Travel the world from the comfort of your couch with these excellent reads!
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Book
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FIC Adi
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Killing Commendatore [Audiobook]
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A thirty-something portrait painter in Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. When he discovers a previously unseen painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances. To close it, he must complete a journey that involves a mysterious ringing bell, a two-foot-high physical manifestation of an Idea, a dapper businessman who lives across the valley, a precocious thirteen-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt during World War II in Vienna, a pit in the woods behind the artist's home, and an underworld haunted by Double Metaphors.
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Audiobook
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FIC Mur
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"From prize-winning Bangladeshi novelist Tahmima Anam, her deeply moving second novel about the rise of Islamic radicalism in Bangladesh seen through the intimate lens of a family"--
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Book
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FIC Ana
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The words that remain : a novel
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"A letter has beckoned to Raimundo since he received it over fifty years ago from his youthful passion, handsome Cícero. But having grown up in an impoverished area of Brazil where the demands of manual labor thwarted his becoming literate, Raimundo has long been unable to read. As young men, he and Cícero fell in love, only to have Raimundo's father brutally beat his son when he discovered their affair. Even after Raimundo succeeds in making a life for himself in the big city, he continues to be haunted by this secret missive full of longing from the distant past. Now at age seventy-one, he at last acquires a true education and the ability to access the letter. Exploring Brazil's little-known hinterland as well its urban haunts, this is a sweeping novel of repression, violence, and shame, along with their flip side: survival, endurance, and the ultimate triumph of an unforgettable figure on society's margins" --
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Book
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FIC Gar
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"In 1940s' Port-au-Prince, Gertie and Sisi become fast childhood friends, despite being on opposite ends of the social and economic ladder. As young girls, they build their unlikely friendship--until a deathbed revelation ripples through their families and tears them apart. After François Duvalier's rule turns deadly in the 1950s, Sisi moves to Paris, while Gertie marries into a wealthy Dominican family. Across decades and continents, through personal successes and failures, they are parted and reunited, slowly learning the truth of their singular relationship. Finally, six decades later, with both women in the United States, a sudden phone call brings them back together once more to reckon with and forgive the past. Village Weavers confronts the silences around class, race, and nationality; charts the moments when lives are irrevocably forced apart; and envisions two girls--connected their entire lives--who try to break inherited cycles of mistrust and find ways back into each other's hearts" --
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Book
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FIC Cha
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"Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? Can they create their own traditions and rituals? Whom can they consider family? As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, spends her days gathering footage from the neighborhood park like an anthropologist observing local customs. "Forget about daily life," chides her grandmother on the phone. "We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park." Life back in Asya and Manu's respective home countries continues--parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up--all just slightly beyond their reach. But the world they're making in their new city is growing, too, they hope, into something that will be distinctly theirs. As they open up the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?" --
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Book
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FIC Sav
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"Jockeying navigator clans guide spaceships through the Hollows: an area of space populated by the mysterious but deadly creatures known as Tanglers. When a Tangler escapes the Hollows for the first time in living memory, each clan must send a representative to help capture it--but the mission may be doomed and the hearts of two clan juniors may be in danger too. Viet Nhi is not good with people. Or politics. Which is a problem when the Rooster clan sends her on the mission against her will, forcing her to work with an ill-matched group of squabbling teammates from rival clans, including one who she can't avoid, and maybe doesn't want to. Hac Cúc of the Snake clan has always been better at poisoning and stabbing than at making friends, but she's drawn to Nhi's perceptiveness and obliviousness to social conventions--including the ones that really should make Nhi think twice about spending time with her. But when their imperial envoy and nominal leader is poisoned, this crew of expendable apprentices will have to learn to work together--fast-before the invisible Tangler can wreak havoc on a civilian city and destroy the fragile reputation of the clans. Along the way, Nhi and Hac Cúc will have to learn the hardest lesson of all: to see past their own misconceptions and learn to trust their growing feelings for each other"--
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Book
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FIC Bod
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"Kiran leaves her home in Punjab for a new start in Canada after a sexual assualt leaves her pregnant. But overstaying her visa and living undocumented brings its own perils for both her and her daughter, Sahaara. Sahaara would do anything to protect her mother. When she learns the truth about Kiran's past, she feels compelled to seek justice--even if it means challenging a powerful and dangerous man" --Book jacket.
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Book
Call Number:
YA FIC Kau
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Cobalt red : how the blood of the Congo powers our lives
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This is the searing exposé of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves. Siddharth Kara has traveled deep into cobalt territory to document the testimonies of the people living, working, and dying for cobalt. Kara investigated militia-controlled mining areas, traced the supply chain of child-mined cobalt from toxic pit to consumer-facing tech giants, and gathered testimonies of people who endure immense suffering and even die mining cobalt. Cobalt is an essential component to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today, the batteries that power our smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles. More than 70 percent of the world's supply of cobalt is mined in the Congo, often by peasants and children in sub-human conditions. Billions of people in the world cannot conduct their daily lives without participating in a human rights and environmental catastrophe in the Congo. Kara argues that we must all care about what is happening in the Congo--because we are all implicated.--
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Book
Call Number:
338.2748 Kar
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In 1913, Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring premiered at the new Théâtre de Champs-Elysées in Paris. The work so perplexed audiences that a riot broke out. "Only a Russian could do that," says Aleksandr Ivanovich. "Only a Russian could make the whole world go mad." A century later, in November 2013, thousands of Ukrainian citizens gathered at Independence Square in Kyiv to protest then-President Yanukovych's failure to sign a referendum with the European Union, opting instead to forge a closer alliance with President Vladimir Putin and Russia. The peaceful protests turned violent when military police shot live ammunition into the crowd, killing over a hundred civilians. I Will Die in a Foreign Land follows four individuals over the course of a volatile Ukrainian winter, as their lives are forever changed by the Euromaidan protests. Katya is an Ukrainian-American doctor stationed at a makeshift medical clinic in St. Michael's Monastery; Misha is an engineer originally from Pripyat, who has lived in Kyiv since his wife's death; Slava is a fiery young activist whose past hardships steel her determination in the face of persecution; and Aleksandr Ivanovich, a former KGB agent, who climbs atop a burned-out police bus at Independence Square and plays the piano. As Katya, Misha, Slava, and Aleksandr's lives become intertwined, they each seek their own solace during an especially tumultuous and violent period. The story is also told by a chorus of voices that incorporates folklore and narrates a turbulent Slavic history.
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Book
Call Number:
FIC Pic
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Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Forty fishermen, including Maren Magnusdatter's brother and father, are drowned and left broken on the rocks below. The women of the tiny Arctic town of Vardø must fend for themselves. Three years later Absalom Cornet comes from Scotland, where he burned witches in the northern isles. His young Norwegian wife, Ursa, sees something she has never seen before: independent women. But Absalom sees only a place untouched by God, and flooded with a mighty evil. Maren and Ursa are drawn to one another in ways that surprise them both, but Absalom's iron rule threatening Vardø's very existence. -- adapted from jacket
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Book
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FIC Har
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"1980: The Democratic People's Republic of Laos is proud to be competing in its first-ever Olympics. Of course, half the world is boycotting the Moscow Summer Olympic Games to protest Russia's recent invasion of Afghanistan, but that has made room for athletes from countries that are usually too small or underfunded to be competitive--countries like Laos. Ex-national coroner of Laos Dr. Siri Paiboun may be retired, but he and his wife, Madame Daeng, would do just about anything to have a chance to visit Moscow, so Siri finagles them the job of medical oversight for the Olympians. Most of the athletes are young and innocent village people who have never worn shoes, never mind imagined anything as marvelous as the Moscow Olympic Village. As the competition heats up, however, Siri begins to suspect that one of the athletes is not who he says he is. Fearing a conspiracy, Siri and his friends investigate, liaising in secret with Inspector Phosy back home in Laos to see if the man might be an assassin. But Siri's progress is derailed when another Lao Olympian is accused of murder. Now in the midst of a murky international incident, Dr. Siri must navigate not one but two paranoid and secretive government machines to make sure justice is done"--
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Book
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FIC Cot
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This novel opens in the aftermath of an inexplicable tragedy--a tiny footbridge in Peru breaks, and five travelers hurtle to their deaths. Brother Juniper, a humble Franciscan friar who witnesses the catastrophe, is committed to discover what manner of lives these five disparate people led, and whether it was divine intervention that took their lives, or a capricious fate.
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Book
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FIC Wil
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Birds Without Wings is the story of a small town in Anatolia in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire told in the richly varied voices of the men and women-Armenians, Christians, Muslims-whose lives are intertwined and rooted there: Iskander, the potter and local fount of wisdom; Philotei, the Christian girl of legendary beauty, courted almost from infancy by Ibrahim the goatherd, a great love that culminates in tragedy and madness; and many more. When jihad is declared against the Franks and the young men of the town are conscripted, we follow Iskander's son, Karatavuk, to Gallipoli, where the intimate brutality of battle robs him of all innocence-just as the town he left behind is robbed of its centuries-old peace by the twin scourges of fanatical religion and nationalism that the war unleashed.
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Book
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FIC De B
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Always another country : [a memoir of exile and home]
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"Born in exile, in Zambia, to a guerrilla father and a working mother, Sisonke Msimang is constantly on the move. Her parents, talented and highly educated, travel from Zambia to Kenya and Canada and beyond with their young family. Always the outsider, and against a backdrop of racism and xenophobia, Sisonke develops her keenly perceptive view of the world. In this sparkling account of a young girl's path to womanhood, Sisonke interweaves her personal story with her political awakening in America and Africa, her euphoria at returning to the new South Africa, and her disillusionment with the new elites"--
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Audiobook
Call Number:
362.87 Msi
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A stunningly original story told as the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geishas. Sayuri's story begins in 1929, when, as a little girl with unusual, blue-gray eyes, she is taken from her home in a fishing village and sold into slavery, becoming servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house.
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Audiobook
Call Number:
FIC Gol
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Anna has two rules for the annual Pace family destination vacations: Tread lightly and survive. It isn't easy when she's the only one in the family who doesn't quite fit in. Her twin brother, Benny, goes with the flow so much he's practically dissolved, and her older sister, Nicole, is so used to everyone--including her blandly docile husband and two kids--falling in line that Anna often ends up in trouble for simply asking a question. Mom seizes every opportunity to question her life choices, and Dad, when not reminding everyone who paid for this vacation, just wants some peace and quiet. The gorgeous, remote villa in tiny Monteperso seems like a perfect place to endure so much family togetherness, until things start going off the rails--the strange noises at night, the unsettling warnings from the local villagers, and the dark, violent past of the villa itself. (Warning: May invoke feelings of irritation, dread, and despair that come with large family gatherings.)
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Book
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FIC Tho
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In small-town Australia, teens Jasper and Charlie form an unlikely friendship when one asks the other to help him cover up a murder until they can prove who is responsible.
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Book
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YA FIC Sil