- May 27, 2026
Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl by Mandy-Suzanne Wong
If I were to distill the lesson of novelist Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s essay collection Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl into a single sentence, that sentence would be: snails are someones, too! The same goes for crabs, jellyfish, starfish, oysters, mussels—Wong excludes no one, no matter how eyeless or slimy. Her essays on undersea invertebrates ...
Read more… - May 18, 2026
A thorough and engaging historical account exploring the mass hysteria, accusations, and executions that took place during the witch trials of 1692. In The Witches, Schiff examines all aspects of the community at that time, including the social, political, and religious tensions of Puritan New England.
-Samantha, Development
Read more… - May 14, 2026
A novel that tracks the lives of the people, animals and angels of a Polish village as they unfurl across the volatile twentieth century, snarled and wrenched askew at intervals by its upheavals and brutalities. There is much quiet, dreamy strangeness here, like a mist laid over the landscape between scenes, swirling full of ghosts ...
Read more… - May 6, 2026
Parable of the Sower is a sci-fi futuristic tale written in the early 1990s and set in the California of the future – the 2020s. There is no water, food is scarce, and jobs that pay money no longer exist. The main character, Lauren, has hyperempathy, which is a difficult disease to handle when surrounded ...
Read more… - April 20, 2026
You Must Live: New Poetry from Palestine edited and translated by Tayseer Abu Odeh & Sherah Bloor
When the Palestinian-American poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha received the 2024 National Book Award for poetry, in her acceptance speech she said, “I don’t want to write anything that is a consolation. I don’t want to console.” I have read a ...
Read more… - April 16, 2026
See what PFL staff are reading as we move into Spring! Historical fiction, nature observations, many audiobooks, and a lot of us were reading Lauren Groff! Place a hold on any title below by clicking the link.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
Wolf Winter by Cecilia Ekback
A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, ...
Read more… - April 8, 2026
I have not seen the movie, but odds are the book is better! It’s the story of a white Zimbabwean family during the Rhodesian Civil War, in the mid sixties-seventies. It was a brutal time to live there. Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight provides a good snapshot of the horrors of the civil ...
Read more… - March 19, 2026
In This Woven Kingdom, Alizah, a powerful jinn disguised as a low-ranking servant girl, has been exhausted and freezing for the past decade. Kamren, the melancholic prince of Arulia, has been daydreaming about killing himself for just as long. A chance encounter on the rough city streets winds their disparate fates into one. Now, Kamren, hopelessly ...
Read more… - March 11, 2026
The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster by Shelley Puhak
Erzsebet Bathory, a 16th-century Hungarian countess, is frequently infamized as history’s most prolific female serial killer, alleged to have murdered housemaids and peasant girls by the hundreds, torturing them, draining their young bodies of blood so she could employ it in her toilette. ...
Read more… - February 25, 2026
This latest novel from Stephen King returns to the crime thriller territory he began with the Bill Hodges trilogy (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch). It’s another Holly Gibney story, with her private investigation business, Finders Keepers, front and center.
King balances two storylines that slowly build and eventually collide in a satisfying conclusion. Holly is ...
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