Staff Reading Picks

Presents a collection of essays about humanity's relationship with nature, exploring subjects ranging from captivity and immigration to ostrich farming and the migrations of songbirds from the Empire State Building.

When a little girl disappears a few weeks before Christmas, suspicion falls on the last person she was seen with: the teenage loner who gave her a ride home after school. Complicating the matter is the fact that detectives can hardly get a word out of him. When a second child disappears and a police officer is found dead, tensions in the small town of Strömstad reach an all-time high.

New York, 1910: Vera Garland is set on making her mark in a man's world of serious journalism. After the world-famous Hope Diamond is bought by Pierre Cartier, Vera begins investigating rumors about his scheme to manipulate its value. Appealing to a young Russian jeweler for help, Vera is unprepared when she gets caught up in his deceptions and finds herself at risk of losing all she has worked so hard to achieve.

In 1941, the first Neumann family member was taken by the Nazis, arrested in German-occupied Czechoslovakia for bathing in a stretch of river forbidden to Jews. He was transported to Auschwitz. Eighteen days later his prisoner number was entered into the morgue book. Of thirty-four Neumann family members, twenty-five were murdered by the Nazis. One of the survivors was Hans Neumann, who, to escape the German death net, traveled to Berlin and hid in plain sight under the Gestapo's eyes.

Its New Years Eve 1982, and Oona Lockhart has her whole life before her. At the stroke of midnight she will turn nineteen, and the year ahead promises to be one of consequence. Should she go to London to study economics, or remain at home in Brooklyn to pursue her passion for music and be with her boyfriend? As the countdown to the New Year begins, Oona faints and awakens thirty-two years in the future in her fifty-one-year-old body. Greeted by a friendly stranger in a beautiful house shes told is her own, Oona learns that with each passing year she will leap to another age at random.

It's February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. While the town's men embrace the coming prosperity, its women intimately know and fear the violence that always seems to follow. In the early hours of the morning after Valentine's Day, fourteen-year-old Gloria Ram©Ưrez appears on the front porch of Mary Rose Whitehead's ranch house, broken and barely alive, after a vicious attack in a nearby oil field. This act of brutality is tried in the churches and barrooms of Odessa before it can reach a court of law.

In this compelling debut, Fleischmann uses remote locations and a barely remembered time as a frame for a story centered on obsession. In 1941, Elizabeth Pfautz still dreams of her identical twin sister, Jacqueline, who disappeared 20 years earlier from their hometown in Pennsylvania when the girls were 11 years old. Now Elizabeth endures a marriage gone sour in isolated Tanacross, Alaska, where her husband, John, teaches for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and she homeschools their precocious daughter, Margaret.

Mia Graydon's life looks picket-fence perfect; she has the house, the husband, and dreams of starting a family. Their relocation to small-town Pennsylvania comes with the usual challenges--finding a new job, new friends, new furniture--but the move is nothing the couple can't handle. That is, until Mia finally meets the stranger she has been dreaming about for a decade. And here's the catch: He's been dreaming of her, too. Now Mia must navigate the tangled web that fate has spun her and, with the help ofthe man of her dreams, go in search of answers.

When most people think about street addresses, if they think of them at all, it is in their capacity to ensure that the postman can deliver mail or a traveler won't get lost. But street addresses were not invented to help you find your way; they were created to find you. In many parts of the world, your address can reveal your race and class.

Three Hours in Paris is the story of Kate Rees, the young American markswoman who has been recruited by British intelligence to drop into Paris on the dangerous business of trying to assassinate the Fuhrer. A country girl from rural Oregon - a grieving widow with no spy training but a vendetta and a lot of gumption - now has the state of the entire war in her hands. When the hit goes badly wrong, Kate is on the run for her life - all the time wrestling with the suspicion that the whole operation was a set-up.