Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides she wants a living wake—a party to bring her family and community together to celebrate the long life she’s led—her sisters are surprised. Has Flor…
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Seattle Picks: Book Group Best Bets
1 user likes thisLooking for good books for discussion? These recently released novels from a variety of genres are sure to spark lively discussion in your book group! Annotations from NoveList, unless otherwise noted. (Created October 2024)
StaffLibrary Staff
The Seattle Public Library
30 items
Family Lore
a Novel
- 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…
- A woman working as an assistant to an octogenarian billionaire in the process of giving away his huge fortune fights the seduction of money.
- A mother and her two daughters find out the hard way over forty years that running from the past can’t save you, in the new novel from the New York Times best-selling author of The Middlesteins.
- A sweeping family saga about the complicated bond between mothers and daughters, the disappearance of a father and the long-hidden history of a declining New England mill town.
- A Malayan mother becomes an unlikely spy for the invading Japanese forces during WWII—causing shocking consequences to rain upon her community and family.
- As China's civil war ravages and engulfs their once-privileged lives, four resourceful daughters defy tradition and flee their home as the Communist army closes in, charting a path across a war-torn nation to independence in Taiwan.
- A single mother is surprised when her family blocks her from uncovering her family's ancestry, past and secrets while trying to prove she was descended from slaves in order to participate in the nation's first federal reparations program.
- A new novel that gives voice to the diverse residents of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore—from young activists in conflict with their traditional parents to the poor who clean for the rich—shows lives which intersect across…
- Liame Noone was many things to many people. To the public, he was an exacting, self-made hotel magnate fleeing his past. To his three ex-wives, he was a loving albeit distant family man who kept his finances flush and his families…
- A novel set in Jim Crow Florida follows Robert Stephens Jr. as he's sent to a segregated reform school that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead.
- When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked…
- A darkly funny domestic horror novel about a woman who must take drastic measures to save her husband and herself from the vengeful ghost of her mother-in-law.
- Ditching her California life for the open road, a restless, semi-famous artist leaves her husband, child and career and reinvents herself in a motel room, embarking on a journey of self-discovery and what it means to be alive and free.
- The Blue sisters have always been exceptional - and different. Avery, a strait-laced lawyer living in London, is the eldest daughter, though she's hiding a secret that could undo her life forever. Bonnie was a boxer but, following a…
- With his marriage on the verge of collapse, journalist Mamush returns to his close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community in Washington, DC, where a death in the family leads him on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to…
- Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most…
- For the past two decades, Rocky has looked forward to her family’s yearly escape to Cape Cod. Their humble beach-town rental has been the site of sweet memories, sunny days, great meals, and messes of all kinds. With Rocky sandwiched…
- After growing up with her life being chronicled and monetized by her entrepreneurial step-mother, Anuri escapes as a young adult but vows to fight the cycle of abuse and save her younger sister from a similar fate.
- In 1960s Nigeria, Kunle, when his younger brother disappears as the country explodes in civil war, sets out on an impossible rescue mission, which becomes a journey of atonement that will see him forced to fight a war he hardly understands…
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