Author: George-Allen, Sam, author. Published: 2020 Call Number: 305.4 Format: Books Summary: "A celebration of the revolutionary potential of women working with other women, and a powerful statement about myths like the "cool girl" or the "catty workplace". Covens. Girl Bands. Ballet troupes. Convents. In all times and places, girls and women have come together in communities of vocation, of necessity, of support. In Witches, Sam George-Allen explores how wherever women gather, magic happens. Female farmers change the way we grow our food. Online beauty communities democratize skin-care rituals. And more than any other demographic, it's teen girls that shape our culture. Patriarchal societies have long been content to champion boys' clubs, while viewing groups that exclude men as sites of rivalry and suspicion. This deeply personal investigation takes us from our workplaces to our social circles, surveying our heroes, our outcasts, and ourselves, in order to dismantle the persistent and pernicious cultural myth of female isolation and competition . . . once and for all."--Publisher's website.
Author: May, Peter, 1951- author. Published: 2020 Call Number: F MAY Format: Books Summary: "Spain, 2020. When ex-pat fugitive Jack Cleland watches his girlfriend die, gunned down in a pursuit involving officer Cristina Sanchez Pradell, he promises to exact his revenge by destroying the policewoman Cristina's aunt Ana has been deaf-blind for the entirety of her adult life: the victim of a rare condition named Usher Syndrome. Ana is the centre of Cristina's world, and of Cleland's cruel plan. John Mackenzie, an ingenious yet irascible Glaswegian investigator, is seconded to aid the Spanish authorities in their manhunt. He alone can silence Cleland before the fugitive has the last, bloody, word."--Publisher description.
Author: Vivian, Siobhan, author. Published: 2020 Call Number: Y VIVIAN Format: Books Summary: After enduring a week of punishing try-outs and making the cut for the girls varsity field hockey team, new players must participate in a night of questionable bonding traditions and loyalty tests, orchestrated by the most senior girls on the squad and performed with the implicit permission of their seemingly all-American young male coach. "A toxic coach finds himself outplayed by the high school girls on his team in this deeply suspenseful novel, which unspools over twenty-four hours through six diverse perspectives"--
Author: Bieker, Chelsea, 1987- author. Published: 2020 Call Number: F BIEKER Format: Books Summary: "Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it's an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms. In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. He promises, through secret 'assignments', to bring the rain everybody is praying for. Lacey has no reason to doubt the pastor. But then her life explodes in a single unimaginable act of abandonment: her mother, exiled from the community for her sins, leaves Lacey and runs off with a man she barely knows. Abandoned and distraught, Lacey May moves in with her widowed grandma, Cherry, who is more concerned with her taxidermy mouse collection than her own granddaughter. As Lacey May endures the increasingly appalling acts of men who want to write all the rules and begins to uncover the full extent of Pastor Vern's shocking plan to bring fertility back to the land, she decides she must go on a quest to find her mother no matter what it takes. With her only guidance coming from the romance novels she reads and the unlikely companionship of the women who knew her mother, she must find her own way through unthinkable circumstances."--Provided by publisher.
Author: Rosenthal, Jason, author. Published: 2020 Call Number: B ROSENTHA Format: Books Summary: An inspiring memoir of life, love, loss, and new beginnings by the widower of bestselling children's author and filmmaker Amy Krouse Rosenthal, whose last of act of love before her death was setting the stage for her husband's life without her in a column in the New York Times. On March 3, 2017, Amy Krouse Rosenthal penned an op-ed piece for the New York Times' Modern Love column--You May Want to Marry My Husband. It appeared ten days before her death from ovarian cancer. A heartbreaking, wry, brutally honest, and creative play on a personal ad--in which a dying wife encouraged her husband to go on and find happiness after her demise--the column quickly went viral, reaching more than five million people worldwide. In My Wife Said You May Want to Marry Me, Jason describes what came next: his commitment to respecting Amy's wish, even as he struggled with her loss. Surveying his life before, with, and after Amy, Jason ruminates on love, the pain of watching a loved one suffer, and what it means to heal--how he and their three children, despite their profound sorrow, went on. Jason's emotional journey offers insights on dying and death and the excruciating pain of losing a soulmate, and illuminates the lessons he learned. As he reflects on Amy's gift to him--a fresh start to fill his empty space with a new story--Jason describes how he continues to honor Amy's life and her last wish, and how he seeks to appreciate every day and live in the moment while trying to help others coping with loss. My Wife Said You May Want to Marry Me is the poignant, unreserved, and inspiring story of a great love, the aftermath of a marriage ended too soon, and how a surviving partner eventually found a new perspective on life's joys in the wake of tremendous loss.
Author: Jones, Naomi McDougall, 1987- author. Published: 2020 Call Number: 384.8 Format: Books Summary: "The Wrong Kind of Woman: Dismantling the Gods of Hollywood is a personal, collective, and metrics-driven dive into the near-absolute systemic exclusion of women from Hollywood, the experiences of women who are trying to break the system open, and the impact that their absence is having on our cultural psyche"--
Author: Alvarez, Julia, author. Published: 2020 Call Number: F ALVAREZ Format: Books Summary: "A literature professor tries to rediscover who she is after the sudden death of her husband, even as a series of family and political jolts force her to ask what we owe those in crisis in our families, biological or otherwise"-- Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loves--lines from her favorite authors play in her head like a soundtrack--but now she finds that the world demands more of her than words. Afterlife is a compact, nimble, and sharply droll novel. Set in this political moment of tribalism and distrust, it asks: What do we owe those in crisis in our families, including--maybe especially--members of our human family? How do we live in a broken world without losing faith in one another or ourselves? And how do we stay true to those glorious souls we have lost?
Author: Scalzi, John, 1969- author. Published: 2020 Call Number: F SCALZI Format: Books Summary: "The Last Emperox is the thrilling conclusion to the award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling Interdependency series, an epic space opera adventure from Hugo Award-winning author John Scalzi. The collapse of The Flow, the interstellar pathway between the planets of the Interdependency, has accelerated. Entire star systems--and billions of people--are becoming cut off from the rest of human civilization. This collapse was foretold through scientific prediction . . . and yet, even as the evidence is obvious and insurmountable, many still try to rationalize, delay and profit from, these final days of one of the greatest empires humanity has ever known. Emperox Grayland II has finally wrested control of her empire from those who oppose her and who deny the reality of this collapse. But "control" is a slippery thing, and even as Grayland strives to save as many of her people form impoverished isolation, the forces opposing her rule will make a final, desperate push to topple her from her throne and power, by any means necessary. Grayland and her thinning list of allies must use every tool at their disposal to save themselves, and all of humanity. And yet it may not be enough. Will Grayland become the savior of her civilization . . . or the last emperox to wear the crown?"--Jacket flap.
Author: Palmer, Daniel, 1962- author. Published: 2020 Call Number: F PALMER Format: Books Summary: "A riveting new thriller about the lies we tell ourselves from the author of Saving Meghan. Just because you love someone doesn't mean you know them. Nina Garrity learned that the hard way after discovering that her missing husband, Glen, had been leading a double life with another woman. But Glen's gone-presumably drowned while fishing on his boat-so she can't confront him about the affair or any of his other misdeeds. A year and a half after the accident, Nina considers herself a widow, even though the police never found a body. Following a chance encounter with Simon Fitch, a teacher from her daughter Maggie's middle school, Nina finds love again and has hopes of putting her shattered life back together. Simon, a widower still grieving the suicide of his first wife, has found his dream girl in Nina. His charm and affections help break through to a heart hardened by betrayal. Nina's teenage son, Connor, embraces Simon as the father he wishes his dad could have been, but Maggie sees a far darker side to this new man in their lives. Even Nina's good friends wonder if Simon is supremely devoted-or dangerously possessive. But Nina is committed, not only to her soon-to-be new husband but also to resuming her former career as a social worker. Before she can move forward, however, Nina must first clear her conscience that she's not making another terrible choice in a man. In doing so, she will uncover the shocking truth: the greatest danger to her, and her children, are the lies people tell themselves"--
Author: Hendrix, Grady, author. Published: 2020 Call Number: F HENDRIX Format: Books Summary: "A supernatural thriller set in South Carolina in the '90s about a women's book club that must protect its suburban community from a mysterious stranger who turns out to be a real monster"-- Patricia Campbell's life has never felt smaller. Her husband is a workaholic, her teenage kids have their own lives, her senile mother-in-law needs constant care, and she's always a step behind on her endless to-do list. The only thing keeping her sane is her book club, a close-knit group of Charleston women united by their love of true crime. At these meetings they're as likely to talk about the Manson family as they are about their own families. One evening after book club, Patricia is viciously attacked by an elderly neighbor, bringing the neighbor's handsome nephew, James Harris, into her life. James is well traveled and well read, and he makes Patricia feel things she hasn't felt in years. But when children on the other side of town go missing, their deaths written off by local police, Patricia has reason to believe James Harris is more of a Bundy than a Brad Pitt. The real problem? James is a monster of a different kind--and Patricia has already invited him in. Little by little, James will insinuate himself into Patricia's life and try to take everything she took for granted--including the book club--but she won't surrender without a fight in this blood-soaked tale of neighborly kindness gone wrong.
Author: Morrey, Beth, author. Published: 2020 Call Number: LP F MORREY Format: Large print Summary: "The world has changed around seventy-nine-year-old librarian Millicent Carmichael, aka Missy. Though quick to admit that she often found her roles as a housewife and mother less than satisfying, Missy once led a bustling life driven by two children, an accomplished and celebrated husband, and a Classics degree from Cambridge. Now her husband is gone, her daughter is estranged after a shattering argument, and her son has moved to his wife's native Australia, taking Missy's beloved only grandchild half-a-world away. She spends her days sipping sherry, avoiding people, and rattling around in her oversized, under-decorated house waiting for...what exactly? The last thing Missy expects is for two perfect strangers and one spirited dog named Bob to break through her prickly exterior and show Missy just how much love she still has to give. In short order, Missy finds herself in the jarring embrace of an eclectic community that simply won't take no for an answer--including a rambunctious mutt-on-loan whose unconditional love gives Missy a reason to re-enter the world one muddy paw print at a time."--
Author: Mathews, Daniel, 1948- author. Published: 2020 Call Number: 634.9 Format: Books Summary: A troubling story of the devastating and compounding effects of climate change in the Western and Rocky Mountain states, told through in-depth reportage and conversations with ecologists, professional forest managers, park service scientists, burn boss, activists, and more. Climate change manifests in many ways across North America, but few as dramatic as the attacks on our western pine forests. In Trees in Trouble, Daniel Mathews tells the urgent story of this loss, accompanying burn crews and forest ecologists as they study the myriad risk factors and refine techniques for saving this important, limited resource. Mathews transports the reader from the exquisitely aromatic haze of ponderosa and Jeffrey pine groves to the fantastic gnarls and whorls of five-thousand-year-old bristlecone pines, from genetic test nurseries where white pine seedlings are deliberately infected with their mortal enemy to the hottest megafire sites and neighborhoods leveled by fire tornadoes or ember blizzards. Scrupulously researched, Trees in Trouble not only explores the devastating ripple effects of climate change, but also introduces us to the people devoting their lives to saving our forests. Mathews also offers hope: a new approach to managing western pine forests is underway. Trees in Trouble explores how we might succeed in sustaining our forests through the challenging transition to a new environment.
Author: Barry, Max, 1973- author. Published: 2020 Call Number: F BARRY Format: Books Summary: "Gilly, Talia, Anders, and Jackson are astronauts captaining a new and supposedly indestructible ship in humanity's war against an alien race. Confined to the ship for years, each of them holding their own secrets, they are about to learn there are threats beyond the reach of human ingenuity--and that the true nature of reality might be the universe's greatest mystery. In this near future, our world is at war with another, and humanity is haunted by its one catastrophic loss--a nightmarish engagement that left a handful of survivors drifting home through space, wracked with PTSD. Public support for the war plummeted, and the military-industrial complex set its sights on a new goal: zero-casualty warfare, made possible by gleaming new ships called Providences, powered by AI. But when the latest-launched Providence suffers a surprising attack and contact with home is severed, Gilly, Talia, Anders, and Jackson must confront the truth of the war they're fighting, the ship that brought them there, and the cosmos beyond"--
Author: Foer, Esther Safran, author. Published: 2020 Call Number: B FOER Format: Books Summary: "Esther Safran Foer grew up in a family where history was too terrible to speak of. The child of parents who were each the sole survivors of their respective families, for Esther the Holocaust was always felt but never discussed. So when Esther's mother casually mentions an astonishing revelation--that her father had a previous wife and daughter, both killed in the Holocaust--Esther resolves to find the truth. Armed with only a black-and-white photo and hand-drawn map, she travels to Ukraine, determined to find the shtetl where her father hid during the war. What she finds not only reshapes her identity but gives her the long-denied opportunity to mourn the all-but-forgotten dead"--
Author: Blædel, Sara, author. Kline, Mark, 1952- translator. Published: 2020 Call Number: F BLAEDEL Format: Books Summary: "The riveting conclusion to the Family Secrets trilogy picks up right where the cliffhanger ending of Her Father's Secret left off with the astonishing revelation that Ilka's father is actually still alive. Reeling from the news, Ilka sets off for her father's last known location, where she is faced with a formidable task: to confront a man who abandoned her as a child--then pulled her as an adult into a frightening, violent world--and finally get the answers she has been desperately seeking. But when she meets her father for the first time in her adult life, he raises more questions than answers. Ilka and her father form a tense alliance and set out to unravel decades-old mysteries and intrigue--before her father's secrets destroy them both"--
Author: Neubauer, Erica Ruth, 1979- author. Published: 2020 Call Number: F NEUBAUER Format: Books Summary: Well-heeled travelers from around the world flock to the Mena House Hotel--an exotic gem in the heart of Cairo where cocktails flow, adventure dispels the aftershocks of World War I, and deadly dangers wait in the shadows . . . Egypt, 1926. Fiercely independent American Jane Wunderly has made up her mind: she won't be swept off her feet on a trip abroad. Despite her Aunt Millie's best efforts at meddling with her love life, the young widow would rather gaze at the Great Pyramids of Giza than into the eyes of a dashing stranger. Yet Jane's plans to remain cool and indifferent become ancient history in the company of Mr. Redvers, a roguish banker she can't quite figure out . . . While the Mena House has its share of charming guests, Anna Stainton isn't one of them. The beautiful socialite makes it clear that she won't share the spotlight with anyone--especially Jane. But Jane soon becomes the center of attention when she's the one standing over her unintentional rival's dead body. Now, with her innocence at stake in a foreign country, Jane must determine who can be trusted, and who had motive to commit a brutal murder. Between Aunt Millie's unusual new acquaintances, a smarmy playboy with an off-putting smile, and the enigmatic Mr. Redvers, someone has too many secrets. Can Jane excavate the horrible truth before her future falls to ruin in Cairo . . . and the body count rises like the desert heat?
Author: Cooper, Keith (Journalist), author. Published: 2019 Call Number: 576.839 Format: Books Summary: In The Contact Paradox, space journalist Keith Cooper tackles some of the myths and assumptions that underlie SETI--the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. For the past six decades a small cadre of researchers have been on a quest to find out, as part of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So far, SETI has found no evidence of extraterrestrial life, but with more than a hundred billion stars in our Galaxy alone to search, the odds of quick success are stacked against us. The silence from the stars is prompting some researchers, inspired by the Arecibo transmission, to transmit more messages into space, in an effort to provoke a response from any civilisations out there that might otherwise be staying quiet. However, the act of transmitting raises troubling questions about the process of contact. We look for qualities such as altruism and intelligence in extraterrestrial life, but what do these mean to humankind? Can civilisations survive in the Universe long enough for us to detect them, and what can their existence, or lack thereof, reveal to us about our future prospects? Can we learn something about our own history when we explore what happens when two civilisations come into contact? Finally, do the answers tell us that it is safe to transmit, even though we know nothing about extraterrestrial life, or as Stephen Hawking argued, are we placing humanity in jeopardy by doing so? In The Contact Paradox, author Keith Cooper looks at how far SETI has come since its modest beginnings, and where it is going, by speaking to the leading names in the field and beyond. SETI forces us to confront our nature in a way that we seldom have before--where did we come from, where are we going, and who are we in the cosmic context of things? This book considers the assumptions that we make in our search for extraterrestrial life, and explores how those assumptions can teach us about ourselves.
Author: Perry, Anne, author. Published: 2019 Call Number: F PERRY Format: Books Summary: "Two fiery deaths have young lawyer Daniel Pitt and his scientist friend Miriam fford Croft racing to solve a forensic crisis in an explosive novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Triple Jeopardy. When a desperate woman comes to Daniel seeking a lawyer for her boyfriend, Rob Adwell, Daniel is convinced of the young man's innocence. Adwell has been accused of murder and setting a fire to conceal the body, but Daniel is sure that science can absolve him--and the brilliant Miriam fford Croft is the best scientist Daniel knows. Working together with Miriam, Daniel reveals Adwell's innocence by showing that an accidental fire caused the victim's death. But it's not long before Adwell is killed in the same fiery fashion. If these deaths are, in fact, murders, what could Miriam have missed? As the evidence begins to contradict itself, Adwell's girlfriend comes into question--and so do the methods Miriam has been using. Soon Miriam's career hangs in the balance, and what started as an accidental fire seems to be part of a larger plot of revenge, with victims accumulating in its wake. Now Miriam and Daniel must uncover who or what is stoking these recurring flames--before they, too, find themselves burned"--
Author: Taylor, Andrew, 1951 October 14- author. Published: 2019 1987 Call Number: F TAYLOR Format: Books Summary: "1939. As Europe teeters on the brink of war, Alfred Kendall is tasked with carrying out a minor mission for the British Intelligence Service. Travelling to Prague, he takes his troubled young son, Hugh, as cover. When Hitler invades Czechoslovakia, Alfred is given an ultimatum by the Czech Resistance. They will arrange for him to return to England, but only if he leaves his son Hugh behind as collateral. Hugh is soon taken under the wing of a Nazi colonel - Helmuth Scholl. But even though Scholl treats Hugh well, his son, Heinz, is suspicious of this foreigner. And as the war across the continent intensifies, they are set on a path that will ultimately lead towards destruction."--Amazon.com.
