Staff Picks -- favorites from all over GRRL
GRRL staff tell you what they recommend from the library.
Check back regularly for updates!
In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. A diary is Nao's only solace--and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Full of Ozeki's signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.
FIC Oze
Book
Apr 1, 2013
Ben and Helen Armistead have reached breaking point. Once a privileged and loving couple, widely envied and respected, it takes just one afternoon - and a single act of recklessness - for Ben to deal the final blow to their marriage, spectacularly demolishing everything they built together.
FIC Dee
Book
Apr 1, 2013
The story of a son's quest to understand the mystery of his father's death and a memoir about the secrets families keep and the role they play in making us who we are. Bob Hainey was found alone near his car in Chicago, dead, of an apparent heart attack. He left behind a young widow, two sons, a fractured family--and questions surrounding the mysterious nature of his death that would obsess Michael long into adulthood. At roughly his father's age when he died, and a seasoned reporter himself, Michael set out to learn what happened that night. --Excerpted from publisher
920 Hai
Book
Apr 1, 2013
A terminally ill cancer patient is attended throughout his final days by his wife and daughter while the trio contemplates their relationships with an estranged son, a situation that stirs up painful memories for a new next-door neighbor who has recently lost her mother.
FIC Har
Book
Apr 1, 2013
So much has been written about Henry VIII and his wives it seems improbable that new books can bring the subject alive in fresh ways, but Hilary Mantel does that. She won her first prestigious Man Booker Prize with "Wolf Hall," her account of Thomas Cromwell's role as adviser to the king. She has won her second Booker with "Bring Up The Bodies," which brings into focus the downfall of Anne Boleyn. Mantel is a terrific writer. She shows us how ambition is dangerous when one false step, or one unwise utterance, can have devastating consequences. And even though we know how things end, we're glued to the page.
FIC Man
Book
Apr 1, 2013
At it's core, this is a novel about a mother's love for her daughter. A young and ideal Joy runs to China in the late 1950s to find her long-lost father and join the New Society of Red China. Joy's mother Pearl, distraught and worried about Joy's safety, travels to China to find and ultimately save her daughter. This book is set in communist China and is a fascinating historical read as well as an endearing story of a mother and daughter.
FIC See
Book
Apr 1, 2013
On November 14, 1889, two young female journalists raced against one another, determined to outdo Jules Verne's fictional hero and circle the globe in less than 80 days. The dramatic race that ensued would span 28,000 miles, captivate the nation, and change both competitors' lives forever.
910.41 Goo
Book
Apr 1, 2013
On the eve of the twentieth century, Mary Mallon emigrated from Ireland at age fifteen to make her way in New York City. Brave, headstrong, and dreaming of being a cook, she fought to climb up from the lowest rung of the domestic-service ladder. Then one determined "medical engineer" noticed that she left a trail of disease wherever she cooked, and identified her as an "asymptomatic carrier" of Typhoid Fever. With this seemingly preposterous theory, he made Mallon a hunted woman.
FIC Kea
Book
Apr 1, 2013
In the summer of 1957, Frances and Bernard meet at an artists' colony. She finds him faintly ridiculous, but talented. He sees her as aloof, but intriguing. Afterward, he writes her a letter. Soon they are immersed in the kind of fast, deep friendship that can take over-- and change the course of-- lives. They find their way to New York and, for a few whirling years, each other. Can we love another person so completely that we lose ourselves?
FIC Bau
Book
Apr 1, 2013
"Kweku Sai is dead. A renowned surgeon and failed husband, he succumbs suddenly at dawn outside his home in suburban Accra. The news of Kweku's death sends a ripple around the world, bringing together the family he abandoned years before"--Dust jacket flap
FIC Sel
Book
Apr 1, 2013
Roger, an accomplished headhunter by day and art thief when opportunity knocks, decides to risk it all to get his hands on an extremely valuable painting, and in doing so discovers something which makes him a hunted man
839.83 Hea
DVD
Dec 31, 1969
Christa Parravani and her identical twin, Cara, were linked by a bond that went beyond siblinghood, beyond sisterhood, beyond friendship. Raised up from poverty by a determined single mother, the gifted and beautiful twins were able to create a private haven of splendor and merriment between themselves and then earn their way to a prestigious college and to careers as artists (a photographer and a writer, respectively) and to young marriages. But, haunted by childhood experiences with father figures and further damaged by being raped as a young adult, Cara veered off the path to robust work and life and in to depression, drugs and a shocking early death.
920 Par
Book
Apr 1, 2013
"[A] tale of a man's journey from impoverished rural boy to corporate tycoon, [stealing] its shape from the business self-help books devoured by ambitious youths all over 'rising Asia'"--Dust jacket flap
FIC Ham
Book
Apr 1, 2013
In 1936, a young mother resting by the side of a road in Central California is spontaneously photographed by a woman documenting the migrant laborers who have taken to America's farms in search of work. Little personal information is exchanged, and neither woman has any way of knowing that they have produced what will become the most iconic image of the Great Depression. A tale created from a brief moment in history, reminds us that although a great photograph can capture the essence of a moment, it only scratches the surface of a life.
FIC Sil
Book
Apr 1, 2013
Brigid Quinn's experiences in hunting sexual predators for the FBI have left her with memories she wishes she didn't have and lethal skills she hopes never to need again. Having been pushed into early retirement by events she thinks she's put firmly behind her, Brigid keeps telling herself she is settling down nicely in Tucson with a wonderful new husband, Carlo, and their dogs. But the past intervenes when a man named Floyd Lynch confesses to the worst unsolved case of Brigid's career--the disappearance and presumed murder of her young protégée, Jessica.
FIC Mas
Book
Apr 1, 2013
Inspector Ricardo Ramirez investigates the murder of a Cuban boy in Havana.
FIC Bla
Book
Apr 1, 2013
During a visit to Venice, Professor David Ullman--one of the world's leading authorities on demonic literature--witnesses a terror in a tiny attic room. Then his 12-year-old daughter Tess disappears before his eyes, and he must find her while confronting an unspeakable darkness along the way.
FIC Pyp
Book
Apr 1, 2013
On the day John F. Kennedy is inaugurated, Claire, a young wife and mother obsessed with the glamour of Jackie, struggles over the decision of whether to stay in a loveless but secure marriage or to follow the man she loves and whose baby she may be carrying. Decades earlier in 1919, Vivien Lowe, an obituary writer, is searching for her lover who disappeared in the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. By telling the stories of the dead, Vivien not only helps others cope with their grief but also begins to understand the devastation of her own terrible loss. The surprising connection between these two women will change Claire's life in unexpected and extraordinary ways.
FIC Hoo
Book
Apr 1, 2013
Conceived in love and possibility, Bonaventure Arrow didn't make a peep when he was born, and the doctor nearly took him for dead. No one knows that Bonaventure's silence is filled with resonance-- he can hear flowers grow, a thousand shades of blue, and the miniature tempests that rage inside raindrops. He can also hear the gentle voice of his father, William Arrow, shot dead before Bonaventure was born by a mysterious stranger. Bonaventure's remarkable gift of listening promises salvation to the souls who love him. With the help of Trinidad Prefontaine, a Creole housekeeper endowed with her own special gifts, Bonaventure will find the key to long-buried mysteries and soothe a chorus of family secrets clamoring to be healed.
FIC Leg
Book
Apr 1, 2013
While investigating the murder of a well-respected barrister who was found dead at a seedy hotel in Crystal Palace, Detective Inspector Gemma James and her partner, Detective Sergeant Melody Talbot, begin to question everything they think they know about their world and those they trust most.
FIC Cro
Book
Apr 1, 2013
We Live in Water, the first collection of short fiction from New York Times bestselling author Jess Walter, is a suite of diverse, often comic stories about personal struggle and diminished dreams, all of them marked by the wry wit and generosity of spirit that has made him one of our most talked-about writers.
FIC Wal
Book
Apr 1, 2013
Domenica Ruta grew up in a working-class town north of Boston, in a trash-filled house on a dead-end road. Her mother, Kathi, a notorious local figure, was a drug addict and sometimes dealer whose life swung between welfare and riches. And yet she managed, despite the chaos she created, to instill in her daughter a love of stories. Despite the fact that there was not a book to be found in her household, Domenica developed a love of reading, which helped her believe that she could transcend this life of undying grudges, self-inflicted misfortune, and the crooked moral code that Kathi and her cohorts lived by. With or Without You is the story of Domenica Ruta's unconventional coming of age and the necessary and painful act of breaking away, and of overcoming her own addictions and demons in the process.
B Rut
Book
Apr 1, 2013
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FIC Mas
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FIC Man
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FIC See
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910.41 Goo
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839.83 Hea
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