Enjoy a selection of our staff's favorite recent reads!
If you love historical fiction, romance, warfare, or time travel this book is perfect for you. Diana Gabaldon brilliantly combines all of these themes (and more) in an addictive storyline that almost dares you to try to put it down. Set in the 1700s in the Scottish Highlands, Claire - a retired military nurse from WWII - finds herself thrust into an entirely new world when she accidentally falls through time. As she struggles to find her way back to her own time period and husband, she discovers several secrets, forgotten from history, and using her quick wits and medical experience learns to survive in a time entirely different from her own.
—Lucie
This stunning poetry collection dissects the treatment of female bodies in modern culture. Marvin's powerful verse explores female agency, motherhood, and bodily autonomy. Visceral, moving, and timely.
—Skylar
Three important things: there's witches, fallen stars, & pirates. And this book makes you want to be all over them. The main question of this book is: how far are you willing to go for the one you love?
—Lydia
Amanda reluctantly leaves her life in California to trail after her husband who takes on a job with the US embassy in Namibia. This novel is highly entertaining and includes satirical commentary on white saviorism as well as an element of mystery (why is Amanda's husband really there...?). The characters are quite amusing!
—Jessie
Offill's newest book contemplates the micro and macro changes in weather - in family, in climate, in hope, in politics. Following the autofiction tradition, the divisions between author and her protagonist are unstable. Like always, Offill's writing is intertextual, wry, and shimmering.
—Jen
Belonging is a brilliant graphic memoir in which Nora Krug comes to terms with being a German from the post-war generation, her family's involvement in the Holocaust, and the generational guilt she inherits because of it. Krug ventures across her family tree using archival material, illustrations, historical photographs, and letters to make sense of her place in an unimagineably dark part of history.
—Lex
This is the most heart-warming book I have ever read! One that I will pick up again and again. When Sibling Dex decides their life is no longer what they wanted, they seek out the simplest of things: the wild. Along the way they find an unexpected friend.
—Lydia
This sexy, grungy, messy cult classic is back in print with a new afterword from the author! NEVADA is a queer punk-rock take on the great American road novel and a snapshot of transgender culture in the early 2000s. Binnie writes with blistering honesty and refuses to define the "Trans Experience" as a monolith. NEVADA is raw, fiery, and in a word: life-changing.
—Skylar
I have been awaiting the publication of Batuman's Either/Or since I read the final page of The Idiot. Once again, Batuman magically puts words to the coming-of-age journey we've all experienced yet struggled to express. She asks: What makes a life worthy of art? of love? It is compelling, wry, intertextual, reflective yet naive. Certainly a bildungsroman for the ages.
—Jen
This captivating murder mystery follows the life of Kya - a mysterious woman nicknamed the "Marsh Girl" who lives on the outskirts of a small town in North Carolina during the 1900's. As the story unfolds, readers are taken through Kya's journey into her teenage years, adulthood, and passing, and together experience a variety of love, prejudice, heartbreak, and triumph through Kya's eyes. With beautiful descriptions of life near the sea, and nail-biting scenes for the duration of Kya's murder trial, this book is the epitome of a "page-turner" and will have you questioning everything you think you know about these characters until the very end.
—Lucie
...The news has been semi-apocalyptic, I’m sure you’re aware. I haven’t had the ability to read anything with any sort hardship or tension in the plot before bed. Then I found The Summer Book. This book worked like a magic balm on my over-worked nerves. Sophia and her Grandmother live out the fecund summer on and island in the gulf of Finland. They teach each other valuable lessons about community, beauty, and care. Brb flying to Finland.
—Jack
A mother-daughter trip to Japan that I wanted to go on and on and on. Reading this was like palming the surface of a pond and having all these little waves nudge and kiss and slip between your fingers time and time again.
—Uyen
This classic enemies-to-lovers tale features two brilliant, struggling writers who make a deal that pushes their limits emotionally AND academically. There's never a dull moment with these two!
—Lucie
These stories, written exclusively in the second person blur the line between the reader and the character. Moore's characteristically glamorous and incantatory prose cast a spell over you as you read so when you look up from the page you'll ask, bewildered "Who was it that just cheated on their husband? Was it me?"
—Jack
While many recent biographies shine light on overlooked LGBT heroes, Bad Gays revisits the villainous queers of yesteryear, from Emperor Hadrian to J. Edgar Hoover. With equal parts compassion and sharp wit, the authors investigate how and when white queerness has abetted imperial agendas and how we might move forward.
—Andy
If you enjoy reading about food, a discovery of personalized faith, and the different ways in which someone can give and receive love this book is a perfect summer read. Elizabeth Gilbert's witty writing style brings her topics to life and she invites you to explore Italy, India, and Indonesia through her eyes. Her book is separated into three parts (one for each country she visits) which describe her journey towards enjoying her life again - physically, mentally, and emotionally. This touching memoir depicts the struggle, and grit Gilbert woman discovers in finding happiness in her own skin once more.
—Lucie
This eerie, spooky story will have you on the edge of your seat. It's edgy, fantastic, and even a little bit romantic. 10/10!
—Lydia
The next Great American Novel? An intricatley and intimately told story of a family on the brink. Of collapse, of rebirth, and of faith. Franzen's character work is on full display in his latest novel - you'll fall madly in love with characters only to hate them on very next page. Both a loving homage of Middle America and searing indictment of it.
—Christian
Fiercely beautiful and unflinching prose tells the tales of three multifaceted women whose lives are intertwined by a serial killer. It’s a breathtaking contemplation of compassion: what it means to have it, to see it, and to lack it.
—Halla
This book feels like an unveiling, a reckoning with the history of hierarchies that has become routine. That history saturates the places we exist in. It dismisses and flattens some bodies while perpetuating the inequalities that keep those bodies dismissed and flattened. But what Truong offers us is a guidebook, a navigation device, a model for how we come to know and love ourselves. Here we're offered a way not only through the racial labyrinth, but also a way out.
—Uyen
Squid Game meets the myth of the Minotaur in this terrifying supernatural thriller. HIDE features fourteen characters participating in a hide-and-seek competition in an abandoned theme park. Don’t get caught, and win $50,000. But the players have no idea why they have been selected, or what waits beyond the gates of the Amazement Park… Perfect for fans of The Hunger Games or Battle Royale.
—Skylar
After reading Smith's poem "Duende," I remember looking up from the page and thinking "It almost feels dangerous that something so powerful can just be casually bought at a bookstore".
—Jack
Gilda is anxious. So anxious, in fact, that she accidentally stumbles into a job as a Catholic church receptionist-- despite being an atheist lesbian. As she struggles to hide her new job from her maybe-girlfriend, and her sexuality from her new boss, she learns that her predecessor's death wasn't as innocent as it may have seemed. This curious, unusual novel bubbles over with heart, honesty, and empathy.
—Skylar