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The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo
Kit includes 8 regular print paperback novels, 1 large print novel, and 1 CD audiobook
Set in Manchuria in 1908, The Fox Wife plays with Chinese myths about the fox gods: foxes with the ability to transform themselves into beguiling, beautiful and tormented men and women. Legend has it that these fox gods sometimes live among people, causing trouble through their trickery and slippery relationship to the truth. Told in two voices, Bao is a detective on a mission to figure out what happened to a woman found frozen to death on the doorstep of a restaurant and Snow is on her own quest to understand the death of her only child. As the story alternates between the perspectives, the pull to solve these mysteries builds momentum. The voices are compelling; the secrets are rich. When the two tales begin to overlap and the gaps fill in, the surprise is worth the wait. (BookPage)
Murder in the Family by Cara Hunter
Kit includes 10 regular print paperback novels
Luke Ryder’s murder has never been solved. Everyone present around the time of the murder swears they saw nothing. Despite a high-profile police investigation and endless media attention, no suspect was ever charged. But some murder cases are simply too big to forget… Now comes the sensational new Netflix series Infamous, dedicated to investigating–and perhaps cracking–this famous cold case. The production team will re-examine testimony, re-interview witnesses, and once again scour the evidence. The family will speak. The key players will be reunited–on camera. The truth will come out. (Goodreads)
A Great Country by Shilpi Somaya Gowda
Kit includes 9 regular print paperback novels
Pacific Hills, California: Gated communities, ocean views, well-tended lawns, serene pools, and now the new home of the Shah family. For the Shah parents, who came to America twenty years earlier with little more than an education and their new marriage, this move represents the culmination of years of hard work and dreaming. For their children, born and raised in America, success is not so simple. For the most part, these differences among the five members of the Shah family are minor irritants, arguments between parents and children, older and younger siblings. But one Saturday night, the twelve-year-old son is arrested. The fallout from that event will shake each family member’s perception of themselves as individuals, as community members, as Americans, and will lead each to consider: how do we define success? (Goodreads)
The Mostly True Story of Tanner and Louise by Colleen Oakley
Kit includes 10 regular print hardback novels
Twenty-one-year-old Tanner Quimby needs a place to live. Preferably one where she can continue sitting around in sweatpants and playing video games nineteen hours a day. Since she has no credit or money to speak of, her options are limited, so when an opportunity to work as a live-in caregiver for an elderly woman falls into her lap, she takes it. (Goodreads)
The Outsider: an Old Man, a Mountain and the Search for a Hidden Past by Brett Popplewell
Kit includes 10 regular print paperback novels
Outsider follows journalist Brett Popplewell as he uncovers the story of Dag Aabye, an aging former stuntman who lived alone inside a school bus on a mountain, running day and night through blizzards and heat waves. The book chronicles Aabye’s life from childhood to the silver screen, reflecting on our notions of aging, belonging and human accomplishment. (CBC Books)
The Last Ranger by Peter Heller
Kit includes 9 regular print paperback novels and 1 large print novel
Ren is a park ranger, tasked with duties both mundane and thrilling: breaking up fights at campgrounds, saving tourists from moose attacks, and attempting to broker an uneasy peace between the wealthy vacationers who tromp around with cameras and the locals who want to carve out a meaningful living amid this western landscape. When Ren discovers his friend Hilly, a biologist and wolf expert, nearly dead in the steel jaws of a wolf trap, he hopes it’s just an accident, but the small red ribbon tied to the stake makes him fairly certain that it wasn’t. What begins as an inquiry into a known poacher soon opens into the discovery of a local group of ranchers who have formed an alliance at odds with both the park and with Ren’s responsibility to protect it. (Goodreads)
Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson
Kit includes 9 regular print novels, 1 large print novel and a black cake recipe
Two estranged siblings must set aside their differences to deal with their mother’s death and her hidden past–a journey of discovery that takes them from the Caribbean to London to California and ends with her famous black cake. In present-day California, Eleanor Bennett’s death leaves behind a puzzling inheritance for her two children, Byron and Benny: a traditional Caribbean black cake, made from a family recipe with a long history, and a voice recording. In her message, Eleanor shares a tumultuous story about a headstrong young swimmer who escapes her island home under suspicion of murder. The heartbreaking journey Eleanor unfolds, the secrets she still holds back, and the mystery of a long-lost child, challenge everything the siblings thought they knew about their family, and themselves. (Bibliomation)
Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista
Kit includes 10 regular print hardback novels
Journalist Patricia Evangelista came of age in the aftermath of a street revolution that forged a new future for the Philippines. Three decades later, in the face of mounting inequality, the nation discovered the fragility of its democratic institutions under the regime of strongman Rodrigo Duterte. Some People Need Killing is Evangelista’s meticulously reported and deeply human chronicle of the Philippines’ drug war. For six years, Evangelista chronicled the killings carried out by police and vigilantes in the name of Duterte’s war on drugs—a war that has led to the slaughter of thousands—immersing herself in the world of killers and survivors and capturing the atmosphere of fear created when an elected president decides that some lives are worth less than others. (Goodreads)
Prairie Edge by Conor Kerr
Kit includes 10 regular print paperback novels
Shortlisted for the 2024 Gillar Prize! Meet Isidore “Ezzy” Desjarlais and Grey Ginther: two distant Métis cousins making the most of Grey’s uncle’s old trailer, passing their days playing endless games of cribbage and cracking cans of cheap beer in between. Grey, once a passionate advocate for change, has been hardened and turned cynical by an activist culture she thinks has turned performative and lazy. One night, though, she has a revelation, and enlists Ezzy, who is hopelessly devoted to her but eager to avoid the authorities after a life in and out of the group home system and jail, for a bold yet dangerous political mission: capture a herd of bison from a national park and set them free in downtown Edmonton, disrupting the churn of settler routine. But as Grey becomes increasingly single-minded in her newfound calling, their act of protest puts the pair and those close to them in peril, with devastating and sometimes fatal consequences. (Penguin Random House)
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliot
Kit includes regular print 7 paperback novels and 1 CD audiobook
In an urgent and visceral work that asks essential questions about the treatment of Native people in North America while drawing on intimate details of her own life and experience with intergenerational trauma, Alicia Elliott offers indispensable insight into the ongoing legacy of colonialism. She engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, love, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrification, writing and representation, and in the process makes connections both large and small between the past and present, the personal and political. (Penguin Random House)
West With Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge
Kit includes 8 regular print paperback novels, 2 large print novels, and 1 CD audiobook
Woodrow Wilson Nickel, age 105, feels his life ebbing away. But when he learns giraffes are going extinct, he finds himself recalling the unforgettable experience he cannot take to his grave. It’s 1938. The Great Depression lingers. Hitler is threatening Europe, and world-weary Americans long for wonder. They find it in two giraffes who miraculously survive a hurricane while crossing the Atlantic. What follows is a twelve-day road trip in a custom truck to deliver Southern California’s first giraffes to the San Diego Zoo. Behind the wheel is the young Dust Bowl rowdy Woodrow. Inspired by true events, the tale weaves real-life figures with fictional ones, including the world’s first female zoo director, a crusty old man with a past, a young female photographer with a secret, and assorted reprobates as spotty as the giraffes. (Princeton Book Review)
Canadian Red by R.W. Stone
Kit includes 10 large print hardback novels, 2 CD audiobooks, and 2 DAISY print-disability DTB
The first time the Donovan twins, Lucas and Jamie, saw a Canadian Northwest Mounted Police officer, they knew that’s what they wanted to be when they grew up. Years later, Lucas Donovan, now a member of the force, is on a mission to bring a ruthless serial killer to justice. For years Jack Emerson has eluded capture in the vast Canadian wilderness, but now Donovan has vowed that nothing on earth will stop him from seeing this man caught and punished. The oath is both personal and professional, since one of the men Emerson killed ruthlessly was Constable Jamie Donovan, Lucas’ twin brother. (Goodreads)
Kingdom of the Blind by Louise Penny
Kit includes 10 large print hardback novels, 2 CD audiobooks, and 2 DAISY print-disability DTB
As the first snowflakes of a major storm start to fall, Chief Superintendent Gamache is standing in front of a crooked house in the middle of the woods, unsure of whom he will find inside. Curiosity is what brings him here after receiving a vague invitation in the mail. He and two others who arrive at the house learn that they’ve been named executors of a will belonging to a woman they never knew in life. Stranger still, the woman, who called herself the Baroness, has left millions to her three children, money everyone is shocked to hear about. (Kirkus Reviews)
The Lost Girls of Paris by Pam Jenoff
Kit includes 10 large print hardback novels, 2 CD audiobooks, and 2 DAISY print-disability DTB
The Lost Girls of Paris is uniquely told in alternating voices and timelines between 1946 and 1943. In 1946, Grace Healey is passing through Grand Central Station when she discovers an abandoned suitcase. Curiosity overcomes her, and she opens the suitcase, discovering a folder with a dozen pictures of different women. Grace investigates the owner of the suitcase and photographs. She discovers they belonged to a woman named Eleanor Trigg, who had that same morning been tragically killed in a motor car accident. She also finds out that Eleanor had been the leader of an elite group of women spies, sent to France during the war. Grace becomes determined to find out what happened to the women, as no trace can now be found, and their secret mission seems most intriguing. (Historical Novel Society)
Seven Days in June by Tia Williams
Kt includes 8 regular print paperback novels, 1 large print novel, and 1 CD audiobook
When Shane and Eva meet unexpectedly at a literary event, sparks fly, raising not only their past buried traumas, but the eyebrows of New York’s Black literati. What no one knows is that twenty years earlier, teenage Eva and Shane spent one crazy, torrid week madly in love. They may be pretending that everything is fine now, but they can’t deny their chemistry – or the fact that they’ve been secretly writing to each other in their books ever since. Over the next seven days in the middle of a steamy Brooklyn summer, Eva and Shane reconnect, but Eva’s not sure how she can trust the man who broke her heart, and she needs to get him out of New York so that her life can return to normal. But before Shane disappears again, there are a few questions she needs answered…With its keen observations of Black life and the condition of modern motherhood, as well as the consequences of motherless-ness, Seven Days in June is by turns humorous, warm and deeply sensual. (Goodreads)
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
Kit includes 8 regular print hardback novels, 1 large print novel, and 1 CD audiobook
What if your story couldn’t be told, your name died on your lips, and your face was forgotten the moment it was out of sight? Your freedom infinite, your profiles endless, your barriers reduced. France, 1714. Addie runs from a life she never wanted, a life she prayed to avoid. The old gods and the new have not granted her reprieve, but as darkness falls, she throws out one last gift, one last wish, one least plea. A deal is struck, and a life is reshaped. Adeline LaRue is no more, and Addie is free to find her way through the world. New York City, 2014. Addie has yet to exhaust the possibilities of entertainment in New York City, but those with its people are caught in an exhausted loop. Never a smile of recognition, never a shared smile of mutual recollection. This is hardly new in her three hundredth year, but loneliness is a hunger all its own. She thinks she knows all the rules of the game, but three small words bring her understanding crashing around her. (Historical Novel Society)
The Light of Days by Judy Batalion
Kit includes 7 regular print paperback novels, 2 large print novels, and 1 CD audiobook
Witnesses to the brutal murder of their families and neighbors and the violent destruction of their communities, a cadre of Jewish women in Poland—some still in their teens—helped transform the Jewish youth groups into resistance cells to fight the Nazis. With courage, guile, and nerves of steel, these “ghetto girls” paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread and jars of marmalade, and helped build systems of underground bunkers. They flirted with German soldiers, bribed them with wine, whiskey, and home cooking, used their Aryan looks to seduce them, and shot and killed them. They bombed German train lines and blew up a town’s water supply. They also nursed the sick and taught children. Yet the exploits of these courageous resistance fighters have remained virtually unknown. The Light of Days at last tells the true story of these incredible women whose courageous yet little-known feats have been eclipsed by time. (Goodreads)
The Maid #1 by Nita Prose
Kit includes 9 regular print paperback novels
The shocking murder of a public figure at a high-end hotel has everyone guessing who the culprit might be. Twenty-five-year-old Molly Gray, an eccentric young woman who’s obsessed with cleaning but doesn’t quite have the same ability to navigate social cues as those around her, loves working as a maid at the Regency Grand Hotel. Raised by her old-fashioned grandmother, who loved nothing more than cleaning and watching Columbo reruns, Molly has an overly polite and straightforward manner that can make her seem odd and off-putting to her colleagues despite her being the hardest worker at the hotel. After her grandmother’s death, Molly’s rigid life begins to lose some of its long-held balance, and when the infamous Mr. Charles Black, a rich and powerful businessman suspected of various criminal enterprises, is found murdered in one of the rooms she cleans, her whole world gets turned upside down. (Kirkus Reviews)
The Next Thing You Know by Jessica Strawser
Kit includes 8 regular print hardback novels, and 1 CD audiobook
As an end-of-life doula, Nova Huston’s job—her calling, her purpose, her life—is to help terminally ill people make peace with their impending death. Unlike her business partner, who swears by her system of checklists, free-spirited Nova doesn’t shy away from difficult clients: the ones who are heartbreakingly young, or prickly, or desperate for a caregiver or companion. When Mason Shaylor shows up at her door, Nova doesn’t recognize him as the indie-favorite singer-songwriter who recently vanished from the public eye. She knows only what he’s told her: That life as he knows it is over. His deteriorating condition makes playing his guitar physically impossible—as far as Mason is concerned, he might as well be dead already. Except he doesn’t know how to say goodbye. Helping him is Nova’s biggest challenge yet. She knows she should keep clients at arm’s length. But she and Mason have more in common than anyone could guess… and meeting him might turn out to be the hardest, best thing that’s ever happened to them both. (MacMillan Publishers)
The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
Kit includes 8 regular print paperback novels, 1 large print novel, and 1 CD audiobook
The Silent Patient is a shocking psychological thriller of a woman’s act of violence against her husband—and of the therapist obsessed with uncovering her motive. Alicia Berenson’s life is seemingly perfect. A famous painter married to an in-demand fashion photographer; she lives in a grand house with big windows overlooking a park in one of London’s most desirable areas. One evening her husband Gabriel returns home late from a fashion shoot, and Alicia shoots him five times in the face, and then never speaks another word. Alicia’s refusal to talk, or give any kind of explanation, turns a domestic tragedy into something far grander, a mystery that captures the public imagination and casts Alicia into notoriety. The price of her art skyrockets, and she, the silent patient, is hidden away from the tabloids and spotlight at the Grove, a secure forensic unit in North London. Theo Faber is a criminal psychotherapist who has waited a long time for the opportunity to work with Alicia. His determination to get her to talk and unravel the mystery of why she shot her husband takes him down a twisting path into his own motivations—a search for the truth that threatens to consume him. (MacMillan Publishers)