New Books: April 2024

Explores how the rise of the "phone-based childhood" has coincided with the rise in rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide in children. He explains how the increase in technology use by children interferes with social and neurological development, and proposes four simple rules that might help to stop the epidemic of mental illness in children.

Essays-in-memoir, Parker examines America’s cultural history and relationship to Black Americans through the ages.

The director of West Point's renowned Performance Psychology Program delivers a complete guide to building and mastering confidence, the key to performance in any field.

1985. Anita de Monte, a rising star in the art world, is found dead in New York City; her tragic death is the talk of the town--until it isn't. By 1998 Anita's name has been all but forgotten, and certainly by the time Raquel, a third-year art history student, is preparing her final thesis. On College Hill, surrounded by privileged students whose futures are already paved out for them, Raquel feels like an outsider. Students of color, like her, are the minority there, and the pressure to work twice as hard for the same opportunities is no secret.

Six stories set in New York City and a novella in Los Angeles.

David’s 18 months working for the Senator’s presidential campaign and along the way David meets a myriad of people who raise a set of questions—questions of history, art, race, religion, and fatherhood—that force David to look at his own life anew and come to terms with his identity as a young Black man and father in America.

John, an impoverished Scottish minister, has accepted a job evicting the lone remaining occupant of an island north of Scotland—Ivar, who has been living alone for decades, with only the animals and the sea for company. Though his wife, Mary, has serious misgivings about the errand, he decides to go anyway, setting in motion a chain of events that neither he nor Mary could have predicted.

After being expelled from their ancestral home in a not-so-distant future, Silvia and her mother finally settle at the Morningside, a crumbling luxury tower in a place called Island City where Silvia's aunt Ena serves as the superintendent. Silvia feels unmoored in her new life because her mother has been so diligently secretive about their family's past, and because the once-vibrant city where she lives is now half-underwater.

Ruby McTavish is a famous North Carolina heiress known for two things: being kidnapped as a child and having four dead husbands. When she herself dies, her fortune and her family's estate, Ashby House, go to her adopted son, Camden. In the 10 years since Ruby's death, Camden has created a simple life for himself and his wife, Jules, as far away from the McTavishes as he can get. When he’s forced to return to Ashby House, he’s determined to wash his hands of his family once and for all by relinquishing his inheritance.

Hayes's seventh collection explores how we see ourselves and our world, mapping the strange and lyrical grammar of thinking and feeling.

Poet Renée Watson looks back at her childhood and urges readers to look forward at their futures with love, understanding, and celebration in this fully illustrated poetry collection. (Audiobook also available through Sora).

50 previously unpublished poems from some of the nation’s most accomplished poets. Each poem engages with its author’s local landscape—be it the breathtaking variety of flora in a national park, or a lone tree flowering persistently by a bus stop—offering an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us and a beautifully diverse range of voices from across the United States.

High-school senior Imogen Scott has always been a cheerleader for her queer friends and sister, calling herself their biggest ally, never missing a Pride Alliance meeting, and supporting her best friend, Lili, when she comes out. Yet Imogen begins to struggle with her self-proclaimed straight-girl identity as she realizes most of Lili’s new college friends are LGBTQ.

When Frances and Aled spend the summer collaborating on her favorite podcast, they realize they understand each other in a way no one else does.

15 year-old Stevie and Nora's plan to abandon their conservative small town for California so they can be together is shattered when a terrible fall steals every trace of Stevie's relationship with Nora from her memory.

1914, WWI England: Gaunt, half German, is fighting his own private battle--an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the glamorous, charming Ellwood--without a clue that Ellwood is pining for him in return. When Gaunt's family asks him to enlist to forestall the anti-German sentiment they face, Gaunt does so immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood. To Gaunt's horror, Ellwood rushes to join him at the front, and the rest of their classmates soon follow. Now death surrounds them in all its grim reality, often inches away, and no one knows who will be next.

Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandment finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, becomes something more. Something epic. Something romantic.