Weekend Reads
Diary of a void
Yagi, Emi, 1988- author.
2022
When thirty-four-year-old Ms. Shibata gets a new job in Tokyo to escape sexual harassment at her old one, she finds that, as the only woman at her new workplace she is expected to do all the menial tasks. One day she announces that she can't clear away her colleagues' dirty cups because she's pregnant and the smell nauseates her. The only thing is Ms. Shibata is not pregnant. Before long, though, the hoax becomes all-absorbing, and the boundary between her lie and her life begins to dissolve.
French braid : a novel
Tyler, Anne, author.
2023
The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever venture beyond Baltimore, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. As these lives advance across decades, the Garretts' influences on one another ripple ineffably but unmistakably through each generation. A freshly observed, funny, joyful, brilliantly perceptive journey deep into one family's foibles, from the 1950s up to our pandemic present.
Harrow : a novel
Williams, Joy, 1944- author.
2021
The author takes us into an uncertain landscape after the environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic. Once nature as we know it is dead, the pursuit of happiness fades into insignificance, food is scarce, and even time doesn't progress in an organized fashion. Harrow follows the picaresque journey of Khristen-- a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen's failing boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and she finds that her mother has disappeared, she washes up at a "resort" on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call "Big Girl." In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature's beauty. What will Khristen and Jeffrey, the precocious ten-year-old boy she meets there, learn from this "gabby seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth"?
The last white man
Hamid, Mohsin, 1971- author
2022
"From the internationally bestselling author of Exit West, a story of love, loss, and rediscovery in a time of unsettling change. One morning, a man wakes up to find himself transformed. Overnight, Anders's skin has turned dark, and the reflection in the mirror seems a stranger to him. At first he shares his secret only with Oona, an old friend turned new lover. Soon, reports of similar events begin to surface. Across the land, people are awakening in new incarnations, uncertain how their neighbors, friends, and family will greet them. Some see the transformations as the long-dreaded overturning of the established order that must be resisted to a bitter end. In many, like Anders's father and Oona's mother, a sense of profound loss and unease wars with profound love. As the bond between Anders and Oona deepens, change takes on a different shading: a chance at a kind of rebirth--an opportunity to see ourselves, face to face, anew."-- Provided by publisher.
The lost wife
Moore, Susanna, author
2023
Arriving in Minnesota Territory with no prospects, Sarah Brinton quickly marries and settling in her new life as a wife and mother, finds kinship among the Sioux women at a nearby reservation until she is caught in the middle of the Sioux Uprising of 1862 where she is lost to both worlds.
Love & saffron : a novel of friendship, food, and love
Fay, Kim, author
2022
When twenty-seven-year-old Joan Bergstrom sends a fan letter - as well as a gift of saffron - to fifty-nine-year-old Imogen Fortier, a life-changing friendship begins. As the two women commune through their letters, they build a closeness that sustains them through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of President Kennedy, and the unexpected in their own lives. Because of her correspondence with Joan, Imogen's decades-long marriage blossoms into something new and exciting, and in turn, Joan learns that true love does not always come in the form we expect it to.
My sister, the serial killer
Braithwaite, Oyinkan, author
2018
Satire meets slasher in this short, darkly funny hand grenade of a novel about a Nigerian woman whose younger sister has a very inconvenient habit of killing her boyfriends. "Femi makes three, you know. Three and they label you a serial killer." Korede is bitter. How could she not be? Her sister, Ayoola, is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola's third boyfriend in a row is dead.
Old God's time
Barry, Sebastian, 1955- author
2023
Retired policeman Tom Kettle is enjoying the quiet of his new home, but his peace is interrupted when two former colleagues turn up at his door to ask questions about a decades-old case. A traumatic case which Tom never quite came to terms with. His peace is further disturbed by a young mother and family who move in next door, a woman on the run from her own troubles. And what of Tom's family - in which everything is not quite what it seems.
Probably Ruby : a novel
Bird-Wilson, Lisa, author
2021
When we first meet Ruby, a MeĢtis woman in her 30s, she's a mess. She's angling to sleep with her therapist while also rekindling an old relationship with a man who was -- let's just say -- a mistake. As we will soon learn, however, Ruby's story is far broader and deeper than its rollicking, somewhat lighthearted first chapter. This is the story of a woman in search of herself, in every sense. Given up for adoption as an infant, Ruby was raised by a white couple who understand little of her Indigenous heritage. Growing up Ruby longs to know where she comes from and who her people are. This is the great mystery that hovers over her life and the book. Through a non-chronological structure, we meet the people who have shaped her life: her adoptive parents; her birth parents and grandparents; the men and women Ruby has been romantically involved with. All these characters form a kaleidoscope of stories, giving Ruby's life dignity and meaning.
The swimmers
Otsuka, Julie, 1962- author
2022
The swimmers are unknown to each other except through their private routines, and the solace each takes in their morning or afternoon laps. But when a crack appears at the bottom of the pool, they are cast out into an unforgiving world without comfort or relief. One of these swimmers is Alice, who is slowly losing her memory. Without the fellowship of other swimmers and the routine of her daily laps she is plunged into dislocation and chaos, swept into memories of her childhood and the Japanese internment camp in which she spent the war.
