May 7 2021
Library Corner
New Fiction
When the Stars Go Dark by Paula McLain – Anna Hart is a seasoned missing persons detective in San Francisco with far too much knowledge of the darkest side of human nature. When tragedy strikes her personal life, Anna, desperate and numb, flees to the Northern California village of Mendocino to grieve. She lived there as a child with her beloved foster parents, and now she believes it might be the only place left for her. Yet the day she arrives, she learns that a local teenage girl has gone missing. The crime feels frighteningly reminiscent of the most crucial time in Anna’s childhood, when the unsolved murder of a young girl touched Mendocino and changed the community forever. As past and present collide, Anna realizes that she has been led to this moment. The most difficult lessons of her life have given her insight into how victims come into contact with violent predators. As Anna becomes obsessed with saving the missing girl, she must accept that true courage means getting out of her own way and learning to let others in.
Northern Spy by Flynn Berry – A producer at the BBC and mother to a new baby, Tessa is at work in Belfast one day when the news of another raid comes on the air. The IRA may have gone underground in the two decades since the Good Friday Agreement, but they never really went away, and lately bomb threats, security checkpoints, and helicopters floating ominously over the city have become features of everyday life. As the news reporter requests the public’s help in locating those responsible for the robbery, security footage reveals Tessa’s sister, Marian, at the scene, pulling a black ski mask over her face. The police believe Marian has joined the IRA, but Tessa is convinced she must have been abducted or coerced; the sisters have always opposed the violence enacted in the name of uniting Ireland. And besides, Marian is vacationing on the north coast. Tessa just spoke to her yesterday. When the truth about Marian comes to light, Tessa is faced with impossible choices that will test the limits of her ideals, the bonds of her family, her notions of right and wrong, and her identity as a sister and a mother. Walking an increasingly perilous road, she wants nothing more than to protect the one person she loves more fiercely than her sister: her infant son, Finn.
Good Company by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeny – Flora Mancini has been happily married for more than twenty years. But everything she thought she knew about herself, her marriage, and her relationship with her best friend, Margot, is upended when she stumbles upon an envelope containing her husband’s wedding ring – the one he claimed he lost one summer when their daughter, Ruby, was five. Flora and Julian struggled for years, scraping together just enough acting money to raise Ruby in Manhattan and keep Julian’s small theater company – Good Company – afloat. A move to Los Angeles brought their first real career successes, a chance to breathe easier, and a reunion with Margot, now a bona fide television star. But has their new life been built on lies? What happened that summer all those years ago? And what happens now?
New Non – Fiction
The Light of Days by Judy Batalion – Witnesses to the brutal murder of their families and the violent destruction of their communities, a cadre of Jewish women in Poland – some still in their teens – became the nerves of a wide-ranging resistance network that fought the Nazis. With courage, guile, and nerves of steel, these “ghetto girls” smuggled guns in loaves of bread and coded intelligence messages in their braids. They helped build lifesaving systems of underground bunkers and sustained thousands of Jews in safe hiding places. They bribed Gestapo guards with liquor, assassinated Nazis, and sabotaged German supply lines. The Light of Days at last reveals the real history of these incredible women whose courageous yet little known feats have been eclipsed by time. Judy Batalion – the granddaughter of Polish Holocaust survivors – follows these real – life heroines through the savage destruction of the ghettos, arrest and internment in Gestapo prisons and concentration camps, and for a lucky few, through the end of the war and into the twenty-first century.