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ON OUR SHELF

WHERE THE SKY MEETS THE OCEAN AND THE AIR TASTES LIKE METAL AND THE BIRDS DON'T MAKE

SOUND by Mike Kleine and Dan Hoy

Detectives Michael and Daniel must try to solve a murder on planet Earth. The victim may or may not be named Jane from Yesterday. And the Man of One Thousand Years, cult leader of the Architects of Q'Noor, may or may not be responsible. As Michael and Daniel hurl themselves inexorably toward a final confrontation with the Man of One Thousand Years through a dreamlike landscape of exploding cacti, cultists, centaurs, spells, river gorgons, lobster enthusiasts, and undulating portals activated by prayer, they collide with a succession of randos and adversaries—Vampyre King, Man with Face Like Fire, Qyumoo'un, Eater of Dreams, Excalibur, Prince Al-Wajeed, and dozens more—sparing few in their frenzied quest for the truth.

THE BOUNDARIES OF

THEIR DWELLING by Blake

Sanz

Moving between the American South and Mexico, these stories explore how immigrant and native characters are shaped by absent family and geography. A Chilanga teen wins a trip to Miami to film a reality show about family while pining for the American brother she's never met. A Louisiana carpenter tends to his drug-addicted son while rebuilding his house after a slew of hurricanes. A New Orleans ne'er-do-well opens a Catholicthemed bar in the wake of his devout mother’s death. A village girl from Chiapas baptizes her infant on a trek toward the U.S. border.

THE NEW EXISTENCE

by Michael Collins

Chicagoan Helen Price, a dying woman, recounts her life while driving toward an oncology appointment. She attempts to take her own life, survives, then dies under tragic circumstances.

In death, Helen bequeaths the family home to her only son, gay playwright Norman Price. Father to an adopted Chinese child, and recently broken up with his partner, Norman’s life is in crisis. Helen also bequeaths a series of tapes to Nate Feldman, a Vietnam draft dodger ensconced in the far reaches of Canada, and the son of Helen’s former boss, Theodore Feldman. Nate’s return to America to claim the tapes occasions confronting a history of animus between father and son, but also the nature of the relationship between Helen Price and Theodore Feldman.

ON OUR SHELF

LOOK AT US by T. L.

Toma

Martin, a market analyst, and Lily, a corporate attorney, have a life that many would envy―they share an expensive New York apartment with their twin toddlers, sample the delicacies of Manhattan’s finest restaurants, and take Caribbean vacations. But when the couple’s nanny announces her imminent departure, they panic: how will they ever find a replacement capable of managing their spirited boys? Enter Maeve, a young Irish émigré. Neither of them imagines how indispensable she will become, either to the household or to their marriage. As the family’s domestic bliss takes an unexpected turn, a different type of intimacy evolves, leading to an explosive finale.

BURIED INSTINCTS -

LOST AND FOUND by

Lynn Henson

Despite the overwhelming odds against them, Blake has managed to lead his friends to a veritable oasis in the apocalypse. Surrounded by a reasonable amount of comfort and security, there’s nothing left to do but wait for the government to get a handle on the undead crisis.

But after a couple of excursions from their home to find supplies and get a sense of the situation in their area, they learn that some of the zombies are even more dangerous than they’d assumed.

TO DUST YOU SHALL

RETURN by Fred Venturini

A town ruled by evil. A man ruled by darkness. Only one can survive.

Curtis Quinn is a Chicago mob legend with a particular set of skills and a price on his head. When the woman he loves disappears, Curtis follows her trail to the occult town of Harlow, where no one is allowed to leave, and an enigmatic, sinister overlord known only as “the Mayor” rules by an autocratic regime.

Beth Jarvis is a plucky teenager unwrapping the secrets of her hometown―Harlow―and the mysterious ceremony that awaits her on her eighteenth birthday. What Beth doesn’t know is the truth about her sister Kate, who escaped their strange town over a decade ago and has evaded the Mayor and his disciples ever since.

ON OUR SHELF

DEVLIN WAUGH: BLOOD

DEBT by Ales Kot, Rory McConville, Mike Dowling

In these new adventures of Devlin Waugh, written by Rory McConville (Judge Dredd) and Aleš Kot (Secret Avengers, Days of Hate) and drawn by Mike Dowling (Ichabod Azrael, Judge Anderson), mutagenic nightmare spores, the search for his missing brother, and a dashing new boyfriend, all combine to create thrilling tales of the camp vamp.

LOST, STOLEN OR STRAYED: A MOST UNRELIABLE MEMOIR

by Andrew Craft

Ruth is banged up in a bin in South London (again) and tortured by an agonizing secret. Matthew, her eldest son, is a new dad working for crazed director Norman ‘fat boy’ Schneibel at a deadly dull TV political show in New York.

At the insistence of her psychiatrist, Ruth summons Matthew to London where she reveals that in 1958, when unmarried mothers were legally labeled “moral Imbeciles”, she gave up a baby girl for adoption. The guilt has ravaged her ever since.

Through their diaries, we accompany Matthew on a wild goose chase, battling bureaucracies, half-truths and his belligerent boss, as he tries to track down his halfsister before Ruth succumbs to terminal cancer. SHAKY TOWN: A NOVEL by

Lou Mathews

In Shaky Town, Lou Mathews has written a timeless novel of workingclass Los Angeles. A former mechanic and street racer, he tells his story in cool and panoramic style, weaving together the tragedies and glories of one of L.A.’s eastside neighborhoods. From a teenage girl caught in the middle of a gang war to a priest who has lost his faith and hit bottom, the characters in Shaky Town live on a dangerous faultline but remain unshakable in their connections to one another.

Like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, Katherine Ann Porter’s Ship of Fools, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, and Pat Barker’s Union Street, Shaky Town is the story of complicated, conflicted, and disparate characters bound together by place.

ON OUR SHELF

THE HOUSE OF RUST

by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber

The House of Rust is an enchanting novel about a Hadrami girl in Mombasa. When her fisherman father goes missing, Aisha takes to the sea on a magical boat made of a skeleton to rescue him. She is guided by a talking scholar’s cat (and soon crows, goats, and other animals all have their say, too). On this journey Aisha meets three terrifying sea monsters. After she survives a final confrontation with Baba wa Papa, the father of all sharks, she rescues her own father, and hopes that life will return to normal. But at home, things only grow stranger.

Caught between her grandmother’s wish to safeguard her happiness with marriage and her own desire for adventure, Aisha is pushed toward a match with a sweet local boy that she doesn’t want.

THE BOYS WHO WOKE

UP EARLY by A.D. Hopkins

TThe gravy train hasn’t stopped in the hollers of western Virginia for more than thirty years when Stony Shelor starts his junior year at Jubal Early High. Class divides and racism are still the hardened norms as the Eisenhower years draw to a close. Violence lies coiled under the calm surface, ready to strike at any time.

On the high school front, the cool boys are taking their wardrobe and music cues from hip TV private dick Peter Gunn, and Dobie Gillis is teaching them how to hit on pretty girls. There’s no help for Stony on the horizon, though. Mary Lou Martin is the girl of his dreams, and she hardly knows Stony exists. In addition, Stony can’t seem to stay out of juvenile court and just may end up in reform school. A long, difficult year stretches out in front of him when a new boy arrives in town. HEIRS OF DECEITS by

Elizabeth Reinach

The novel is set in the late Victorian period in England. It concerns conflicts in attitude to social class and destitution and religion. The central character is Sir Gilbert Stanley, Tory politician and great landowner. Like many rich men, he had taken peasant mistresses in his youth, later abandoning them with no means of support. These women all died evil deaths, and the children were placed in the workhouse. Sir Gilbert longed secretly for these children and watched their progress to adulthood. Unaware he was their father, the children became absorbed into his household as servants. He favoured them, and their status became ambiguous. The outside world was horrified, and the household imploded. Murder and chaos followed.

ON OUR SHELF

2084 by David Perlstein

After its second revolution, America is nothing—and everything—to joke about. The U.S.A. is history.

In 2044, the Covenantal States of America constitutes a whiteChristian autocracy echoing George Orwell’s banned classic, 1984. Washington pushes back against armed rebels, humor ridiculing tyranny and mushrooming graffiti referencing Orwell’s novel in the form of 2084.

Sam Klein, a member of the Minyan, a clandestine group of stand-up comics, organizes a July Fourth comedy protest while his Indian-American wife Indira, a native Californian, faces deportation. The Fourth, celebrating an America made great yet again, brings unexpected fireworks.

THE SON OF ABRAHAM

by Kathleen Kaufman

Ten years after the city of Los Angeles is nearly destroyed by a violent domestic terrorist attack, Esther Robertson struggles to reconcile her father’s culpability as leader of the deadly Son of Abraham cult. She grants CBS’s top reporter, Cooper Carlson, a rare interview and insight into her father, Alan Robertson, who sits awaiting trial for his crimes in federal prison.

A report of a horrific and seemingly natural disaster interrupts the interview. Another will follow and another after that. Are these increasingly violent and bizarre phenoms truly natural, or is there another force behind them?

OPEN BLIND EYES

by Rachel Timothy

Open Blind Eyes brings you face to face with the reality of sex trafficking in America through the true story viewpoint of a girl from a small town. Rachel was only nine years old when she was first approached by a perpetrator who was known to her as a teacher and coach. She goes into detail of the process of being groomed and how the evil of what was happening to her in the dark remained unseen by everyone around her. She describes how she coped for so many years by blocking out the memories only to have them resurface when she was an adult with a family of her own. Rachel had no idea that when she would pursue justice it would end up putting her right back in the world of trafficking. It wasn’t until her church family saw the signs and believed what she was saying that she was able to start the process of finding freedom. Rachel shows her faith and love of God during the highs and lows of her journey and she prays for each person who reads her story.

ON OUR SHELF

SWIMMING TO THE TOP

OF THE TIDE by Patricia Hanlon The Great Marsh is the largest continuous stretch of salt marsh in New England, extending from Cape Ann to New Hampshire. Patricia Hanlon and her husband built their home and raised their children alongside it. But it is not until the children are grown that they begin to swim the tidal estuary daily. Immersing herself, she experiences, with all her senses in all seasons, the vigor of a place where the two ecosystems of fresh and salt water mix, merge, and create new life.

In Swimming to the Top of the Tide, Hanlon lyrically charts her explorations, at once intimate and scientific. Noting the disruptions caused by human intervention, she bears witness to the vitality of the watersheds, their essential role in the natural world, and the responsibility of those who love them to contribute to their sustainability.

HER PERFECT BONES

by Ellery Kane

The girl’s body is curled up like a shell and almost completely buried in sand. Only her fingertips can be seen, reaching helplessly up towards an escape she will never find…

Seventeen-year-old Shelby Mayfield sits alone on a bus to Fog Harbor, California. Aside from a few items of clothing, all she has with her is twenty-two dollars, the ragdoll she’s kept since kindergarten, and the devastating secret she’s been hiding.

How long will it be before her family realizes she’s gone?

Can anyone see the fresh bruise on her cheek beneath the makeup?

Perhaps she was a fool to believe the person she is meeting in this remote little town could help her…

INKED: CARTOONS, CONFESSIONS, REJECTED IDEAS AND SECRET SKETCHES FROM THE NEW YORKER'S JOE

DATOR by Joe Dator

From inspiration to conception and all the trials in-between. Filled with more than 150 of Dator’s single-panel cartoons, this lively, quick-witted book betrays a deadpan sense of humor.

But Inked is more than a book of cartoons. Dator also dives into the creative process, offering bonus commentary on how ideas have come to fruition, how one idea has led to another, and the various attempts to get an idea right. Along the way, he shows how a spark of imagination has turned into a laugh-out-loud moment with only a single image and caption, and how other attempts have found themselves on the cutting-room floor.

ON OUR SHELF

CONSTANTINE AT THE

BRIDGE by Stephen Dando-Collins

The AD 312 Battle of the Milvian Bridge, just outside Rome, marked the start of a monumental change for Rome and her empire. This battle was the figurative bridge between old pagan Rome and new Christian Rome. And once Constantine had crossed that bridge, there was no turning back.

Constantine the Great, after winning this battle against his brother-in-law Maxentius and taking power at Rome, and strongly influenced by his mother, forcefully steered Romans away from the traditional worship of their classical gods toward Christianity, setting Rome on two paths – the adoption of Christianity as the state religion, and the relegation of the city of Rome to obscurity as the Western Roman Empire collapsed within 175 years.

PHOENIX FLAME by Sara

Holland

Maddie Morrow thought her problems were over. She saved the Inn at Havenfall--a sanctuary between magical worlds hidden deep in the mountains of Colorado--from the evil Silver Prince. Her uncle the Innkeeper is slowly recovering from a mysterious spell that has left him not quite human. And there are still a few weeks of summer left to spend with her handsome, more-than-just-a-friend Brekken, even though she can't stop thinking about Taya.

But Maddie soon realizes there's more work to be done to protect the place her family has run for centuries. She must embark on a dangerous mission to put an end to the black-market trading of magical objects and open the Inn's doors to Solaria, the once feared land of shapeshifters.

As she tries to accomplish both seemingly impossible tasks, Maddie uncovers family secrets that could change everything.

FOOL'S ERRAND by Jeffrey S. Stephens

Years after the death of his gangster father, a young man discovers a letter that sends him reluctantly defying the mob as he races to locate a hidden treasure.

It’s been six years since the untimely death of Blackie—a charming rogue who endlessly pursued “The Big Deal”—when his son discovers an enigmatic letter telling of a cache of stolen money. Feeling no choice but to pursue his father’s dream, he embarks on a search that leads from New York, to the Strip in Las Vegas, and ultimately to the south of France. Along this life-altering journey, he is confronted by the dangers of his father’s past as he unravels a decadesold mystery, while revealing other long-buried secrets as well.

Poignant and entertaining, humorous and exciting, romantic and mysterious, Fool’s Errand leads him to discover both the treasure and himself.

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In the old days, books had awful covers and marvelous content; nowadays, the opposite happens.”

— GIACOMO LEOPARDI, THOUGHTS

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