MLA - Main Librarians' Picks 2023 Q1

"Decades after being imprisoned for threatening his city with an army of giant robots, an elderly scientist reenters society, only to discover he needs help navigating life in the 21st century. Experiencing real kindness and friendship for the first time, his new relationships challenge the inventor’s single-minded devotion for vengeance-- just as his plans threaten to spiral out of his control"--Jacket flap.

"The scars from a family tragedy draw an estranged police detective back to her childhood home as a teenage boy's death quickly causes the past to collide with the present"--

"The Empress of Salt and Fortune Wandering cleric Chih of the Singing Hills travels to the riverlands to record tales of the notorious near-immortal martial artists who haunt the region. On the road to Betony Docks, they fall in with a pair of young womenfar from home, and an older couple who are more than they seem. As Chih runs headlong into an ancient feud, they find themselves far more entangled in the history of the riverlands than they ever...

"From the Man Booker finalist and bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves comes an epic novel about the family behind one of the most infamous figures in American history: John Wilkes Booth"-- In 1822, a secret family moves into a secret cabin some thirty miles northeast of Baltimore, to farm, to hide, and to bear ten children over the course of the next sixteen years. Junius Booth--breadwinner, celebrated Shakespearean actor,...

"Senior year at Ellingham Academy for Stevie Bell isn't going well. With the cold case of the century solved, Stevie is adrift. There is nothing to distract her from the questions pinging around her brain--questions about college, love, and life in general. Relief comes when David invites Stevie and her friends to join him for study abroad, and his new friend Izzy introduces her to a double-murder cold case. In 1995, nine friends from Cambridge University...

"From the author of Good Morning, Midnight comes a hopeful, sweeping story of survival and resilience spanning one extraordinary woman's lifetime as she navigates the uncertainty, brutality, and arresting beauty of a rapidly changing world. Florida as we know it is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels wreak gradual havoc on the state's infrastructure, a powerful hurricane approaches a small town on the southeastern...

Four-year-old Sal cannot find a gift she recieved from Santa, her new baby sister still does not have a name and takes up all of Mama's attention, and her brother Billy is annoying, but Sal finds her own strengths over an eventful Christmas season with her family.

"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. Already a bestseller in France and certain to be read worldwide for generations to come, Small Things...

"A heartening and life-affirming novel about a single mother learning to make a bigger life, and the power of human connection to grow our worlds"--

"Helen Wilcox has one desire: to successfully launch her daughters into society. From the upper crust herself, Helen's unconventional--if happy--marriage has made the girls' social position precarious. Then her husband gambles the family fortunes on an elevated railroad that he claims will transform the face of the city and the way the people of New York live, but will it ruin the Wilcoxes first? As daughters Jemima and Alice navigate the rise and...