco in North Carolina.

By Jojo Moyes
Recommended By Betty Petreshock, Reference Librarian, Lisa C., Library Clerk, Lisa V., Library Clerk, Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk, Jackie, Head of Readers' Services
With Betty Petreshock, Reference Librarian

Tuesday, November 12, 2013. 7:30 PM.

Taking a job as an assistant to extreme sports enthusiast Will, who is wheelchair bound after a motorcycle accident, Louisa struggles with her employer's acerbic moods and learns of his shocking plans before demonstrating to him that life is still worth living.

By Sonia Sotomayor

The first Hispanic American on the U.S. Supreme Court shares the story of her life before becoming a judge.

By Christina Baker Kline
Recommended By Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian, Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk

Close to aging out of the foster care system, Penobscot Indian Molly Ayer takes a community service position helping an elderly woman named Vivian clean out her home and discovers that they are more alike than different as she helps Vivian solve a mystery from her past

By Charles Belfoure
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services, Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian
With Lisa Jones, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, June 28, 2016. 1:30 PM.

A Parisian architect is paid handsomely to devise secret hiding spaces for Jews in his Nazi-occupied country but struggles with risking his life for a cause he is ambivalent towards, until a personal failure brings home their suffering.

By Andre Brink

When Francois Brink, her children's father and the son of her master, reneges on his promise to grant her freedom, Philida files a complaint against the Brink family in 1830s South Africa, an act that changes her life beyond recognition.

By Laura Moriarty

When her daughter accidentally hits and kills another high school girl with the family's car, Leigh, a troubled mother, is forced to confront her relationship with her daughter, her resentment toward her husband (who understands the daughter better) and her long-buried feelings towards her own neglectful mother.

By Kate Morton
Recommended By Brenda Cherry, Reference Librarian

Withdrawing from a family party to the solitude of her tree house, sixteen-year-old Laurel Nicolson witnesses a shocking murder that throughout a subsequent half century shapes her beliefs, her acting career, and the lives of three strangers from vastly different cultures.

By Robert Crais
Series Joe Pike Mysteries

When Joe Pike witnesses Dru Rayne's uncle beaten by a protection gang, he becomes a target, and discovers Dru and her uncle are not who they seem.

By A.S.A. Harrison
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services, Jean Buchholtz, Library Clerk, Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Arlene Silverman, Library Clerk, Betty Petreshock, Reference Librarian

Told in alternating voices, this gripping novel follows the events leading up to the violent dissolution of Jodi and Todd's marriage - a union steeped in lies, infidelity, jealousy and denial.

By Jamie Ford
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

Confined to Seattle's Sacred Heart Orphanage during the Great Depression, Chinese-American boy William Eng becomes convinced that a certain movie actress is actually the mother he has not seen since he was seven years old.

By J.R. Moehringer
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

2013 Long Island Reads Selection

Tuesday, April 23, 2013.  1:30 PM

A fictionalized account of Willie Sutton, one of the most notorious criminals in American history, traces his life, his doomed romance with his first love, and his surprise pardon on Christmas Eve in 1969.

By J.R. Moehringer

In a memoir of growing up with a single mother, the author describes how he received valuable life lessons and friendship from an assortment of characters at the neighborhood bar, who provided him with a kind of fatherhood by committee.

By Jennifer L. Holm

In 1935, when her mother gets a job housekeeping for a woman who does not like children, eleven-year-old Turtle is sent to stay with relatives she has never met in far away Key West, Florida.

By Carlos Eire

A memoir of the Cuban Revolution from the perspective of a Batista-era child describes his carefree early days, the harrowing legal changes that occurred with the ascension of Fidel Castro, his witness to the disappearance of numerous peers, and his eventual relocation to the United States during Operation Pedro Pan.

By Laura Moriarty
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

Engrossed in a new relationship to the point that her studies begin to suffer, college junior Veronica is devastated when a plea for help goes unheeded, but a surprising request from her mother teaches her about family, love, and independence.