The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb

When 47 year old Caelum Quirk and his wife, Maureen moved to Littleton, Colorado, they never imagined what changes would come in to their lives. They both got jobs at the neighboring Columbine High School and all seemed right with the world. Then Caelum’s aunt back in Three Rivers, Connecticut had a stroke and Caelum traveled back to be with her. And Maureen back in Colorado, went to work alone, never imagining that her life would be changed dramatically by two vengeful students who carefully premeditated a murderous rampage. Maureen miraculously survives but the trauma overwhelms her. She flees East to be with her husband.

While Maureen fights to regain her sanity, Caelum discovers a cache of old diaries, letters and newspaper clippings in an upstairs bedroom of his family’s home. Piece by piece, Caelum reconstructs five generations of men and women whose legacy he bears.  Suddenly unimaginable secrets, long-buried fears, anger, guilt and grief rise to the surface. As Caelum grapples with unexpected and confounding revelations from the past, he also struggles to fashion a future out of the ashes of tragedy. “His personal quest for meaning and faith becomes a mythic journey that is at the same time quintessentially contemporary — and American.  This is a profound and heart-rending work of fiction.”  Are you a genealogist, history buff or just a reader of fiction? If so, reserve your copy of this remarkable work today.  

Michelle by Liza Mundy

“She can be funny and sharp-tongued, warm and blunt, empathic and demanding. Who is the woman Barack Obama calls ‘the boss’? In Michelle, Washington Post writer Liza Mundy paints a revealing and intimate portrait, taking us inside the marriage of the most dynamic couple in politics today… Michelle’s story carries with it all the extraordinary achievements and lingering pain of America in the post-civil rights era. In coordination with this exciting time as our country prepares for a new President, we recommend this new biography. Reserve your copy today.

A Mercy by Toni Morrison

A powerful tragedy distilled into a small masterpiece by the Nobel Prize Winning author of Beloved.

Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader in 1680s United States, when the slave trade is still in its infancy. Reluctantly he takes a small slave girl in part payment from a plantation owner for a bad debt. Feeling rejected by her slave mother, 14-year-old Florens can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master’s house, but later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives . . .

At the novel’s heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter - a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.  Reserve your copy today.

Cross Country by James Patterson

When the home of Alex Cross’s oldest friend, Ellie Cox, is turned into the worst murder scene Alex has ever seen, the destruction leads him to believe that he’s chasing a horrible new breed of killer. As Alex and his girlfriend, Brianna Stone, become entangled in the deadly Nigerian underworld of Washington D.C., what they discover is shocking: a stunningly organized gang of lethal teenagers headed by a powerful, diabolical man-the African warlord known as the Tiger. Just when the detectives think they’re closing in on the elusive murderer, the Tiger disappears into thin air. Tracking him to Africa, Alex knows that he must follow. Alone.  Reserve your copy today.

Scarpetta by Patricia Cornwell

Leaving behind her Charleston forensic pathology practice to accept an assignment in New York City, Kay Scarpetta learns the story of an injured psychiatric patient who claims he was attacked by a stalker who was killing someone else at the time. Reserve your copy today.