Southborough Staff Picks- Popular Fiction

1) All the broken places

Author

Boyne, John

Series

Boy in the striped pyjamas volume 2

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Print

Description

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An elderly London resident befriends the little boy who moves in downstairs, but his parents' fighting brings her back to her harrowing escape from Nazi Germany at age twelve and grim post-war years in France with her mother. Ninety-one-year-old Gretel Fernsby has lived in the same well-to-do mansion block in London for decades. She lives a quiet, comfortable life, despite her deeply disturbing, dark past. She doesn't talk about her escape from Nazi...

2) Ask again, yes: a novel

Author

Keane, Mary Beth

Notes

Why Carol likes this book: While there is tragedy in this story, there is also family devotion, love and hope. Each family faces challenges, and each, in their own way, conquer those challenges. I enjoyed the love story between Peter and Kate that began as a childhood friendship. Anne struggles with mental illness but does her best to remain connected to her son. I marveled at the devotion within each family and the eventual forgiveness of mistakes made and also the acknowledgment and acceptance of the silent challenges others face. The author brings the characters full circle and paints a picture of the importance of empathy and forgiveness.

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Print

Description

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"A family saga about two Irish American families in a New York suburb, the love between two of their children, and the tragedies that threaten to tear them apart and destroy their futures"--

3) The authenticity project: a novel

Author

Pooley, Clare

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Print, Playaway

Description

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"A story about a solitary green notebook that brings together six strangers and leads to unexpected friendship, and even love--think Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine meets Love, Actually "Everybody lies about their lives. What would happen if you shared the truth?" This is the question that Julian Jessop, an eccentric, seventy-nine-year-old artist, poses within a pale green exercise book that he labels The Authenticity Project, before leaving it...

4) Beartown

Author

Backman, Fredrik

Series

Beartown volume 1

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Print, Playaway

Description

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"From the New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She's Sorry, and Britt-Marie Was Here, comes a poignant, charming novel about a forgotten town fractured by scandal, and the amateur hockey team that might just change everything. Winning a junior ice hockey championship might not mean a lot to the average person, but it means everything to the residents of Beartown, a community slowly being eaten...

5) The beekeeper of Aleppo: a novel

Author

Lefteri, Christy

Notes

Why Amy likes this book: This is an extremely powerful story of losing hope and finding it again. The author’s beautiful storytelling deeply affected me because I could imagine Nuri and Afra’s heartache as my own when they reflect upon a fulfilling life together with familiar hopes and dreams that are suddenly taken away. That the characters continue their way of life despite the coming atrocities makes the impact of the war in Syria no longer a distant event, but one that can happen to anyone. I appreciated this story even more because of the author’s own experience working with refugees in Athens.

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Print

Description

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In the midst of war, he found love In the midst of darkness, he found courage In the midst of tragedy, he found hope. What will you find from his story? Nuri is a beekeeper; his wife, Afra, an artist. They live a simple life, rich in family and friends, in the beautiful Syrian city of Aleppo - until the unthinkable happens. When all they care for is destroyed by war, they are forced to escape. But what Afra has seen is so terrible she has gone blind,...

6) Before and again

Author

Delinsky, Barbara

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Print

Description

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"Mackenzie Cooper took her eyes off the road just long enough to rob her of her beloved daughter and ultimately of her new marriage, family, friends, and privacy. Now she lives in Vermont under the name Maggie Reid. She's thankful for her new friends--though she can't risk telling them too much-- and takes satisfaction in working as a makeup artist. Covering up scars is a skill she has mastered. Then a friend's teenage son is thrust into the national...

7) Before I go to sleep: a novel

Author

Watson, S. J

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, Large Print

Description

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Without her husband's knowledge, Christine, whose memory is damaged by a long-ago accident, is treated by a neurologist who helps her to remember her former self through journal entries until inconsistencies begin to emerge, raising disturbing questions.

8) Before you go: a novel

Author

Butler, Tommy

Notes

Why Carol likes this book: This novel tells the story our quest for happiness and filling the voids we feel. Would we choose to change our life or repeat it if given the chance? While our lives can be filled with sadness, misfortune, and tragedy, it can also be filled with love, adventure, and happiness. Sometimes simply in our daily experiences. A beautifully written and thought-provoking story about the quest for a life fulfillment.

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

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"In the Before, humankind is created with a hole in its heart, the designers not realizing their mistake -- if it was a mistake -- until too late. Elliot Chance is just a boy, and knows nothing of this. All he knows is that he doesn't feel at home in this world, and his desire for escape becomes more urgent as he grows into adulthood, where the turbulence of life seems to offer no cure for the emptiness. Desperate and lost, he stumbles upon a support...

9) Black cake: a novel

Author

Wilkerson, Charmaine

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Print

Description

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"In this moving debut novel, two estranged siblings must set aside their differences to deal with their mother's death and her hidden past--a journey of discovery that takes them from the Caribbean to London to California and ends with her famous black cake. In present-day California, Eleanor Bennett's death leaves behind a puzzling inheritance for her two children, Byron and Benny: a traditional Caribbean black cake, made from a family recipe with...

10) The bookshop on the corner

Author

Colgan, Jenny

Series

Kirrinfief

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, Large Print

Description

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Nina Redmond is a librarian with a gift for finding the perfect book for her readers. But can she write her own happy-ever-after? In this valentine to readers, librarians, and book-lovers the world over, the New York Times-bestselling author of Little Beach Street Bakery returns with a funny, moving new novel for fans of Meg Donohue, Sophie Kinsella, and Nina George's The Little Paris Bookshop. "Losing myself in Jenny Colgan's beautiful pages is the...

11) Calling me home

Author

Kibler, Julie

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eBook, Kindle, Large Print

Description

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A debut novel interweaving the story of a heartbreaking, forbidden love in 1930s Kentucky with an unlikely modern-day friendship. Eighty-nine-year-old Isabelle McAllister has a favor to ask her hairdresser Dorrie Curtis: drop everything and drive from Arlington, Texas, to a funeral in Cincinnati. Tomorrow. Dorrie, fleeing problems of her own, agrees. It's a journey that changes both their lives, as she learns Isabelle's tale of a forbidden relationship...

12) Catching genius

Author

Kiernan, Kristy

13) Cloud cuckoo land: a novel

Author

Doerr, Anthony

Notes

Why Marianna likes this book: It is an astonishing display of the power of the written word to travel through millennia and across cultures both in times of utmost need and moments of warm comfort. The range of characters and settings enhance the message of meaningful connection through literature.

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Print, Playaway

Description

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"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of perhaps the most bestselling and beloved literary fiction of our time comes a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring novel about children on the cusp of adulthood in a broken world, who find resilience, hope, and story. The heroes of Cloud Cuckoo Land are children trying to figure out the world around them, and to survive. In the besieged city of Constantinople in 1453, in a public library in Lakeport,...

14) The curious charms of Arthur Pepper

Author

Patrick, Phaedra

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Print

Description

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"Sixty-nine-year-old Arthur Pepper lives a simple life. He gets out of bed at precisely 7:30 a.m., just as he did when his wife, Miriam, was alive. He dresses in the same gray slacks and mustard sweater-vest, waters his fern, Frederica, and heads out to his garden. But on the one-year anniversary of Miriam's death, something changes. Sorting through Miriam's possessions, Arthur finds an exquisite gold charm bracelet he's never seen before. What follows...

15) Cutting for stone: a novel

Author

Verghese, A

Description

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"A sweeping, emotionally riveting first novel -- an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home. Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother's death in childbirth and their father's disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with...

16) Daisy Jones & the Six: a novel

Author

Reid, Taylor Jenkins

Notes

Why Carol likes this book: I love the way this book was written! It’s an oral history and as the author interviews the fictional members of the band, they have no filter in telling their story! They share their dreams and experiences as well as recollections of events which are sometimes contradictory. Some book reviews claim this story is based on Stevie Nicks, whose music I love, and Fleetwood Mac. This is a quick read and a fun story of the collaboration of talented musicians and living the life of a touring band during the 60’s.

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Print, Playaway

Description

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"Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go-Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it's the rock and roll she loves most. By the time she's twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things. Another band getting noticed is The Six, led by the brooding Billy Dunne....

17) Demon Copperhead: a novel

Author

Kingsolver, Barbara

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Print, Playaway

Description

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Demon Copperhead: a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Demon befriends us on this, his journey through the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular...

18) Dinner with a perfect stranger: an invitation worth considering

Author

Gregory, David

Formats:

Book, Large Print

Description

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The mysterious envelope arrives on Nick Cominsky's desk amid a stack of credit card applications and business-related junk mail. Although his seventy-hour workweek has already eaten into his limited family time, Nick can't pass up the opportunity to see what kind of plot his colleagues have hatched. The normally confident, cynical Nick soon finds himself thrown off-balance, drawn into an intriguing conversation with a baffling man who appears to be...

19) Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine: a novel

Author

Honeyman, Gail

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Print

Description

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""Move over, Ove (in Fredrik Backman's A Man Called Ove)--there's a new curmudgeon to love."--Booklist (starred review). "Eleanor Oliphant is a truly original literary creation: funny, touching, and unpredictable. Her journey out of dark shadows is absolutely gripping."--Jojo Moyes, #1New York Times bestselling author of Me Before You. "Deft, compassionate and deeply moving -- Honeyman's debut will have you rooting for Eleanor with every turning page."...

20) Empire falls

Author

Russo, Richard

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eBook, Kindle, Large Print

Description

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • The bestselling author of Nobody's Fool and Straight Man delves deep into the blue-collar heart of America in a work that overflows with hilarity, heartache, and grace.
“Rich, humorous ... Mr. Russo’s most seductive book thus far.” —The New York Times
Welcome to Empire Falls, a blue-collar town full of abandoned...