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New Books

  • Image for "The Last White Man"

    The Last White Man

    NATIONAL BESTSELLER

    NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE SUMMER BY TIME, ELLE, USA TODAY, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY AND MORE


    “Perhaps Hamid’s most remarkable work yet … an extraordinary vision of human possibility.” –Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies

    “Searing, exhilarating … reimagines Kafka’s iconic The Metamorphosis for our racially charged era.” Hamilton Cain, Oprah Daily

    From the New York Times-bestselling author of Exit West, a story of love, loss, and rediscovery in a time of unsettling change.


    One morning, a man wakes up to find himself transformed. Overnight, Anders’s skin has turned dark, and the reflection in the mirror seems a stranger to him. At first he shares his secret only with Oona, an old friend turned new lover. Soon, reports of similar events begin to surface. Across the land, people are awakening in new incarnations, uncertain how their neighbors, friends, and family will greet them.Some see the transformations as the long-dreaded overturning of the established order that must be resisted to a bitter end. In many, like Anders’s father and Oona’s mother, a sense of profound loss and unease wars with profound love. As the bond between Anders and Oona deepens, change takes on a different shading: a chance at a kind of rebirth--an opportunity to see ourselves, face to face, anew.
     
    In Mohsin Hamid’s “lyrical and urgent” prose (O Magazine), The Last White Man powerfully uplifts our capacity for empathy and the transcendence over bigotry, fear, and anger it can achieve.

  • Image for "The Daughter of Doctor Moreau"

    The Daughter of Doctor Moreau

    NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - From the bestselling author of Mexican Gothic and Velvet Was the Night comes a lavish historical drama reimagining of The Island of Doctor Moreau set against the backdrop of nineteenth-century Mexico.

    "This is historical science fiction at its best: a dreamy reimagining of a classic story with vivid descriptions of lush jungles and feminist themes. Some light romance threads through the heavier ethical questions concerning humanity."--Library Journal (starred review)

    "The imagination of Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a thing of wonder, restless and romantic, fearless in the face of genre, embracing the polarities of storytelling--the sleek and the bizarre, wild passions and deep hatreds--with cool equanimity."--The New York Times (Editors' Choice)

    Carlota Moreau: A young woman growing up on a distant and luxuriant estate, safe from the conflict and strife of the Yucatán peninsula. The only daughter of a researcher who is either a genius or a madman.

    Montgomery Laughton: A melancholic overseer with a tragic past and a propensity for alcohol. An outcast who assists Dr. Moreau with his experiments, which are financed by the Lizaldes, owners of magnificent haciendas and plentiful coffers.

    The hybrids: The fruits of the doctor's labor, destined to blindly obey their creator and remain in the shadows. A motley group of part human, part animal monstrosities.

    All of them live in a perfectly balanced and static world, which is jolted by the abrupt arrival of Eduardo Lizalde, the charming and careless son of Dr. Moreau's patron, who will unwittingly begin a dangerous chain reaction.

    For Moreau keeps secrets, Carlota has questions, and, in the sweltering heat of the jungle, passions may ignite.

    The Daughter of Doctor Moreau is both a dazzling historical novel and a daring science fiction journey.

  • Cover of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

    Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

    In this exhilarating novel by the best-selling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry two friends--often in love, but never lovers--come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

    Utterly brilliant. In this sweeping, gorgeously written novel, Gabrielle Zevin charts the beauty, tenacity, and fragility of human love and creativity. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is one of the best books I've ever read.
    --John Green

    On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

    Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.

  • Image for "An Immense World"

    An Immense World

    NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world. Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist Ed Yong takes us on “a thrilling tour of nonhuman perception” (The New York Times), allowing us to experience the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that other animals perceive.
     
    “One of this year’s finest works of narrative nonfiction . . . Yong’s reporting is layered, seasoned with vivid scenes from laboratories and in the field, interviews with researchers across a spectrum of disciplines.”—Oprah Daily
     
    “A dazzling ride through the sensory world of astoundingly sophisticated creatures.”—The Wall Street Journal

    The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses to encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries that remain unsolved. 

    Funny, rigorous, and suffused with the joy of discovery, An Immense World takes us on what Marcel Proust called “the only true voyage . . . not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes.”

  • Image for "Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks"

    Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks

    From the prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing--and one of the most decorated journalists of our time--twelve enthralling stories of skulduggery and intrigue

    "I read everything he writes. Every time he writes a book, I read it. Every time he writes an article, I read it ... he's a national treasure." --Rachel Maddow

    "Patrick Radden Keefe is a brilliant writer, and each of these pieces reminds you that this world and the people in it are more interesting, complicated and moving than you had allowed yourself to imagine. ROGUES is a marvel, showcasing the work of a reporter at the absolute top of his game." --Daniel Alarcón, author of The King is Always Above the People


    Patrick Radden Keefe has garnered prizes ranging from the National Magazine Award to the Orwell Prize to the National Book Critics Circle Award for his meticulously-reported, hypnotically-engaging work on the many ways people behave badly. Rogues brings together a dozen of his most celebrated articles from The New Yorker. As Keefe says in his preface "They reflect on some of my abiding preoccupations: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial."

    Keefe brilliantly explores the intricacies of forging $150,000 vintage wines, examines whether a whistleblower who dared to expose money laundering at a Swiss bank is a hero or a fabulist, spends time in Vietnam with Anthony Bourdain, chronicles the quest to bring down a cheerful international black market arms merchant, and profiles a passionate death penalty attorney who represents the "worst of the worst," among other bravura works of literary journalism.

    The appearance of his byline in The New Yorker is always an event, and collected here for the first time readers can see his work forms an always enthralling but deeply human portrait of criminals and rascals, as well as those who stand up against them.

  • Image for "Either/Or"

    Either/Or

    An instant New York Times bestseller!

    “Batuman has a gift for making the universe seem, somehow, like the benevolent and witty literary seminar you wish it were . . .This novel wins you over in a million micro-observations.” —The New York Times

    From the acclaimed and bestselling author of The Idiot, the continuation of beloved protagonist Selin’s quest for self-knowledge, as she travels abroad and tests the limits of her newfound adulthood


    Selin is the luckiest person in her family: the only one who was born in America and got to go to Harvard. Now it’s sophomore year, 1996, and Selin knows she has to make it count. The first order of business: to figure out the meaning of everything that happened over the summer. Why did Selin’s elusive crush, Ivan, find her that job in the Hungarian countryside? What was up with all those other people in the Hungarian countryside? Why is Ivan’s weird ex-girlfriend now trying to get in touch with Selin? On the plus side, it feels like the plot of an exciting novel. On the other hand, why do so many novels have crazy abandoned women in them? How does one live a life as interesting as a novel—a life worthy of becoming a novel—without becoming a crazy abandoned woman oneself?

    Guided by her literature syllabus and by her more worldly and confident peers, Selin reaches certain conclusions about the universal importance of parties, alcohol, and sex, and resolves to execute them in practice—no matter what the cost. Next on the list: international travel.

    Unfolding with the propulsive logic and intensity of youth, Either/Or is a landmark novel by one of our most brilliant writers. Hilarious, revelatory, and unforgettable, its gripping narrative will confront you with searching questions that persist long after the last page.

  • Image for "Horse"

    Horse

    “Brooks’ chronological and cross-disciplinary leaps are thrilling.” —The New York Times Book Review

    “Horse isn’t just an animal story—it’s a moving narrative about race and art.” —TIME

    A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history


    Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young artist who has made his name on paintings of the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamor of any racetrack. 
     
    New York City, 1954. Martha Jackson, a gallery owner celebrated for taking risks on edgy contemporary painters, becomes obsessed with a nineteenth-century equestrian oil painting of mysterious provenance.
     
    Washington, DC, 2019. Jess, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian, find themselves unexpectedly connected through their shared interest in the horse—one studying the stallion’s bones for clues to his power and endurance, the other uncovering the lost history of the unsung Black horsemen who were critical to his racing success.
     
    Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred Lexington, Horse is a novel of art and science, love and obsession, and our unfinished reckoning with racism.

  • Image for "Last Summer on State Street"

    Last Summer on State Street

    For fans of Jacqueline Woodson and Brit Bennett, a striking coming-of-age debut about friendship, community, and resilience, set in the housing projects of Chicago during one life-changing summer.

    Toya Wolfe is a storyteller of the highest order. Last Summer on State Street is a stunning debut.--Rebecca Makkai, New York Times bestselling author of The Great Believers

    Even when we lose it all, we find the strength to rebuild.

    Felicia "Fe Fe" Stevens is living with her vigilantly loving mother and older teenaged brother, whom she adores, in building 4950 of Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes. It's the summer of 1999, and her high-rise is next in line to be torn down by the Chicago Housing Authority. She, with the devout Precious Brown and Stacia Buchanan, daughter of a Gangster Disciple Queen-Pin, form a tentative trio and, for a brief moment, carve out for themselves a simple life of Double Dutch and innocence. But when Fe Fe welcomes a mysterious new friend, Tonya, into their fold, the dynamics shift, upending the lives of all four girls.

    As their beloved neighborhood falls down around them, so too do their friendships and the structures of the four girls' families. Fe Fe must make the painful decision of whom she can trust and whom she must let go. Decades later, as she remembers that fateful summer--just before her home was demolished, her life uprooted, and community forever changed--Fe Fe tries to make sense of the grief and fraught bonds that still haunt her and attempts to reclaim the love that never left.

    Profound, reverent, and uplifting, Last Summer on State Street explores the risk of connection against the backdrop of racist institutions, the restorative power of knowing and claiming one's own past, and those defining relationships which form the heartbeat of our lives. Interweaving moments of reckoning and sustaining grace, debut author Toya Wolfe has crafted an era-defining story of finding a home -- both in one's history and in one's self.

  • Image for "These Impossible Things"

    These Impossible Things

    A razor-sharp debut novel of three best friends navigating love, sex, faith, and the one night that changes it all.

    It's always been Malak, Kees, and Jenna against the world. Since childhood, under the watchful eyes of their parents, and countless aunties and uncles, they've learned to live their own lives alongside the expectations of being good Muslim women. Staying over at a boyfriend's place is disguised as a best friend's sleepover, and tiredness can be blamed on studying instead of partying. But as they grow older and the stakes of love and life grow higher, the three young women find this delicate balancing act between rebellion and religion increasingly difficult to navigate.

    Malak has always wanted the whole package: for her partner, community, and faith to coexist happily, and she wants this dream so much she's willing to break her own heart to get it. Kees is in love with Harry, a white Catholic man who her parents can never know about. When he proposes, she must decide between her future happiness and the life she knows and family she loves. Jenna is the life of the party, always ready to seek out new pleasures even though she's plagued by a sense of loneliness she can't shake. Through it all, they have always had each other. But as their college years come to a close, one night changes everything as harsh truths are revealed and their bonds are ruptured.

    As their lives begin to take different paths, Malak, Kees, and Jenna--now on the precipice of true adulthood--must find a way back to each other as they reconcile faith, family, and tradition with their own needs and desires. These Impossible Things is a paean to youth and female friendship--and to all the joy and messiness love holds.

  • Cover of "Love Marriage"

    Love Marriage

    "Yasmin Ghorami is twenty-six, in training to be a doctor (like her Indian-born father) and engaged to the charismatic, upper-class Joe Sangster, whose domineering mother Helen is a famous feminist. Though both Yasmin's parents and Joe's mother approve of the marriage, the cultural gulf between them is vast as, it turns out, is the gulf in sexual experience between Yasmin and Joe. The novel opens as Yasmin, her parents, and her brother pile into their car, packed with Indian food prepared by Yasmin's mother, to go to dinner to meet Joe's mother in her elegant townhouse in one of London's poshest neighborhoods. Contrary to all of Yasmin's fears, her unsophisticated and somewhat flamboyant mother is embraced and celebrated by Helen and her friends"--

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Wilmette Public Library

1242 Wilmette Ave.
Wilmette, Illinois 60091
847-256-5025
 

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