June 28, 2024
New Fiction
Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books by Kirsten Miller – Lula Dean is on a mission. The resident busybody of Troy, Georgia, is hell-bent on removing “pornography and propaganda” from the town’s libraries. Even her lifelong nemesis, school-board president (and former cheerleading captain) Beverly Underwood, can’t seem to stop her. To prove she has nothing against good, wholesome literature, Lula builds her own little lending library in her front yard for her neighbors to enjoy. Filled with classics like The Southern Belle’s Guide to Etiquette, 101 Cakes to Bake for Your Family, and The Art of the Deal, Lula’s library is an instant success! Or so she thinks. What Lula doesn’t know is that a local troublemaker has secretly restocked the little library with banned books cleverly disguised in the jackets of Lula’s “wholesome” reads. Literary classics, gay romance, Black history, Judy Blume novels, books of witchy spells – all just waiting to be discovered. As the townsfolk borrow books from Lula’s banned book library, they find their lives transformed in hilarious, profound, and unforeseen ways. But when the truth about the library comes out, the showdown that’s been brewing between Beverly and Lula will roil the whole town…and change if forever.
The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley – It’s the opening night of The Manor, and no expense, small or large, has been spared. The infinity pool sparkles; crystal pouches for guests’ healing have been placed in the seaside cottages and Woodland Hutches; the “Manor Mule” cocktail (grapefruit, ginger, vodka, and a dash of CBD oil) is being poured with a heavy hand. Everyone is wearing linen. And yet, just outside The Manor’s immaculately kept grounds, an ancient forest bristles with secrets. The local community resents what they see as The Manor’s intrusion into the local woods and attempts to privatize the beach, and small skirmishes have erupted on the edges of the property between locals and the staff. And the whispers keep coming, about an old piece of pagan folklore – it must be folklore? -the Night Birds, an avenging force that can be called upon to make right wrongs that elude the law. Though surely everything at The Manor has been done aboveboard. On the Sunday morning of opening weekend, the local police are called. There’s been a fire. A body’s been discovered. Something’s not right with the guests. What happened on the grounds of The Manor the past thirty-six hours? And who-or what- is the cause? Everyone has an agenda. Everyone has a past. But not everyone will survive.
Middle of the Night by Riley Sager – The worst thing to ever happen on Hemlock Circle occurred in Ethan Marsh’s backyard. One July night, ten-year-old Ethan and his best friend and neighbor, Billy, fell asleep in a tent set up on a manicured lawn in a quiet, quaint New Jersey cul-de-sac. In the morning, Ethan woke up alone. During the night, someone had sliced the tent open with a knife and taken Billy. He was never seen again. Thirty years later, Ethan has reluctantly returned to his childhood home. Plagued by bad dreams and insomnia, he begins to notice strange things happening in the middle of the night. Someone seems to be roaming the cul-de-sac at odd hours, and signs of Billy’s presence keep appearing in Ethan’s backyard. Is someone playing a cruel prank? Or has Billy, long thought dead, somehow returned to Hemlock Circle? The mysterious occurrences prompt Ethan to investigate what really happened that night, a quest that reunites him with former friends and neighbors and leads him into the woods that surround Hemlock Circle. Woods where Billy claimed ghosts roamed and where a mysterious institute does clandestine research on a crumbling estate. The closer Ethan gets to the truth, the more he realizes that no place - be it quiet forest or suburban street – is completely safe. And that the past has a way of haunting the present.
The Glass Maker by Tracy Chevalier – Venice, 1486. Across the lagoon lies Murano. Time flows differently here – like the glass the island’s maestros spend their lives learning to handle. Orsola Rosso is the eldest daughter in a family of glassblowers. As a woman, she is not meant to work with glass – but she had the hands for it, the heart, and a vision. When her father dies, she teaches herself to make glass beads in secret, and her work boosts the Rosso family fortune. Skipping like a stone through the centuries, we follow Orsola and her family as they live through creative triumph and heartbreaking loss, from a plague devastating Venice to Continental soldiers stripping its palazzos bare, from the domination of Murano and its glass maestros to the transformation of the city of trade into a city of tourists. In every era, the Rosso women ensure that their work, and their bonds, endure.