Staff Picks

"Everybody lies about their lives. What would happen if you shared the truth?" This is the question that Julian Jessop poses within a pale green exercise book before leaving it behind in Monica's Café. When Monica discovers Julian's abandoned notebook, not only does she add her own story to the book, she is determined to find a way to help Julian feel less lonely. And so it goes with the others who find the green notebook that will soon contain their...

Escaping from Paris in 1942 after the arrest of her father, a Polish Jew, a graduate student finds refuge in a small mountain town, where she forges identity documents to help hundreds of Jewish children flee the Nazis.

The jailhouse lawyer: A young lawyer takes on the judge who is destroying her hometown--and ends up in jail herself. In picture-perfect Erva, Alabama, the most serious crimes are misdemeanors. Speeding tickets. Shoplifting. Contempt of court. Then why is the jail so crowded? And why are so few prisoners released? There's only one place to learn the truth behind these incriminating secrets. Sometimes the best education a lawyer can get is a short stretch...

"Lily Weiss is her mother's worst nightmare: thirty-two and single--the horror! She's also a talented writer, but hides behind a boring job at a science foundation. To her friends, she's reliable and selfless, which is how she winds up a bridesmaid in five weddings in six weeks. Even if her own love life is...well, she'd rather not talk about it. To keep her sanity, Lily needs a safe place to vent. And so her anonymous blog, Bridesmania, is born....

"From Kristin Hannah, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Nightingale and The Great Alone, comes an epic novel of love and heroism and hope, set against the backdrop of one of America's most defining eras-the Great Depression. Texas, 1934. Millions are out of work and a drought has broken the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as the crops are failing, the water is drying up, and dust threatens...

"Aware of the racial tumult in the years after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Mei tries to remain blissfully focused on her job, her close friendship with the camp foreman's daughter, and telling stories about Paul Bunyan--reinvented as Po PanYin (Auntie Po), an elderly Chinese matriarch"--

When Priyanka finds a mysterious pashmina in her house, she is transported to an India which may or may not be real, and goes in search of the reason why her mother left her homeland and the father she has never met.

"Meet Charise. She's energetic, helpful, a model pet owner and full of inventions. But she's also a bad sister. When she goes too far and breaks little brother Daniel's tooth, can she redeem herself? Is an accident really an accident if you could have stopped it? But most importantly... What does it mean to be a good sister?"--

After she saves a man from drowning, Haley wakes up in a pocket universe that appears as a gothic estate and helps three brothers whose job it is to protect her world against a penultimate evil.