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(NEW!) The Alice Network, by Kate Quinn (historical fiction)
In 1915, Eve Gardiner is recruited for a network of spies during WWI in enemy-occupied France. Thirty years later, her life is disrupted by the arrival of Charlie St. Clair—a single, pregnant college girl from America in search of her long lost cousin.
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(NEW!) Always, by Sarah Jio (contemporary fiction)
While enjoying a meal with her perfect fiancée, a woman is brought face-to-face with the once love of her life—now living on the street. Alternating between the past and present, Always is an unfolding exploration of a woman faced with an impossible choice of what she will sacrifice for true love.
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(NEW!) Beartown, by Fredrik Backman (contemporary fiction)
When a small town hockey team is on the cusp of winning a national championship, dreams may be dashed as the star player is accused of rape. Beartown explores the hopes that bring a small community together, and the courage it takes for an individual to go against the grain.
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(NEW!) Behold the Dreamers, by Imbolo Mbue (literary fiction)
After landing a job as chauffeur to a senior executive at Lehman Brothers, Cameroonian immigrant Jende Jonga and his family are given the opportunity to succeed in America. But not all is as it appears to be, and when his employer’s lives are upended by the financial ruin of Lehman Brothers and the beginnings of the Great Depression, impossible choices have to be made.
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Birdie, by Tracey Lindberg (Canadian author; contemporary fiction)
Bernice Meetoos, a Cree woman, leaves her home in Northern Alberta to Gibsons, BC. She tries to recover from wounds of the past and build a new life.
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(NEW!) Bluebird, Bluebird, by Attica Locke (suspense)
Darren Lark, a Texas ranger with a troubled marriage and a complicated past, heads back home to small-town Texas when a black man and a white woman are found murdered. Winner of the 2018 Edgar Award for Best Novel!
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(NEW!) Born A Crime, by Trevor Noah (biography)
While many people know Trevor Noah from his day job as host of The Daily Show, they may be unaware that the early years of his life were complicated by living as an illegal mixed race child in apartheid South Africa. Here he reflects on his dangerous childhood alongside his loving mother with his trademark comic wit.
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(NEW!) The Clay Girl, by Heather Tucker (Canadian author; literary fiction)
For the Appleton sisters, life had unraveled many times before, but this time, it explodes. Eight-year-old Ari is dispatched to Cape Breton and her Aunt Mary. But Mary offers an unexpected refuge to Ari and her steadfast companion, Jasper, an imaginary seahorse. Through the sexual revolution and drug culture of the 1960s, Ari struggles with her father’s legacy of suicide and her mother’s addictions.
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(NEW!) The Color of Our Sky, by Amita Trasi (literary fiction)
India, 1986: Mukta has come of age and must fulfill her destiny of becoming a temple prostitute, as her mother and grandmother did before her. In an attempt to escape her fate, Mukta is sent to be a house girl for an upper-middle-class family in Mumbai. There she discovers a friend in the daughter of the family, Tara, who helps her recover from the wounds of her past. Tara introduces Mukta to an entirely different world, and a friendship that becomes a sisterhood.
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A Different Kind of Daughter, by Maria Toorpakai (biography)
A woman from an oppressive Pakistani tribal region, where women playing sports is forbidden, discusses how she passed as a boy in order to play the sports she loved, thus becoming a lightning rod of freedom in her country’s fierce battle over women’s rights, as well as the subject of a forthcoming 2016 documentary. (NoveList)
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(NEW!) Faithful, by Alice Hoffman (contemporary fiction)
Shelby Richmond was a normal teenager until she becomes the survivor in an accident that takes her best friend’s life. Survivor’s guilt becomes the driving destructive force in her life, causing her to make a series of bad choices. Eventually she must find a way to a brighter future—with the help of an angel who has been with her all along.
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(NEW!) Fifth Business, by Robertson Davies (Canadian author; literary fiction)
Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in WWI. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him... A remarkable story told by a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real. (Goodreads)
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(NEW!) Fire in the Stars, by Barbara Fradkin (Canadian author; suspense)
After surviving a horrific trauma in Nigeria, international aid worker Amanda Doucette returns to Canada to rebuild her life and her shaken ideals. There, the once-passionate, adventurous woman needs all her strength and ingenuity when a friend and fellow survivor goes missing along with his son. (Goodreads)
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First Comes Love, by Emily Giffin (contemporary fiction)
Josie and Meredith Garland are two sisters following different paths in life after having lived through a tragedy. As the anniversary of the tragedy approaches, the two women must confront the issues that separate them and come to terms with the decisions they have made.
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Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin (fantasy)
The aristocratic Stark family faces its ultimate challenge in the onset of a generation-long winter, the poisonous plots of the rival Lannisters, the emergence of the Neverborn demons, and the arrival of barbarian hordes.
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The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins (suspense)
Rachel is a washed-up thirty-something who creates a fantasy about the seemingly perfect couple she sees during her daily train ride into London. When the woman goes missing, Rachel manages to insert herself into the investigation of the woman’s disappearance. (LibraryReads)
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(NEW!) The Girls, by Emma Cline (historical fiction)
Northern California, during the violent end of the 1960s. A lonely and thoughtful teenager, Evie Boyd, is soon in thrall to Suzanne, a mesmerizing older girl, and is drawn into the circle of a soon-to-be infamous cult and the man who is its charismatic leader, not realizing she is coming closer and closer to unthinkable violence.
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The High Mountains of Portugal, by Yann Martel (Canadian author; contemporary fiction)
An Iberian rhinoceros, two chimpanzees, three dead wives, and two dead toddlers all figure in this highly imaginative novel. Martel's narrative wizardry connects three novellas set seven decades apart in the eponymous region of Portugal….Martel is in a class by himself in acknowledging the tragic vicissitudes of life while celebrating wildly ridiculous contretemps that bring levity to the mystery of existence. (Publisher’s Weekly)
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(NEW!) A House in the Sky by Amanda Lindhout, Sara Corbett (Canadian author; biography)
As a child growing up in small-town Alberta, living in a dank basement apartment where her mother often suffered beatings at the hands of her boyfriend, Amanda Lindhout found escape in copies of National Geographic. Years later, after much travel in exotic locales, Lindhout would find herself incarcerated in another dank room, this one in Somalia. (Quill & Quire)
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(NEW!) Hum If You Don't Know the Words, by Bianca Marais (Canadian author; historical fiction)
Life under Apartheid has created a secure future for Robin Conrad, a nine-year-old white girl living with her parents in 1970s Johannesburg. In the same nation but worlds apart, Beauty Mbali, a Xhosa woman in a rural village, struggles to raise her children alone after her husband’s death. The Soweto Uprising alters the fault lines on which their society is built, and shatters their worlds when Robin’s parents are left dead and Beauty’s daughter goes missing.
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The Illegal, by Lawrence Hill (Canadian author; dystopian fiction)
Keita Ali is on the run. He is desperate to flee Zantoroland, a mountainous black island that produces the fastest marathoners in the world. Keita signs on with notorious marathon agent, Anton Hamm, who provides Keita with a chance to run the Boston marathon. But when Keita fails to place among the top finishers, rather than being sent back to his own country, he goes into hiding. (NoveList)
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The Lake House, by Kate Morton (contemporary/historical fiction)
Living on her family’s idyllic lakeside estate in Cornwall, England, Alice Edevane is a bright, inquisitive, innocent, and precociously talented sixteen-year-old who loves to write stories. But the mysteries she pens are no match for the one her family is about to endure…
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The Light Between Oceans, by M.L. Stedman (historical fiction)
After moving with his wife to an isolated Australian lighthouse where they suffer miscarriages and a stillbirth, Tom allows his wife to claim an infant that has washed up on the shore, a decision with devastating consequences. (NoveList)
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Live By Night, by Dennis Lehane (historical fiction)
Meticulously researched and artfully told, Live by Night is the riveting story of one man’s rise from Boston petty thief to the Gulf Coast’s most successful rum runner, and it proves again that the accolades New York Times bestseller Lehane consistently receives are well deserved.
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(NEW!) The Lost Diaries of Susanna Moodie, by Cecily Ross (Canadian author; historical fiction)
A personal account of what Susanna Moodie may have written in her diary, had she kept one in the backwoods of Canada. Ross takes historical fact and combines this with her own experience and imagination of what Moodie’s inner world may have looked like. (Laura, Goodreads review)
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The Mountain Between us, by Charles Martin (contemporary fiction)
Stranded in a frigid mountain wilderness after a plane crash, a gifted surgeon and a young magazine writer are forced to rely on each other for survival while confronting painful truths about their personal lives. (NoveList)
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(NEW!) My Sister Rosa, by Justine Larbalestier (suspense)
Seventeen-year-old Aussie Che Taylor loves his younger sister, Rosa. But he’s also certain that she’s a psychopath—clinically, threateningly, dangerously. New York provides far too many opportunities for Rosa to play her increasingly complex and disturbing games. Che’s always been Rosa’s rock, protecting her from the world. Now, the world might need protection from her.
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The Nest, by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney (contemporary fiction)
If you think your family is dysfunctional, move over because here come the Plumbs. Suddenly faced with the dismantling of the nest egg they’ve counted on to solve their financial woes, the four Plumb siblings have to grow up and fast. (LibraryReads)
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The Nightingale, by Kristin Hannah (historical fiction)
After being kicked out of boarding school, Isabelle is forced to live with her sister, Vianne, and her family in the French countryside. While the sisters struggle with their relationship, peace is hard to find as Hitler begins his invasion of France.
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(NEW!) One Perfect Lie, by Lisa Scottoline (suspense)
Chris Brennan is a highly personable and charming man applying to be a high school government teacher at Central Valley High School and to be the assistant baseball coach. He seems to be the perfect and ideal candidate but Chris is gifted in the art of deception, a man with a plan, a dark and deadly agenda. (Paromjit, Goodreads review)
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(NEW!) The Orphan's Tale, by Pam Jenoff (literary fiction)
Sixteen-year-old Noa has been cast out in disgrace after becoming pregnant by a Nazi soldier and being forced to give up her baby. Then Noa discovers a boxcar containing dozens of Jewish infants bound for a concentration camp... In a moment that will change the course of her life, she snatches one of the babies and flees into the snowy night, finding refuge with a German circus. Noa and the lead aerialist, Astrid, soon forge a powerful bond, but the secrets that burn between them may destroy everything.
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(NEW!) The Readymade Thief, by Augustus Rose (contemporary fiction)
Lee Cuddy is seventeen years old and on the run... She finds refuge in a cooperative of runaways holed up in an abandoned building they call the Crystal Castle, but the façade of the Castle conceals a far more sinister agenda. Lee escapes into the unmapped corners of the city—empty aquariums, deserted motels, patrolled museums, and even the homes of vacationing families, but the deeper she goes underground, the more tightly she finds herself bound in the strange web she’s trying to elude. (Goodreads)
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The Rosie Project, by Graeme Simsion (contemporary fiction)
Don Tillman sets up a project designed to find him the perfect wife. His starts off with a questionnaire that has to be adjusted a little as he goes along, especially once he meets Rosie. Rosie is everything he’s not looking for in a wife, but she ends up his friend as he helps her try and find her biological father. Of course it helps that he is a Professor of Genetics so know a things or two about DNA and how to obtain it.
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(NEW!) Shark Drunk, by Morten Strøksnes (biography)
Two friends embark on a quest to find a mythical shark whose meat contains a toxin that’s been known to make people high. While on their quest, the men look at the ocean from many different perspectives, making observations—sometimes intoxicated—while trying to find this elusive creature.
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Small Great Things, by Jodi Picoult (contemporary fiction)
A black neonatal nurse is charged with causing the death of a white supremacist’s newborn baby. The story is told from the points of view of the nurse, her attorney, and the baby’s heartbroken father. As always, Picoult’s attention to legal, organizational, and medical details help the tale ring true. What sets this book apart, though, are the uncomfortable points it makes about racism. The novel is both absorbing and thought-provoking, and will surely spark conversations among friends, families and book clubs. (LibraryReads)
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The Snowden Files, by Luke Harding (non-fiction)
Edward Snowden, a young computer genius working for America's National Security Agency, blew the whistle on the way this frighteningly powerful organisation uses new technology to spy on the entire planet. The consequences have shaken the leaders of nations worldwide.
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Somewhere in France, by Jennifer Robson (Canadian author; historical fiction)
Lady Elizabeth Neville-Ashford longs have a life of substance and meaning. Only one person other than her beloved brother Edward ever listened to what she wanted -- Robert Fraser, Edward's best friend. When the world is engulfed by World War I, Robbie becomes a trauma surgeon in a field hospital while Lilly breaks free of convention, leaving home and eventually becoming an ambulance driver. When she is transferred to the same field hospital where Robbie works, she hopes to strengthen the growing bond between them.
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(NEW!) Son of a Trickster, by Eden Robinson (Canadian author; literary fiction)
Everyone knows a guy like Jared: the burnout kid in high school who sells weed cookies and has a scary mom who’s often wasted and wielding some kind of weapon. He struggles to keep everything afloat... and sometimes he blacks out. And he puzzles over why his maternal grandmother has never liked him, why she says he’s the son of a trickster, that he isn’t human. Mind you, ravens speak to him—even when he’s not stoned. You think you know Jared, but you don’t.
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(NEW!) The Stars are Fire, by Anita Shreve (historical fiction)
In October 1947, after a summer long drought, fires break out all along the Maine coast. Five months pregnant, Grace Holland is left alone to protect her children. Along with her friend, the women must deal with lost homes and lost husbands in the devestating aftermath, but soon Grace revels in new freedoms, joys, and triumphs she could never have expected. And then the unthinkable happens—and Grace’s bravery is tested as never before.
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Stranger, by David Bergen (suspense)
After an affair with an American doctor so finds herself pregnant and alone in Sierra Madre de Chiapas. When she gives birth her daughter is taken from her and she is informed she is being moved to America. So sets out to reclaim her stolen daughter.
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(NEW!) Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember, by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee (biography)
Christine Hyung-Oak Lee woke up with a headache on New Year’s Eve 2006. By New Year’s Day, she was unable to form a coherent sentence. Lee processes her stroke and illuminates the connection between memory and identity in an honest, meditative, and truly funny manner. And as she recovers, she begins to realize that this devastating event provides a catalyst for coming to terms with her true self.
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Two by Two, by Nicholas Sparks (contemporary fiction)
Everything is going great for 32-year-old advertising executive Russell Green, who loves his wife, his daughter, and their big Charlotte, NC, home. Then, in quick succession, he loses both wife and job and finds himself raising his daughter on his own. (Library Journal)
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Unflinching: The Making of a Canadian Sniper, by Jody Mitic (biography)
Jody Mitic an elite sniper tell us about his personal journey into the Canadian military, through sniper training, and firefights in Afghanistan, culminating on the fateful night when he stepped on a landmine and lost both of his legs below the knees.
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When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi (biography)
Author and physician Kalanithi had nearly completed his residency in neurosurgery at Stanford when he was diagnosed with Stage lV lung cancer at the age of 36. Despite the stubborn progression of his disease, Kalanithi was able to write, work, and delve into a number of profound issues before the end of his life, documented here. (Publisher’s Weekly)
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(NEW!) Where the Light Falls, by Allison Pataki, Owen Pataki (historical fiction)
This sweeping saga brings the French Revolution to life, from the battlefields to the courts of law to the modest homes of its citizens and even to the horrors of La Place de Revolution where the guillotine performed its ugly deeds. This story is centered around four protagonists: a young idealist lawyer and his wife, and a former nobleman turned soldier and the woman he loves. (Susan Peterson, Goodreads review)
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The Widow, by Fiona Barton (suspense)
Four years after being accused of murdering a young girl, Glen is hit by a bus and killed. After playing the supportive wife throughout this ordeal, Jean is now free to tell the truth and reporter Kate Waters will stop at nothing to be the one to reveal it.
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The Witches of New York, by Ami McKay (historical fiction)
Be lured deep inside the lives of a trio of remarkable young women navigating the glitz and grotesqueries of Gilded-Age New York by any means possible, including witchcraft...
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(NEW!) The Woman in Cabin 10, by Ruth Ware (suspense)
Lo Blacklock, a journalist who writes for a travel magazine, has just been given the assignment of a lifetime: a week on a luxury, exclusive cruise. As the week wears on, frigid winds whip the deck, gray skies fall, and Lo witnesses a woman being thrown overboard. The problem? All passengers remain accounted for and so, the ship sails on as if nothing has happened, despite Lo’s desperate attempts to convey that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong...
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The Wonder, by Emma Donoghue (historical fiction)
A village in 1850s Ireland is mystified by what appears to be a miracle--a little girl seems to be thriving after months without food. An English nurse and an international journalist try to get to the root of why the child may actually be the victim of murder in this psychological thriller.
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(NEW!) The Worrier's Guide to the End of the World, by Torre Deroche (biography)
When a friend invites Torre to join her pilgrimage through Tuscany, she straps on a pair of flimsy street shoes and gets rambling. But the magical hills of Italy are nothing like the dusty and merciless roads of India where the pair wind up. Hoping to end the journey as wise, svelte, and kick-ass warriors, they worry that this might be one adventure too far. Coming face-to-face with their worst fears, they discover the power of friendship to save us from our darkest moments.
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Simplify your book club selection with Book Club in a Bag! These kits contain 12 copies of book-club-worthy titles, from biography to historical fiction to suspense, along with a discussion guide.
