Staff Picks

  • Staff Picks: Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk

    May 14, 2026Staff Picks: Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk
    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 ...
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  • Staff Pick: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

    May 6, 2026Staff Pick: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
    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 ...
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  • Aurora’s Anticipated New Nonfiction for April 2026: Poetry Month

    April 20, 2026Aurora's Anticipated New Nonfiction for April 2026: Poetry Month
    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 ...
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  • Staff Picks: What We’re Reading: Spring 26

    April 16, 2026Staff Picks: What We're Reading: Spring 26
    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, ...
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  • Staff Pick: Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller

    April 8, 2026Staff Pick: Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
    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 ...
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  • Staff Pick: This Woven Kingdom by Tahereh Mafi 

    March 19, 2026Staff Pick: This Woven Kingdom by Tahereh Mafi 
    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 ...
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  • Aurora’s Anticipated Non-Fiction: March

    March 11, 2026Aurora's Anticipated Non-Fiction: March
    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. ...
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  • Staff Pick: Never Flinch by Stephen King (audiobook)

    February 25, 2026Staff Pick: Never Flinch by Stephen King (audiobook)
    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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  • Staff Pick: River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey

    February 19, 2026Staff Pick: River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey
    River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey finally dares to ask the questions: What if the American Hippo Bill of 1910 actually passed? And, once a community of meat hippos was established, what if outlaws and cowboys were able to tame and ride them? And, AND, what if they all set out on a quest for revenge?! -Sarah, Reference
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  • Staff Picks: The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez

    February 4, 2026Staff Picks: The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez
    The Cemetery of Untold Stories is about an author who buries the books she never finished in a cemetery she created.  The stories are based on actual people whose paths had crossed over the years and they whisper their stories to a woman who is a caretaker of the graves.  In addition to being incredible ...
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