Jen Wilde

Former library book, stamp on inside of front cover and some fading. 

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Arizona

After being labeled the music world's newest celebrity trainwreck, a bisexual teen drummer has to find a way to be true to herself in the midst of family betrayal, relationship drama and the ever-present paparazzi attention.

The Brightsiders

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Elton John

Former library book, some tape and sticker residue, stamp on first page 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Elton John Official Autobiography

INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In his first and only official autobiography, music icon Elton John reveals the truth about his extraordinary life, from his rollercoaster lifestyle as shown in the film Rocketman, to becoming a living legend. Christened Reginald Dwight, he was a shy boy with Buddy Holly glasses who grew up in the London suburb of Pinner and dreamed of becoming a pop star. By the age of twenty-three he was performing his first gig in America, facing an astonished audience in his bright yellow dungarees, a star-spangled T-shirt, and boots with wings. Elton John had arrived and the music world would never be the same again. His life has been full of drama, from the early rejection of his work with song-writing partner Bernie Taupin to spinning out of control as a chart-topping superstar; from half-heartedly trying to drown himself in his LA swimming pool to disco-dancing with Princess Diana and Queen Elizabeth; from friendships with John Lennon, Freddie Mercury, and George Michael to setting up his AIDS Foundation to conquering Broadway with Aida, The Lion King, and Billy Elliot the Musical. All the while Elton was hiding a drug addiction that would grip him for over a decade. In Me, Elton also writes powerfully about getting clean and changing his life, about finding love with David Furnish and becoming a father. In a voice that is warm, humble, and open, this is Elton on his music and his relationships, his passions and his mistakes. This is a story that will stay with you by a living legend.

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Robert Harris

A Novel

A spy thriller set against a backdrop of the fateful Munich Conference of 1938 follows the experiences of a rising star in the British diplomatic service who is on a disastrous collision course with an Oxford friend, a secret member of the anti-Hitler resistance.

Munich

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Jane Thynne

"New York, present day: On a whim, photographer Juno Lambert buys the 1931 Underwood typewriter that once belonged to celebrated journalist Cordelia Capel. Within its case she discovers an unpublished novel, igniting a transatlantic journey to fill the gaps in the story of Cordelia and her sister's loving yet tempestuous relationship. England, 1936: Cordelia's socialite sister, Irene, marries a German man from a powerful family who whisks her away to Berlin. Cordelia remains in England to pursue the writing career she cherishes, but in the male-dominated world of journalism, she can only get hired as a typist. The sisters exchange letters as politics begin to boil in Europe and tensions come to a head when Cordelia discovers Irene's husband is a Nazi sympathizer. Does that make Irene one by proxy? With increasing desperation, Cordelia writes to Irene, seeking to understand her loyalties. But the sisters' letters don't tell the whole story. So Cordelia decides to fill in the blanks by sitting down with her Underwood and--finally--writing the truth. When Juno discovers the trove of letters the two exchanged, a vivid portrait of Berlin in the devastating years during and after the war comes into focus. In this moving novel, Jane Thynne offers an intimate glimpse into a lesser known side of World War II"--

The Words I Never Wrote

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Preti Taneja

We That Are Young

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Rebecca Stott

In 1815 France, a young medical student discovers that the beauty who shared his coach has stolen the rare coral specimens he carried and soon he encounters a ring of philosopher thieves determined to sabotage pre-Darwinian theories of evolution.

The Coral Thief

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Whitney Scharer

A sweeping debut set in Paris in the 1930's about the love story between Vogue model turned photographer Lee Miller and the artist Man Ray. "I'd rather take a picture than be one," says Lee Miller, after she arrives in Paris in 1929. Gorgeous and talented, Lee has left behind a successful modeling career to pursue her dream of being an artist. She catches the eye of renowned artist Man Ray, and though he wants to use her only as a model, Lee convinces him to teach her photography as well. Man is an egotistical, charismatic force, and soon their personal and professional lives become intimately entwined. Their romance unfolds against the backdrop of bohemian Paris, with nights spent at smoky cabarets, opium dens, and Surrealist parties, and days spent working together to discover radical new photography techniques. But as Lee begins to assert herself, and moves from being a muse to an artist, Man's jealousy spirals out of control, and soon their mutual betrayals threaten to destroy them both. Told in interweaving timelines of 1930s Paris and war-torn Europe during WWII, this richly detailed, sensuous, and captivating debut by Whitney Scharer brings Lee Miller-- a brilliant and pioneering artist in her own right--out of the shadows of a man's legacy and into the light.

The Age of Light

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Lisa See

“I finally understand what the poets have written. In spring, moved to passion; in autumn only regret.” For young Peony, betrothed to a suitor she has never met, these lyrics from The Peony Pavilion mirror her own longings. In the garden of the Chen Family Villa, amid the scent of ginger, green tea, and jasmine, a small theatrical troupe is performing scenes from this epic opera, a live spectacle few females have ever seen. Like the heroine in the drama, Peony is the cloistered daughter of a wealthy family, trapped like a good-luck cricket in a bamboo-and-lacquer cage. Though raised to be obedient, Peony has dreams of her own. Peony’s mother is against her daughter’s attending the production: “Unmarried girls should not be seen in public.” But Peony’s father assures his wife that proprieties will be maintained, and that the women will watch the opera from behind a screen. Yet through its cracks, Peony catches sight of an elegant, handsome man with hair as black as a cave–and is immediately overcome with emotion. So begins Peony’s unforgettable journey of love and destiny, desire and sorrow–as Lisa See’s haunting new novel, based on actual historical events, takes readers back to seventeenth-century China, after the Manchus seize power and the Ming dynasty is crushed. Steeped in traditions and ritual, this story brings to life another time and place–even the intricate realm of the afterworld, with its protocols, pathways, and stages of existence, a vividly imagined place where one’s soul is divided into three, ancestors offer guidance, misdeeds are punished, and hungry ghosts wander the earth. Immersed in the richness and magic of the Chinese vision of the afterlife, transcending even death, Peony in Love explores, beautifully, the many manifestations of love. Ultimately, Lisa See’s new novel addresses universal themes: the bonds of friendship, the power of words, and the age-old desire of women to be heard.

Peony in Love

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Elizabeth McCracken

NATIONAL BESTSELLER A Recommended Book of 2019 from Entertainment Weekly * O, The Oprah Magazine * Southern Living * BBC * Huffington Post * Lit Hub * Kirkus * Bustle * Publishers Weekly * BookRiot * Popsugar * Bookish * The Boston Globe * The Seattle Times A sweeping and enchanting new novel from the widely beloved, award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken about three generations of an unconventional New England family who own and operate a candlepin bowling alley From the day she is discovered unconscious in a New England cemetery at the turn of the twentieth century—nothing but a bowling ball, a candlepin, and fifteen pounds of gold on her person—Bertha Truitt is an enigma to everyone in Salford, Massachusetts. She has no past to speak of, or at least none she is willing to reveal, and her mysterious origin scandalizes and intrigues the townspeople, as does her choice to marry and start a family with Leviticus Sprague, the doctor who revived her. But Bertha is plucky, tenacious, and entrepreneurial, and the bowling alley she opens quickly becomes Salford’s most defining landmark—with Bertha its most notable resident. When Bertha dies in a freak accident, her past resurfaces in the form of a heretofore-unheard-of son, who arrives in Salford claiming he is heir apparent to Truitt Alleys. Soon it becomes clear that, even in her death, Bertha’s defining spirit and the implications of her obfuscations live on, infecting and affecting future generations through inheritance battles, murky paternities, and hidden wills. In a voice laced with insight and her signature sharp humor, Elizabeth McCracken has written an epic family saga set against the backdrop of twentieth-century America. Bowlaway is both a stunning feat of language and a brilliant unraveling of a family’s myths and secrets, its passions and betrayals, and the ties that bind and the rifts that divide.

Bowlaway

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Syed M. Masood

"Following two families from Pakistan and Iraq in the 90s through to San Francisco in 2016, a comic novel about being Muslim immigrants in modern America"--

The Bad Muslim Discount

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Mary Alice Monroe

While recovering from breast cancer in a remote cabin in North Carolina, Mia Landan finds the journal of Kate Watkins, a 1920s fly fisher, and, inspired by Kate's example, learns to fish and uncovers many secrets around her.

Time Is a River

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Marlo Morgan

Mutant Message Down Under

Following her modern classic and worldwide bestseller Mutant Message Down Under, Marlo Morgan's long-awaited new novel is a tale of self-enlightenment about aboriginal twins separated at birth and the search for roots that reunites them form opposite sides of the globe. Once more Morgan unveils the inspiring aboriginal worldview while pointedly exposing the plight of an ancient race rapidly becoming extinct as a result of more than two hundred years of systematic discrimination. Message from Forever follows the lives of Australian aboriginal twins who were taken form their young mother by Christian missionaries. The baby boy is sent to a huge sheep ranch, where he grows up with little adult supervision and random affection. On his own, Geoff develops his talent as an artist, producing work at a level well beyond his five years. The boy is adopted by an American minister and is raised in New England with little sense of who he is or of his cultural heritage. His sister is given only the first name Beatrice by the nuns at an Australian orphanage, where she encounters continual racism and experiences shattering looses for the first eighteen years of her life. Upon reaching adulthood, Beatrice leaves the orphanage to work at a boardinghouse. Beatrice hungers to know more about her ancestral roots. She walks away from her life in the city to strike out into the northern desert nation, where she goes on a walkabout with a small band of Aborigines. Geoff does not fare so well in America. As a teen, he runs away from home and slips into a life of crime, alcohol, and alienation. His addictions destroy him, and he finds himself on Death Row with little sense of how he got there. After decades of learning about people in the Outback, Beatrice leaves her nomadic life to become a "runner between both worlds." She returns to the Mutant world as a political activist fighting for aboriginal rights of citizens arrested and convicted of crimes in foreign countries, as well as a champion of the rights of adults who were taken from their native culture as children. Her life's work bring her into contact with her lost brother, though neither is aware of their relationship. Beatrice gives Geoff the "message from forever," which outlines aboriginal philosophy and principles of good living, along with an offer to return to Australia. As we read the message with Geoff, we are challenged to stretch our concepts of identity, spirituality, and openness transcends injustice and degradation, directing us to live our lives in accordance with ageless values and simple wisdom.

Message from Forever

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Linden MacIntyre

Praise for Linden MacIntyre: “MacIntyre isn’t just another face and larynx from television [but] an honest-to-God writer…” —Winnipeg Free Press “MacIntyre is a fine writer.” — Alistair MacLeod

The Bishop's Man

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Richard Flanagan

First Person

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Ashley Hope Pérez

Former library book, stamps and tape present

A Michael L. Printz Honor Book

"This is East Texas, and there's lines. Lines you cross, lines you don't cross. That clear?"

New London, Texas. 1937. Naomi Vargas and Wash Fuller know about the lines in East Texas as well as anyone. They know the signs that mark them. They know the people who enforce them. But sometimes the attraction between two people is so powerful it breaks through even the most entrenched color lines. And the consequences can be explosive.

Ashley Hope Pérez takes the facts of the 1937 New London school explosion--the worst school disaster in American history--as a backdrop for a riveting novel about segregation, love, family, and the forces that destroy people.

"[This] layered tale of color lines, love and struggle in an East Texas oil town is a pit-in-the-stomach family drama that goes down like it should, with pain and fascination, like a mix of sugary medicine and artisanal moonshine."--The New York Times Book Review

"Pérez deftly weaves [an] unflinchingly intense narrative....A powerful, layered tale of forbidden love in times of unrelenting racism."―starred, Kirkus Reviews

"This book presents a range of human nature, from kindness and love to acts of racial and sexual violence. The work resonates with fear, hope, love, and the importance of memory....Set against the backdrop of an actual historical event, Pérez...gives voice to many long-omitted facets of U.S. history."―starred, School Library Journal

Out of Darkness

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Chris Rush

A Memoir

Lambda Literary Award Finalist | A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Named a best book of 2019 by Parade

The Light Years is a joyous and defiant coming-of-age memoir set during one of the most turbulent times in American history

"This stunningly beautiful, original memoir is driven by a search for the divine, a quest that leads Rush into some dangerous places . . . The Light Years is funny, harrowing, and deeply tender." --Kate Tuttle, The L.A. Times

"Rush is a fantastically vivid writer, whether he's remembering a New Jersey of 'meatballs and Windex and hairspray' or the dappled, dangerous beauty of Northern California, where 'rock stars lurked like lemurs in the trees.' Read if you loved... Just Kids by Patti Smith." --Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

"As mythic and wild with love, possibility, and danger as the decades it spans, you'll read The Light Years with your breath held. Brutal, buoyant and wise to the tender terror of growing up, Chris Rush has written a timeless memoir of boyhood in the American wilderness." --Emma Cline, author of The Girls

Chris Rush was born into a prosperous, fiercely Roman Catholic, New Jersey family. But underneath the gleaming mid-century house, the flawless hostess mom, and the thriving businessman dad ran an unspoken tension that, amid the upheaval of the late 1960s, was destined to fracture their precarious facade.

His older sister Donna introduces him to the charismatic Valentine, who places a tab of acid on twelve-year-old Rush's tongue, proclaiming: "This is sacrament. You are one of us now."

After an unceremonious ejection from an experimental art school, Rush heads to Tucson to make a major drug purchase and, still barely a teenager, disappears into the nascent American counterculture. Stitching together a ragged assemblage of lowlifes, prophets, and fellow wanderers, he seeks kinship in the communes of the west. His adolescence is spent looking for knowledge, for the divine, for home. Given what Rush confronts on his travels--from ordinary heartbreak to unimaginable violence--it is a miracle he is still alive.

The Light Years is a prayer for vanished friends, an odyssey signposted with broken and extraordinary people. It transcends one boy's story to perfectly illustrate the slow slide from the optimism of the 1960s into the darker and more sinister 1970s. This is a riveting, heart-stopping journey of discovery and reconciliation, as Rush faces his lost childhood and, finally, himself.

The Light Years

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Kjell Eriksson

Ebba Segerberg

The Princess of Burundi

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Holly Miller

"The Light We Lost meets How to Walk Away in this romantic and page-turning American debut that poses a heartbreaking question: Would you choose love, if you knew how it would end?"--

The Sight of You

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Susan Henderson

High Plains Book Award Winner for Fiction * Western Writers of America Spur Award Winner for Best Contemporary  Western Novel *  WILLA Literary Award Winner in Contemporary Fiction * Montana Book Award Honor Book

With the quiet precision of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres and the technical clarity of Mary Roach's Stiff, this is a novel about a young woman who comes most alive while working in her father's mortuary in a small, forgotten Western town.

"The dead come to me vulnerable, sharing their stories and secrets . . . "

Mary Crampton has spent all of her thirty years in Petroleum, a small Western town once supported by a powerful grain company. Living at home, she works as the embalmer in her father's mortuary: an unlikely job that has long marked her as an outsider. Yet, to Mary there is a satisfying art to positioning and styling each body to capture the essence of a subject's life.

Though some townsfolk pretend that the community is thriving, the truth is that Petroleum is crumbling away--a process that began twenty years ago when an accident in the grain elevator killed a beloved high school athlete. The mill closed for good, the train no longer stopped in town, and Robert Golden, the victim's younger brother, was widely blamed for the tragedy and shipped off to live elsewhere. Now, out of the blue, Robert has returned to care for his terminally ill mother. After Mary--reserved, introspective, and deeply lonely--strikes up an unlikely friendship with him, shocking the locals, she finally begins to consider what might happen if she dared to leave Petroleum.

Set in the American West, The Flicker of Old Dreams explores themes of resilience, redemption, and loyalty in prose as lyrical as it is powerful.

The Flicker of Old Dreams

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Jane Healey

A mother's secret past and her daughter's present collide in this richly atmospheric novel from the acclaimed author of The Animals at Lockwood Manor. In the summer of 1973, Ruth and her four friends were obsessed with pre-Raphaelite paintings--and a little bit obsessed with each other. Drawn to the cold depths of the river by Ruth's house, the girls pretend to be the drowning Ophelia, with increasingly elaborate tableaus. But by the end of that fateful summer, real tragedy finds them along the banks. Twenty-four years later, Ruth returns to the suffocating, once grand house she grew up in, the mother of young twins and seventeen-year-old Maeve. Joining the family in the country is Stuart, Ruth's childhood friend, who is quietly insinuating himself into their lives and gives Maeve the attention she longs for. She is recently in remission, unsure of her place in the world now that she is cancer-free. Her parents just want her to be an ordinary teenage girl. But what teenage girl is ordinary? Alternating between the two fateful summers, The Ophelia Girls is a suspense-filled exploration of mothers and daughters, illicit desire, and the perils and power of being a young woman.

The Ophelia Girls

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Susan Mihalic

A searing and darkly gripping debut novel about a teenaged girl’s fierce struggle to reclaim her life from her abusive father. Fifteen-year-old equestrian prodigy Roan Montgomery has only ever known two worlds: inside the riding arena, and outside of it. Both, for as long as she can remember, have been ruled by her father, who demands strict obedience in all aspects of her life. The warped power dynamic of coach and rider extends far beyond the stables, and Roan's relationship with her father has long been inappropriate. She has been able to compartmentalize that dark aspect of her life, ruthlessly focusing on her ambitions as a rider heading for the Olympics, just as her father had done. However, her developing relationship with Will Howard, a boy her own age, broadens the scope of her vision. A page-turner and urgent survivor story, Dark Horses takes the searing themes of abuse and resilience in Gabriel Tallent’s My Absolute Darling and applies the compelling exploration of female strength in Emma Donoghue’s Room. In much the same way that V.C. Andrews’s Flowers in the Attic transfixed a generation, Dark Horses will keep you turning the pages.

Dark Horses

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Lea Carpenter

Red, White, Blue

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Peter Mayle

Small marker on top of pages and small stain on bottom of pages 

The bestsellling author of A Year in Provence and Hotel Pastis now surveys his territory from a differnt vantage point: the all-fours perspective of his dog, Boy--"a dog whose personality is made up of equal parts Boswell and Dr. Johnson, Mencken and A. A. Milne" (Chicago Sun-Times). Enhanced by 59 splendidly whimsical drawings by Edward Koren. From the Trade Paperback edition.

A Dog's Life

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Julie Carrick Dalton

Julie Carrick Dalton's The Last Beekeeper is a celebration of found family, an exploration of truth versus power, and the triumph of hope in the face of despair.

"Fans of Delia Owens will swoon to find their new favorite author." (Hank Phillippi Ryan)

It's been more than a decade since the world has come undone, and Sasha Severn has returned to her childhood home with one goal in mind--find the mythic research her father, the infamous Last Beekeeper, hid before he was incarcerated. There, Sasha is confronted with a group of squatters who have claimed the quiet, idyllic farm as their own. While she initially feels threatened, the group soon becomes her newfound family, offering what she hasn't felt since her father was imprisoned: security and hope. Maybe it's time to forget the family secrets buried on the farm and focus on her future.

But just as she settles into her new life, Sasha witnesses the impossible. She sees a honey bee, presumed extinct. People who claim to see bees are ridiculed and silenced for reasons Sasha doesn't understand, but she can't shake the feeling that this impossible bee is connected to her father's missing research. Fighting to uncover the truth could shatter Sasha's fragile security and threaten the lives of her newfound family--or it could save them all.

Julie Carrick Dalton's The Last Beekeeper is a celebration of found family, an exploration of truth versus power, and the triumph of hope in the face of despair. It is a meditation on forgiveness and redemption and a reminder to cherish the beauty that still exists in this fragile world.

Also by Julie Carrick Dalton:
Waiting for the Night Song

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