Readers' Advisory: Adult Resources

A scintillating debut from a major new voice in fiction, Songs in Ursa Major is a love story set in 1969, alive with music, sex, and the trappings of fame.

Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief -- a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi's phenomenal debut.

A romance writer who no longer believes in love and a literary writer stuck in a rut engage in a summer-long challenge that may just upend everything they believe about happily ever afters. Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance.

At its simplest, “Gingerbread” is about family — Harriet tells her daughter her origin story, how Harriet came to England with her own mother from the magical but flawed country of Druhástrana, and how they struggled to survive and create a new home for themselves.

A heartfelt debut about the unlikely relationship between a young woman who's lost her husband and a major league pitcher who's lost his game. In a sleepy seaside town in Maine, recently widowed Eveleth “Evvie” Drake rarely leaves her large, painfully empty house nearly a year after her husband's death in a car crash.

Best friends Mia and Lorrie Ann couldn't be more different; where Mia is reckless and proudly hard-hearted, Lorrie Ann is kind, serenely beautiful, and seemingly immune to the kind of teenage mistakes that Mia can't help but make. But within a few years, fortunes change.

Best friends since second grade, Fiona Lin and Jane Shen explore the lonely freeways and seedy bars of Los Angeles together through their teenage years, surviving unfulfilling romantic encounters, and carrying with them the scars of their families' tumultuous pasts.

Based on the acclaimed book by Cheryl Strayed (author of the best-selling Wild), Tiny Beautiful Things follows Sugar, an online advice columnist who uses her personal experiences to help the real-life readers who pour their hearts out to her.

Set mainly in New York City, the film follows a gambler and dancer, "Lucky" (Astaire), who is trying to raise money to secure his marriage when he meets dance instructor Penny (Rogers) and begins dancing with her; the two soon fall in love and are forced to reconcile their feelings.

Wickedly hilarious and utterly recognizable, Girls in White Dresses tells the story of three women grappling with heartbreak and career change, family pressure and new love—all while suffering through an endless round of weddings and bridal showers.

18-year-old Opal is a young Black woman working as a housekeeper in a small Southern town in the 1930s—and then the Klan descends. A moving story that confronts America's tragic past, When Stars Rain Down is both heartwarming and heart-wrenching.

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern Black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities.

The epic tale of Janie Crawford, whose quest for identity takes her on a journey during which she learns what love is, experiences life's joys and sorrows, and come home to herself in peace.

The alternate history novel tells the story of Cora, a slave in the Antebellum South during the 19th century, who makes a bid for freedom from her Georgia plantation by following the Underground Railroad, which the novel depicts as a rail transport system with safe houses and secret routes.

Winner of the NBCC's John Leonard First Book Prize A New York Times 2016 Notable Book One of Oprah's 10 Favorite Books of 2016 NPR's Debut Novel of the Year One of Buzzfeed's Best Fiction Books Of 2016 One of Time's Top 10 Novels of 2016 "Homegoing is an inspiration." --Ta-Nehisi Coates  The unforgettable New York Times best seller begins with the story of two half-sisters, separated by forces beyond their control: one sold into slavery, the other married to a British slaver. Written with tremendous sweep and power, Homegoing traces the generations of family who follow, as their destinies lead them through two continents and three hundred years of history, each life indeliably drawn, as the legacy of slavery is fully revealed in light of the present day.             Effia and Esi are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast's booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia's descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.

Samantha Downing's deliciously dark debut crime novel MY LOVELY WIFE follows a married couple with a unique way of keeping the spark in their relationship alive… serial murder. That's right, this book centers around a pair of ordinary suburban spouses whose date nights involve death.

Stephanie Kilgour and Patrick are adjusting to life with their colicky twin girls. The babies are a handful, but even as Stephanie struggles with the disorientation of sleep deprivation as a stay-at-home mom, there's one thing she's sure of: she has all she ever wanted.

n Home Before Dark, Maggie Holt is a 30-year-old woman who has inherited a mansion, Baneberry Hall, from her late father, Ewan. 25 years ago, Ewan wrote a non-fictional bestselling novel called House of Horrors about the Holt family's experiences living in the house he claims was haunted for 20 days, before they fled in terror. It's a book that came to define Maggie's life.