Peak Picks Current Titles Book List
New titles from the Peak Picks collection that are currently in rotation. Stop by any branch to see what's available today!
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The Great Divide
Adult Fiction. "'WORK IN PARADISE’ the notice declared, calling for laborers to come to Panama to build a canal. Ada Bunting, a 16-year-old from Barbados, is lured there, anxious to earn money to help her ailing sister. HenrÃquez… casts the disruptive and dangerous digging of the massive canal as a magnet that pulls together disparate characters. [The author] reveals the forgotten blood, sweat, and tears that made this engineering marvel possible, while dramatizing…how ‘the great divide’ not only split the land but also communities, families, culture, and a sense of wholeness.†Booklist
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The House of Hidden Meanings
Adult Nonfiction. “RuPaul strips away all artifice and recounts the story of his life with breathtaking clarity and tenderness, bringing his signature wisdom and wit to his own biography. From his early years growing up as a queer Black kid in San Diego navigating complex relationships with his absent father and temperamental mother, to forging an identity in the punk and drag scenes of Atlanta and New York, to finding enduring love with his husband Georges LeBar and self-acceptance in sobriety, RuPaul excavates his own biography life-story, uncovering new truths and insights in his personal history.†Publisher description
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James
Adult Fiction. “Everett portrays in this ingenious retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a Black man who’s mastered the art of minstrelsy to get what he needs from gullible white people. Many of the same things happen as they do in Twain’s original… The main difference is in the telling. Jim narrates, not Huck… Everett also pares down the prose and adds humor in place of sentimentality. Jim’s wrenching odyssey concludes with remarkable revelations, violent showdowns, and insightful meditations on literature and philosophy. Everett has outdone himself.†Publishers Weekly
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The Manicurist's Daughter
Adult Nonfiction. “The youngest of four children, and the only one born in the U.S., Lieu grew up helping her Vietnamese mother, Hà Thi (or ‘Jennifer’ to her American clients) operate several nail salons in Northern California. When Hà Thi died suddenly after receiving an abdominoplasty from a surgeon with a history of malpractice, 11-year-old Lieu was set adrift. Lieu's candor about her mother's faults…and righteous anger at the surgeon who killed her set this apart from similar fare. It's a generous portrait of grief that will touch those who've struggled with loss.†Publisher description
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Parasol Against the Axe
Adult Fiction. “Years ago, Hero, Sofie, and Dorothea were united in a criminal venture, but now they're barely friendly. Yet when Sofie invites both Hero and Thea to her bachelorette weekend in Prague, they both show up. …Hero opts to lose herself in Paradoxical Undressing, a novel gifted to her by her 15-year-old son. Little does she know that Thea… is reading the same book. Or that the story within changes depending on who is reading it and when they pick it up. Oyeyemi's latest is a loving and lively tribute to Prague… as well as the complexities of both female friendship and storytelling†Publishers Weekly
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Slow Productivity
Adult Nonfiction. “Our current definition of ‘productivity’ is broken. It pushes us to treat busyness as a proxy for useful effort, leading to impossibly lengthy task lists and ceaseless meetings. We're overwhelmed by all we have to do and on the edge of burnout, left to decide between giving into soul-sapping hustle culture or rejecting ambition altogether. But are these really our only choices? Newport deconstructs the absurdities inherent in standard notions of productivity, and then provides step-by-step advice for cultivating a slower, more humane alternative.†Publisher description
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There's Always This Year
Adult Nonfiction. “Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1990s, Hanif Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron James were forged and countless others weren't. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tension between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with intimate, personal storytelling." Publisher description
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Until August
Adult Fiction. “In a rediscovered novel…, Ana Magdalena Bach has been happily married for 27 years and has no reason to escape the life she has made with her husband and children. And yet, every August, she travels by ferry to the island where her mother is buried, and for one night takes a new lover. Across sultry Caribbean evenings full of salsa and boleros, lotharios and conmen, Ana journeys further each year into the hinterland of her desire and the fear hidden in her heart. Until August is a profound meditation on freedom, regret, self-transformation, and the mysteries of love—an unexpected gift…†Publisher description
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A Year of Last Things
Adult Nonfiction (Poetry). “The dazzling latest by Ondaatje brings his formidable literary gifts and imagination to bear on questions of memory and artistic process. Tenderly plumbing friends, ex-lovers, works of art, and ‘echoing rivers where we lost and found ourselves,’ he writes of ‘all those small recalls of this and that/ before our walk up a staircase into the dark.’ Poetry offers a place ‘beyond the familiar properties’: ‘the breaking line's breath-like leap/ into the missed life// till there was no longer a story, only stillness/ or falling.’ This collection radiates the joy of a fully realized, literary life. †Publishers Weekly
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Fourteen Days
Adult Fiction. “The tenants in a dilapidated apartment building on New York’s Lower East Side are going lockdown stir-crazy as COVID-19 rampages. The new super, lonely and worried about her ill father, finds refuge on the roof. Soon the renters join her, bringing up chairs and cocktails and telling stories. Putting a bold new twist on the plague novel, this bountiful, unpredictable, witty, and affecting tale-of-tales is… a collaboration by 36 exceptional writers, including Angie Cruz, Celeste Ng, Tommy Orange, Ishmael Reed, Hampton Sides, R.L. Stine…, and Meg Wolitzer.†Booklist
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