@ Your Library
Happy New Year! May 2021 be filled with great books, awesome learning experiences and terrific opportunities to discover new things.
It has been a while since I looked at the New York Times bestseller list. The library owns the following titles appearing in the top five on the hardcover fiction and nonfiction lists. Fiction titles include Ready Player Two by Clive Ernest, A Time for Mercy by John Grisham, Deadly Cross by James Patterson, The Return by Nicholas Sparks and Daylight by David Baldacci. Non-fiction titles include A Promised Land by Barack Obama, Becoming by Michelle Obama, Caste: the origins of our discontents by Isabel Wilkerson and Untamed by Glennon Doyle.
The above books are popular and generally not sitting on the shelf waiting for you to borrow them. So here are some new titles that were sitting on the shelf as I write the column.
It has been a while since James Patterson wrote a book without an additional author and The Midwife Murders is no exception. Patterson and Richard DiLallo penned this story about a Manhattan hospital with a string of kidnappings of newborn babies. Can midwife and single mom Lucy Ryuan work with a skeptical NYPD detective to solve the case?
Sara Paretsky has now published twenty V.I Warshawski novels with Dead Land. These mysteries set in Chicago feature a no-nonsense detective who knows the rotten underbelly well enough to steer clear, but when she gets involved in a fight over parkland use, she gets very close to her breaking point.
Lisa Wingate has been writing for a number of years, but three years ago her book Before We Were Yours hit the bestselling lists and there has been no looking back for her. The Book of Lost Friends is her newest and focuses on three young women searching for family amid the destruction of the post-Civil War south.
Sue Monk Kidd travels way back in time for her fourth novel. The Book of Longings is set in first century Galilee for a reverential approach to Jesus’ life as experienced by Ana, a young woman with a desire to tell her story in a time and place determined to keep her quiet.
Lucinda Riley isn’t an author I’ve read before, but her work on the ‘Seven Sisters’ series, about adopted sisters and based allegorically on the mythology of the famous star constellation, has me wanting to go back read this series from the beginning. The latest title is The Sun Sister. Electra is a top model, who seems to have it all, but is cracking under the pressure as the story opens.
Two new non-fiction titles getting some buzz include The Zealot and the Emancipator by H.W. Brands. The subtitle is ‘John Brown Abraham Lincoln and the Struggle for American Freedom.” The Vapors by David Hill tells the tale of Hot Springs, Arkansas ‘a Southern Family, the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America’s Forgotten Capital of Vice.”