NCW Libraries

"From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six,...

June, 1916. Louis C. Tiffany, the eccentric glass genius, dynamites the breakwater at his fantastical Oyster Bay mansion, so as to foil the town from reclaiming the beach for public use. The explosion shakes the apple crate where Prudence, the daughter of Tiffany's prized gardener, is sleeping and the rocks where Randall, her brother, is playing. Nearly a century later Prudence receives an unexpected visit at her New York apartment from Grace, a hospice...

"When Professor Hess stumbles across an unusual letter to the editor in an art journal, he is surprised to have known so little about the brilliant and mysterious artist it describes, the late Harriet Burden. Intrigued by her story, and by the explosive scandal surrounding her legacy, he begins to interview those who knew her, hoping to separate fact from fiction, only to find himself tumbling down a rabbit's hole of personal and psychological intrigue....

When an extraterrestrial arrives on Earth, his first impressions of humans are less than positive. Taking the form of Professor Andrew Martin at Cambridge University, the visitor is eager to complete his task and hurry back to his own utopian planet. Disgusted by the way humans look, what they eat, their capacity for murder and war, he is equally baffled by the concepts of love and family. But as time goes on, he starts to reconsider.

Legendary author Thomas Pynchon, winner of the National Book Award for his classic Gravity's Rainbow, applies his inimitable style to the mystery novel. As the marijuana haze of the free-love 1960s begins to fade, Doc Sportello drifts in and out of awareness. He hasn't seen his girlfriend in a long time. Then one day she shows up and rattles off a fantastic story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer, and Doc can't help but get drawn...

It is April 1975 and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong....

When her mother sells the family home in the big city, crime reporter Jimm Juree is forced to follow her eccentric family to a rural village on the coast of southern Thailand. She's convinced her career - maybe her life - is over. But that changes with the murder of a local abbot and the unearthing of a van containing the skeletal remains of two hippies. Now Jimm's life seems a bit more exciting, a bit more promising - and a lot more deadly.