Peak Picks Current Titles Book List
A complete list of current Peak Picks titles.
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We Survived the Night
Adult Nonfiction. “NoiseCat's ambitious debut ruminates on generational trauma and resilience among Indigenous communities. It opens with a night watchman's horrific discovery at St. Joseph's Mission, an Indian residential school in B.C.: a Salish newborn, NoiseCat's father, abandoned in the garbage, ‘the only known survivor of the school's incinerator.’ With this harrowing legacy at the heart of his narrative, NoiseCat traces his family's history, including his father's achievements as an artist and struggles with alcoholism, and reflects on Coyote Stories, the oral tradition centered on the famed trickster.” --Publishers Weekly
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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History Matters
Adult Nonfiction. “History Matters brings together selected essays by beloved historian David McCullough, some published here for the first time, written at different points over the course of his long career but all focused on the subject of his lifelong passion: the importance of history in understanding our present and future. Edited by McCullough's daughter, Dorie McCullough Lawson, and his longtime researcher, Michael Hill, History Matters is a tribute to a master historian and offers fresh insights into McCullough's enduring interests and writing life.” Publisher description
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Mother Mary Comes to Me
Adult Nonfiction. Booker Prize-winning Indian novelist Roy recounts a life of poverty and upheaval, defiance and triumph in an emotionally raw memoir, centered on her complicated relationship with her mother. Mary Roy…was a volatile, willful woman, angry and abusive. To escape her mother's demands and tantrums, Arundhati, at age 18, decided to move permanently to Delhi…she embarked on a long relationship with a filmmaker, which ignited her career as a writer. Throughout, Mrs. Roy loomed large in her daughter's life, and her death, in 2022, left the author overcome with grief. An intimate, stirring chronicle.” Kirkus
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Replaceable You
Adult Nonfiction. “The body is the most complex machine in the world, and the only one for which you cannot get a replacement part from the manu-facturer. For centuries, medicine has reached for what's available--sculpting noses from brass, borrowing skin from frogs and hearts from pigs, crafting eye parts from jet canopies and breasts from petroleum by-products. Today we're attempting to grow body parts from scratch using stem cells and 3D printers. How are we doing? Are we there yet? Irrepressible and accessible, Replace-able You immerses readers in the wondrous, improbable and surreal quest to build a new you.” Publisher description
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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The Wilderness
Adult Fiction. “Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood… swoops in and stays. As these friends move from the late 2000’s into the late 2020’s, from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another—amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability, and the increasing volatility of modern American life.” Publisher description
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Automatic Noodle
Adult Fiction. “When Staybehind and his fellow robots wake up after a mysterious shutdown, they find the restaurant is flooding. And worse, the owners of their shop are on the lam after running a crypto scam. But after conferring, the assorted robots, living in a postwar San Francisco in a future where California is liberated from the U.S. and robots have a first wave of basic civil rights, decide that if humans can run a restaurant, so can they. In a daring move, they reopen as Authentic Noodle, a shop that serves biang biang–style noodles. But when a robophobic group begins to flood their site with one-star reviews, they’ll have to fight to remain open. Newitz has gifted sf readers with a hopeful, postapocalyptic found-family tale.” Booklist
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Sabzi
Adult Nonfiction. “Lifting its name from the Persian word for ‘herbs’, Sabzi brings you more than 80 accessible plant-forward recipes that celebrate the best of Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and South Asian flavors. From bountiful salads to fragrant soups, colorful mezze, and heart-warming mains, Yasmin invites home cooks to make delicious meals that are good for the health of both people and the planet, while staying connected to the traditional food cultures that make us who we are. With easy-to-make recipes that put vibrant vegetables at the heart of a meal, dishes in the book include: Halloumi Lasagne; Smoky Tofu Shakshuka; Sweet Potatoes with Pistachio and Mint Pesto; Rhubarb and Cardamom Tart... and many more. An invitation into Yasmin's treasure trove of a kitchen, Sabzi is a celebration of the life-affirming and nourishing power of plants.” Publisher description
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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The Convenience Store by the Sea
Adult Fiction. “In the seaside town of Mojiko, the eccentric Mr. Shiba manages a Tenderness store, where his magnetic personality and handsome figure are nothing compared to his love for his customers and employees. The story follows multiple Tenderness patrons as they navigate hardships, with the store bringing them closer together. Among them are employee Mitsuri, a mother who struggles with raising a difficult teenage boy and finds solace in publishing her popular online manga. There’s also customer Yoshirō, an aspiring manga artist who strives to leave his job as a tutor; and Azusa, a middle schooler who yearns to step out of her friend’s shadow and discovers joy in the sweet treats at Tenderness, fueling her desire to become a pastry chef. Mr. Shiba’s interventions in others’ lives has mixed results… but overall, the well-meaning proprietor seeds a sense of hope and purpose in those he encounters.” PW
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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A Marriage at Sea
Adult Nonfiction. “Elmhirst's narrative turns on two 1960s-era British dreamers who decided to pitch it all in and sail from grim, gray Britain around the globe to New Zealand, ‘discovering new lands on the other side of the world.’ The author discovered the story of Maurice Bailey, a printer by trade, who took a studious approach to the voyage, learning navigation and reading and rereading reference books. His wife, Maralyn, was eminently practical--certainly more so than Maurice, who insisted on having no radio transmitter aboard to ‘preserve their freedom from outside interference.’ That would prove a consequential decision when a whale collided with their boat and sank it….they floated, adrift and without a clue as to their location in the vast Pacific, for 117 days until finally being spotted, quite by chance, by a passing South Korean fishing boat. A nimbly told story that should serve as a caution--but oddly, too, as inspiration--to would-be escapists.’ Kirkus
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Atmosphere
Adult Fiction. "Joan Goodwin has always been obsessed with space, which is why she became an astrophysics professor at Rice University. But then,...NASA announces that it's looking for female scientists to join the space program. Joan is accepted on her second try, and in 1980, she begins training...The story cuts back and forth between a disaster in 1984 and the story of Joan's journey through the space program. Reid keeps the tension high, making this perhaps her most propulsive novel yet as she balances the drama of Joan's personal life with the fast-paced action of a catastrophe in space. Even with the high-stakes action, the touching and surprising love story is the emotional heart of the book." Kirkus
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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