en-US Fri, 28 Mar 2025 06:54:04 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 195391623 From New York Times bestselling author Tracey Lange, a poignant story about the resilience of family, the importance of community, and the magic of middle school hockey

When Kyle McCray gets word his father has suffered a debilitating stroke, he returns to his hometown of Potsdam, New York, where he doesn’t expect a warm welcome. Kyle left suddenly two and a half years ago, abandoning people who depended on him: his father, his employees, his friends—not to mention Casey, his wife of sixteen years and a beloved teacher in town. He plans to lie low and help his dad recuperate until he can leave again, especially after Casey makes it clear she wants him gone.

The longer he’s home, the more Kyle understands the impact his departure has had on the people he left behind. When he’s presented with an opportunity for redemption as the coach of the floundering middle school hockey team, he begins to find compassion in unexpected places. Kyle even considers staying in Potsdam, but that’s only possible if he and Casey can come to some kind of peace with each other.

Full of love and hope, What Happened to the McCrays? takes an intimate look at both sides of a failed marriage and two people who must finally confront the awful pain of their past or risk being consumed by it.]]> 352 Tracey Lange 1250328438 Karl 5 4.10 2025
author: Tracey Lange
name: Karl
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2025
rating: 5
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]]> 214152335
Arabella and Aziz’s instant connection reminds Zoya of the passion she once felt for Aziz’s grandfather, a man she desired desperately, even after her father arranged another husband for her. In turn, Zoya would later marry off her youngest daughter, Naya, who aspired to date the Jackson 5 and wasn’t ready to be a wife or mother to Arabella at sixteen. Now that Naya’s children are grown and she’s arrived at an abrupt midlife crossroads, it’s time to settle old scores…]]> 336 Betty Shamieh 1668046547 Karl 5 3.90 2025
author: Betty Shamieh
name: Karl
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2025
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/03/24
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]]> 2362299
Self-portraits catch your eye. They seem to do it deliberately. Walk into any art gallery and they draw attention to themselves. Come across them in the world's museums and you get a strange shock of recognition, rather like glimpsing your own reflection. For in picturing themselves artists reveal something far deeper than their own physical looks: the truth about how they hope to be viewed by the world, and how they wish to see themselves.

In this beautifully written and lavishly illustrated book, Laura Cumming, art critic of the Observer, investigates the drama of the self-portrait, from Durer, Rembrandt and Velazquez to Munch, Picasso, Warhol and the present day. She considers how and why self-portraits look as they do and what they reveal about the artist's innermost sense of self -- as well as the curious ways in which they may imitate our behaviour in real life. Drawing on art, literature, history, philosophy and biography to examine the creative process in an entirely fresh way, Cumming offers a riveting insight into the intimate truths and elaborate fictions of self-portraiture and the lives of those who practise it.

A work of remarkable depth, scope and power, this is a book for anyone who has ever wondered about the strange dichotomy between the innermost self and the self we choose to present for posterity -- our face to the world.]]> 320 Laura Cumming 0007118430 Karl 5 4.12 2009
author: Laura Cumming
name: Karl
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2009
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/02/03
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]]> 56930717 Acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Velazquez Laura Cumming shares the riveting story of her mother’s mysterious kidnapping as a toddler in a small English coastal village—and how that event reverberated through her own family and her art for decades.

In the fall of 1929, when Laura Cumming’s mother was three years old, she was kidnapped from a beach on the Lincolnshire coast of England. There were no screams when she was taken, suggesting the culprit was someone familiar to her, and when she turned up again in a nearby village several days later, she was found in perfect health and happiness. No one was ever accused of a crime. The incident quickly faded from her memory, and her parents never discussed it. To the contrary, they deliberately hid it from her, and she did not learn of it for half a century.

This was not the only secret her parents kept from her. For many years, while raising her in draconian isolation and protectiveness, they also hid the fact that she’d been adopted, and that shortly after the kidnapping, her name was changed from Grace to Betty.

In Five Days Gone, Laura Cumming brilliantly unspools the tale of her mother’s life and unravels the multiple mysteries at its core. Using photographs from the time, historical documents, and works of art, Cumming investigates this case of stolen identity with the toolset of a detective and the unique intimacy of a daughter trying to understand her family’s past and its legacies. Compulsive, vivid, and profoundly touching, Five Days Gone is a masterful blend of memoir and history, an extraordinary personal narrative unlike any other.]]> 321 Laura Cumming Karl 5 3.49 2019
author: Laura Cumming
name: Karl
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2019
rating: 5
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]]> 62919831
As a brilliant art critic and historian, Laura Cumming has explored the importance of art in life and can give us a perspective on the time and place in which the artist worked. Now, through the lens of one dramatic event in 17th-century Holland, Cumming “has fashioned a book that combines memoir, art criticism, and history to illuminating effect� ( The New York Times Book Review ).

In 1654, the Thunderclap—an enormous explosion at a gunpowder store—devasted the city of Delft, killing hundreds of people, including the extraordinary painter Carel Fabritius, and injuring thousands more.

Framing the story around the life of Fabritius, Cumming illuminates this extraordinary moment in art history while also writing about her own father, a painter. Like Dutch art, the story gradually links country, city, town, street, house, interior—all the way to the bird on its perch, the blue and white tile, the smallest seed in a loaf of bread. The impact of a painting and how it can enter our thoughts, influence our view and understanding of the world is the heart of this book. Cumming has brought her unique eye to her most compelling subject yet.

Featuring beautiful full-color images of Dutch paintings throughout.]]> 272 Laura Cumming 1982181745 Karl 5 4.15 2023
author: Laura Cumming
name: Karl
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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]]> 18197812 128 Debra Bloomfield 0826354297 Karl 5 4.00 2014
author: Debra Bloomfield
name: Karl
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2014
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/01/29
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]]> 21816588
Mary Randlett Landscapes presents a visual record of the Northwest at its most pristine and poetic. During her many years of finely tuned observation, Randlett has learned to take the time to ponder the essences of what she sees―the curl of a bird's drifting feather, a water strider not quite breaking the surface of the water, fog ascending a hillside, the moment a pond's surface turns to ice. Her photography brings this corner of the Northwest to the world.]]> 128 Mary Randlett 0295994061 Karl 5 4.67 2007
author: Mary Randlett
name: Karl
average rating: 4.67
book published: 2007
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/01/29
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]]> 60201082 301 Bradeigh Godfrey 1665055189 Karl 5 3.84 2022
author: Bradeigh Godfrey
name: Karl
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2022
rating: 5
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date added: 2025/01/07
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I especially appreciated that neither the police nor the doctors were treated as obstacles in the way of the story, but were a perfectly plausible part of it.
]]> 60914204
From the outside, Elena Vega's life appears to be an easy one: the only child of two professional parents, private school, NYU. But her twenties are aimless and lacking in connection. Something has always been amiss in her life: her father, the brilliant but deeply troubled Santiago Vega.

Born in rural Puerto Rico, Santiago arrived in New York as a small child. His harsh, mercurial father returned to the island, leaving Santiago to be raised by his mentally ill mother and his formidable grandmother. An outstanding student, he followed scholarships to Stanford, then Yale Law, marrying Elena's mother along the way. Santiago is the shining star of his migrant family--the one who made it out and struck it rich. But he is a haunted man, plagued by trauma, bipolar disorder, and alcoholism. He's lost contact with Elena over the years and returned to San Juan to wrestle his demons alone.

Then Hurricane Maria strikes, and Santiago vanishes. Desperate to know what happened to the father she once adored, Elena returns to Puerto Rico, a place she loved as a child but hasn't seen in years. There she must unravel the truth about who her father is, crisscrossing the storm-swept island and reaching deep into his family tree to find relatives she's never met, each of whom seems to possess a clue about Santiago's fate.

A compelling mystery unfolds, as Elena is reunited with family, and with a place she loved and lost--the island of Puerto Rico, which is itself a character in this book. It's a story of connection, migration, striving, love, and loss, illuminated by humor and affection, written by a novelist at the height of her gifts.]]> 364 Leah Franqui Karl 5 3.45 2022
author: Leah Franqui
name: Karl
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2022
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/11/21
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]]> 200703680 From the internationally bestselling author of In an Instant and Hadley & Grace comes Two Good Men, a searing drama about two men on a quest for justice—from opposite sides of the law.

Dick Raynes feared this day would come. Otis Parsons, a violent felon, has been released from prison, and Dick’s sister, Dee, is the one who helped put him there. Dick’s marriage is over, and his career is in shambles, so with nothing to lose, he sets out to do whatever it takes to keep Dee and her son safe. But Otis is just the beginning. Using his knowledge as a scientist to develop a formula able to predict those offenders most likely to strike again, he sets out to protect future victims the law is powerless to defend.

FBI agent Steve Patterson investigates crimes against those who have paid their dues for past mistakes, running a department he created after his son was killed by a vigilante mother who targeted the wrong person. Recognizing a disturbing pattern of untimely deaths in recently released felons, he sets out to discover who’s behind it. What he doesn’t expect is to find another chance at love—with the sister of the man he is chasing.

Dick’s sense of right and wrong is tested as he pursues and neutralizes the most dangerous threats, while Steve makes it his mission to stop this vigilante serial killer before he is labeled a hero. Both men pursue a noble cause, but only one can prevail.]]> 378 S.E. Redfearn Karl 5 4.30 2024
author: S.E. Redfearn
name: Karl
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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]]> 34553973
Unfortunately, her three-year-old decides Cyril is now his best buddy, and Robin can’t bear to take anything else away from her son. A few hot dogs and video games won’t do any permanent damage� right?

Cyril doesn’t magically transform into a good person—or even a decent one—but he does prove to be a better role model than Robin expected. Gradually, she also begins to realize that Cyril may be the one person who truly understands the magnitude of her loss.

He also knows far more about her husband’s death than he’s been letting on.

Ramsey Hootman’s trademark blend of humor and heart shines in this offbeat tale of love, loss, and exasperation—guaranteed to leave you breathless at the end.]]> 338 Ramsey Hootman 099880701X Karl 5 4.02
author: Ramsey Hootman
name: Karl
average rating: 4.02
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]]> 37684123 An evocative novel in the vein of Kate Morton and Daphne du Maurier, in which the thrill of first love clashes with the bonds of sisterhood, and all will be tested by the dark secret at the heart of Applecote Manor.

"An enthralling story of secrets, sisters, and an unsolved mystery."--Kate Morton, New York Times bestselling author of The Lake House

Four sisters. A house with a past. One secret summer.

When fifteen-year-old Margot Wilde and her three sisters arrive at Applecote Manor in June 1959, they expect a quiet English country summer. Instead, they find their aunt and uncle still reeling from the disappearance of their daughter, Audrey, five years before. As the arrival of two handsome neighbors divides the sisters' loyalties, Margot is drawn into the life Audrey left behind and the mystery of her vanishing. Fifty years later, Jessie is desperate to move her family out of their London home, and gorgeous Applecote Manor seems like the perfect solution. But once there, Jessie finds herself increasingly isolated, at odds with her fifteen-year-old stepdaughter, and haunted by the strange rumors that surround the manor. Rich with heat and angst, in The Wildling Sisters the thrill of first love clashes with the bonds of sisterhood, taking readers on a breathless journey into the darkest secrets of the human heart.]]> 352 Eve Chase 1101983167 Karl 5 3.83 2017
author: Eve Chase
name: Karl
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2017
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/09/14
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]]> 28118525
Rome, 1953: Hal, an itinerant journalist flailing in the post-war darkness, has come to the Eternal City to lose himself and to seek absolution for the thing that haunts him. One evening he finds himself on the steps of a palazzo, walking into a world of privilege and light. Here, on a rooftop above the city, he meets the mysterious Stella. Hal and Stella are from different worlds, but their connection is magnetic. Together, they escape the crowded party and imagine a different life, even if it's just for a night. Yet Stella vanishes all too quickly, and Hal is certain their paths won't cross again.

But a year later they are unexpectedly thrown together, after Hal receives an invitation he cannot resist. An Italian Contessa asks him to assist on a trip of a lifetime -- acting as a reporter on a tremendous yacht, skimming its way along the Italian coast toward Cannes film festival, the most famous artists and movie stars of the day gathered to promote a new film.

Of all the luminaries aboard -- an Italian ingénue, an American star, a reclusive director -- only one holds Hal in Stella. And while each has a past that belies the gilded surface, Stella has the most to hide. As Hal's obsession with Stella grows, he becomes determined to bring back the girl she once was, the girl who's been confined to history. An irresistibly entertaining and atmospheric novel set in some of the world's most glamorous locales, The Invitation is a sultry love story about the ways in which the secrets of the past stay with us -- no matter how much we try to escape them.]]> 432 Lucy Foley 0316273473 Karl 5 3.46 2016
author: Lucy Foley
name: Karl
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2016
rating: 5
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]]> 182484258
Nicholson Baker wanted to learn how to paint.

In 2019, after years of researching and writing about secret and often horrible government programs for his book My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act , he was wiped out. Having been steeped for so long in the history of war, violence, and conspiracy, the world had lost some of its brightness. Photography had scratched a creative itch for years, but now, Baker was desperate to squeeze more out of what he saw � he wanted to live, slowly, through the snatches of life he was recording in photos. Maybe, he thought, he could learn to paint? The idea consumed him, but he was nagged by an even more debilitating What if he failed?

Finding a Likeness is Baker’s record of the years he worked to improve his artistic skills, beginning with his first, humble attempts to set paintbrush to paper. Driven by a natural curiosity and a strong desire to paint faces, clouds, and landscapes that actually resemble faces, clouds, and landscapes, he attends classes from local artists, watches YouTube tutorials, and seeks out master painters from the past and present in the hopes of uncovering their secrets. In his inimitable voice, Baker recounts the highs and lows of the creative process, reflects on memories of growing up as the son of two painters, and learns what it means to really see.

Filled with Baker’s own art, as well as the work of artists from around the world, Finding a Likeness is a tender and deeply felt testimony to taking a step back and going back to basics. Baker improves dramatically in his craft, but as he considers what it means to try, fail, and try again, he discovers far more than what it takes to paint a cloud � rather, he shows us how to bear witness to the world, to the good and the bad, and to do it all justice with paper and ink.]]> 352 Nicholson Baker 1984881396 Karl 5 3.79
author: Nicholson Baker
name: Karl
average rating: 3.79
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]]> 129807687
American Mother moves back and forth in time as Foley recalls her son's determination to shed light on the plight of those caught up in the agonies of war; his harrowing months of captivity; and the days following his death. Channeling Foley's singular voice, McCann brings to life her shock, sadness, resolve, and astonishing hope in the face of an unthinkably altered life.

American Mother is a work of profound moral clarity and courage, a book that takes readers inside one woman's extraordinary journey to find connection in a world torn asunder, and to fight for others as a way to keep James Foley's memory alive.]]> 256 Colum McCann Karl 5 4.13
author: Colum McCann
name: Karl
average rating: 4.13
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]]> 19160 216 Marcus Sanders 0811847195 Karl 3 4.08 1321
author: Marcus Sanders
name: Karl
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1321
rating: 3
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date added: 2024/06/21
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The drawings I'd give a 5. The text, well, I guess I just wasn't up for Dante, adapted or otherwise.
]]> 150778764 288 Andre Dubus III 1324000449 Karl 5 4.13 2024
author: Andre Dubus III
name: Karl
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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]]> 59364113 A fascinating, revelatory portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staffer who spent a decade as a museum guard.

Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They’re the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two million square foot treasure house. Caught up in his glamorous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought he’d be one of them. Then his older brother was diagnosed with fatal cancer and he found himself needing to escape the mundane clamor of daily life. So he quit The New Yorker and sought solace in the most beautiful place he knew.

To his surprise and the reader’s delight, this temporary refuge becomes Bringley’s home away from home for a decade. We follow him as he guards delicate treasures from Egypt to Rome, strolls the labyrinths beneath the galleries, wears out nine pairs of company shoes, and marvels at the beautiful works in his care. Bringley enters the museum as a ghost, silent and almost invisible, but soon finds his voice and his tribe: the artworks and their creators and the lively subculture of museum guards—a gorgeous mosaic of artists, musicians, blue-collar stalwarts, immigrants, cutups, and dreamers. As his bonds with his colleagues and the art grow, he comes to understand how fortunate he is to be walled off in this little world, and how much it resembles the best aspects of the larger world to which he gradually, gratefully returns.

In the tradition of classic workplace memoirs like Lab Girl and Working Stiff, All The Beauty in the World is a surprising, inspiring portrait of a great museum, its hidden treasures, and the people who make it tick, by one of its most intimate observers.]]> 240 Patrick Bringley 1982163321 Karl 5 4.00 2023
author: Patrick Bringley
name: Karl
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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]]> 126918693 Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez reveals her experience as the U.S. born daughter of immigrants and what happened when, at fifteen, her parents were forced back to Mexico in this galvanizing yet tender memoir.

Born to Mexican immigrants south of the Rillito River in Tucson, Arizona, Elizabeth had the world at her fingertips as she entered her freshman year of high school as the number one student. But suddenly, Elizabeth's own country took away the most important right a child has: a right to have a family.

As her parents� visas expired, they were forced to return to Mexico, leaving Elizabeth responsible for her younger brother, as well as her education. Determined to break the cycle of being “a statistic,� she knew that even though her parents couldn’t stay, there was no way she could let go of the opportunities the U.S. could provide.

Armed with only her passport and sheer teenage determination, Elizabeth became what her school would eventually describe as an unaccompanied, homeless youth, one of thousands of underage victims affected by family separation due to broken immigration laws. For fans of Educated by Tara Westover and The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande, My Side of the River explores separation, generational trauma, and the toll of the American dream. It’s also, at its core, a love story between a brother and a sister who, no matter the cost, is determined to make the pursuit of his own dreams easier than it was for her.]]> 272 Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez 1250277957 Karl 5 3.75 2024
author: Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez
name: Karl
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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]]> 9014 370 Richard Bachman 0451196716 Karl 5 4.11 1978
author: Richard Bachman
name: Karl
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1978
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/05/06
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]]> 82306
In this cauterizing thriller, Andrew Vachss's renegadeĚýinvestigator teams up with a lethally gifted avenger to follow a child's murderer through the catacombs of New York, where every alley is blind and the penthouses are as dangerous as the basements.Ěý Fearfully knowing, crackling with narrative tension, and written in prose as forceful as a hollow-point slug, Flood is Burke at his deadliest—and Vachss at the peak of his form.]]> 341 Andrew Vachss 0679781293 Karl 5 3.96 1985
author: Andrew Vachss
name: Karl
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1985
rating: 5
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]]> 150444427
Desperate for answers to the millions of questions his untimely death has raised, Anna checks in to The Sycamores, the run-down motel turned apartment Henry rented as an art studio. As she absorbs every bit of gossip the eclectic mix of residents are willing to share about her husband and each other, she begins to piece together a picture of a very different man than the one she married, and the life he led behind her back. The more she learns, and the less sense things seem to make, she finds herself wondering: Did she ever really know Henry at all?

But Henry’s secrets aren’t the only ones; as Anna’s search for clues expands, Cass, the mysterious, jaded motel manager, seems more and more determined to keep Anna in the dark. And when threatening letters start appearing at her door, Anna has to decide what’s more important—the truth, or her own safety.]]> 298 Seraphina Nova Glass 1525809806 Karl 0 3.69 2024
author: Seraphina Nova Glass
name: Karl
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 145844219 Shift Happens tells the story of keyboards like no book ever before, covering 150 years from the early typewriters to the pixellated keyboards in our pockets. This is the only book that connects the world of typewriters to the universe of computers. Whether you’re into vintage typewriters, classic clicky IBM keyboards, or modern mechanical wonders, it will have something for you. None of the above? Get ready to become a keyboard nerd anyway, and look at an everyday boring QWERTY slab with newfound respect.

Shift Happens is full of stories � some never before told � interleaved with 1,000+ beautiful full-color photos across two volumes. It’s a great gift for keyboard or typewriter aficionados, but also suits everyone who cares about design, the stories of everyday objects, or tech history.

This special edition of Shift Happens features two hardcover volumes (each 608 pages), plus a bonus 160-page softcover collection of extras, all delivered inside a custom, beautiful slipcase.]]> 1216 Marcin Wichary Karl 5 4.87 2023
author: Marcin Wichary
name: Karl
average rating: 4.87
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/03/07
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]]> 333619 Hard Candy is vintage Burke.]]> 242 Andrew Vachss 0679761691 Karl 5 4.08 1989
author: Andrew Vachss
name: Karl
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1989
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/02/26
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]]> 59991576 For those too afraid or intimidated by technology to think about where their kids go on the Internet, Andrew Vachss� Blood Line will rock you to your core.

In the world of dangerous men, a blood line is a cause passed from generation to generation from master to protégé. But on the path to becoming a master, each protégé must find their own hunting ground�

When a young girl is lured away by an Internet predator, the young protégé of an assassin who never leaves a trace decides to leave his own mark by hunting down sexual predators targeting vulnerable teens who are bullied and feeling unwanted.

As Sonny discovers his own cause—his own reason for existence—and a skill set beyond anything his master taught him, he steps out of the shadows and joins a long blood line of masters seeking justice on behalf of defenseless children.]]> 254 Andrew Henry Vachss 1639772405 Karl 5 4.33
author: Andrew Henry Vachss
name: Karl
average rating: 4.33
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rating: 5
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date added: 2024/02/06
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]]> 62593654 After the untimely death of her outgoing, hugely successful influencer sister, an introverted woman takes on the terrifying challenge of completing her sister’s bucket list as the world watches, in a bid to save her family—and others—from the crippling medical debt her cancer battle left behind.

My dying wish is for you to finish my bucket list. I refuse to die without knowing this list will be completed. And I refuse to die without knowing my family will be okay . . .

Jodie Boyd is a shy and anxious twenty-something, completely unsure what to do with her life. Her older sister, Bree, is an adventurous, globe-trotting, hugely successful Instagram influencer with more than a million followers. She’s the most alive person Jodie knows—up until Bree’s unfathomable, untimely death from Leukemia. The Boyds are devastated, not to mention overwhelmed with medical debt. But Bree thought of everything—and soon, Jodie is shocked by a new post on her sister’s Instagram feed.

The first of many Bree recorded in secret, the post foretells a jaw-dropping challenge for Jodie: to complete Bree’s very public bucket list. From “Fly over Antarctica,� to “Perform a walk-on cameo in a Broadway musical,� if Jodie does it—and keeps all Bree’s followers—a corporate sponsor will pay off the staggering medical debt. If she gains followers, the Boyds won’t be the only ones to benefit. It’s crazy. It’s terrifying. It’s impossible, immoral even, to refuse. So, despite the whole world watching, Jodie plunges in, never imagining that in death, her sister will teach her how to live, and that the last item on the list—“Fall in love”—may just prove to be the easiest.]]> 400 Amy T. Matthews 1496742087 Karl 5 3.93 2023
author: Amy T. Matthews
name: Karl
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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]]> 43812076
It is a morning's lessons, a dress rehearsal of Macbeth, a snowy trek through the woods.

It is an eternity waiting for news. Or a countdown to something terrible.

It is 180 minutes to discover who you will die for and what men will kill for.

In rural Somerset in the middle of a blizzard, the unthinkable happens: a school is under siege. Told from the point of view of the people at the heart of it, from the wounded headmaster in the library, unable to help his trapped pupils and staff, to teenage Hannah in love for the first time, to the parents gathering desperate for news, to the 16 year old Syrian refugee trying to rescue his little brother, to the police psychologist who must identify the gunmen, to the students taking refuge in the school theatre, all experience the most intense hours of their lives, where evil and terror are met by courage, love and redemption.]]> 320 Rosamund Lupton 0241374499 Karl 5 4.09 2020
author: Rosamund Lupton
name: Karl
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2020
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/12/04
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]]> 63222106 New York Times bestselling author of the Reese’s Book Club pick We Were Never Here.

Kelly’s new life in Philadelphia has turned into a nightmare: She’s friendless and jobless, and the lockdown has her trapped in a tiny apartment with the man she gave up everything for, who’s just called off their wedding. The only bright spot is her newly rekindled friendship with her childhood friend Sabrina—now a glamorous bestselling author with a handsome, high-powered husband.

When Sabrina and Nathan offer Kelly an escape hatch, volunteering the spare room of their remote Virginia mansion, she jumps at the chance to run away from her old life. There, Kelly secretly finds herself falling for both her enchanting hosts—until one night, a wild and unexpected threesome leads the couple to open their marriage for her.

At first, Kelly loves being part of this risqué new world. But when she discovers that the last woman they invited into their marriage is missing, she starts to wonder if they could be dangerous . . . and if she might be next.

Packed with Andrea Bartz’s signature tension, twists, and toxic relationships, The Spare Room marks an edgy, boundary-pushing new direction from the “master of the �feminist thriller’� (Los Angeles Times).]]> 336 Andrea Bartz 1984820494 Karl 5 3.09 2023
author: Andrea Bartz
name: Karl
average rating: 3.09
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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]]> 60600072

Isabel needs a good friend during such a rocky start, and finds one when she reconnects with Rose Brewster, her charismatic classmate from undergrad. But when Rose confides to Isabel that she is in trouble, and then goes missing, Isabel’s already-unsteady life is sent into a tailspin. A suicide note surfaces, followed by a coded message: Rose is alive but, unless Isabel can complete the research begun before her friend’s disappearance, both women will be killed by her captors.Ěý


As Isabel follows the Rose’s paper trail from Genoa to Florence and, finally, to Paris, she uncovers family secrets, the legend of an enormous cursed emerald, and a chain of betrayal and treason which parallels her own perilous present. If she can put the pieces together soon, she could solve a 400-year-old mystery—and save her and her friend’s lives in the process.


Combining epistolary elements, Gothic suspense, and an atmospheric “dark academiaâ€� setting, The Bequest is a gripping literary thriller that will appeal to fans of Alex Michaelidesâ€� The Maidens and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.Ěý±Ő±Ő> 312 Joanna Margaret Karl 0 2.99 2022
author: Joanna Margaret
name: Karl
average rating: 2.99
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/08
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]]> 10569 (back cover)]]> 320 Stephen King 0743455967 Karl 5 4.33 2000
author: Stephen King
name: Karl
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2000
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/09/29
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]]> 63946934 A young British woman working in a book bindery gets a chance to pursue knowledge and love when World War I upends her life in this new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of the Reese’s Book Club pick The Dictionary of Lost Words.

“Williams spins an immersive and compelling tale, sweeping us back to the Oxford she painted so expertly in The Dictionary of Lost Words.”—Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife

It is 1914, and as the war draws the young men of Britain away to fight, women must keep the nation running. Two of those women are Peggy and Maude, twin sisters who live on a narrow boat in Oxford and work in the bindery at the university press.

Ambitious, intelligent Peggy has been told for most of her life that her job is to bind the books, not read them—but as she folds and gathers pages, her mind wanders to the opposite side of Walton Street, where the female students of Oxford’s Somerville College have a whole library at their fingertips. Maude, meanwhile, wants nothing more than what she has: to spend her days folding the pages of books in the company of the other bindery girls. She is extraordinary but vulnerable, and Peggy feels compelled to watch over her.

Then refugees arrive from the war-torn cities of Belgium, sending ripples through the Oxford community and the sisters� lives. Peggy begins to see the possibility of another future where she can educate herself and use her intellect, not just her hands. But as war and illness reshape her world, her love for a Belgian soldier—and the responsibility that comes with it—threaten to hold her back.

The Bookbinder is a story about knowledge—who creates it, who can access it, and what truths get lost in the process. Much as she did in the international bestseller The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams thoughtfully explores another rarely seen slice of history through women’s eyes.]]> 437 Pip Williams 0593600444 Karl 5 3.94 2023
author: Pip Williams
name: Karl
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/09/20
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]]> 63241104 In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.]]> 309 Ann Patchett 006332752X Karl 5 3.92 2023
author: Ann Patchett
name: Karl
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/08/23
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]]> 22318742 A book by Jon. Krakauer Jon Krakauer Karl 5 4.16 1996
author: Jon Krakauer
name: Karl
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1996
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/08/02
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]]> 61273812 You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself in lyrical vignettes that shine, hard and clear as jewels. The book begins with one woman’s personal, particular heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes. With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she’s known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself. The power of these pieces is cumulative: page after page, they build into a larger interrogation of family, work, and patriarchy.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful, like the work of Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, and Gina Frangello, is an unflinching look at what it means to live and write our own lives. It is a story about a mother’s fierce and constant love for her children, and a woman’s love and regard for herself. Above all, this memoir is an argument for possibility. With a poet’s attention to language and an innovative approach to the genre, Smith reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new. Something beautiful.]]> 320 Maggie Smith 1982185856 Karl 5 4.03 2023
author: Maggie Smith
name: Karl
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/07/17
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]]> 43782399
Years later, Claire is living and working in New York City when a brief but fateful encounter brings her together with Clive Richardson, one of the men originally suspected of murdering her sister. It is a moment that sets Claire on an obsessive pursuit of the truth - not only to find out what happened the night of Alison’s death but also to answer the elusive question: Who exactly was her sister? At seven, Claire had been barely old enough to know her: a beautiful, changeable, provocative girl of eighteen at a turbulent moment of identity formation.

As Claire doggedly shadows Clive, hoping to gain his trust, waiting for the slip that will reveal the truth, an unlikely attachment develops between them, two people whose lives were forever marked by the same tragedy.]]> 343 Alexis Schaitkin 1250219590 Karl 5 3.36 2020
author: Alexis Schaitkin
name: Karl
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2020
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/07/13
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]]> 61913597 Longing for independence, a young sheltered Kenyan woman flees the expectations of her mother for a life in New York City that challenges all her beliefs about race, love, and family.

"Lucky Girl is at times tender, at times funny, at times uncomfortably frank. . . . A fresh look at racism, privilege, and the challenges of coming-of-age and falling in love between two cultures."--Charmaine Wilkerson, New York Times bestselling author of Black Cake

Soila is a lucky girl by anyone's estimation. Raised by her stern, conservative mother and a chorus of aunts, she has lived a protected life in Nairobi. Soila is headstrong and outspoken, and she chafes against her mother's strict rules. After a harrowing assault by a trusted family friend, she flees to New York for college, vowing never to return home.

New York in the 1990s is not what Soila imagined it would be. Instead of finding a golden land of opportunity, Soila is shocked by the entitlement of her wealthy American classmates and the poverty she sees in the streets. She befriends a Black American girl at school and witnesses the insidious racism her friend endures, forcing Soila to begin to acknowledge the legacy of slavery and the blind spots afforded by her Kenyan upbringing. When she falls in love with a free-spirited artist, a man her mother would never approve of, she must decide whether to honor her Kenyan identity and what she owes to her family, or to follow her heart and forge a life of her own design.

Lucky Girl is a fierce and tender debut about the lives and loves we choose--what it meant to be an African immigrant in America at the turn of the millennium, and how a young woman finds a place for herself in the world.]]> 336 Irene Muchemi-Ndiritu 0593133900 Karl 5 4.08 2023
author: Irene Muchemi-Ndiritu
name: Karl
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/07/05
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]]> 214579
Father Jared Osborne has received an extraordinary assignment from his superiors: Investigate an itinerant preacher stirring up deep trouble in central Europe. His followers all him B, but his enemies say he’s something else: the Antichrist. However, the man Osborne tracks across a landscape of bars, cabarets, and seedy meeting halls is no blasphemous monster—though an earlier era would undoubtedly have rushed him to the burning stake. For B claims to be enunciating a gospel written not on any stone or parchment but in our very genes, opening up a spiritual direction for humanity that would have been unimaginable to any of the prophets or saviors of traditional religion. Pressed by his superiors for a judgment, Osborne is driven to penetrate B’s inner circle, where he soon finds himself an anguished collaborator in the dismantling of his own religious foundations. More than a masterful novel of adventure and suspense, The Story of B is a rich source of compelling ideas from an author who challenges us to rethink our most cherished beliefs.]]> 352 Daniel Quinn 0553379011 Karl 5 4.14 1996
author: Daniel Quinn
name: Karl
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1996
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/05/27
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]]> 45304101 A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris

In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister.

Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.

The Great Believers has become a critically acclaimed, indelible piece of literature; it was selected as one of New York Times Best 10 Books of the Year, a Washington Post Notable Book, a Buzzfeed Book of the Year, a Skimm Reads pick, and a pick for the New York Public Library's Best Books of the year.]]> 421 Rebecca Makkai 073522353X Karl 5 4.26 2018
author: Rebecca Makkai
name: Karl
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2018
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/05/13
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]]> 60776094
Aspiring playwright, Kate Gamble, is struggling to launch a script she's been secretly researching her entire life, mostly at the family dinner table. Her father is Christian Gamble, CEO of Buck Technologies, a private data integration company whose clients include the CIA and virtually every counter-terrorism organization in the Western World. Kate's father adores her, and a play about the dark side of Big Data would be the ultimate betrayal in his eyes. But Kate is compelled to tell this story--not only as an artist exploring the personal information catastrophe that affects us all, but as a daughter trying to understand her mother's apparent loss of purpose, made even more disturbing by the suicide note she left behind: I did it for Kate.

Then Patrick Battle comes back into her life, changing everything she has ever thought about her play, her father, and her mother's tragic death. Patrick is a childhood friend, but he is now Buck's golden boy with security clearance to the company's most sensitive projects. When Buck comes under investigation by the Justice Department and Patrick suddenly goes missing, Kate doesn't know who to trust. A phone call confirms her worst nightmare: Patrick has been kidnapped, and the ransom demand is Code 6--the most secret and potentially dangerous technology her father's company has ever developed.

Kate's fight to bring Patrick home safely reveals a conspiracy and cover up that may implicate one of the most powerful executives in the tech industry, while the development of Kate's play unleashes family secrets and the demons behind her mother's cryptic final note. The two paths converge in explosive fashion, leading to a shocking and terrifying discovery that puts Kate and Patrick in the crosshairs of forces who will stop at nothing to control Code 6.]]> 368 James Grippando 0063223783 Karl 0 3.65 2023
author: James Grippando
name: Karl
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/02/19
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]]> 13278426
I am writing this down because this is my story. There were only ever two people who knew my secret, and both are gone before me.

Who was Bridget, and what became of her?

Natalie escapes into the diary, eager to unlock its secrets, and reluctantly accepts the help of library archivist Kathleen Lynch, a widow with her own painful secret: she's estranged from her only daughter. Kathleen sees in Natalie traces of the daughter she has lost, and in Bridget, another spirited young woman at risk.

What could an Irish immigrant domestic servant from the 1920s teach them both? As the troubles of a very modern world close in around them, and Natalie's torments at school escalate, the faded pages of Bridget's journal unite the lonely girl and the unhappy widow - and might even change their lives forever.]]> 322 Meg Mitchell Moore 0316097691 Karl 0 3.61 2012
author: Meg Mitchell Moore
name: Karl
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/02/17
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]]> 25241503

The Hawthorne family has it all. Great jobs, a beautiful house in one of the most affluent areas of Northern California, and three charming kids whose sunny futures are all but assured. And then comes their eldest daughter’s senior year of high school . . .
Ěý Ěý ĚýFirstborn Angela Hawthorne is a straight-A student and star athlete, with extracurricular activities coming out of her ears and a college application that’s not going to write itself. She’s set her sights on Harvard, her father’s alma mater, and like a dog with a chew toy, Angela won’t let up until she’s basking in crimson-colored glory. Except her class rank as valedictorian is under attack, she’s suddenly losing her edge at cross-country, and she can’t help but daydream about a cute baseball player. Of course Angela knows the time put into her schoolgirl crush would be better spent coming up with a subject for her English term paper—which, along with her college essay, has a rapidly approaching deadline.
Ěý Ěý ĚýAngela’s mother, Nora, is similarly stretched to the limit, juggling parent-teacher meetings, carpool, and a real estate career where she caters to the mega-rich and super-picky buyers and sellers of the Bay Area. The youngest daughter, second-grader Maya, still can’t read; the middle child, Cecily, is no longer the happy-go-lucky kid she once was; and their dad, Gabe, seems oblivious to the mounting pressures at home because a devastating secret of his own might be exposed. A few ill-advised moves put the Hawthorne family on a collision course that’s equal parts achingly real and delightfully screwball—and they learn that whatever it cost to get their lucky lives it may cost far more to keep them.
Ěý Ěý ĚýSharp, topical, and wildly entertaining, The Admissions shows that if you pull at a loose thread, even the sturdiest lives start to unravel at the seams of high achievement.]]> 320 Meg Mitchell Moore 0385540043 Karl 0 3.61 2015
author: Meg Mitchell Moore
name: Karl
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/02/17
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]]> 49820160
Lucas and Margo are fed up. Margo is a brilliant programmer tired of being talked over as the company's sole black employee, and while Lucas is one of many Asians at the firm, he's nearly invisible as a low-paid customer service rep. Together, they decide to steal their tech start-up's user database in an attempt at revenge. The heist takes a sudden turn when Margo dies in a car accident, and Lucas is left reeling, wondering what to do with their secret--and wondering whether her death really was an accident. When Lucas hacks into Margo's computer looking for answers, he is drawn into her secret online life and realizes just how little he knew about his best friend.

With a fresh voice, biting humor, and piercing observations about human nature, Kevin Nguyen brings an insider's knowledge of the tech industry to this imaginative novel. A pitch-perfect exploration of race and start-up culture, secrecy and surveillance, social media and friendship, New Waves asks: How well do we really know each other? And how do we form true intimacy and connection in a tech-obsessed world?]]> 320 Kevin Nguyen 1984855239 Karl 0 3.48 2020
author: Kevin Nguyen
name: Karl
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/02/13
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]]> 7357502 Top Book Pick by the Today Show, Good Morning America, Parade and Good Housekeeping.

Isabel Raine thought she had everything--a successful career, a supportive family, and a happy marriage to the man she loved. Then one ordinary morning, her husband, Marcus, picks up his briefcase, kisses her good-bye, and simply vanishes.

That day, all her calls to him go straight to voice mail; the messages she leaves at his office go unreturned, too. Panicking after finally receiving a call from his cell phone in which all she can hear is a man's terrified cry, Isabel calls the police. But they aren't interested. Men leave, they tell her. They leave all the time. Desperate to find her husband, Isabel races to his office. But instead of finding him, she finds herself in the middle of an FBI raid. Hours later, she awakens in the hospital with a severe concussion and a homicide detective by her bedside waiting to question her aboutĚýMarcus Raine-the real Marcus Raine.

Now the only thing Isabel knows for sure is that her husband of five years is gone. Where is he and who is he are questions no one seems able to answer. But Isabel will not rest until she discovers the truth about the man she loves, even if it means risking everything--including her own life.

New York Times bestselling master of suspense Lisa Unger takes us on a nightmarish journey from bustling, glamorous New York City to the twisted streets of Prague, seeking an answer to one bone-chilling question:ĚýWhat if the man you love, the one sleeping beside you, is a stranger?]]> 480 Lisa Unger 0307476340 Karl 0 3.52 2008
author: Lisa Unger
name: Karl
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/02/11
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]]> 57933599
Physics offers deep insights into the workings of the universe but those insights come in the form of equations that often look like gobbledygook. Sean Carroll shows that they are really like meaningful poems that can help us fly over sierras to discover a miraculous multidimensional landscape alive with radiant giants, warped space-time, and bewilderingly powerful forces. High school calculus is itself is a centuries-old marvel as worthy of our gaze as the Mona Lisa. And it may come as a surprise the extent to which all our most cutting-edge ideas about black holes are built on the math calculus enables.

No one else could so smoothly guide readers to grasping the very equation Einstein used to describe his theory of general relativity. In the tradition of the legendary Richard Feynman lectures presented sixty years ago, this book is an inspiring, dazzling introduction to a way of seeing that will resonate across cultural and generational boundaries for many years to come.]]> 304 Sean Carroll 0593186583 Karl 0 3.95 2022
author: Sean Carroll
name: Karl
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/02/09
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]]> 53064562 400 Meg Mitchell Moore 0062840096 Karl 0 3.54 2020
author: Meg Mitchell Moore
name: Karl
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/02/09
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]]> 60784641 From New York Times bestselling author Rachel Hawkins comes a deliciously wicked gothic suspense, set at an Italian villa with a dark history, for fans of Lucy Foley and Ruth Ware.

As kids, Emily and Chess were inseparable. But by their 30s, their bond has been strained by the demands of their adult lives. So when Chess suggests a girls trip to Italy, Emily jumps at the chance to reconnect with her best friend.

Villa Aestas in Orvieto is a high-end holiday home now, but in 1974, it was known as Villa Rosato, and rented for the summer by a notorious rock star, Noel Gordon. In an attempt to reignite his creative spark, Noel invites up-and-coming musician, Pierce Sheldon to join him, as well as Pierce’s girlfriend, Mari, and her stepsister, Lara. But he also sets in motion a chain of events that leads to Mari writing one of the greatest horror novels of all time, Lara composing a platinum album––and ends in Pierce’s brutal murder.

As Emily digs into the villa’s complicated history, she begins to think there might be more to the story of that fateful summer in 1974. That perhaps Pierce’s murder wasn’t just a tale of sex, drugs, and rock & roll gone wrong, but that something more sinister might have occurred––and that there might be clues hidden in the now-iconic works that Mari and Lara left behind.

Yet the closer that Emily gets to the truth, the more tension she feels developing between her and Chess. As secrets from the past come to light, equally dangerous betrayals from the present also emerge––and it begins to look like the villa will claim another victim before the summer ends.]]> 279 Rachel Hawkins 125028001X Karl 0 3.59 2023
author: Rachel Hawkins
name: Karl
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/02/07
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]]> 60666845 Two couples, two close friends, one missing husband�

Jake Hayes is missing. This much is certain. At first, his wife, Nina, thinks he is blowing off steam at a friend’s house after their heated fight the night before. But then a day goes by. Two days. Five. And Jake is still nowhere to be found.

Lily Scott, Nina’s friend and coworker, thinks she may have been the last to see Jake before he went missing. After Lily confesses everything to her husband, Christian, the two decide that nobody can find out what happened leading up to Jake’s disappearance, especially not Nina. But Nina is out there looking for her husband, and she won’t stop until the truth is discovered.]]> 320 Mary Kubica 0778333116 Karl 0 3.51 2023
author: Mary Kubica
name: Karl
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/02/05
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]]> 60784359
A year on, Kim Gillespie’s absence casts a long shadow as her friends and loved ones gather deep in the heart of South Australian wine country to welcome a new addition to the family.

Joining the celebrations is federal investigator Aaron Falk. But as he soaks up life in the lush valley, he begins to suspect this tight-knit group may be more fractured than it seems.

Between Falk’s closest friend, a missing mother, and a woman he’s drawn to, dark questions linger as long-ago truths begin to emerge.

An outstanding novel, a brilliant mystery and a heart-pounding read from the author of The Dry, Force of Nature, The Lost Man and The Survivors.]]> 356 Jane Harper 1250235359 Karl 5 3.96 2022
author: Jane Harper
name: Karl
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2022
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/02/03
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]]> 60784373
For decades afterward, the friends have kept a secret worth killing for. But now Olivia wants to tell, and Naomi sets out to find out what really happened in the woods―no matter how dangerous the truth turns out to be.]]> 336 Kate Alice Marshall 1250859883 Karl 0 3.93 2023
author: Kate Alice Marshall
name: Karl
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/02/02
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]]> 209199 221 Richard Stark 0843955945 Karl 0 3.84 1971
author: Richard Stark
name: Karl
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1971
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/31
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]]> 60657798
Timed with Stephen King’s 75th birthday on September 21, 2022, Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life, and Influences features archival photos and documents from King’s personal collection alongside the stories behind how his novels, novellas, short stories, and adaptations came to be.

With critically acclaimed titles that have also been turned into blockbuster sensations like IT and Carrie, King's work has stood the test of time across decades. This history of the writer's struggles, triumphs, bestsellers, lesser-known stories, collaborations, and moreĚýmakes the perfect addition to any Stephen King fan’s collection.

Celebrate the beloved King of Horror with this informational and entertaining look insideĚýKing’s most iconic titles and the culture they have created.]]> 243 Bev Vincent 0760376824 Karl 0 4.43 2022
author: Bev Vincent
name: Karl
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/31
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]]> 61273865
A remote village. A deadly secret. An outsider who knows the truth.

Robert Reid moved his family to Scotland’s Outer Hebrides in the 1990s, driven by hope, craving safety and community, and hiding a terrible secret. But despite his best efforts to fit in, Robert is always seen as an outsider. And as the legendary and violent Hebridean storms rage around him, he begins to unravel, believing his fate on the remote island of Kilmeray cannot be escaped.

For her entire life, Maggie MacKay has sensed something was wrong with her. When Maggie was five years old, she announced that a man on Kilmeray—a place she’d never visited—had been murdered. Her unfounded claim drew media attention and turned the locals against each other, creating rifts that never mended.

Nearly twenty years later, Maggie is determined to find out what really happened, and what the islanders are hiding. But when she begins to receive ominous threats, Maggie is forced to consider how much she is willing to risk to discover the horrifying truth.

Unnerving, enthralling, and filled with gothic suspense, The Blackhouse is a spectacularly sinister tale readers won’t soon forget.]]> 322 Carole Johnstone 1982199679 Karl 0 3.37 2022
author: Carole Johnstone
name: Karl
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/31
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]]> 32828517 For fans of Elin Hilderbrand and Emma Straub comes an emotionally gripping novel about a woman who returns to her hometown in coastal Maine and finds herself pondering the age-old question of what could have been.

Growing up in Little Harbor, Maine, the daughter of a widowed lobsterman, Eliza Barnes could haul a trap and row a skiff with the best of them. But she always knew she'd leave that life behind. Now that she's married, with two kids and a cushy front-row seat to suburban country club gossip in an affluent Massachusetts town, she feels adrift.

When her father injures himself in a boating accident, Eliza pushes the pause button on her own life to come to his aid. But when she arrives in Maine, she discovers her father's situation is more dire than he let on. Eliza's homecoming is further complicated by the reemergence of her first love--and memories of their shared secret. Then Eliza meets Mary Brown, a seventeen-year-old local who is at her own crossroad, and Eliza can't help but wonder what her life would have been like if she'd stayed.

Filled with humor, insight, summer cocktails, and gorgeous sunsets, The Captain's Daughter is a compassionate novel about the life-changing choices we make and the consequences we face in their aftermath.]]> 308 Meg Mitchell Moore 0385541252 Karl 0 3.75 2017
author: Meg Mitchell Moore
name: Karl
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/29
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]]> 29938032
Soon after her arrival at Corbin’s grand apartment on Beacon Hill, Kate makes a shocking discovery: his next-door neighbor, a young woman named Audrey Marshall, has been murdered. When the police question her about Corbin, a shaken Kate has few answers, and many questions of her own—curiosity that intensifies when she meets Alan Cherney, a handsome, quiet tenant who lives across the courtyard, in the apartment facing Audrey’s. Alan saw Corbin surreptitiously come and go from Audrey’s place, yet he’s denied knowing her. Then, Kate runs into a tearful man claiming to be the dead woman’s old boyfriend, who insists Corbin did the deed the night that he left for London.

When she reaches out to her cousin, he proclaims his innocence and calms her nerves--until she comes across disturbing objects hidden in the apartment and accidentally learns that Corbin is not where he says he is. Could Corbin be a killer? What about Alan? Kate finds herself drawn to this appealing man who seems so sincere, yet she isn’t sure. Jet-lagged and emotionally unstable, her imagination full of dark images caused by the terror of her past, Kate can barely trust herself, so how could she take the chance on a stranger she’s just met?]]> 384 Peter Swanson 0062427040 Karl 0 3.75 2017
author: Peter Swanson
name: Karl
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/27
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]]> 60321515 The Other Side of Night begins with a man named David Asha writing about his biggest regret: his sudden separation from his son, Elliot. In his grief, David tells a story.

Next, we step into the life of Harriet Kealty, a police officer trying to clear her name after a lapse of judgment. She discovers a curious inscription in a secondhand book—a plea: Help me, he’s trying to kill me. Who wrote this note? Who is “he�?

This note leads Harri to David Asha, who was last seen stepping off a cliff. Police suspect he couldn’t cope after his wife’s sudden death. Still, why would this man jump and leave behind his young son? Quickly, Harri’s attention zeroes in on a person she knows all too well.

Ben Elmys: once the love of her life. A surrogate father to Elliot Asha and trusted friend to the Ashas.

Ben may also be a murderer.�

]]> 304 Adam Hamdy 1982196181 Karl 0 3.50 2022
author: Adam Hamdy
name: Karl
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 59575959 Ěý
“Osborne is a startlingly good observer of privilege, noting the rites and rituals of the upper classes with unerring precision and an undercurrent of malice.”—Katie Kitamura, The New York Times Book Review, on Beautiful Animals
Ěý
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE The Washington Post, CrimeReads

After two decades as a journalist in Hong Kong, ex-pat Englishman Adrian Gyle has very little to show for it. Evenings are whiled away with soup dumplings and tea at Fung Shing, the restaurant downstairs from his home on Java Road, watching the city—once overflowing with wine dinners and private membersâ€� clubs—erupt in violence as pro-democracy demonstrations hit ever closer to home.Ěý

Watching from the skyrises is Adrian’s old friend Jimmy Tang, the scion of one of Hong Kong’s wealthiest families. Just as Gyle prepares to turn his back on Hong Kong, he finds one last the mysterious Rebecca, a student involved in the protests, and the latest of Jimmy’s reckless dalliances. But when Rebecca goes missing and Jimmy hides, Gyle feels that old familiar urge to investigate.Ěý

Piecing together Rebecca’s final days and hours, Gyle must tread carefully through a volatile world of friendship and betrayal where personal loyalties vanish like the city he onceĚýknew so well. On Java Road tells the story of a man between the fault lines of old worlds and new orders in pursuit of the truth.]]> 256 Lawrence Osborne 0593242327 Karl 0 3.52 2022
author: Lawrence Osborne
name: Karl
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 7213274 136 Elizabeth Carmel 0977687716 Karl 5 4.25 2009
author: Elizabeth Carmel
name: Karl
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2009
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/01/25
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]]> 61145046 When a severed hand washes ashore in the wealthy enclave of Palm Beach, Florida, the lives of two women—a lonely writer obsessed with the unsolved murder of her mother’s best friend and a panicked wife whose husband has disappeared with their children—collide as the world shutters in the pandemic lockdown of 2020.

A young woman’s life seems perfect until her family goes missing. A writer lives alone with her dog and collects arcane murder statistics. What each of them stands to lose as they sneak around the do-not-enter tape blocking Reef Road beach is exposed by the steady tightening of the cincture encircling them.

In a nod to the true crime that inspired it, Deborah Goodrich Royce’s Reef Road probes unhealed generational scars in a wrenching and original work of fiction. It is both stunning and sexy and, like a bystander surprised by a curtain left open, you won’t be able to look away.]]> 320 Deborah Goodrich Royce 1637584962 Karl 0 3.49 2023
author: Deborah Goodrich Royce
name: Karl
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/24
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]]> 60784636
Except for the occasional catnap or small blackout where she loses track of time, she hasn’t slept in a year.

Isabelle's entire existence now revolves around finding him, but she knows she can’t go on this way forever. In hopes of jarring loose a new witness or buried clue, she agrees to be interviewed by a true-crime podcaster—but his interest in Isabelle's past makes her nervous. His incessant questioning paired with her severe insomnia has brought up uncomfortable memories from her own childhood, making Isabelle start to doubt her recollection of the night of Mason’s disappearance, as well as second-guess who she can trust... including herself. But she is determined to figure out the truth no matter where it leads.]]> 326 Stacy Willingham 1250803853 Karl 0 4.04 2023
author: Stacy Willingham
name: Karl
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/23
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IMHO, it would be great to see what Willingham could do with a straight novel. She is such a good writer, with deep characters and motivations, the crime/suspense stuff started to feel like a crutch, compelling though it may be. Anyway, thanks for the excellent book.
]]> 60587043
They meet the second Tuesday of every month and vote…and then someone dies.

Over the last few years, prominent people—a retired diplomat, beloved basketball coach, the CEO of an empire—have died in a series of fluke accidents and shocking suicides. There’s no apparent connection, no signs of foul play. Behind it all is a powerful group of women, the Sophie Foundation, who meet over wine and cheese to review files of men who behave very, very badly, and then mete out justice.

Jessa Hall jumped at the mysterious, exclusive invitation to this secret club. The invite comes when she’s at her lowest, aching for a way to take back control. After years of fighting and scratching to get ahead, she’s ready for a chance to make the “bad guys� lose. Jessa soon realizes, though, just how far she’s willing to go and how dangerous this game has become.

Once in the group, it’s impossible to get out. She has nowhere to turn except former friend Gabby Fielding who is investigating the mysterious death of her ex-husband. Aligned in their goal to take down the Foundation, Gabby and Jessa need each other but working together doesn’t mean they trust each other…or that either will survive to tell the truth.]]> 403 Darby Kane 0063225565 Karl 0 3.38 2022
author: Darby Kane
name: Karl
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/23
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]]> 30333938
Enter Will Cooper: The attractive, 21-year-old new neighbor with an intriguing passion for slam poetry and a unique sense of humor. Within days of their introduction, Will and Layken form an intense emotional connection, leaving Layken with a renewed sense of hope.

Not long after an intense, heart-stopping first date, they are slammed to the core when a shocking revelation forces their new relationship to a sudden halt. Daily interactions become impossibly painful as they struggle to find a balance between the feelings that pull them together, and the secret that keeps them apart.]]> 354 Colleen Hoover Karl 0 4.06 2012
author: Colleen Hoover
name: Karl
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/21
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]]> 44009968 Grappling with motherhood, economic anxiety, rage, and the limits of language, Want is a fiercely personal novel that vibrates with anger, insight, and love.

Elizabeth is tired. Years after coming to New York to try to build a life, she has found herself with two kids, a husband, two jobs, a PhD―and now they’re filing for bankruptcy. As she tries to balance her dream and the impossibility of striving toward it while her work and home lives feel poised to fall apart, she wakes at ungodly hours to run miles by the icy river, struggling to quiet her thoughts.

When she reaches out to Sasha, her long-lost childhood friend, it feels almost harmless―one of those innocuous ruptures that exist online, in texts. But her timing is uncanny. Sasha is facing a crisis, too, and perhaps after years apart, their shared moments of crux can bring them back into each other’s lives.

In Want, Lynn Steger Strong explores the subtle violences enacted on a certain type of woman when she dares to want things―and all the various violences in which she implicates herself as she tries to survive.]]> 209 Lynn Steger Strong 1250247543 Karl 0 3.33 2020
author: Lynn Steger Strong
name: Karl
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/20
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]]> 59900080 A collection of more than 125 small poems, all of them new, each a thought or observation compressed to its emotional essence--from the former United States Poet Laureate and New York Times bestselling author of Aimless Love.

Whenever I open a book of poems, I tend to flip through looking for the small ones. Just as I might have trust in an abstract expressionist painter if I knew he or she could draw a credible chicken, I trust poets who can go short. --Billy Collins

You can spot a Billy Collins poem immediately. The amiable voice, the light touch, the sudden turn at the end. He puts the 'fun' back in profundity, says poet Alice Fulton. In his own words, his poems tend to start in Kansas and end in Oz.

Now America's favorite poet (The Wall Street Journal) has found a new form for his unique poetic style: the small poem. Here Collins writes about his trademark themes of nature, animals, poetry, mortality, absurdity, and love--all in a handful of lines. Neither haiku nor limerick, the small poem pushes to an extreme poetry's famed power to condense emotional and conceptual meaning. Inspired by the small poetry of writers as diverse as William Carlos Williams, W.S. Merwin, Kay Ryan, and Charles Simic, and written with Collins's recognizable wit and wisdom, the more than 125 new poems of Musical Tables show one of our greatest poets channeling his unique voice into a new phase of his exceptional career.

3:00 AM

Only my hand
is asleep,
but it's a start.]]> 176 Billy Collins 0399589783 Karl 0 3.77 2022
author: Billy Collins
name: Karl
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 6314652 529 Lisa Unger 0307472299 Karl 0 3.62 2008
author: Lisa Unger
name: Karl
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/19
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]]> 60603268 From the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling author of A Thousand Acres: a mystery set in 1850s Gold Rush California, as two young prostitutes—best friends Eliza and Jean—follow a trail of missing girls.

Monterey, 1851. Ever since her husband was killed in a bar fight, Eliza Ripple has been working in a brothel. It seems like a better life, at least at first. The madam, Mrs. Parks, is kind, the men are (relatively) well behaved, and Eliza has attained what few women have: financial security. But when the dead bodies of young women start appearing outside of town, a darkness descends that she can’t resist confronting. Side by side with her friend Jean, and inspired by her reading, especially by Edgar Allan Poe’s detective Dupin, Eliza pieces together an array of clues to try to catch the killer, all the while juggling clients who begin to seem more and more suspicious.

Eliza and Jean are determined not just to survive, but to find their way in a lawless town on the fringes of the Wild West—a bewitching combination of beauty and danger—as what will become the Civil War looms on the horizon. As Mrs. Parks says, “Everyone knows that this is a dangerous business, but between you and me, being a woman is a dangerous business, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise …”]]> 224 Jane Smiley 0525520333 Karl 0 3.03 2022
author: Jane Smiley
name: Karl
average rating: 3.03
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/18
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]]> 54974710 USA Today bestselling author Kaira Rouda.

Kate Nelson had it all. A flourishing company founded with her husband, John; a happy marriage; and a daughter, Ashlyn. The picture-perfect family. Until John left for another woman. Tish is half his age. Ambitious. She’s cultivated a friendship with Ashlyn. Tish believes she’s won.

She’s wrong.

Tish Nelson has it all. Youth, influence, a life of luxury, and a new husband. But the truth is, there’s a lot of baggage. Namely, his first wife—and suspicions of his infidelity. After all, that’s how she got John. Maybe it’s time for a romantic getaway, far from his vindictive ex. If Kate plans on getting John back, Tish is one step ahead of her.

She thinks.

But what happens next is something neither Kate nor Tish saw coming. As best-laid plans come undone, there’s no telling what a woman will do in the name of love—and revenge.]]> 306 Kaira Rouda 1542025958 Karl 0 3.75 2021
author: Kaira Rouda
name: Karl
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/17
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]]> 62328661 In Rough Sleepers, Tracy Kidder shows how one person can make a difference, as he tells the story of Dr. Jim O’Connell, a man who invented ways to create a community of care for a city’s unhoused population, including those who sleep on the streets—the “rough sleepers.�

When Jim O’Connell graduated from Harvard Medical School and was nearing the end of his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, the chief of medicine made a proposal: Would he defer a prestigious fellowship and spend a year helping to create an organization to bring health care to homeless citizens? Jim took the job because he felt he couldn’t refuse. But that year turned into his life’s calling. Tracy Kidder spent five years following Dr. O’Connell and his colleagues as they served their thousands of homeless patients. In this book, we travel with O’Connell as he navigates the city, offering medical care, socks, soup, empathy, humor, and friendship to some of the city’s most vulnerable citizens. He emphasizes a style of medicine in which patients come first, joined with their providers in what he calls “a system of friends.”]]> 320 Tracy Kidder 1984801430 Karl 5 ]]> 4.34 2023
author: Tracy Kidder
name: Karl
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/01/16
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thank you for another fantastic book, tracy.

]]> 60209475 A new work of philosophical suspense.

Penny, an artist, has lived in the same apartment for decades, surrounded by the artifacts and keepsakes of her long life. She is resigned to the mundane rituals of old age, until things start to slip. Before her longtime partner passed away years earlier, provisions were made, unbeknownst to her, for a room in a unique long-term care residence, where Penny finds herself after one too many “incidents.�

Initially, surrounded by peers, conversing, eating, sleeping, looking out at the beautiful woods that surround the house, all is well. She even begins to paint again. But as the days start to blur together, Penny—with a growing sense of unrest and distrust—starts to lose her grip on the passage of time and on her place in the world. Is she succumbing to the subtly destructive effects of aging, or is she an unknowing participant in something more unsettling?

At once compassionate and uncanny, told in spare, hypnotic prose, Iain Reid’s genre-defying third novel explores questions of conformity, art, productivity, relationships, and what, ultimately, it means to grow old.]]> 289 Iain Reid 1982169354 Karl 0 3.76 2022
author: Iain Reid
name: Karl
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/15
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]]> 40401992 J. Courtney Sullivan’s Maine meets the works of Elin Hilderbrand in this delicious summer read involving three strangers, one island, and a season packed with unexpected romance, well-meaning lies, and damaging secrets.

Anthony Puckett was a rising literary star. The son of an uber-famous thriller writer, Anthony’s debut novel spent two years on the bestseller list and won the adoration of critics. But something went very wrong with his second work. Now Anthony’s borrowing an old college’s friend’s crumbling beach house on Block Island in the hopes that solitude will help him get back to the person he used to be.

Joy Sousa owns and runs Block Island’s beloved whoopie pie café. She came to this quiet space eleven years ago, newly divorced and with a young daughter, and built a life for them here. To her customers and friends, Joy is a model of independence, hard-working and happy. And mostly she is. But this summer she’s thrown off balance. A food truck from a famous New York City brand is roving around the island, selling goodies—and threatening her business.

Lu Trusdale is spending the summer on her in-laws� dime, living on Block Island with her two young sons while her surgeon husband commutes to the mainland hospital. When Lu’s second son was born, she and her husband made a deal: he’d work and she’d quit her corporate law job to stay home with the boys. But a few years ago, Lu quietly began working on a private project that has becoming increasingly demanding on her time. Torn between her work and home, she’s beginning to question that deal she made.

Over the twelve short weeks of summer, these three strangers will meet and grow close, will share secrets and bury lies. And as the promise of June turns into the chilly nights of August, the truth will come out, forcing each of them to decide what they value most, and what they are willing to give up to keep it.]]> 416 Meg Mitchell Moore 0062840088 Karl 0 3.77 2019
author: Meg Mitchell Moore
name: Karl
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/14
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]]> 35012246
As a boy, William Goldman claims, he loved to hear his father read the S. Morgenstern classic, The Princess Bride. But as a grown-up he discovered that the boring parts were left out of good old Dad's recitation, and only the "good parts" reached his ears.

Now Goldman does Dad one better. He's reconstructed the "Good Parts Version" to delight wise kids and wide-eyed grownups everywhere.

What's it about? Fencing. Fighting. True Love. Strong Hate. Harsh Revenge. A Few Giants. Lots of Bad Men. Lots of Good Men. Five or Six Beautiful Women. Beasties Monstrous and Gentle. Some Swell Escapes and Captures. Death, Lies, Truth, Miracles, and a Little Sex.

In short, it's about everything.

This edition include fiftyĚýfull-page color illustrations by Michael Manomivibul (taken from the 2013 edition and enlarged), full-color chapter openers, and a beautiful color rendition of the map printed on the endpapers.]]> 392 William Goldman 1328948854 Karl 5 4.43 1973
author: William Goldman
name: Karl
average rating: 4.43
book published: 1973
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/01/13
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]]> 32872 New York Times bestselling author Lisa Unger's second sensational thriller featuring Ridley Jones "bursts from the starting gate and never lets up." (Booklist, starred review) And it "will force you to stay up past your bedtime, just as you do with the books of James Patterson and Michael Connelly." (Richmond Times-Dispatch)

InĚýBeautiful Lies,ĚýRidley Jones stepped off a street corner and into an abyss of violence, deception, and fear. Now, she is just trying to get on with her life when another seemingly mundane act--picking up some prints at a photo lab--sends her on a mission to find a ghost from her past. A figure of the same man appears in too many pictures she's taken in the last year, lurking just far enough away to make identification impossible. But, she is not the only one who wants to know who the man is, and soon finds herself in the middle of a deeper investigation and unsure who to trust.

The only thing Ridley knows for sure is that she has to get to the truth about herself and her past if she is ever going to find her way home.]]> 308 Lisa Unger 0307338460 Karl 0 3.67 2007
author: Lisa Unger
name: Karl
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/12
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]]> 59486245 240 Dave Alvin 1947026917 Karl 0 4.48
author: Dave Alvin
name: Karl
average rating: 4.48
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/11
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]]> 59918843
The small town of Paradise is devastated when a star high-school baseball player is found dead at the bottom of a bluff just a day after winning the team’s biggest game. For Jesse, the loss is doubly difficult—the dead teen was the nephew of his colleague, Suitcase Simpson, and Jesse had been coaching the young shortstop. As he searches for answers about how the boy died and why, he is stonewalled at every turn, and it seems that someone is determined to keep him from digging further.

Jesse suddenly must divide his attention between two cases after the shocking murder of former Paradise police chief, Charlie Farrell. Before his death, Farrell had been looking into a series of scam calls that preyed upon the elderly. But how do these “ghost calls� connect to his death? When threats—and gunshots—appear on Jesse’s own doorstep, the race to find answers is on. Both old and new enemies come into play, and in the end, Jesse and his team must find the common factor between the two deaths in order to prevent a third.]]> 368 Mike Lupica 059354028X Karl 0 4.23 2022
author: Mike Lupica
name: Karl
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/10
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]]> 60254211 240 Lynn Steger Strong 0063135140 Karl 0 3.37 2022
author: Lynn Steger Strong
name: Karl
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/09
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]]> 59040906
A mother questions everything she knows about her son when a local woman is found dead.

Valerie has been forgetting things. Her daughter worries about her being on her own in her big Victorian house—one rumored to be haunted after a tragedy decades earlier—and truth be told, she is a little lonely. With few options, she asks her adult son to move home, but it’s not quite the reunion she hoped for. Hudson is taciturn, moody and frequently gone.

The neighbors already hold a grudge against Hudson, and they aren’t happy about his return. When a young woman is found murdered a block away, suspicion falls on him immediately, without a shred of evidence. While Valerie fights to defend her son, she begins to wonder who she really invited into her home.

It’s a horrible thing for a mother to even think…but is it possible she’s enabled a monster? A monster she is living with, alone?]]> 320 Amber Garza 0778386481 Karl 0 3.55 2022
author: Amber Garza
name: Karl
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/08
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]]> 60095078 A taut, groundbreaking new novel about a writer's relationship with her larger-than-life mother--and about the very nature of writing, memory, and art

Ten months after her mother's death, the narrator of The Hero of This Book takes a trip to London. The city was a favorite of her mother's, and as the narrator wanders the streets, she finds herself reflecting on her mother's life and their relationship. Thoughts of the past meld with questions of the future: Back in New England, the family home is now up for sale, its considerable contents already winnowed.

The woman, a writer, recalls all that made her complicated mother extraordinary--her brilliant wit, her generosity, her unbelievable obstinacy, her sheer will in seizing life despite physical difficulties--and finds herself wondering how her mother had endured. Even though she wants to respect her mother's nearly pathological sense of privacy, the woman must come to terms with whether making a chronicle of this remarkable life constitutes an act of love or betrayal.

The Hero of This Book is a searing examination of grief and renewal, and of a deeply felt relationship between a child and her parents. What begins as a question of filial devotion ultimately becomes a lesson in what it means to write. At once comic and heartbreaking, with prose that delights at every turn, this is a novel of such piercing love and tenderness that we are reminded that art is what remains when all else falls away.]]> 192 Elizabeth McCracken 0062971271 Karl 0 3.72 2022
author: Elizabeth McCracken
name: Karl
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/07
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]]> 60305888 I, Maggie Banks, solemnly swear to uphold the rules of Cobblestone Books.

If only, I, Maggie Banks, believed in following the rules.

When Maggie Banks arrives in Bell River to run her best friend's struggling bookstore, she expects to sell bestsellers to her small-town clientele. But running a bookstore in a town with a famously bookish history isn't easy. Bell River's literary society insists on keeping the bookstore stuck in the past, and Maggie is banned from selling anything written this century. So, when a series of mishaps suddenly tip the bookstore toward ruin, Maggie will have to get creative to keep the shop afloat.

And in Maggie's world, book rules are made to be broken.

To help save the store, Maggie starts an underground book club, running a series of events celebrating the books readers actually love. But keeping the club quiet, selling forbidden books, and dodging the literary society is nearly impossible. Especially when Maggie unearths a town secret that could upend everything.

Maggie will have to decide what's more important: the books that formed a small town's history, or the stories poised to change it all.]]> 336 Shauna Robinson Karl 0 3.74 2022
author: Shauna Robinson
name: Karl
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/06
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]]> 59808188 My Dark Vanessa meets The Queen's Gambit in this new novel of suspense about the bonds of family, the limits of talent, the risks of ambition, and the rewards of revenge.

When former piano prodigy Saskia Kreis returns home to Milwaukee after her mother's unexpected death, she expects to inherit the family estate, the Elf House. But with the discovery that her mother's will bequeathed the Elf House to a man that Saskia shares a complicated history with, she is forced to reexamine her own past--and the romantic relationship that changed the course of her life--for answers. Can she find a way to claim her heritage while keeping her secrets buried, or will the fallout from digging too deep destroy her?

Set against a post #MeToo landscape, The Ingenue delves into mother-daughter relationships, the expectations of talent, the stories we tell ourselves, and what happens when the things that once made you special are taken from you. Moving between Saskia's childhood and the present day, this dark, contemporary fairy tale pulses with desire, longing, and uncertainty, as it builds to its spectacular, shocking climax.]]> 320 Rachel Kapelke-Dale 1250834562 Karl 0 3.42 2022
author: Rachel Kapelke-Dale
name: Karl
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/05
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]]> 58085227
Communism had failed to deliver the promised utopia. One’s “biography”—class status and other associations long in the past—put strict boundaries around one’s individual future. When Lea’s parents spoke of relatives going to “university� or “graduating,� they were speaking of grave secrets Lea struggled to unveil. And when the early �90s saw Albania and other Balkan countries exuberantly begin a transition to the “free market,� Western ideals of freedom delivered chaos: a dystopia of pyramid schemes, organized crime, and sex trafficking.

With her elegant, intellectual, French-speaking grandmother; her radical-chic father; and her staunchly anti-socialist, Thatcherite mother to guide her through these disorienting times, Lea had a political education of the most colorful sort—here recounted with outstanding literary talent. Now one of the world’s most dynamic young political thinkers and a prominent leftist voice in the United Kingdom, Lea offers a fresh and invigorating perspective on the relation between the personal and the political, between values and identity, posing urgent questions about the cost of freedom.]]> 288 Lea Ypi 0393867730 Karl 5 4.29 2021
author: Lea Ypi
name: Karl
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2021
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/01/04
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]]> 59817685 USA TODAY bestselling author Kimberly Belle returns with a deeply addictive thriller exploring the dark side of the digital world when a mommy-blogger’s assistant goes missing.

When Alex first began posting unscripted family moments and motivational messages online, she had no intention of becoming an influencer. Overnight it seemed she’d amassed a huge following, and her hobby became a full-time job—one that was impossible to manage without her sharp-as-a-tack personal assistant, AC.

But all the good-will of her followers turns toxic when one controversial post goes viral in the worst possible way. Alex reaches out to AC for damage control, but her assistant has gone silent. This young woman Alex trusted with all her secrets, who had access to her personal information and front row seats to the pressure points in her marriage and family life, is now missing and the police are looking to Alex and her husband for answers. As Alex digs into AC’s identity � and a woman is found murdered � she’ll find the greatest threat isn’t online, but in her own living room.

Written in alternating perspectives between Alex, her husband, and the mysterious AC, this juicy cat and mouse story will keep you guessing till the very end.]]> 352 Kimberly Belle 0778333256 Karl 0 3.50 2022
author: Kimberly Belle
name: Karl
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/03
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]]> 59808186
A wealthy family shrouded in scandal; a detective tasked with solving an impossible cold case; and a woman with a dark past collide in Hannah Morrissey's stunning new Black Harbor mystery, The Widowmaker.

Ever since business mogul Clive Reynolds disappeared twenty years ago, the name "Reynolds" has become synonymous with "murder" and "mystery." And now, lured by a cryptic note, down-on-her-luck photographer Morgan Mori returns home to Black Harbor and into the web of their family secrets and double lives. The same night she photographs the Reynolds holiday get-together, Morgan becomes witness to a homicide of a cop that triggers the discovery of a long-buried clue.

This could finally be the thing to crack open the chilling cold case, and Investigator Ryan Hudson has a chance to prove himself as lead detective. If only he could stop letting his need to solve his partner's recent murder distract him. But as Morgan exposes her own dark demons, could her sordid history be the key to unlocking more than one mystery?]]> 304 Hannah Morrissey 1250795974 Karl 0 3.63 2022
author: Hannah Morrissey
name: Karl
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/02
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]]> 61065813 Bono--artist, activist, and the lead singer of Irish rock band U2--has written a memoir: honest and irreverent, intimate and profound, Surrender is the story of the remarkable life he's lived, the challenges he's faced, and the friends and family who have shaped and sustained him.

"When I started to write this book, I was hoping to draw in detail what I'd previously only sketched in songs. The people, places, and possibilities in my life. Surrender is a word freighted with meaning for me. Growing up in Ireland in the seventies with my fists up (musically speaking), it was not a natural concept. A word I only circled until I gathered my thoughts for the book. I am still grappling with this most humbling of commands. In the band, in my marriage, in my faith, in my life as an activist. Surrender is the story of one pilgrim's lack of progress ... With a fair amount of fun along the way." --Bono

As one of the music world's most iconic artists and the cofounder of the organizations ONE and (RED), Bono's career has been written about extensively. But in Surrender, it's Bono who picks up the pen, writing for the first time about his remarkable life and those he has shared it with. In his unique voice, Bono takes us from his early days growing up in Dublin, including the sudden loss of his mother when he was fourteen, to U2's unlikely journey to become one of the world's most influential rock bands, to his more than twenty years of activism dedicated to the fight against AIDS and extreme poverty. Writing with candor, self-reflection, and humor, Bono opens the aperture on his life--and the family, friends, and faith that have sustained, challenged, and shaped him.

Surrender's subtitle, 40 Songs, One Story, is a nod to the book's forty chapters, which are each named after a U2 song. Bono has also created forty original drawings for Surrender, which appear throughout the book.]]> 564 Bono 0525521046 Karl 5 4.19 2022
author: Bono
name: Karl
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2022
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/01/01
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]]> 56790170 For those who could read between the lines, the censored news out of China was terrifying. But the president insisted there was nothing to worry about.

Fortunately, we are still a nation of skeptics. Fortunately, there are those among us who study pandemics and are willing to look unflinchingly at worst-case scenarios. Michael Lewis’s taut and brilliant nonfiction thriller pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration to the outbreak of COVID-19.

The characters you will meet in these pages are as fascinating as they are unexpected. A thirteen-year-old girl’s science project on transmission of an airborne pathogen develops into a very grown-up model of disease control. A local public-health officer uses her worm’s-eye view to see what the CDC misses, and reveals great truths about American society. A secret team of dissenting doctors, nicknamed the Wolverines, has everything necessary to fight the pandemic: brilliant backgrounds, world-class labs, prior experience with the pandemic scares of bird flu and swine flu…everything, that is, except official permission to implement their work.

Michael Lewis is not shy about calling these people heroes for their refusal to follow directives that they know to be based on misinformation and bad science. Even the internet, as crucial as it is to their exchange of ideas, poses a risk to them. They never know for sure who else might be listening in.]]> 304 Michael Lewis 0393881555 Karl 5 4.25 2021
author: Michael Lewis
name: Karl
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2021
rating: 5
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date added: 2022/12/31
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]]> 60196172
After nearly dying of a gunshot wound, Jonathan Stride has been on leave from the Duluth Police for more than a year. When his partner, Maggie Bei, gets called about a suspicious abduction involving a local lawyer, she tells Stride it's time for him to come back.

Attorney Gavin Webster says he paid $100,000 in ransom money to the men who kidnapped his wife. Now they've disappeared with the cash, and she's still missing. Gavin claims to be desperate to find her--but Stride discovers that the lawyer had plenty of motive to be the mastermind behind the crime.

Even as Stride digs for the truth about Gavin Webster and his wife, he must also deal with a crisis in his own marriage.

His wife, Serena, is struggling after the death of her mother, the abusive woman she hadn't seen in twenty-five years. When she loses control at a crime scene and draws her gun on a fellow cop, Serena finds herself kicked off the Webster case. Alone at her desk, she begins hunting through old police files and starts to ask questions about a mother's death that was written off as suicide. That death haunts Serena like an echo of her own childhood--but her obsession with it takes a terrible toll.

As Serena shuts him out of her despair, and his own investigation grows increasingly tangled, Stride wonders whether going back to his detective work was the right decision. But all he can do is keep moving forward. Because Stride fears the Webster kidnapping may be only one part of a horrific murder conspiracy.

And it's not over yet.]]> 350 Brian Freeman 1094082341 Karl 5 4.29 2022
author: Brian Freeman
name: Karl
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2022
rating: 5
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date added: 2022/12/22
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]]> 60177373 Legendary storyteller Stephen King goes deep into the well of his imagination in this spellbinding novel about a seventeen-year-old boy who inherits the keys to a parallel world where good and evil are at war, and the stakes could not be higher—for their world or ours.

Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was ten, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself—and his dad. Then, when Charlie is seventeen, he meets Howard Bowditch, a recluse with a big dog in a big house at the top of a big hill. In the backyard is a locked shed from which strange sounds emerge, as if some creature is trying to escape. When Mr. Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie the house, a massive amount of gold, a cassette tape telling a story that is impossible to believe, and a responsibility far too massive for a boy to shoulder.

Because within the shed is a portal to another world—one whose denizens are in peril and whose monstrous leaders may destroy their own world, and ours. In this parallel universe, where two moons race across the sky, and the grand towers of a sprawling palace pierce the clouds, there are exiled princesses and princes who suffer horrific punishments; there are dungeons; there are games in which men and women must fight each other to the death for the amusement of the “Fair One.� And there is a magic sundial that can turn back time.

A story as old as myth, and as startling and iconic as the rest of King’s work, Fairy Tale is about an ordinary guy forced into the hero’s role by circumstance, and it is both spectacularly suspenseful and satisfying.]]> 607 Stephen King 1668002175 Karl 5 4.05 2022
author: Stephen King
name: Karl
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2022
rating: 5
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date added: 2022/11/26
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]]> 60165418 Dinosaurs is both sharp-edged and tender, an emotionally moving, intellectually resonant novel that asks, In the shadow of existential threat, where does hope live?]]> 230 Lydia Millet 1324021462 Karl 5 3.85 2022
author: Lydia Millet
name: Karl
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2022
rating: 5
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date added: 2022/11/26
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]]> 57693648 The debut adult novel by the bestselling and award-winning YA author Nina LaCour, following two women on a star-crossed journey toward each other

When Sara Foster runs away from home at sixteen, she leaves behind not only the losses that have shattered her world but the girl she once was, capable of trust and intimacy. Years later, in Los Angeles, she is a sought-after bartender, renowned as much for her brilliant cocktails as for the mystery that clings to her. Across the city, Emilie Dubois is in a holding pattern. In her seventh year and fifth major as an undergraduate, she yearns for the beauty and community her Creole grandparents cultivated but is unable to commit. On a whim, she takes a job arranging flowers at the glamorous restaurant Yerba Buena and embarks on an affair with the married owner.

When Sara catches sight of Emilie one morning at Yerba Buena, their connection is immediate. But the damage both women carry, and the choices they have made, pulls them apart again and again. When Sara's old life catches up to her, upending everything she thought she wanted just as Emilie has finally gained her own sense of purpose, they must decide if their love is more powerful than their pasts.

At once exquisite and expansive, astonishing in its humanity and heart, Yerba Buena is a love story for our time and a propulsive journey through the lives of two women finding their way in the world.]]> 304 Nina LaCour 1250810469 Karl 5 3.85 2022
author: Nina LaCour
name: Karl
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2022
rating: 5
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date added: 2022/11/13
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]]> 58456850 Donald Knuth Karl 5 4.20
author: Donald Knuth
name: Karl
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 5
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date added: 2022/09/08
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]]> 59097080
Brian and Margot Dunne live year-round in Seaside, just steps away from the bustling boardwalk, with their daughters Liz and Evy. The Dunnes run a real estate company, making their living by quickly turning over rental houses for tourists. But the family’s future becomes precarious when Brian develops a brain tumor, transforming into an erratic version of himself. Amidst the chaos and new caretaking responsibilities, Liz still seeks out summer adventure and flirting with a guy she should know better than to pursue. Her younger sister Evy works in a candy shop, falls in love with her friend Olivia, and secretly adopts the persona of a middle-aged mom in an online support group, where she discovers her own mother’s vulnerable confessions. Meanwhile, Margot faces an impossible choice driven by grief, impulse, and the ways that small-town life has shaped her. Falling apart is not an option, but she can always pack up and leave the beach behind.

“An emotional family drama...with endearing characters and deep insights� ( Glamour ), The Shore is a heartbreaking yet ultimately uplifting novel infused with humor about finding sisterhood, friendship, and love in a time of crisis. This big-hearted novel examines the grit and hustle of running a small business in a tourist town, the ways we connect with strangers when our families can’t give us everything we need, and the comfort found in embracing the pleasures of youth while coping with unimaginable loss.]]> 294 Katie Runde 198218017X Karl 5 3.46 2022
author: Katie Runde
name: Karl
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2022
rating: 5
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date added: 2022/08/01
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]]> 59575980
“How many lives can you imagine yourself living?�

So Hannah Larson wonders. When a close relative falls ill, Hannah and her young son, Nicky, decide to join him for the summer at Ashton Hall, a historic manor house outside Cambridge, England. Hannah gave up her academic career to raise her beloved child, who is neurodivergent and experiences the world differently from others, and she’s grateful to escape her life in New York City, where her marriage has been upended by a devastating betrayal.

Soon after their arrival, ever-curious Nicky discovers the skeletal remains of a woman in a forgotten, walled-off wing of the manor, and Hannah is pulled into an all-consuming quest for answers. Working from clues in centuries-old ledgers and the personal papers of the long-departed family, Hannah begins to re-create the Ashton Hall of the Elizabethan era in all its color and conflict. As the secrets of her own life begin to unravel, and the rewards and complications of being Nicky’s mother come into focus, Hannah realizes that Ashton Hall’s women before her had lives not so different from her own. She confronts what women throughout history have had to do to control their own destinies and protect their children.

Rich with passion, strength, and ferocity across the ages, Ashton Hall is a novel that reveals how the most profound hauntings are within ourselves.]]> 416 Lauren Belfer 0593359496 Karl 5 3.63 2022
author: Lauren Belfer
name: Karl
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2022
rating: 5
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date added: 2022/07/20
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The cover makes it look like a conventional gothic, but in my reading experience, it's anything but. Set entirely in the present day, with our protagonist researching the past. (And, only one protogonist - no multiple perspectives, no point of view switches. Rather a relief.) Children who are not merely angelic cut-outs. Work and family balances. Such a wonderful and complex novel ... thank you, Lauren Belfer!
]]> 57771234
A Latina hero in the elite macho tech world of Silicon Valley, privately, she was hanging by a thread. Deep in the throes of alcoholism, hiding her sexuality from her family, and repressing the abuse she’d suffered as a child, she started climbing. Something about the brute force required for the ascent� the risk and spirit and sheer size of the mountains and death’s close proximity―woke her up. She then took her biggest pain as a survivor to the biggest mountain: Everest.

“The Mother of the World,� as it’s known in Nepal, allows few to reach her summit, but Silvia didn’t go alone. She gathered a group of young female survivors and led them to base camp alongside her. It was never easy. At times hair-raising, nerve-racking, and always challenging, Silvia remembers the acute anxiety of leading a group of novice climbers to Everest’s base, all the while coping with her own nerves of summiting. But, there were also moments of peace, joy, and healing with the strength of her fellow survivors and community propelling her forward.

In the Shadow of the Mountain is a remarkable story of heroism, one which awakens in all of us a lust for adventure, an appetite for risk, and faith in our own resilience.]]> 320 Silvia Vasquez-Lavado 1250776740 Karl 5 4.22 2022
author: Silvia Vasquez-Lavado
name: Karl
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2022
rating: 5
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date added: 2022/06/24
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]]> 58690857 A beautifully written, witty memoir that is also an immersive exploration of classical music--its power, its meanings, and what it can teach us about ourselves--from the MacArthur Genius Grant-winning pianist

"Jeremy Denk has written a love letter to the music, and especially to the music teachers, in his life."--Conrad Tao, pianist and composer

In Every Good Boy Does Fine, renowned pianist Jeremy Denk traces an implausible journey. His life is already a little tough as a precocious, temperamental six-year-old piano prodigy in New Jersey, and then a family meltdown forces a move to New Mexico. There, Denk must please a new taskmaster, an embittered but devoted professor, while navigating junior high school. At sixteen he escapes to college in Ohio, only to encounter a bewildering new cast of music teachers, both kind and cruel. After many humiliations and a few triumphs, he ultimately finds his way as a world-touring pianist, a MacArthur "Genius," and a frequent performer at Carnegie Hall.

Many classical music memoirs focus on famous musicians and professional accomplishments, but this book focuses on the everyday: neighborhood teacher, high school orchestra, local conductor. There are few writers capable of so deeply illuminating the trials of artistic practice--hours of daily repetition, mystifying advice, pressure from parents and teachers. But under all this struggle is a love letter to the act of teaching.

In lively, endlessly imaginative prose, Denk dives deeply into the pieces and composers that have shaped him--Bach, Mozart, and Brahms, among others--and offers lessons on melody, harmony, and rhythm. How do melodies work? Why is harmony such a mystery to most people? Why are teachers so obsessed with the metronome?

In Every Good Boy Does Fine, Denk shares the most meaningful lessons of his life, and tries to repay a debt to his teachers. He also reminds us that we must never stop asking questions about music and its purposes: consolation, an armor against disillusionment, pure pleasure, a diversion, a refuge, and a vehicle for empathy.]]> 368 Jeremy Denk 0812995988 Karl 5 4.01 2022
author: Jeremy Denk
name: Karl
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2022
rating: 5
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date added: 2022/04/25
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]]> 57693250 From acclaimed bestselling author James Runcie, a meditation on grief and music, told through the story of Bach's writing of the St. Matthew Passion.

In 1727, Stefan Silbermann is a grief-stricken thirteen-year-old, struggling with the death of his mother and his removal to a school in distant Leipzig. Despite his father's insistence that he try not to think of his mother too much, Stefan is haunted by her absence, and, to make matters worse, he's bullied by his new classmates. But when the school's cantor, Johann Sebastian Bach, takes notice of his new pupil's beautiful singing voice and draws him from the choir to be a soloist, Stefan's life is permanently changed.


Over the course of the next several months, and under Bach's careful tutelage, Stefan's musical skill progresses, and he is allowed to work as a copyist for Bach's many musical works. But mainly, drawn into Bach's family life and away from the cruelty in the dorms and the lonely hours of his mourning, Stefan begins to feel at home. When another tragedy strikes, this time in the Bach family, Stefan bears witness to the depths of grief, the horrors of death, the solace of religion, and the beauty that can spring from even the most profound losses.


Joyous, revelatory, and deeply moving, The Great Passion is an imaginative tour de force that tells the story of what it was like to sing, play, and hear Bach's music for the very first time.]]> 272 James Runcie Karl 5 3.90 2022
author: James Runcie
name: Karl
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2022
rating: 5
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date added: 2022/04/21
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]]> 58132555 Only One of Them Gets Out Alive

On a cold, misty Sunday night, two women are alone in the offices of fashion conglomerate Claudine de Martineau International. One is the company's human resources director. Impeccably dressed and perfectly coiffed, she sits at her desk and stares somberly out the window. Down the hall, her colleague, one of the company's lawyers, is buried under a pile of paperwork, frantically rushing to finish.

Leaving at the same time, the two women, each preoccupied by her own thoughts, enter the elevator that will take them down from the 30th floor.

When they arrive at the lobby, one of the women is dead. Was it murder or suicide?

An incredibly original novel that turns the office thriller on its head, The Cage is a wild ride that begins with a bang and picks up speed as it races to its dramatic end.]]> 352 Bonnie Kistler 0063089149 Karl 5 3.53 2022
author: Bonnie Kistler
name: Karl
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2022
rating: 5
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date added: 2022/04/21
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]]> 54335133 An electrifying novel about the meteoric rise of an iconic interracial rock duo in the 1970s, their sensational breakup, and the dark secrets unearthed when they try to reunite decades later for one last tour.

Opal is a fiercely independent young woman pushing against the grain in her style and attitude, Afro-punk before that term existed. Coming of age in Detroit, she can’t imagine settling for a 9-to-5 job—despite her unusual looks, Opal believes she can be a star. So when the aspiring British singer/songwriter Neville Charles discovers her at a bar’s amateur night, she takes him up on his offer to make rock music together for the fledgling Rivington Records.

In early seventies New York City, just as she’s finding her niche as part of a flamboyant and funky creative scene, a rival band signed to her label brandishes a Confederate flag at a promotional concert. Opal’s bold protest and the violence that ensues set off a chain of events that will not only change the lives of those she loves, but also be a deadly reminder that repercussions are always harsher for women, especially black women, who dare to speak their truth.

Decades later, as Opal considers a 2016 reunion with Nev, music journalist S. Sunny Shelton seizes the chance to curate an oral history about her idols. Sunny thought she knew most of the stories leading up to the cult duo’s most politicized chapter. But as her interviews dig deeper, a nasty new allegation from an unexpected source threatens to blow up everything.

Provocative and chilling, The Final Revival of Opal & Nev features a backup chorus of unforgettable voices, a heroine the likes of which we’ve not seen in storytelling, and a daring structure, and introduces a bold new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> Dawnie Walton 1797118501 Karl 5 3.91 2021
author: Dawnie Walton
name: Karl
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2021
rating: 5
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date added: 2022/04/18
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]]> 698
Two families, who would otherwise never have come together, meet by chance at the Baltimore airport—the Donaldsons, a very American couple, and the Yazdans, Maryam’s fully assimilated son and his attractive Iranian American wife. Each couple is awaiting the arrival of an adopted infant daughter from Korea. After the babies from distant Asia are delivered, Bitsy Donaldson impulsively invites the Yazdans to celebrate with an “arrival party,� an event that is repeated every year as the two families become more deeply intertwined.

Even independent-minded Maryam is drawn in. But only up to a point. When she finds herself being courted by one of the Donaldson clan, a good-hearted man of her vintage, recently widowed and still recovering from his wife’s death, suddenly all the values she cherishes—her traditions, her privacy, her otherness—are threatened. Somehow this big American takes up so much space that the orderly boundaries of her life feel invaded.

A luminous novel brimming with subtle, funny, and tender observations that cast a penetrating light on the American way as seen from two perspectives, those who are born here and those who are still struggling to fit in.]]> 277 Anne Tyler 0307263940 Karl 5 3.59 2006
author: Anne Tyler
name: Karl
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2006
rating: 5
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date added: 2022/02/22
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]]> 54981009
As Hannah’s increasingly desperate calls to Owen go unanswered, as the FBI arrests Owen’s boss, as a U.S. marshal and federal agents arrive at her Sausalito home unannounced, Hannah quickly realizes her husband isn’t who he said he was. Bailey just may hold the key to figuring out Owen’s true identity—and why he really disappeared.]]> 307 Laura Dave 1501171348 Karl 5 3.78 2021
author: Laura Dave
name: Karl
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2021
rating: 5
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date added: 2022/02/13
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]]> 54997060 Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara AlegrĂ­a Hudes tells her lyrical story of coming of age against the backdrop of an ailing Philadelphia barrio, with her sprawling idiosyncratic, love-and-trouble-filled Puerto Rican family as a collective muse.

Quiara AlegrĂ­a Hudes was the sharp-eyed girl on the stairs while her family danced in her grandmother's tight North Philly kitchen. She was awed by her aunts and uncles and cousins, but haunted by the secrets of the family and the unspoken, untold stories of the barrio--even as she tried to find her own voice in the sea of language around her, written and spoken, English and Spanish, bodies and books, Western art and sacred altars. Her family became her private pantheon, a gathering circle of powerful orisha-like women with tragic real-world wounds, and she vowed to tell their stories--but first she'd have to get off the stairs and join the dance. She'd have to find her language.

Weaving together Hudes's love of books with the stories of her family, the lessons of North Philly with those of Yale, this is an inspired exploration of home, memory, and belonging--narrated by an obsessed girl who fought to become an artist so she could capture the world she loved in all its wild and delicate beauty.]]> 336 Quiara AlegrĂ­a Hudes 0399590048 Karl 5 4.19 2021
author: Quiara AlegrĂ­a Hudes
name: Karl
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2021
rating: 5
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date added: 2022/02/08
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]]> 1071726
It is this extraordinary metamorphosis, magical and terrifying, that these beautifully written pages record.]]> 191 J.A. Baker 1590171330 Karl 5 4.15 1967
author: J.A. Baker
name: Karl
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1967
rating: 5
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date added: 2022/02/03
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]]> 55315486 From journalist Abe Streep, the story of coming of age on a reservation in the American West and a team uniting a community

March 11, 2017, was a night to remember. On that night, in front of the hopeful eyes of thousands of friends, family members, and fans, the Arlee Warriors would finally bring the high school basketball state championship title home to Montana’s Flathead Indian Reservation. The game would become the stuff of legend, with the boys revered as local heroes. The team’s place in history was now cemented, but for starters Will Mesteth, Jr. and Phillip Malatare, life would keep moving on―senior year was only just beginning.

In Brothers on Three, we follow Phil and Will, along with their teammates, coaches, and families, as they balance the pressures of adolescence, shoulder the dreams of their community, and chart their own individual courses for the future. And in doing so, a picture emerges of modern Indigenous life and the challenges of growing up on a reservation in contemporary America.

Brothers on Three is not simply a story about high school basketball, about state championships and a winning team. It is a book about community, and it is about boys on the cusp of adulthood, finding their way through the intersecting worlds they inhabit and forging their own paths to personhood.]]> 368 Abe Streep 1250210682 Karl 5 3.86 2021
author: Abe Streep
name: Karl
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2021
rating: 5
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date added: 2022/02/03
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]]>