Seattle Staff Faves 2024: Fiction, Part 1
Every year we ask our staff across the system for their favorite books published in a given year. Our staff are such voracious readers that we needed two parts for adult fiction this year! Enjoy this variety of fiction staff favorites, with annotations by staff members or as noted. (Created November 2024)
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When To Pick A Pomegranate
In this collection of contemplative and cathartic short comics, the pomegranate Anar and the woman Guli exist as reflections of each other -- repellent to one another and yet inexorably drawn together once more. (Catalog description)
Format: Book
Availability: On order
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Martyr!
An alcoholic, addict and poet, Cyrus Shams, the orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, finds his obsession with martyrs leading him to examine the mysteries of his past and to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. (NoveList Plus)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Selamlik
Furat, a Syrian in his early 20s, visits Sibky Park in Damascus, one of the city's most popular cruising areas. There he learns about the hammams, secret meeting places for gay men located throughout the old city. Inside these public baths, the air is thick with the scent of bay laurel soap, and naked men hide in the steam. Furat faces sometimes violent disapproval from all levels of society, and yet he manages to find the love he's been seeking just before his world collapses and he's forced to flee. (Back cover)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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The Cemetery of Untold Stories
When a novelist decides to retire, she builds a cemetery for the stories she has never finished telling. (Kirkus)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Nicked
In 1087, when Tyun, a treasure hunter renowned for "liberating" holy relics from their tombs, is paid to bring the 700-year-old bones of Saint Nicholas to Bari, Italy, to cure the plague, Brother Nicephorus is ordered to be his guide and forced to commit an act of sacrilege on their journey. (NoveList Plus)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Disturbing the Dead
A modern-day homicide detective trapped in the body of an 1860s housemaid investigates when the body discovered in an unwrapped mummy is not very old, in the third novel of the series following The Poisoner's Ring. (NoveList Plus)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Interesting Facts About Space
When she unwittingly plunges into her first serious romantic entanglement, space-obsessed Enid starts to believe that someone is following her. (NoveList Plus)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Mammoth
Mammoth’s protagonist is a disenchanted young lesbian. She’s inexperienced, irritated by life, eager to gestate, and determined to strip everything else down to essentials. She seduces men at random, swaps her urban habitat for an isolated farmhouse, befriends a shepherd, nurses lambs, battles stray cats, waits tables, cleans house, and dabbles in sex work—all in pursuit of life in the raw. (NoveList Plus)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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The Familiar
Servant Luzia Cotado hides her talent for milagritos (little miracles) in fear that their discovery would also uncover her Jewish roots and the Ladino spells she uses to fix burnt bread and broken glasses, bringing the Inquisition to her door. But when her magic is discovered, it attracts the attention of a patron who’s desperate for the favor of the king—and she’s quickly tossed into a contest of miracles that is at the center of the politics of a struggling Spain. (Booklist)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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The Atlas Complex
Vulnerable to the lethal terms of their recruitment, six Alexandrians grapple with the ethics of their astronomical abilities while the outside world mobilizes to destroy them, forcing them to decide what they're willing to betray for limitless power and who will be destroyed along the way. (NoveList Plus)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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