April 30, 2021
Library Corner
New Fiction
The Last Bookshop in London by Madeline Martin – August 1939: London prepares for war as Hitler’s forces sweep across Europe. Grace Bennett has always dreamed of moving to the city, but the bunkers and blackout curtains that she finds on her arrival were not what she expected. And she certainly never imagined she’d wind up working in Primrose Hill, a dusty old bookshop nestled in the heart of London. Through blackouts and air raids as the Blitz intensifies, Grace discovers the power of storytelling to unite her community in ways she never dreamed – a force that triumphs over even the darkest nights of war.
Tell No Lies by Allison Brennan – Something mysterious is killing the wildlife in the mountains just south of Tucson. When a college intern turned activist sets out to collect her own evidence, she, too, ends up dead. Local law enforcement is slow to get involved. That’s when the mobile FBI unit goes undercover to infiltrate the town and its copper refinery in search of possible leads. Quinn and Costa find themselves scouring the desolate landscape, which keeps revealing clues to something much darker – greed, child trafficking and more death. As the body count adds up, it’s clear they have stumbled onto much more than they bargained for. Now they must figure out who is at the heart of this mayhem and stop them before more innocent lives are lost.
Hamnet & Judith by Maggie O’Farrell – England, 1580. A young Latin tutor – penniless, bullied by a violent father – falls in love with an eccentric young woman: a wild creature who walks her family’s estate with a falcon on her shoulder and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer. Agnes understands plants and potions better than she does people, but once she settles on Henley Street in Stratford she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband. His gifts as a writer are just beginning to awaken when their beloved twins, Hamnet and Judith, are afflicted with the bubonic plague, and, devastatingly, one of them succumbs to the illness.
New Non-Fiction
Crossroads by Kaleb Dahlgren – On April 6, 2018, sixteen people died and thirteen others were injured after a bus taking the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team to a playoff game collided with a transport truck in a rural intersection. The tragedy moved millions of people to leave hockey sticks by their front door to show sympathy and support for the Broncos. People from more than eighty countries pledged millions of dollars to families that had been directly affected by the accident. Crossroads is the story of Kaleb Dahlgren, a young man who survived the bus crash and faced life afterwards with positivity and grit. In this chronicle of his time with the Broncos and in the loving community of Humboldt, Saskatchewan, Dahlgren takes a hard look at this experience of unprecedented loss but also revels in the overwhelming response and outpouring of love from across Canada and around the world. But this book goes much deeper, revealing the adversity Dahlgren faced long before his time in Humboldt and his inspiring journey since the accident. From a childhood spent learning to live with type 1 diabetes to his remarkable recovery from severe brain trauma that astounded medical professionals, Dahlgren documents a life of perseverance, gratitude, and hope in the wake of enormous obstacles and life altering tragedy.