New Books: Faculty and Staff Recommendations! '24

PALOMA YANNAKAKIS. At a moment at which the fabric of everyday social life is increasingly threatened across the globe, this book is a necessary exercise of the literary imagination: what, it asks, does it mean to inhabit the world together today?

SIMON DYTON. In upstate New York, in the woods around Woodstock, Abe and Dan, two widowers who have found solace in each other's company and a shared passion for fishing, hear rumors of the Creek, and what might be found there, the remedy to both their losses, they dismiss it as just another fish story.

NATHALIE NISINSON. Dickensian fantasy of Dora, a former domestic servant, who is given curatorship of The National Museum of the Worker by her lover. The place that isn't at all what it seems as she unravels a monstrous conspiracy that brings her to the edge of worlds.

JENN CYRANSKI. Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general--also known as her tough-as-talons mother--has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders.

SOPHIE PACI. Vienna, 1938. Samuel Adler is five years old when his father disappears during Kristallnacht--the night his family loses everything. Samuel's mother secures a spot for him on a Kindertransport train out of Nazi-occupied Austria to England. Arizona, 2019: Eight decades later, Anita Diaz and her mother board another train, fleeing looming danger in El Salvador and seeking refuge in the United States. But their arrival coincides with the new family separation policy, and seven-year-old Anita finds herself alone at a camp in Nogales. Intertwining past and present, in search of family and home.

JILLIAN PAGLIOCCA. Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. But it’s the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant, Nobel–prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with—of all things—her mind.

FIONA O'DOHERTY, KATIE SPERCO. Raised in the sun-drenched, idyllic world of Southern California and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing. But in 1965, when her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path.

FAITH YUSKO. Tom Hazard has a dangerous secret. He may look like an ordinary 41-year-old, but owing to a rare condition, he's been alive for centuries. He becomes a high school history teacher--the perfect job for someone who has witnessed the city's history first hand.

CLEVIE YOUNGBLOOD. The Modern Day. The Confederate States of America stretches from Richmond to Los Angeles, locked in perennial struggle with its Cold War rival, the United States. Slavery is legal. Those who endure it fight in fierce pursuit of liberty.

KENDRA O'DWYER. Tells an emotionally impactful tale centering on the life and legacy of Lexington, a bay colt who became a racing champion in mid-nineteenth-century America.

ELIZABETH DAVIS. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe's theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.

JORDAN PAQUET. On Harlow Street, the well-to-do neighborhood couples and their children gather for a catered barbecue as the summer winds down; drinks continue late into the night. Everything is fabulous until the picture-perfect hostess explodes in fury because her son disobeys her. Everyone at the party hears her exquisite veneer crack--loud and clear. Before long, that same young boy falls from his bedside window in the middle of the night.

JULIE ZUCKER. A woman risks everything to end her family's centuries-old curse, solve her mother's disappearance, and find love.

KELLY ROOT. It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man, faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.

WENDY CORTES. Andres, a professor, returns to his suburban hometown in the wake of his husband's infidelity. There he finds himself with no excuse not to attend his twenty-year high school reunion, and hesitantly begins to reconnect with people he used to call friends.

LILLIAN RITCHIE. When a dangerous package goes missing on Boxing Day, the Thursday Murder Club, when one of their own is murdered, take on their most deadly opponents yet.

MARIE O'BRIEN. Novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries.

EMMA JANTZEN, JULIA GLEASON. The teenage son of an Appalachian single mother who dies when he is eleven uses his good looks, wit, and instincts to survive foster care, child labor, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses.

FIONA WILLIAMS, LORRAINE GALLUCCI 1920s New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth--all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune?

CONNIE LAWS. The heroes of Cloud Cuckoo Land are trying to figure out the world around them: Anna and Omeir, on opposite sides of the formidable city walls during the 1453 siege of Constantinople; teenage idealist Seymour in an attack on a public library in present day Idaho; and Konstance, on an interstellar ship bound for an exoplanet, decades from now.

PAULIANDA JONES. Sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor.

ERIC WALTERS. Penn was in college when he was diagnosed with ADHD, although the signs of having a brain that worked just a little bit differently had been there since he was a kid. Rather than view the diagnosis as a curse or give in to feelings of inadequacy or failure, he took a different approach, one that he wants to share with fellow ADHDers and the people who care about them.

KRYSTA CAMP. In many ways, we're more comfortable than ever before. But could our sheltered, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged lives actually be the leading cause of many our most urgent physical and mental health issues?

JOEL AVERY. Arriving at a moment in which basic bodily rights are once again imperiled, this book is an investigation into the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.

MATT SPEISER. Discusses London's darkest year during the blitz through the day-to-day experience of Winston Churchill and those closest to him.

MELISSA LIJO. You'll learn: The habit that makes it 42% more likely you'll achieve your goals. How to overcome a lack of time and money. How to deal with criticism and imposter syndrome.

JAMIE RABOY. Lara Love Hardin recounts her slide from soccer mom to opioid addict to jailhouse shot-caller and her unlikely comeback as a highly successful ghostwriter in this harrowing, hilarious, no-holds-barred memoir.

LAURA MANSILLA. Draws on her experiences with parenting, marriage, career, friendship, illness, aging, and mortality to explore how people interact with others and conduct of life.

MARIANNE FITZGERALD. NPR correspondent Nina Totenberg delivers an extraordinary memoir of her personal successes, struggles, and life-affirming relationships, including her beautiful friendship of nearly fifty years with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.