NCW Libraries

Mukesh lives a quiet life in the London Borough of Wembley after losing his beloved wife. He worries about his granddaughter, Priya, who hides in her room reading while he spends his evenings watching nature documentaries. Aleisha is a bright teenager working at the local library for the summer. She discovers a crumpled-up piece of paper in the back of To Kill a Mockingbird; it is a list of novels that she has never heard of, and she impulsively decides...

Elizabeth Brown loves to read more than anything else, but when her collection of books grows and grows, she must make a change in her life.

"Twelve-year-old Kyle gets to stay overnight in the new town library, designed by his hero (the famous gamemaker Luigi Lemoncello), with other students but finds that come morning he must work with friends to solve puzzles in order to escape"--

From Pulitzer Prize–winning book critic Michael Dirda comes a collection of his most personal and engaging essays on the literary life--the perfect companion for any lover of books. Michael Dirda has been hailed as "the best-read person in America" by the Paris Review and "the best book critic in America" by the New York Observer. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, he was awarded for his reviews in the Washington Post, and he picked up an Edgar...

""The only art I'll ever study is stuff that I can steal from." --David Bowie // Three years before David Bowie died, he shared a list of 100 books that changed his life. His choices span fiction and nonfiction, literary and irreverent, and include timeless classics alongside eyebrow-raising obscurities. // In 100 short essays, music journalist John O'Connell studies each book on Bowie's list and contextualizes it in the artist's life and work. How...

"Mr. Lemoncello holds a contest for his young friends where they must race to bring interesting facts back to his library"--

"Nicky is a shy girl who feels most at home in the safe space of her school library, but the library closes for a week and Nicky is forced to face her social anxiety. When she meets a group of unique, diverse, inspiring women at her mother's diner--members of a women's motorcycle club--Nicky realizes that being different doesn't have to mean being alone, and that there's a place for everyone. Book lovers of all ages will find inspiration in this beautiful...

"Jorge Carrión collects bookshops: from Gotham Book Mart and the Strand Bookstore in New York City to City Lights Bookshop and Green Apple Books in San Francisco and all the bright spots in between (Prairie Lights, Tattered Cover, and countless others). In this thought-provoking, vivid, and entertaining essay, Carrión meditates on the importance of the bookshop as a cultural and intellectual space. Filled with anecdotes from the histories of some...

In this fun and funny celebration of literacy, kids of all ages will discover that the act of reading is a daring adventure that can take you anywhere! You can read at the playground, under the sea, at the opera and even in outer space! It turns out you can read everywhere! And when you do, you open yourself to a universe of adventure. Presented in light-hearted, rib-tickling verse that's perfect for reading aloud, You Can Read sings it loud and proud:...

When fifth-grader Trip Kindleman, who does not like to read very much, is hit on the head by a heavy box and becomes a character in a series of different books--from a sports story to a science fiction novel to an adventure tale--his view of reading is changed forever.