NCW Libraries

Longlisted for the 2020 Grand Prix de littérature américaine
Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2017 (Top 10)
Chicago Public Library Best of the Best Books 2017
Indie Next Summer 2018 Pick For Reading Groups

The haunting tale of a desolate cottage, and the hair-thin junction between this life and the next, from bestselling National Book Award finalist Gail Godwin.
After...

"The celebrated author of Single, Carefree, Mellow, returns with her debut novel--a rueful, funny examination of love, marriage, infidelity, and origami. Divorcing his wife to marry his girlfriend, Audra, is the one impulsive thing Graham Cavanaugh has ever done. Audra is charming and spontaneous and fun, but life with her can be exhausting, constantly interrupted by phone calls, burdened by houseguests, and populated by old men with backpacks full...

The complete short fiction of Kurt Vonnegut has been assembled for the first time. Organized thematically, these ninety-eight stories were written from 1941 to 2007, and include those Vonnegut published in magazines or collected in Welcome to the Monkey House, Bagombo Snuff Box, and other books. Also included are five previously unpublished stories, as well as a handful of others that were published online. "The complete short stories of Kurt Vonnegut"--...

"With empathy, grace, humor, and piercing insight, the author of gods in Alabama pens a powerful, emotionally resonant novel of the South that confronts the truth about privilege, family, and the distinctions between perception and reality--the stories we tell ourselves about our origins and who we really are. Superheroes have always been Leia Birch Briggs' weakness. One tequila-soaked night at a comics convention, the usually level-headed graphic...

"A bold and intriguing fabulist novel that reimagines two of the most legendary characters in American literature--Captain Ahab and Ishmael of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick--from the critically acclaimed Edgar and World Fantasy award-winning author of The Girl in the Glass and The Shadow Year. At the end of a long journey, Captain Ahab returns to the mainland to confront the true author of the novel Moby-Dick, his former shipmate, Ishmael. For Ahab...

When widowed mule breeder Cy Bellman reads in the newspaper that colossal ancient bones have been discovered in the salty Kentucky mud, he sets out from his small Pennsylvania farm to see for himself if the rumors are true: that the giant monsters are still alive and roam the uncharted wilderness beyond the Mississippi River. Promising to write and to return in two years, he leaves behind his daughter, Bess, to the tender mercies of his taciturn sister...

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft...

"The first novel from Sarah Jessica Parker's new imprint, SJP for Hogarth, A Place for Us is a deeply moving and resonant story of love, identity and belonging A Place for Us unfolds the lives of an Indian-American Muslim family, gathered together in their Californian hometown to celebrate the eldest daughter, Hadia's, wedding - a match of love rather than tradition. It is here, on this momentous day, that Amar, the youngest of the siblings, reunites...

Mary Crampton has spent all of her thirty years in Petroleum, a small Western town once supported by a powerful grain company. Living at home, she works as the embalmer in her father's mortuary: an unlikely job that has long marked her as an outsider. Yet, to Mary there is a satisfying art to positioning and styling each body to capture the essence of a subject's life. Though some townsfolk pretend that the community is thriving, the truth is that...

"In this mega-bestseller from France and the follow-up to The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles, a woman contends with divorce, family trouble, and even murder in her journey to discover who she really is. Fortysomething mother of two Josephine Cortes is at a crossroads. She has just moved to a posh new apartment in Paris after the success of the historical novel she ghostwrote for her sister, Iris. Still struggling with her divorce--the result of her husband...