Staff Reading Picks

Petty’s innovative, genre-busting debut opens with a vignette set in Barcelona, in which an unnamed narrator addresses another unnamed character, telling her she’s sorry for standing her up. From there, the novel rockets through metafictional sections—a script for a horror movie, a first-person narrative, a set of revisions for a college essay, and more—which initially seem disparate but are inevitably connected. In the first substantive segment, a young lacrosse player named Nick Brothers explains what happened to him and his team in 1999.

In the late 1930s, civil war gripped Spain. General Franco and his Fascists overthrew the government; hundreds of thousands fled over the mountains to the French border. Roser, a pregnant young widow, finds her life intertwined with that of Victor Dalmau, an army doctor and the brother of her deceased love. To survive, the two must unite in a marriage neither of them wants; Sponsored by poet Pablo Neruda, they embark on the SS Winnipeg along with 2,200 other refugees in search of a new life.

A group of strangers who live near each other in London become fast friends after writing their deepest secrets in a shared notebook.Julian Jessop, a septuagenarian artist, is bone-crushingly lonely when he starts "The Authenticity Project"as he titles a slim green notebookand begins its first handwritten entry questioning how well people know each other in his tiny corner of London.

In this otherworldly novel, a cantankerous surgeon in a remote village in India attempts to revive a dead family.A surgeon is about to leave his clinic for the night when a teacher, his pregnant wife, and their boy make a special request. They are undead, recently murdered by attackers, but an angel has promised them that if the surgeon repairs their injuries by dawn, they'll be returned to the land of the living.

Tracing the line between wildlife and the law, the acclaimed science writer examines how humans interact with the natural world. “What is the proper course when wild animals break laws intended for people?” So asks Roach in a book that, in the author’s characteristic style, ranges widely, from wild animal attacks to the inherent dangers of certain plants to ways in which we have treated animals that most humans consider vermin.

Cast adrift in the Depression-era West after the last of her relatives pass away, Zorrie survives by working at a radium processing plant before finding love, community and unexpected loss upon returning to her small Indiana hometown.This book was a finalist for the National Book Award.

There are multiple books, fiction and nonfiction, about the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, but stories of what happened to the detainees after being released from the camps are less frequently told. Hirahara changes that with this deeply researched historical mystery about a Japanese family from California who were "resettled" in Chicago in 1944 after spending more than two years at the Manzanar internment camp.

Who knows you better: you or your best friend? Close friends Fiona and Jane—or Jane and Fiona—are constant presences in each other’s lives, sometimes from afar, sometimes in each other’s faces. From childhood through early adulthood, the two Taiwanese American young women scramble though the obstacle courses of their lives, each negotiating complicated family circumstances and carrying the weight of secrets kept from them and secrets they keep from others.

The American alpine skier and former Olympian remembers the struggles and triumphs that marked her storied career. Vonn was just 2 1/2 when her father first put her on skis. She tried other sports, but she discovered that no other activity came close to giving her the “speed, the power, the adrenaline [rush]” she adored. A hometown encounter with Olympic ski champion Picabo Street inspired Vonn deeply enough that by age 9 she declared her intent to ski in the 2002 Olympics.