Peak Picks Current Titles Book List
New titles from the Peak Picks collection that are currently in rotation. Stop by any branch to see what's available today!
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The Berry Pickers
NEW FOR OCTOBER! Adult Fiction. “In July 1962, a Mi'kmaq family travels from Nova Scotia to Maine to pick blueberries, and the four-year-old daughter disappears. Subsequently, little Norma grows up haunted by strange dreams she becomes convinced are memories as one family mourns, another hides secrets, and a mystery slowly unravels over 50 years. Of Mi'kmaq and settler ancestry, Peters won the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Unpublished Prose.” Library Journal
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Family Meal: A Novel
NEW FOR OCTOBER! Adult Fiction. “Cam is living in Los Angeles and falling apart after the love of his life has died. Kai's ghost won't leave Cam alone... When Cam returns to his hometown of Houston, he crashes back into the orbit of his former best friend, TJ, and TJ's family bakery. TJ's not sure how to navigate this changed Cam, impenetrably cool and self-destructing, or their charged estrangement. Can they find a way past all that has been said - and left unsaid - to save each other? With his signature generosity and eye for food, sex, love, and the moments that make us the most human, Bryan Washington returns with a brilliant new novel.” Pub description
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Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of A New Tycoon
NEW FOR OCTOBER! Adult Nonfiction. “When Michael Lewis first met him, Sam Bankman-Fried was the world's youngest billionaire and crypto's Gatsby. CEOs, celebrities, and leaders of small countries all vied for his time and cash after he catapulted…onto the Forbes billionaire list. Who was this rumpled guy in cargo shorts and limp white socks, whose eyes twitched across Zoom meetings as he played video games on the side? Lewis sets out to answer this question, taking readers into the mind of Bankman-Fried, whose rise and fall offers an education in high-frequency trading, cryptocurrencies, philanthropy, bankruptcy, and the justice system.” Pub description
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The House of Doors
NEW FOR OCTOBER! Adult Fiction. “Tan (The Garden of Evening Mists) explores the power of storytelling in this intoxicating outing. At Cassowary House in Penang, Malaya, in 1921, Lesley Hamlyn prepares to receive ‘Willie’ Somerset Maugham, the famed English writer and friend of her husband, Robert. Increasingly drawn to Willie—who is desperate for new material for a novel to stave off bankruptcy—Lesley gradually unburdens herself to the author, unearthing a trove of long-buried secrets ranging from the personal to the political. This is a stunner.” PW
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How to Say Babylon
NEW FOR OCTOBER! Adult Nonfiction. “Forbidden by her militant Rastafarian father from talking to friends or wearing pants or jewelry, Sinclair and her sisters were subject to his unpredictable whims and rage. With the help of scholarships, she attended a prestigious private school in Jamaica and eventually left for college in America (the proverbial ‘Babylon’ of the title). In dazzling prose, she examines the traumas of her childhood against the backdrop of her new life as a poet in Babylon, declining to vilify her father even as she questions whether a relationship with him might be salvageable. Readers will be swept away by her tale of triumph over oppression.” PW
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Let Us Descend
NEW FOR OCTOBER! Adult Fiction. “’The first weapon I ever held was my mother's hand.’ So begins the story of Annis, a young Black woman enslaved in the antebellum South, navigating the phantasmagoria of her shifting circumstances. The particular hell of slavery in the United States is well-represented in fiction, and Ward doesn't attempt any kind of reinvention here, nor does she go the route of grand allegory. Instead, she employs her prodigious skills to craft a deeply moving and empathic story of one woman's contention with her life's constants—death, loss, and the ‘descent’ of the title, but also hope and the possibility of rebirth.” Library Journal
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A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial
NEW FOR OCTOBER! Adult Nonfiction. "’This is a war story,’ writes Nguyen, in an autobiography that is deeply personal and intensely political. In nonlinear fashion, the author recounts his family's flight from wartime Vietnam in 1975, when he was 4; a childhood in San José, where his parents (called, in their native tongue, Ba Má) operated a Vietnamese grocery store; and his development as a writer, scholar, and conflicted citizen of what he sardonically calls AMERICATM--a process that inevitably widens the gap with his immigrant parents. A fragmentary reflection on the refugee experience, at once lyrical and biting, by one of our leading writers.” Kirkus
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Monica
NEW FOR OCTOBER! Adult Graphic Novel. "Clowes's long-awaited, genre-bending thriller begins with a young woman named Penny, who, upon becoming pregnant while her fiancé is off fighting in Vietnam, runs away and falls in with a group of bohemian artists. When her daughter, Monica, is just a few years old, Penny mysteriously vanishes; years later, an adult Monica becomes obsessed with finding her. Clowes's formal ingenuity, meticulous attention to psychological and visual detail, and masterful sense of narrative and tone combine to create an emotionally resonant and unforgettable opus.” Kirkus
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Prequel
NEW FOR OCTOBER! Adult Nonfiction. "Before and even after our troops had begun fighting abroad in World War II, a clandestine network flooded the country with disinformation aimed at sapping the strength of the U.S. war effort and persuading Americans that our natural alliance was with the Axis, not against it. At the same time, a handful of extraordinary activists and journalists were tracking the scheme, exposing it even as it was unfolding. In 1941 the U.S. Department of Justice finally made a frontal attack, identifying the key plotters, finding their backers, and prosecuting dozens in federal court. None of it went as planned.” Pub description
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Roman Stories
NEW FOR OCTOBER! Adult Fiction. “Lahiri delivers a dazzling collection of nine stories originally written in Italian and featuring characters who grapple with vast emotional and social chasms that cleave the lives of families, longtime friends, and immigrants. In ‘The Reentry,’ two friends, an Italian woman in mourning for her father and a visiting professor, meet at a trattoria where the woman downplays the racially tinged slights her dark-skinned friend endures from the owners, forever altering the friendship. Throughout, Lahiri’s luminous prose captures a side of Rome often ignored… These unembroidered yet potent stories shine.” PW
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