2024 NATIONAL MEDAL
for Museum and Library Service Finalist

Adults

The Therapist: A Novel

When Alice and Leo move into a newly renovated house in The Circle, a gated community of exclusive houses, it is everything they've dreamed of. But appearances can be deceptive... As Alice is getting to know her neighbours, she discovers a devastating secret about her new home, and begins to feel a strong connection with Nina, the therapist who lived there before. Alice becomes obsessed with trying to piece together what happened two years before. But no one wants to talk about it. Her neighbors are keeping secrets and things are not as perfect as they seem.

The Woman They Could Not Silence

1860: Elizabeth Packard, housewife and mother of six, is facing a horrifying battle with her husband of 21 years. Feeling increasingly threatened by Elizabeth and her brilliant intellect, Theophilus Packard makes a plan to put his wife back in her place. One summer morning, he has her committed to an insane asylum. The horrific conditions inside the Illinois State Hospital in Jacksonville, Illinois, are overseen by Dr. Andrew McFarland, a man who will prove to be even more dangerous to Elizabeth than her traitorous husband.

Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness

When Kristen Radtke was in her twenties, she learned that, as her father was growing up, he would crawl onto his roof in rural Wisconsin and send signals out on his ham radio. Those CQ calls were his attempt to reach somebody--anybody--who would respond. In Seek You, Radtke uses this image as her jumping off point into a piercing exploration of loneliness and the ways in which we attempt to feel closer to one another. She looks at the very real current crisis of loneliness through the lenses of gender, violence, technology, and art.