2022 Staff Picks

"The beautifully ornate reading room at the Boston Public Library is completely silent one weekday morning, until a woman's terrified scream echoes through the room. Security guards immediately appear and instruct everyone inside to stay put until they determine there is no threat. While they wait for the all-clear, four strangers who had been sitting in the reading room get to chatting and quickly become friendly. Harriet, Marigold, Whit, and Caine...

"From T. Kingfisher, the award-winning author of The Twisted Ones, comes What Moves the Dead, a gripping and atmospheric retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's classic "The Fall of the House of Usher." When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania. What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed...

Bored with traditional palace life, Princess Cimorene travels to the Mountains of Morning where she is befriended by a group of powerful dragons and joins in their struggle to protect their kingdom from being taken over by disreputable wizards.

Cielo loves to skateboard, but loses her confidence after a fall, until the intervention of some new friends helps her regains her confidence.

"Sue just wants to spend the summer reading and making comics at sleepaway camp with her friends, but instead she gets stuck going to Honduras to visit relatives with her parents and two sisters. They live way out in the country, which means no texting, no cable, and no Internet! The trip takes a turn for the worse when Sue's mother announces that they'll be having a surprise quinceąera for Sue, which is the last thing she wants. She can't imagine...

Transgender demigod Teo is unexpectedly selected for the Sunbearer Trials, a fierce competition among demigod heroes where the winner sacrifices the loser to Sol, their blood fueling the Sun Stones that protect Reino del Sol. "Only the most powerful and honorable semidioses get chosen. I'm just a Jade. I'm not a real hero." As each new decade begins, the Sun's power must be replenished so that Sol can keep traveling along the sky and keep the evil...

"A New York Times bestselling author, National Book Award finalist, and "one of our greatest living writers" (Shondaland) reimagines the love story in this fresh and seductive novel about a young woman seeking joy while healing from loss. Feyi Adekola wants to learn how to be alive again. It's been five years since the accident that killed the love of her life and she's almost a new person now-an artist with her own studio, and sharing a brownstone...

"A Psalm for the Wild-Built A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is a story of kindness and love from one of the foremost practitioners of hopeful SF. After touring the rural areas of Panga, Sibling Dex (a Tea Monk of some renown) and Mosscap (a robot sent on a quest to determine what humanity really needs) turn their attention to the villages and cities of the little moon they call home. They hope to find the answers they seek, while making new friends, learning...

"When Prince burst onto the pop scene in 1978, he put Minneapolis on the music map. Many up-and-coming bands followed the trail that he blazed. MPLS Sound is the story of one such group--Starchild, led by a young woman inspired by Prince to start her own revolution. Through her journey, we see from within exactly how His Royal Badness transformed the entire Minneapolis scene."--Provided by publisher.

"A disgraced ex-CIA operative must return to the field with only his ex-wife as his handler in this electrifying thriller from a former intelligence officer. A single well-placed American asset has kept Iran's secret uranium enrichment from hitting weapons-grade. For the last decade, a mild-mannered Iranian physicist has enabled a CIA hack into software controlling Iran's gas-centrifuge arrays. But now the saboteur has gone dark, off grid--and he's...