NCW Libraries

"A beautiful Berkeley mom with a radical past vanishes while hiking, leaving her family to piece together her secrets, in this keenly observed novel for readers of Emma Straub and Maria Semple--from the bestselling author ofAll We Ever Wanted Was Everything"-- "Billie is a beautiful Berkeley mom with a radical past--a teenage runaway from Northern California who took up with a group of environmental activists wanted by the FBI, lived dangerously,...

"Helen Clapp's breakthrough work on five-dimensional spacetime landed her a tenured professorship at MIT; her popular books explain physics in plain terms. Helen disdains notions of the supernatural in favor of rational thought and proven ideas. So it's perhaps especially vexing for her when, on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday in June, she gets a phone call from a friend who has just died. That friend was Charlotte Boyce, Helen's roommate at Harvard....

Lenora Allbright is 13 when her father convinces her mother, Cora, to forgo their inauspicious existence in Seattle and move to Kaneq, AK. It's 1974, and the former Vietnam POW sees a better future away from the noise and nightmares that plague him. Having been left a homestead by a buddy who died in the war, Ernt is secure in his beliefs, but never was a family less prepared for the reality of Alaska, the long, cold winters and isolation. Locals...

How far would you go to uncover the truth? One spring night in 1998, the beautiful Cressida Strauss plunges from a fourth-floor balcony at the Lycée Internationale Suisse with catastrophic consequences. Loath to draw negative publicity to the school, a bastion of European wealth and glamor, officials quickly dismiss the incident as an accident, but questions remain: Was it a suicide attempt? Or was Cressida pushed? It was no secret that she had a...

Sent into an arranged marriage, Tan Yunxian, forbidden to continue her work as a midwife-in-training as well as see her forever friend Meiling, is ordered to act like proper wife and seeks a way to continue treating women and girls from every level of society in fifteenth-century China. "According to Confucius, "an educated woman is a worthless woman," but Tan Yunxian--born into an elite family, yet haunted by death, separations, and loneliness--is...

"Olivia McAfee knows what it feels like to start over. Her picture-perfect life--living in Boston, married to a brilliant cardiothoracic surgeon, raising a beautiful son, Asher--was upended when her husband revealed a darker side. She never imagined she would end up back in her sleepy New Hampshire hometown, living in the house she grew up in, and taking over her father's beekeeping business. Lily Campanello is familiar with do-overs, too. When she...

"Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one in the journalism community is more astounded than Monique herself ... Regardless of why Evelyn has chosen her to write her biography, Monique is determined to use this opportunity to jumpstart her career. Summoned to Evelyn's Upper East Side...

"From New Yorker writer and Thurber Prize-winning author of Truth in Advertising comes a wry yet tenderhearted father-daughter story that looks at family, marriage, and fame through the lens of a popular TV anchor's public fall from grace" --

In this follow-up to "The Beach Street Knitting Society & Yarn Club," McNeil picks right up with small-town intrigue, packed lunches, and the joys of knitting--not to mention romance.

"From the best-selling author of Maine, a gorgeous, compulsively-readable novel that tells the story of the complex relationship between two women, Elisabeth, a privileged new mother and writer attempting to find her footing after childbirth, and Sam, the idealistic, working-class college student she hires to nanny her young son"-- Ex-New Yorker Elisabeth, an accomplished journalist and new mother, is struggling to adjust to life in a small town....