Staff Picks
Stay in touch with the personal favorites of the KDL Staff. Each title is handpicked.
Christopher Andersen
Traces the inspirational story of the late celebrity couple’s early marriage, describing their passionate shared years prior to Christopher’s paralyzing accident as based on interviews with people who knew them best.
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Leslie T. Chang
Chronicles the everyday world of the millions of female Chinese migrant workers who have left their homes in rural towns to find jobs in China’s cities, as revealed through a two-year study of the lives of two young women, and assesses the sociological significance and global influence of this movement.
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Mary Higgins Clark & Carol Higgins Clark
In tranquil Branscombe, New Hampshire, for the holidays, private investigator Regan Reilly and amateur sleuth Alvirah Meehan investigate shenanigans involving the local mega lottery in the midst of preparations for a local festival.
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Suzanne Collins
In a future North America, where the rulers of Panem maintain control through an annual televised survival competition pitting young people from each of the twelve districts against one another, sixteen-year-old Katniss’s skills are put to the test when she voluntarily takes her younger sister’s place.
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Helene Cooper
The author traces her childhood in war-torn Liberia and her reunion with a foster sister who had been left behind when her family fled the region.
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Clive Cussler & Dirk Cussler
When a series of unexplained deaths and international hostilities occur in the wake of a breakthrough discovery to reverse global warming, NUMA director Dirk Pitt and his children investigate a mysterious silvery mineral with links to a fabled Northwest Passage expedition.
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Jeffery Deaver
Arriving at a deserted lake house to investigate an aborted call to police, Deputy Anna McCafferty walks into the middle of a heinous crime and is deprived of her weapon, car, and phone, forced to flee, along with the twenty-five-year-old daughter of the murdered couple, into the surrounding forest to escape the perpetrators who must eliminate any potential witnesses.
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Phillip Finch
Traces the harrowing experiences of diving companions David Shaw and Don Shirley, whose 2005 underwater recovery endeavor in Africa’s dangerous Bushman’s Hole crater resulted in one of their deaths and the near escape of the other.
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Neil Gaiman
After the grisly murder of his entire family, a toddler wanders into a graveyard where the ghosts and other supernatural residents agree to raise him as one of their own.
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Jean Giono
This is the timeless story of a solitary shepherd who spent his life working anonymously to reforest Provence, France, and by doing so revitalized the land and the people who lived there.
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John Grogan
The author examines the events of his life and his evolving relationship with his parents, from his upbringing in a devout Catholic home, to his marriage to a Protestant woman, and finally his father’s diagnosis with leukemia.
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Michael Gruber
Desperately typing out the details of a case that puts him at the center of a deadly conspiracy that could mean his imminent demise, intellectual property lawyer Jake Mishkin recounts how a bookstore fire led to the discovery of a cache of encrypted seventeenth-century letters revealing the whereabouts of one of the most valuable historical items in the world.
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Adena Halpern
Arriving in heaven with her dog Peaches after an unfortunate auto accident, twenty-nine-year-old Alexandra Dorenfield is delighted to find herself in the seventh — and highest — level of heaven, where she is reunited with her grandparents and finds the man of her dreams, until she discovers that she must prove her right to remain there, or be demoted to a lower level of the hereafter.
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Carol Edgemon Hipperson
Traces the experiences of a World War II veteran who participated in the world’s first battles between aircraft carriers, tracing his military enlistment as a restless youth and radio training through his witness to the sinking of the Yorktown and his observations on the secret relationship between Russian and American forces in Alaska.
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Polly Horvath
Hot air balloon rides, a new friendship with a preacher, and an encounter with an aspiring psychic make 12-year-old Jane’s boring summer vacation an adventure to remember while teaching her a lot about herself in the process.
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Neta Jackson
For everyone who loves the best-selling Yada Yada Prayer Group novels comes a brand new series sprinkled with familiar faces and places from the Yada Yada world.
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Kate Jacobs
Five years after the death of her mother, Dakota is running their knitting store part time with the help of members of the “Friday Night Knitting Club,” each of who is seeking solace in their friendship from their own challenges in life.
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Watt Key
After the death of his father, ten-year-old Moon leaves their forest shelter home and is sent to an Alabama institution, becoming entangled in the outside world he has never known and making good friends, a relentless enemy, and finally a new life.
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Kathe Koja
Content with following all the rules at the Vaughn School and living what would be considered by most to be a perfect life, Lily Noble’s straightforward existence gets thrown for a loop when unconventional Hazel Tobias suddenly arrives and begins to show her everything that she’s been missing in the world.
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Margo Lanagan
A young woman who has endured unspeakable cruelties is magically granted a safe haven apart from the real world and allowed to raise her two daughters in this alternate reality, until the barrier between her world and the real one begins to break down.
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Jim Lynch
Over the course of a single summer, thirteen-year-old Miles O’Malley, a young boy with a fascination for the sea, copes with the trials of growing up, his infatuation with the girl next door, bickering parents, and his fear that his life and his beloved Puget Sound are slipping away from him.
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Vicki Myron
Traces the author’s discovery of a half-frozen kitten in the drop-box of her small-community Iowa library and the feline’s development into an affable library mascot whose intuitive nature prompted hundreds of abiding friendships, in a tale told against a backdrop of the town’s struggles with the 1980s farm crisis.
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Sally Nicholls
Eleven-year-old Sam McQueen, who has leukemia, writes a book during the last three months of his life, in which he tells about what he would like to accomplish, how he feels, and things that have happened to him.
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Joseph O'Neill
Abandoned amid the offbeat inhabitants of the Chelsea Hotel when his English wife and son return to London following September 11th, Hans, a banker originally from the Netherlands, struggles to find himself in his adopted country, until he stumbles upon a vibrant New York cricket subculture and the charismatic Chuck Ramkissoon.
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M. William Phelps
A portrait of the legendary Revolutionary War patriot traces his Connecticut childhood and Yale education through perspectives about soldier life and his service as a spy, in an account that draws on Hale’s personal journals and letters.
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Deanna Raybourn
A British aristocrat with an eccentric family and a husband she does not love, Lady Julia Grey is stunned by the sudden death of her husband and enlists the help of private sleuth Nicholas Brisbane to unravel the mystery of his death and the threats that he had been receiving, all the while taking on an unconventional role in London society.
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Marilynne Robinson
Returning to Gilead to care for her dying father, Glory Boughton is joined by her long-absent brother, with whom she bonds throughout his struggles with alcoholism, unemployment, and their father’s traditionalist values.
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David Rosenfelt
When a drunken stranger confides in him that he had killed a young woman in Kinnelon, New Jersey, some three months earlier, Tim Wallace, already suspected of having murdered his wife after she dies in a boating accident, suddenly finds his life put under a microscope by the cops and launches a personal investigation to uncover the truth.
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J. K. Rowling
Featuring commentary by Albus Dumbledore, a collection of tales from the world of Harry Potter includes “The Wizard and the Hopping Pot,” “Babbitty Rabbitty and her Cackling Stump,” and “The Tale of the Three Brothers.”
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Mary Doria Russell
The sole survivor of a crew sent to explore a new planet, Jesuit priest Emilio Sandoz discovers an alien civilization that raises questions about the very essence of humanity, an encounter that leads Sandoz to a public inquisition and the destruction of his faith.
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Curtis Sittenfeld
When her husband is elected president of the United States, Alice Blackwell finds her new life as first lady increasingly tumultuous as she recalls her early life, her courtship and marriage, and the crisis that nearly destroyed their relationship and reflects on the privileges and difficulties of her position as her private beliefs conflict with her public responsibilities.
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Thrity Umrigar
A new novel by the author of Bombay Time vividly captures the delicate balance of class and gender in contemporary India as witnessed through the lives of two compelling women — Sera Dubash, an upper middle-class parsi housewife, and Bhima, an illiterate domestic hardened by a life of loss and despair.
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Patricia Wood
Having learned essential life skills from his dedicated grandmother that helped him overcome his low IQ, Perry finds himself without a caregiver at the age of thirty-one and wins a fortune by playing the lottery, a lucrative windfall that brings him more family than he ever wanted.
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