New Releases: Recommendations (6/5/20)

The Lies That Bind by Emily Griffin

A young woman falls hard for an impossibly perfect man before he disappears without a trace. . . .

Twenty-eight year old Cecily Gardner is new to NYC with dreams of becoming a reporter. She’s homesick and recently broke up with her longtime boyfriend. It’s 2am on a Saturday Night in Spring of 2001 and she’s in a dive bar about to call her ex...when a man on the barstool next to her tells her “Don’t Do it.” After hours of talking and tequila, they form a special connection. He should have been jut a rebound, a one time thing, but they can’t seem to say goodbye. 

However, Grant disappears and Cecilia learns that she’s not the only one looking for him. She searches for the answers to the questions that plague her--What happened to Grant? Who is he, really? Did she ever know him? Can you love a man who isn’t who he seemed to be?

All Adults Here by Emma Straub

What do you do when you realize that you may have accidentally traumatized your children while raising them?

After witnessing a school bus accident, Astrid Strick has the startingly realization that she wasn’t quite the parent she thought she had been to her three, now-grown children. How did it impact them?

Her oldest son seems to measure his adult life by no-one else’s standards. Her middle daughter is pregnant, but still very much in her adolescence stage. And her youngest can’t seem to get his life on the right tracking, making his own parenting mistakes. But how can anyone decide which past mistakes mattered the most? Is it worth apologizing now? Maybe the only ones with the answers are Astrid’s 13-year-old grand-daughter and her new friend.

 A young woman who breaks stereotypes marries...Jesus.

Raised in a wealthy family, Ana is rebellious and ambitious, with a brilliant mind and a daring spirit. She engages in furtive scholarly pursuits and writes narratives about neglected and silenced women. Ana is expected to marry an older widower, a prospect that horrifies her. An encounter with eighteen-year-old Jesus changes everything.

Their marriage evolves with love and conflict, humor and pathos in Nazareth, where Ana makes a home with Jesus, his brothers, and their mother, Mary. Ana's pent-up longings intensify amid the turbulent resistance to Rome's occupation of Israel, partially led by her brother, Judas. She is sustained by her fearless aunt Yaltha, who harbors a compelling secret. When Ana commits a brazen act that puts her in peril, she flees to Alexandria, where startling revelations and greater dangers unfold, and she finds refuge in unexpected surroundings. Ana determines her fate during a stunning convergence of events considered among the most impactful in human history.

The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell

25 Years ago, police found a crying baby in a home with three dead bodies and a note, but...where were the other four children who lived there?

Soon after her twenty-fifth birthday, Libby Jones returns home from work to find the letter she’s been waiting for her entire life. She soon learns not only the identity of her birth parents, but also that she is the sole inheritor of their abandoned mansion on the banks of the Thames in London’s fashionable Chelsea neighborhood, worth millions. Everything in Libby’s life is about to change. But what she can’t possibly know is that others have been waiting for this day as well—and she is on a collision course to meet them.

Twenty-five years ago, police were called to 16 Cheyne Walk with reports of a baby crying. When they arrived, they found a healthy ten-month-old happily cooing in her crib in the bedroom. Downstairs in the kitchen lay three dead bodies, all dressed in black, next to a hastily scrawled note. And the four other children reported to live at Cheyne Walk were gone...

Conjure Women by Afia Atakora 

What happens when there’s war and an accursed child is born?

Spanning eras and generations, Conjure Women tells of the lives of three unforgettable women: Miss May Belle, a wise healing woman; her precocious and observant daughter Rue, who is reluctant to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a midwife; and their master’s daughter Varina. The secrets and bonds among these women and their community come to a head at the beginning of a war and at the birth of an accursed child, who sets the townspeople alight with fear and a spreading superstition that threatens their newly won, tenuous freedom.

Which one is your top favorite? Let us know in the comments!