By George Orwell
Recommended By Amy B., Children's Librarian
With Jean Simpson, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, September 27, 2016. 1:30 PM.

Portrays a terrifying vision of life in the future when a totalitarian government, considered a "Negative Utopia," watches over all citizens and directs all activities, becoming more powerful as time goes by.

By Jacqueline Woodson
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian
With Lisa Jones, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, November 14, 2017. 7:30 PM

Torn between the fantasies of her youth and the realities of a life marked by violence and abandonment, August reunites with a beloved old friend who challenges her to reconcile her past and come to terms with the difficulties that forced her to grow up too quickly.

By Imbolo Mbue
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Jackie, Head of Readers' Services, Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian, Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director
With Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, November 28, 2017. 1:30 PM

An immigrant working class couple from Cameroon and the upper class American family for whom they work find their lives and marriages shaped by financial circumstances, infidelities, secrets, and the 2008 recession.

By Daniel Silva
Series Gabriel Allon

Art restorer, assassin, and spy Gabriel Allon finds himself poised to become the chief of Israel's secret intelligence service, but not before answering the French government's request to eliminate the person responsible for detonating a massive bomb in Paris.

By Lauren Beukes
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager

Detective Gabriella Versado investigates after disturbing displays that fuse the bodies of murder victims with those of animals are uncovered in abandoned Detroit buildings.

By Jacqueline Woodson

In vivid poems that reflect the joy of finding her voice through writing stories, an award-winning author shares what it was like to grow up in the 1960s and 1970s in both the North and the South.

By Ann Leary
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager

A wealthy but unconventional New England family of four stepsiblings struggles to come to terms with their legacy and the myths they have built their lives upon during a lavish family wedding that exposes long-standing resentments and unfortunate truths.

By Yasmine El Rashidi

A woman in Cairo reflects on three pivotal summers of her life, including when she was a six– year– old unable to ask questions, an idealistic college student in the volatile Mubarak period, and an adult in the aftermath of Mubarak's overthrow.

By Alice Hoffman
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk, Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk, Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

After walking away from an accident that robs her best friend of her future, Shelby Richmond struggles to fight her way back to her own future.

By Ann Leary
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

“Successful real-estate broker, family woman and raging alcoholic Hildy Good embarks on a life of denial and loneliness while resenting the intervention of her loved ones and becoming embroiled in a scandal in her New England town that involves two craggy seniors (From the Publisher).”

By Neil Gaiman
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager

The world is going to end next Saturday, but there are a few problems--the Antichrist has been misplaced, the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse ride motorcycles, and the representatives from heaven and hell decide that they like the human race.

By Gwen Cooper
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

A pet rescue volunteer and literacy outreach coordinator describes her relationship with a three-pound blind cat whose daredevil character and affectionate personality saw the author through six moves, a burglary, and the healing of her broken heart.

By Brad Meltzer
Series House of Secrets

After an accident leaves her with no memory, Hazel Nash must put together the pieces of her past and present to find the truth about her father and his connection to a corpse found with a book found in his chest.

By Vaddey Ratner
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian
With Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, July 9, 2013. 7:30 PM.

Her life of privilege in Cambodia shattered by the outbreak of civil war on the streets of Phnom Penh, young Raami endures four years of loss, starvation, and brutal forced labor while clinging to memories of the legends and poems told to her by her father. 

By Stuart Nadler
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

When her cherished anonymity is threatened by the reissue of a best–seller from her early career, writer Henrietta navigates scandals in the lives of her daughters over the course of a fateful few days marked by French food, loss and an old rooster.

By Elizabeth Bettina
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

Take a journey with the author as she discovers much to her surprise, that her grandparent's small village, nestled in the heart of southern Italy, housed an internment camp for Jews during the Holocaust, and that it was far from the only one.

By Ronald Balson
Recommended By Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian

Holocaust survivor Lena Woodward enlists the help of lawyer Catherine Lockhart and private investigator Liam Taggart to help her resolve a secret from her past in Nazi-occupied Poland.

By David Baldacci
Series Amos Decker

Amos Decker, newly hired to a FBI special task force, takes an interest in convicted murderer Melvin Mars’ case when he discovers the eerie similarities to his own life.

By Martha Hall Kelly
Recommended By Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director, Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian, Jean Buchholtz, Library Clerk

The lives of three women converge at the Ravensbruck concentration camp as Caroline Ferriday resolves to help from her post at the French consulate, Kasia Kuzmerick becomes a courier in the Polish resistance, and Herta Oberheuser takes a German government medical position.

By Alice Hoffman
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian
With Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, July 26, 2016. 1:30 PM

Dreaming of an exotic life in Paris while coming of age in a St. Thomas refugee community, young Rachel is forced to marry a widower before falling scandalously in love and becoming the mother of Impressionist master Camille Pissarro.

By Elie Wiesel
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

Tuesday, November 15, 2016. 7:30 PM.

The narrative of a boy who lived through Auschwitz and Buchenwald provides a short and terrible indictment of modern humanity.

By Jane L. Rosen

Nine unrelated women whose circumstances are shaped by unrequited love, infidelity and fame find their lives touched by the same little black dress and its seemingly magical properties.

By Kim Alkemade
Recommended By Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian, Isabel Zinman, Readers' Services Librarian
With Lisa Jones, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, October 18, 2016. 7:30 PM.

When hospice nurse Rachel realizes that her new patient is the doctor that spent years subjecting her to tortuous medical experiments at a Jewish orphanage, she is forced to confront her memories of the time and their lasting effect.

By Stephen Birmingham

A novelist who has specialized in creating tales of the rich and well placed offers an insider's view of one of the wealthiest segments of an affluent city: Jewish upper– class life in New York.

By Diana Gabaldon
Series Outlander Novels
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager, Meghan F., Children's Services Librarian , Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian

Hurtled back through time more than two hundred years to Scotland in 1743, Claire Randall finds herself caught in the midst of an unfamiliar world torn apart by violence, pestilence, and revolution and haunted by her growing feelings for James Fraser, a young soldier.

By Nadia Hashimi
With Lisa Jones, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, May 23, 2017. 1:30 PM.

Adopting the custom of bacha posh in 2007 Kabul, which allows her to dress and be treated as a boy, attend school and chaperone her sisters until she is of marriageable age, Rahima, the daughter of a drug– addicted father, discovers that she is not the first in her family to adopt this unusual custom.

By Cassie Dandridge Selleck

In the summer of 1976, recently widowed and childless, Ora Lee Beckworth hires a homeless old black man to mow her lawn. The neighborhood children call him the Pee– can Man; their mothers call them inside whenever he appears. When the police chief's son is found stabbed to death near his camp, the man Ora knows as Eddie is arrested and charged with murder. Twenty– five years later, Ora sets out to tell the truth about the Pecan Man.

By Bethany Chase

After her world is turned upside down by the discovery that her husband is having an affair with a man, Caroline Hammond must reimagine her life without the relationship that had defined it since high school. Genres: Relationships; Men/Women Relationships; Women’s Relationships *Domestic Fiction?*

By Kate Clifford Larson

Based on correspondence, entries in Rose Kennedy's diaries, and family interviews, describes the plight of a woman who was intellectually disabled and kept hidden by her family after she received a lobotomy at age twenty– three.

By Juliette Fay
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

Devastated by her husband's sudden death, Janie LaMarche and her two small children find unexpected support from her ipecac–toting aunt, an "unflinchingly nice" parish priest, and a contractor hired by Janie's late husband.

By Lauren Beukes
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

The sole survivor of a time-traveling serial killer who began his murder spree in Depression-era Chicago tries to hunt him down in 1989 along with help from an ex-homicide reporter.

By Jeff Hobbs
Recommended By Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian, Jackie, Head of Readers' Services
With Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, September 13, 2016. 7:30 PM.

Traces a young man's effort to escape the dangers of the streets and his own nature after graduating from Yale, describing his youth in violent 1980s Newark, efforts to navigate two fiercely insular worlds and life-ending drug deals.

By Delia Ephron
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager

Secrets and relationships unravel for two couples vacationing on coastal Sicily in a tale told from alternating points of view that gradually reveals an affair and a precocious ten–year–old's role in the group's psychological undoing.

By Lawrence Hill
Recommended By Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk, Jackie, Head of Readers' Services, Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk

Dreaming of escaping her life of slavery in South Carolina and returning to her African home, slave Aminata Diallo is thrown into the chaos of the Revolutionary War, during which she helps create a list of black people who have been honored for their service to the king.

By Lucy Knisley

Presents an illustrated memoir of what happens after the proposal. Fascinated and horrified by the wedding industry, the author sets out to put her own stamp on the tradition and create the most adorable DIY wedding imaginable.

By Philippa Gregory

Brought to the Tudor court as a young bride, Katherine of Aragon forges a unique sisterhood with the king's sisters, Margaret and Mary, that is shaped by rivalries, wars, betrayal, widowhood, motherhood, passion, and secrets.

By Liane Moriarty
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager

A busy couple formerly on the brink of realizing their dreams reflects on a fortuitous gathering with their best friends and another couple in a tale that explores the role of guilt in relationships and the power of everyday moments in family life.

By Colson Whitehead
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

By Ellen Feldman

A Cold War-era marriage is tested by allegiances, betrayals, and a wife's discovery about her beloved and trusted husband's covert ties to the CIA.

By Sue Grafton
Series Kinsey Millhone Mysteries

On her thirty-eighth birthday, Kinsey Millhone receives a facial punch that leaves her with a broken nose and two black eyes before she tackles a suspicious suicide involving a host of unscrupulous characters.

By Nadia Hashimi
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services, Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions

When her happy middle–class life in Afghanistan is shattered by the rise of the Taliban and her husband's murder by fundamentalists, former schoolteacher Fereiba embarks on a high-risk effort to escape to England with her three children.

By Stuart Nadler
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

"Falling in love with a young African-American woman during the summer of 1952, Hilly Wise, the son of one of the country’s most powerful lawyers, inadvertently reveals dark secrets that shatter both families and compel Hilly years later to settle old scores (From the Publisher)."