Fiction-adult

Now that her brilliant botanist daughter is off at college, buttoned-up Maeve Cosgrove loves her job at a quiet Maine public library more than anything. But when a teenager accuses Maeve--Maeve!--of spying on her romantic escapades in the mezzanine bathroom, she winds up laid off and humiliated. Stuck at home in a tailspin, Maeve cares for the mysterious plants in her daughter's greenhouse while obsessing over the clearly troubled girl at the source of the rumor. She hopes to have a powerful ally in her attempts to clear her name: her favorite author, Harrison Riddles, who has finally responded to her adoring letters and accepted an invitation to speak at the library.

Riddles, meanwhile, arrives in town with his own agenda. He announces a plan to write a novel about another young library patron, Sudanese refugee Willie, and enlists Maeve's help in convincing him to participate. Maeve wants to look out for Willie, but Riddles's charisma and the sheen of literary glory he promises are difficult to resist. A scheme to get her job back draws Maeve further into Riddles's universe--where shocking questions about sex, morality, and the purpose of literature threaten to upend her orderly life.

A writer of "savage compassion" (Salvatore Scibona, author of The Volunteer), Sarah Braunstein constructs a shrewd, page-turning caper that explores one woman's search for agency and ultimate reckoning with the kind of animal she is.

In the beginning, it was easy to imagine their future. They were young and giddy, sure of themselves and of their love for each other. "Dept. of Speculation" was their code name for all the thrilling uncertainties that lay ahead. Then they got married, had a child and navigated the familiar calamities of family life--a colicky baby, a faltering relationship, stalled ambitions.

When their marriage reaches a sudden breaking point, the wife tries to retrace the steps that have led them to this place, invoking everything from Kafka to the Stoics to doomed Russian cosmonauts as she analyzes what is lost and what remains. In language that shimmers with rage and longing and wit, Offill has created a brilliantly suspenseful love story--a novel to read in one sitting, even as its piercing meditations linger long after the last page.

'Once upon a time, there was a little girl who lived in a library...'

Deep in the bowels of a New York Public Library lies a dragon: the monstrous coal furnace that Sharon's father, the live-in custodian, must feed every night.

A moving examination of family secrets, forgiveness, and the power of language, Feeding the Dragon explores Sharon's life growing up in the library and the fire she never allowed to fade.

The seed for this book was planted in 2011 when the author gave a talk at a veterans' home on his first book―Shot Down Over Italy―about a B-25 crew. One of the veterans, John Cooney, sought him out to tell him that he too went down in a plane over Italy during World War II, but with a B-24 crew. Over the next three years, they kept in touch and when John passed away in 2014 someone in his family called the author his biographer.

While this book began with war stories about John, the crew he served with, and other crews of their bomb group, it grew to encompass much more when the author learned that John's father served in World War I. His father served with the medical support forces which cared for casualties of war while John served with the fighting air forces many of whom became casualties of war.

The book analyzes two world wars-how they were started, mobilized, fought, supported, ended, and more. It explains the role of the United States in both wars with a focus on its medical support in World War I, which cared for the sick and wounded, and its airpower in World War II, which bombed factories that made weapons, oil fields that fueled them, facilities that stored them, and the transportation networks that brought them to the battlefront.

The book shows that powerful leaders start wars, but citizens fight them and experience the horror. It describes the process of changing from a peacetime economy producing goods and services that help people to a wartime economy producing goods and services that harm people. War is hell and this book pays tribute to those who experienced this hell while doing their duty as citizens.

Because countries now have nuclear weapons which could elevate horror to an unfathomable level, this book also shows why we need to keep powerful leaders in check by giving the citizens who fight wars the freedom to govern themselves and wield more power than a powerful few who could start another world war.