Books & Bites: August 2024

“Kurzweil offers a thought-provoking analysis of human and artificial intelligence and a unique look at a future in which the capabilities of the computer and the species that invented it grow ever closer.”—BILL GATES

Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millennia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species's existence.

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • From one of the sharpest voices in fiction today, a profound and enthralling novel about beauty and power, capital, art and those who devote their lives to creating it

Author Lisa Jewell launches the Marvel Crime program with an original story of Jessica Jones investigating a case about a mother who fears her children have been replaced

The second book in the City trilogy. When a movie is made about his former life, Danny Ryan looks for his cut and seeks to restart his criminal empire.

Two rival crime families that control all of New England start a war against each other.

Told through a complex series of interweaving letters, Clarissa is a richly ambiguous study of a fatally attracted couple and a work of astonishing power and immediacy. A huge success when it first appeared in 1747, and translated into French and German, it remains one of the greatest of all European novels.

A novel of family, secrets, ghosts, and homecoming set on the seaside cliffs of Maine, by the New York Times best-selling author of Friends and Strangers

A drama of murder, love, and redemption set in Nova Scotia in the final year of World War I.

A “quietly stunning” (Ocean Vuong) exploration of love and loss, the struggles and limitations of family life—and how we all must learn to live together and apart—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours

Piercing contemporary classic Foster is a heartbreaking story of childhood, loss, and love.

Longlisted for the New American Voices Award • “This is a story with so many twists and turns I was riveted through the last page.”—Jodi Picoult

A chilling horror novel about a haunting, told from the perspective of a young girl whose troubled family is targeted by an entity she calls “Other Mommy,” from the New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box

Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical play Long Day’s Journey into Night is regarded as his masterpiece and a classic of American drama.

A young woman searches for the truth about her sister, who boarded a ship headed to the frozen Arctic and never returned in this “engrossing historical mystery” (The Washington Post).

A novel about a journalist in pursuit of a story about a child who survived a cult mass suicide, which may not be all that it appeared to be, told in Janice Hallett's signature original and innovative style of emails, messages, news clips, and screenplay excerpts

Sometimes the truth kills…

Set in the 1950s on Erdrich’s home reservation, this absorbing novel reveals efforts by Congress to terminate Native American rights.

In 1942 London, 18-year-old Nellie Morris has a chance encounter with an American airman.

“The novel’s strengths abound. It upends clichés, pieties and commonplaces while also noticing salient details of the lockdown.” -The New York Times Book Review

A captivating, brilliantly imaginative story of three extraordinary animals--and a young boy--whose lives intersect in Paris Paras is a spirited racehorse at a racetrack west of Paris.

During the 1948 War of Independence--a time when pigeons are still used to deliver battlefield messages--a gifted young pigeon handler is mortally wounded. In the moments before his death, he dispatches one last pigeon, carrying his extraordinary gift to the girl he has loved since adolescence.

A murder leads detective Jack Caffery into England’s drug underground in this “brilliant, dense, scary” crime thriller in the Edgar Award–winning series (The Globe and Mail, Toronto).

The author’s own Milwaukee bookstore is the setting of a clever ghost story in which all the staff members are Native Americans.

A look at the potentially positive and negative aspects of biotechnology, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.

A Jack Caffrey thriller from “easily today’s best writer of visceral and elemental horror . . . guaranteed to creep out even the strongest of heart.” (Booklist, starred review)

It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.

Adrift in a sleepy coastal Massachusetts town, a man who ferries fugitives by day gets twisted up in a plot to pilfer diamonds in this Casablanca-infused heist novel.

Amorous, high-spirited, and filled with what Fielding called “the glorious lust of doing good,” but with a tendency toward dissolution, Tom Jones is one of the first characters in English fiction whose human virtues and vices are realistically depicted.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart.

Seductive…consistently fun…This is The Graduate with an advanced degree. Wayne’s plot was made to gallop, and it does not disappoint. I read The Winner in two nights. It’s not just the sex that’s provocative; it’s the way the reader is steadily pulled into Conor’s dilemma…I’d judge Wayne on his easy access to the immoral and amoral, but given my own voracious consumption of this book, better to stay off my high horse.” — The New York Times

Polly Bodine, the first American woman put on trial for capital murder in our nation's debut media circus

When a pilot suffers a heart attack at 35,000 feet, a commercial airliner filled with passengers crashes into a nuclear power plant in the small town of Waketa, Minnesota, which becomes ground zero for a catastrophic national crisis with global implications.

A comic thriller following the trials and tribulations of Claire, a part-time serial killer, who is keen to keep her favorite hobby a secret-despite the efforts of a determined blackmailer