Staff Picks
Stay in touch with the personal favorites of the KDL Staff. Each title is handpicked.

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Wintergirls
Laurie Halse Anderson

Eighteen-year-old Lia feels she is being haunted by Cassie’s restless spirit when her best friend dies from anorexia—the same disorder Lia has been struggling with.


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Magic Strikes (Kate Daniels, Book 3)
Ilona Andrews

When her werewolf friend Derek is attacked and left for dead, mercenary Kate Daniels investigates and stumbles upon a dark plot, involving a secret no-holds-barred, ultimate preternatural fighting tournament—a discovery that could forever alter the face of Atlanta’s shapeshifting community.


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The Charlemagne Pursuit: A Novel
Steve Berry

A mysterious manuscript discovered in the tomb of Charlemagne sends Cotton Malone on a perilous international quest to the harsh world of Antarctica in pursuit of the truth about the death of his father on a classified sub mission beneath Antarctica.


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A Curse Dark as Gold
Elizabeth C. Bunce

Upon the death of her father, seventeen-year-old Charlotte struggles to keep the family’s woolen mill running in the face of an overwhelming mortgage, but when a man capable of spinning straw into gold appears on the scene she must decide if his help is worth the price.


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August Heat
Andrea Camilleri

When a boy suddenly disappears into a narrow shaft hidden under his family’s beach rental, Inspector Salvo Montalbano and his long-suffering girlfriend Livia, in pursuit of the child, uncover something terribly sinister in the melancholy Sicilian heat.


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Little Bee: A Novel
Chris Cleave

Presents a tale of a precarious friendship between an illegal Nigerian refugee and a recent widow from suburban London, a story told from the alternating and disparate perspectives of both women.


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Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
Temple Grandin

Drawing on the latest scientific research and her own work with animals, the author discusses the emotional needs of animals and how to fulfill them, challenging common myths about animal emotions, mental stimulation, and emotional well-being.


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Mudbound
Hillary Jordan

When Henry McAllan moves his city-bred wife, Laura, to a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in 1946, she finds herself in a place both foreign and frightening. Henry’s love of rural life is not shared by Laura, who struggles to raise their two young children in an isolated shotgun shack under the eye of her hateful, racist father-in-law.


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The Piano Teacher: A Novel
Janice Y. K. Lee

Hired by the wealthy Chen family as a piano instructor, Claire Pendleton is seduced by the social life of Hong Kong’s expatriate community and begins an affair with Will Truesdale, an enigmatic Englishman with a devastating past.


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Life Sentences: A Novel
Laura Lippman

The New York Times best-selling author of Another Thing to Fall and What the Dead Know raises difficult and illuminating questions about the nature of memory and truth, in a stand-alone novel of twisting suspense.


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Revenge of the Spellmans: A Novel
Lisa Lutz

Isabel pursues therapy while trailing her newest client’s errant wife, Rae faces skyrocketing expectations in light of her high SAT score, and Henry disrupts the family with a new love interest.


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Sniper One: On Scope and Under Siege with a Sniper Team in Iraq
Dan Mills

A decorated member of the Princess of Wales’ Royal Regiment recounts his 2004 tour of duty in Iraq, a six-month service of peaceful intentions that were violently altered by hostile attacks by the people of Al Amarah. 50,000 first printing.


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We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese
Elizabeth M. Norman

The story of American nurses on Bataan—the “Angels of Bataan and Corregidor”—vividly chronicles their capture by the Japanese, three-year imprisonment, and eventual triumphant release, drawing on interviews with survivors, letters, and journals.


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The Help
Kathryn Stockett

Limited and persecuted by racial divides in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, three women, including an African-American maid, her sassy and chronically unemployed friend, and a recently graduated white woman, team up for a clandestine project against a backdrop of the budding civil rights era.


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Among the Mad (Maisie Dobbs Novels)
Jacqueline Winspear

Having witnessed a suicide on a busy London street, Maisie Dobbs learns that she has been mentioned in a threatening letter to the prime minister and is subsequently recruited by Scotland Yard.


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A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table
Molly Wizenberg

A creator of the award-winning Orangette blog presents a memoir about the life lessons she learned in the kitchens of her youth, in a recipe-complemented account that describes experiences of loss and love while enjoying her father’s French toast, her husband’s pickles, and her chocolate wedding cakes.


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Peace, Locomotion
Jacqueline Woodson

Separated from his little sister after moving in with his new foster family, twelve-year-old Lonnie keeps a journal in order to share his memories with her when they meet again, but after his foster brother goes off to war, another dose of loss hits him hard and the concept of peace becomes more real with every passing day he is away.


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