Staff Reading Picks

Did I Ever Tell You? reads like a novel but is an unforgettable true story.

Genevieve (Gwen) Kingston was just eleven years old when her mother passed away, leaving behind a chest filled with gifts and letters to celebrate the milestones of Gwen's life and each of her birthdays until age thirty.

When Did I Ever Tell You? opens, just three packages remain: engagement, marriage, and first baby. Tracing Gwen's coming-of-age, the book reveals a treasure hunt, with each gift and letter unveiling more about her mother, her family, and--ultimately--herself.

Aa successful art dealer confesses the story of his rise to a former classmate in an airport bar--a story that begins with his rescue and resuscitation of a drowning man with whom he becomes inextricably and disturbingly linked.

Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a vacation: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter, and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they've rented for the week. The houseowners, Ruth and G. H., arrive in the middle of the night in a panic. They say a sudden blackout has swept the city: the TV and internet are down, and no cell phone service. Is the vacation home, isolated from civilization, a safe place for their families? And are they safe from one other?

As German tanks roll across the border and into Paris, an American heiress joins the resistance and becomes known as the Postmistress because she delivers information to those in hiding and uses her charms and skill to house the hunted and deliver them to safety.

In the final year of the nineteenth century, Peter Winceworth is toiling away at the letter S for Swansby's multivolume Encyclopaedic Dictionary. But his disaffection with his colleagues compels him to assert some individual purpose and artistic freedom, and he begins inserting unauthorized, fictitious entries. In the present day, Mallory, the publisher's young intern, starts to uncover these mountweazels in the process of digitization and through them senses their creator's motivations, hopes, and desires.

Called home to care for her grandmother after a fall, Jess, a journalist, discovers a book chronicling the police investigation into an old unsolved murder that has a shocking connection to her family.

A sweeping novel set in Singapore during the years leading up to its independence from British colonial powers, about one young boy from a rural fishing family and the love story that will shape his life and complicate the fate of his larger community.

In 1983, deep in New Mexico's Gila National Forest, the bodies of a young woman and two children were found. Who were they? How did they get there?

Lucas Goodgame lives in Majestic, Pennsylvania, a quaint suburb that has been torn apart by a recent tragedy. Everyone in Majestic sees Lucas as a hero--everyone, that is, except Lucas himself. Insisting that his deceased wife, Darcy, visits him every night in the form of an angel, Lucas spends his time writing letters to his former Jungian analyst, Karl.

After his son is convicted of capital murder, Vietnam War veteran Jeremiah Fitzjurls takes over the care of his granddaughter, Joanna, raising her with as much warmth as can be found in an Ozark junkyard outfitted to be an armory. He teaches her how to shoot and fight, but there is not enough training in the world to protect her when the dreaded Ledfords, notorious meth dealers and fanatical white supremacists, come to collect on Joanna as payment for a long-overdue blood debt.