Fiction

Description: In 1862, thirty-eight Dakota-Sioux men were hanged in the largest mass execution in US history. This is the story of two young women -- one settler, one Dakota-Sioux -- connected by the fate of the thirty-ninth man. As war overtakes the frontier, Emma’s family farmstead is attacked by Dakota-Sioux warriors; on that same prairie, Oenikika desperately tries to hold on to her calling as a healer and follow the orders of her father, Chief Little Crow. When the war is over and revenge-fueled war trials begin, each young woman is faced with an impossible choice. In a swiftly changing world, both Emma and Oenikika must look deep within and fight for the truth of their convictions -- even as horror and injustice unfolds all around them.

Description: "Once nature as we know it is dead, the pursuit of happiness fades into insignificance, food is scarce, and even time doesn't progress in an organized fashion. Harrow follows the picaresque journey of Khristen--a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen's failing boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and she finds that her mother has disappeared, she washes up at a 'resort' on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call 'Big Girl.' In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature's beauty. What will Khristen and Jeffrey, the precocious ten-year-old boy she meets there, learn from this 'baggy seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth'? Rivetingly strange and beautiful, delivered with Williams's searing, deadpan wit, their intertwined tale of paradise lost serves to commit us anew to that paradise, and to their reasons--against all reasonableness--to try and recover something of it" -- Provided by publisher.

Description: "Leila Slimani draws on her own family's inspiring story for the first volume in a planned trilogy about race, resilience, and women's empowerment. Mathilde, a spirited young Frenchwoman, falls in love with Amine, a handsome Moroccan soldier in the French army during World War II. After the war, the couple settles in Morocco. While Amine tries to cultivate his family farm's rocky terrain, Mathilde feels her vitality sapped by the isolation, the harsh climate, the lack of money, and the mistrust she inspires as a foreigner. Left increasingly alone to raise her two children in a world whose rules she does not understand, and with her daughter taunted at school by rich French girls for her secondhand clothes and unruly hair, Mathilde goes from being reduced to a farmer's wife to defying the country's chauvinism and repressive social codes by offering medical services to the rural population. As tensions mount between the Moroccans and the French colonists, Amine finds himself caught in the crossfire: in solidarity with his Moroccan workers yet also a landowner, despised by the French yet married to a Frenchwoman, and proud of his wife's resolve but ashamed by her refusal to be subjugated. All of them live in the country of others--especially the women, forced to live in the land of men--and with this novel, Leila Slimani issues the first salvo in their emancipation" -- Provided by publisher.

Description: Seven-year-old Theodora Brigid Brook is a half-Black, half-Irish girl coming of age in Manhattan's impoverished Five Points district in the mid-1800s. Though an orphan, Theo is rich with family, zig-zagging between her grandmothers' tenements and her aunties' homes: from Seneca Village to the Brooklyn tobacco factories to Barnum's sensationalist museum, through the barbershops and dance halls, the taverns and the African Free School. Over the course of the novel's seven years, Theo encounters refugees fleeing Southern bondage or European destitution, migrants seeking fortune in the West and newsboys shouting the world home, camaraderie and conflict, economic depressions and momentous elections, ominious upheaval and cataclysmic draft riots and war. As American attitudes shift -- on slavery, race, on women, on class, on colonialism and indigeneity -- these national growing pains are seen through the curious, yearning, buoyant eyes of young Theo. Corthron's Moon and the Mars guides readers through the time of a country divided, when a national reckoning was taking place, one that will resonate with readers today.

Description: Lina Henry is a wife and mother who likens herself to a pretty paper doll. She lives in a beautiful home in the Atlanta suburbs. Her husband, David, is a well-to-do investment banker. She's raised two wonderful teenagers. To the outside world, the Henry family is perfect. What no one knows is that Lina's paper doll life is being torn apart in a controlling and abusive marriage. When Lina develops an unexpected friendship with another man, and reconnects with her former best friend, she begins navigating a way out of the emotional minefield that is her home. But as David senses his loss of control, he becomes more dangerous, and Lina must do everything in her power to protect herself and her children. In order to take back the happiness she deserves, Lina must first rediscover the strength and the fearlessness of her three-dimensional self.

Description: "A long-married couple is forced to confront their friend's painful past when a church revival comes to a nearby town... A woman in an arranged marriage struggles to connect with the son she hid from her husband for years... A well-meaning sister unwittingly reunites an abuser with his victims... Through the lives of an indelible array of individuals--musicians, housewives and pastors, children and grandparents, the men and women who own the dry cleaners and the mini-marts--Yoon Choi explores the Korean-American experience at its interstices: where first and second generations either clash or find common ground; where meaning falls in the cracks between languages; where relationships bend under the weight of tenderness and disappointment; where displacement turns to heartbreak" -- Provided by publisher.

Description: "A young woman comes of age in 1960s- and 1970s-era Bombay, a vanished world that is complex and indelibly rendered. Vidya's childhood is marked by the shattering absence and then the bewildering reappearance of her mother and baby brother at the family home. Restless, observant, and longing for connection with her brilliant and increasingly troubled mother, Vidya navigates the stifling expectations of her life with a vivid imagination until one day she peeks into a classroom where girls are learning kathak, a dazzling, centuries-old dance form that requires the utmost discipline and focus. Her pursuit of artistic transcendence through kathak soon becomes the organizing principle of her life, even as she leaves home for college and falls in complicated love with her best friend. As the uncertain future looms, she must ultimately confront the tensions between romantic love, her art, and the legacy of her own imperfect mother.

Description: "When it comes to personal training, Taylor Powell kicks serious butt. Unfortunately, her bills are piling up, rent is due, and the money situation is dire. Taylor needs more than the support of her new best friends, Samiah and London. She needs a miracle. And Jamar Dixon might just be it. The oh-so-fine former pro athlete wants back into the game, and he wants Taylor to train him. There's just one catch -- no one can know what they're doing. But when they're accidentally outed as a couple, Taylor's plan is turned completely upside down. Is Jamar just playing to win . . . or is he playing for keeps?"-- Provided by publisher.

Description: "Building on the success of All City, here is a wry, and at the same time dark and risk-taking, story collection from author (and baker) Alex DiFrancesco that pushes the boundaries of transgender awareness and filial bonds. Here is the hate between 16-year-old Junie, who is transitioning, and their mom's boyfriend Chad when the family moves into Chad's house on Lake Erie. And here is the love being tested between Sawyer and his dad, who named his boat after his child and resists changing it from Sara to Sawyer now. There is DiFrancesco's willingness to enter lands that are violent and comfortless in some of these stories, testing the limits of what it means to be human, sometimes returning stronger and wiser and sometimes not returning at all as their characters surge forward into unknown spaces" -- Provided by publisher.