MLA - Main Librarians' Picks 2024 Q1

What if your nightmares weren't really nightmares at all? We spend an average of 33 years of our lives asleep. But what really happens, and what are we capable of, when we sleep? Anna Ogilvy was a budding twenty-five-year-old writer with a bright future. Then, one night, she stabbed two people to death with no apparent motive-and hasn't woken up since. Dubbed "Sleeping Beauty" by the tabloids, Anna's condition is a rare psychosomatic disorder known...

"A four-year-old Mi'kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a tragic mystery that haunts the survivors, unravels a family, and will remain unsolved for nearly fifty years July 1962. A Mi'kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family's youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at...

"Christian Cooper is a self-described Blerd (Black nerd), an avid comics fan, and an expert birder who devotes every spring to gazing upon the migratory birds that stop to rest in Central Park, just a subway ride away from where he lives in New York City. When birdwatching in the park one morning in May 2020, Cooper was engaged in the ritual that had been a part of his life since he was ten years old. But when a routine encounter with a dog-walker...

"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of perhaps the most bestselling and beloved literary fiction of our time comes a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring novel about children on the cusp of adulthood in a broken world, who find resilience, hope, and story. The heroes of Cloud Cuckoo Land are children trying to figure out the world around them, and to survive. In the besieged city of Constantinople in 1453, in a public library in Lakeport,...

"A detective novel set in 1945, about two female private investigators trying to solve the locked-room murder of a society widow"--

"A dark and stylish novel of psychological suspense about a young theater critic drawn into a dangerous game that blurs the lines between reality and performance. Vivian Parry likes the dark. A former actress, she now works as the junior theater critic at a major Manhattan magazine. Her nights are spent beyond the lights, in a reserved seat, giving herself over to the shows she loves. By day, she savages them, with words sharper than a knife. Angling...

After meeting a dog during a walk, a little girl declares that she wants one hundred dogs, but as her parents point out all the difficulties, she gradually reduces the number--until she gets the one dog she really wants.

"H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene in this arresting combination of memoir, natural history, and literary inquiry that chronicles one woman's experience of life in Northern California during the worst fire season on record. Told in luminous,perceptive prose, The Last Fire Season is a deeply incisive inquiry into what it really means-now-to live in relationship to the elements of the natural world. When Manjula Martin moved from the city...

In an illustrated memoir, the creator of the Bloggess blog shares humorous stories from her life, including her awkward upbringing in Texas and her relationship with her husband.

Experiencing an epiphany within the most daunting prison of the monstrous Lord Ruler, half-Skaa Kelsier finds himself taking on the powers of a Mistborn, and teams up with ragged orphan Vin in a desperate plot to save their world.