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Gambits & Gamesmanship
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The queen’s gambit
Summary:Eight year-old orphan Beth Harmon is quiet, sullen, and by all appearances unremarkable. That is, until she plays her first game of chess. Her senses grow sharper, her thinking clearer, and for the first time in her life she feels herself fully in control. By the age of sixteen, she’s competing for the U.S. Open championship. But as Beth hones her skills on the professional circuit, the stakes get higher, her isolation grows more frightening, and the thought of escape becomes all the more tempting.
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The queen of Katwe : a story of life, chess, and one extraordinary girl’s dream of becoming a grandmaster
Summary:The astonishing true story of Phiona Mutesi, a teenager from the slums of Kampala, Uganda, who, inspired by an unlikely mentor, a war refugee turned missionary, becomes an international chess champion.
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King’s gambit : a son, a father, and the world’s most dangerous game
Summary:An insider’s account of the fiercely competitive world of professional chess describes the author’s experiences as a child prodigy who spent his weekends in the chess epicenter of Greenwich Village, a youth also marked by his parents’ divorce and his observations about the eccentric lives of fellow players.
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A partial history of lost causes
In St. Petersburg, Russia, world chess champion Aleksandr Bezetov begins a quixotic quest: He launches a dissident presidential campaign against Vladimir Putin. He knows he will not win—and that he is risking his life in the process—but a deeper conviction propels him forward. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, thirty-year-old English lecturer Irina Ellison struggles for a sense of purpose. Irina is certain she has inherited Huntington’s disease—the same cruel illness that ended her father’s life. When Irina finds an old, photocopied letter her father wrote to the young Aleksandr Bezetov, she makes a fateful decision. Her father asked the chess prodigy a profound question—How does one proceed in a lost cause?—but never received an adequate reply. Leaving everything behind, Irina travels to Russia to find Bezetov and get an answer for her father, and for herself.
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Grandmaster : a novel
Summary:Invited to a parent-child weekend chess tournament, freshman Daniel discovers that his father was once one of the country’s leading young players but that the intense competition surrounding the game proved to be unhealthy, a past they are forced to confront when they meet a former rival.
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The eight : a novel
Summary: New York City, 1972. A dabbler in mathematics and chess, Catherine Velis is also a computer expert for a Big Eight accounting firm. Before heading off to a new assignment in Algeria, Cat has her palm read by a fortune-teller. The woman warns Cat of danger. Then an antiques dealer approaches Cat with a mysterious offer: He has an anonymous client who is trying to collect the pieces of an ancient chess service, purported to be in Algeria. If Cat can bring the pieces back, there will be a generous reward. The South of France, 1790. Mireille de Remy and her cousin Valentine are young novices at the fortresslike Montglane Abbey. With France aflame in revolution, the two girls burn to rebel against constricted convent life&;and their means of escape is at hand. Buried deep within the abbey are pieces of the Montglane Chess Service, once owned by Charlemagne. Whoever reassembles the pieces can play a game of unlimited power. But to keep the Game a secret from those who would abuse it, the two young women must scatter the pieces throughout the world…
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The tournament
Summary:When the feared sultan of the mid-16th-century Ottoman Empire issues a chess tournament challenge to European royals, a young Elizabeth I accompanies England’s champion, only to witness a brutal murder amid dangerous court machinations.
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The Grandmaster : Magnus Carlsen and the match that made chess great again
Summary:Butler captures one of the world’s greatest sportsmen at the height of their powers, and attempts to decipher the secret to that greatness.
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Sophia : a novel
Summary:“Reverend Maloney isn’t the world’s greatest spiritual advisor. He drinks gin out of his coffee cup and has sex dreams about the Holy Ghost. His best friend Eli isn’t perfect either, but he’s a chess genius, so Maloney sees an opportunity in traveling around the country so Eli can win major chess tournament after chess tournament (while Maloney pockets Eli’s winnings). Chased by a blind headhunter named Jack Cataract, the Reverend, his girlfriend, and Eli race across North America and around New York City, from Washington Square Park to a jetski ride to the great green gown of Lady Liberty. In this uproariously funny, unabashedly sexy, and highly-anticipated novel, Michael Bible delivers a devastating story about the American South, chess tournaments, and one debaucherous reverend’s struggle with spirituality. In the spirit of Nicholson Baker and Barry Hannah, Sophia is an adventure with a raunchy and obviously flawed cast of characters, written with enormous heart.”
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The kings of New York : a year among the geeks, oddballs, and geniuses who make up America’s top high school chess team
Summary:Documents a season with the highly competitive Edward R. Murrow High School chess team, from cash games in Washington Square Park to the SuperNationals in Nashville, citing the contributions of their calculus teacher coach and a prospective grand-master player.
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Endgame : Bobby Fischer’s remarkable rise and fall from America’s brightest prodigy to the edge of madness
Summary:From an author who wrote one of the bestselling Bobby Fischer books ever and who was himself a friend of Fischer’s comes an impressively researched biography that for the first time captures the complete, remarkable arc of the life of the chess master.
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The Death’s Head chess club : a novel
Summary:“A novel of the improbable friendship that arises between a Nazi officer and a Jewish chessplayer in Auschwitz SS Obersturmfuhrer Paul Meissner arrives in
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Korean American Day is January 13th
Trust exercise : a novel
Summary:In 1982 in a southern city, David and Sarah, two freshmen at a highly competitive performing arts high school, thrive alongside their school peers in a rarified bubble, ambitiously devoting themselves to their studies ;to music, to movement, to Shakespeare and, particularly, to classes taught by the magnetic acting teacher Mr. Kingsley. It is here in these halls that David and Sarah fall innocently and powerfully into first love. And also where, as this class of students rises through the ranks of high school, the outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and the future, does not affect them–until it does.
Kim Jiyoung, born 1982
Summary:"In a small, tidy apartment on the outskirts of the frenzied metropolis of Seoul, Kim Jiyoung-a millennial "everywoman"-spends her days caring for her infant daughter. Her husband, however, worries over a strange symptom that has recently appeared: Jiyoung has begun to impersonate the voices of other women-dead and alive, both known and unknown to her. Truly, flawlessly, completely, she became that very person. As she plunges deeper into this psychosis, Jiyoung’s concerned husband sends her to a psychiatrist, who listens to her narrate her own life story-from her birth to a family who expected a son, to elementary school teachers who policed girls’ outfits, to male coworkers who installed hidden cameras in women’s restrooms and posted the photos online. But can her doctor cure her, or even discover what truly ails her?"
Your house will pay : a novel
Summary:A powerful and taut novel about racial tensions following two Los Angeles families–one Korean-American, one African American–grappling with the effects of a decades-old crime.old crime.
The kinship of secrets
Summary:"From the author of The Calligrapher’s Daughter comes the riveting story of two sisters, one raised in the United States, the other in South Korea, and the family that bound them together even as the Korean War kept them apart."
Shelter
Summary:"Kyung Cho is a young father burdened by a house he can’t afford. Nearby in an exclusive neighborhood, an act of violence leaves his well-to-do parents unable to stay on their own. Living under the same roof, old feelings of guilt and anger surface. This masterful debut asks what it means to provide for one’s family and answers with a story as riveting as it is profound.
Free food for millionaires
Summary:"Goodbye, Columbus meets the novels of Amy Tan in this American story of class, society and identity that marks the debut of a new voice in fiction"–Provided by the publisher.
The incendiaries : a novel
Summary:A young Korean-American woman at an elite American university is drawn into acts of domestic terrorism by a cult tied to North Korea and then disappears, leading a fellow student into an obsessive search for her.
On such a full sea
Summary:From the author of Native Speaker and The Surrendered, this is a highly provocative, deeply affecting story of one woman’s legendary quest to comprehend the life into which she has been born, in a shocking future America. Here the author takes his masterly storytelling, and his long-standing interests in identity, culture, work, and love, and lifts them to a new plane. He brings us into a world created from scratch, a vividly imagined future America. In a future, long-declining America, society is strictly stratified by class. Long-abandoned urban neighborhoods have been repurposed as highwalled, self-contained labor colonies. And the members of the labor class-descendants of those brought over en masse many years earlier from environmentally ruined provincial China, find purpose and identity in their work to provide pristine produce and fish to the small, elite, satellite charter villages that ring the labor settlement. In return for their contributions, the workers are protected from the violence of the wild, crime -ridden, anarchic quasi-states that exist elsewhere. In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when the man she loves mysteriously disappears. Fan’s journey to find him takes her out of the safety of B-Mor, through the anarchic Open Counties, where crime is rampant with scant governmental oversight, and to a faraway charter village, in a quest that begins to call into question everything she knows about herself and her destiny, that will soon become legend to those she left behind. The novel explores the delicate balance between fate and free will, ignorance and knowledge, subjection and control, and how quickly the tide can change. It is a novel with contemporary relevance and insight into American anxieties about Chinese power and influence, and our own prospects and legacies. — Provided by publisher.
The queen of the night
Summary:Lilliet Berne is a sensation of the Paris Opera, a legendary soprano with every accolade except an original role, every singers’ chance at immortality. When one is finally offered to her, she realizes with alarm that the libretto is based on a hidden piece of her past. Only four could have betrayed her: one is dead, one loves her, one wants to own her. And one, she hopes, never thinks of her at all. As she mines her memories for clues, she recalls her life as an orphan who left the American frontier for Europe and was swept up into the glitzy, gritty world of Second Empire Paris. In order to survive, she transformed herself from hippodrome rider to courtesan, from empress’s maid to debut singer, all the while weaving a complicated web of romance, obligation, and political intrigue.
Pachinko
Summary:"In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant-and that her lover is married-she refuses to be bought. Instead,
New Reads for the New Year
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The Wife Upstairs
Summary:A delicious twist on a Gothic classic, The Wife Upstairs pairs Southern charm with atmospheric domestic suspense, perfect for fans of B.A. Paris and Megan Miranda.
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The Children’s Blizzard
Summary:From the New York Times-bestselling author of The Aviator’s Wife comes a story of courage on the prairie, inspired by the devastating storm that struck the Great Plains in 1888.
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Remote control
Summary:“The day Fatima forgot her name, Death paid a visit. From here on in she would be known as Sankofa–a name that meant nothing to anyone but her, the only tie to her family and her past. Her touch is death, and with a glance a town can fall. And she walks-alone, except for her fox companion-searching for the object that came from the sky and gave itself to her when the meteors fell and when she was yet unchanged; searching for answers. But is there a greater purpose for Sankofa, now that Death is her constant companion?”–Provided by publisher
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This Close to Okay
Summary:A recently divorced therapist spots a man standing on the edge of a bridge and convinces him to join her for coffee instead of jumping and the pair spend a cathartic weekend sharing secrets and angsts.
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Summary:“A singular and stunning debut novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other, and a betrayal that threatens their existence.”–Provided by publisher
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This time next year
Summary:“Their lives began together, but their worlds couldn’t be more different. After thirty years of missed connections, they’re about to meet again…”
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The mermaid from Jeju : a novel
Summary:A talented young deep-sea diver from occupied 1948 Korea’s neighboring Jeju Island visits Mt. Halla for her family’s annual trading trip before her romance with a mountain youth is upended by family tragedy and political turbulence.
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Black Buck
Summary:For fans of Sorry to Bother You and The Wolf of Wall Street–a blazing, satirical debut novel about a young man given a shot at stardom as the lone black salesman at a mysterious, cultlike, and wildly successful startup where nothing is as it seems.
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Coming This Winter: Ages 9-12
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Last mirror on the left
Summary:Otto and Sheed, The Legendary Alston Boys of Logan County, are ordered by Missus Nedraw to bring a fugitive to justice in a world that mirrors their own but has its own rules.
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Amari and the night brothers
Summary:Thirteen-year-old Amari, a poor Black girl from the projects, gets an invitation from her missing brother to join the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs and join in the fight against an evil magician.
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Just Like That
Summary:With insight and a light touch, best-selling, Newbery Honor-winning author Gary D. Schmidt tells two poignant, linked stories: that of a grieving girl and a boy trying to escape his violent past.
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Best Science Fiction 2020
Finna
Summary:When an elderly customer at a Swedish big box furniture store — but not that one — slips through a portal to another dimension, it’s up to two minimum-wage employees to track her across the multiverse and protect their company’s bottom line. Multi-dimensional swashbuckling would be hard enough, but those two unfortunate souls broke up a week ago. To find the missing granny, Ava and Jules will brave carnivorous furniture, swarms of identical furniture spokespeople, and the deep resentment simmering between them. Can friendship blossom from the ashes of their relationship? In infinite dimensions, all things are possible.
Harrow the ninth
Summary:"After rocking the cosmos with her deathly debut, Tamsyn Muir continues the story of the penumbral Ninth House in Harrow the Ninth, a mind-twisting puzzle box of mystery, murder, magic, and mayhem. Nothing is as it seems in the halls of the Emperor, and the fate of the galaxy rests on one woman’s shoulders. Harrowhark’s health is failing, her magic refuses to cooperate, her sword makes her throw up, and even her mind threatens to betray her. What’s worse, someone is trying to kill her. And she has to wonder: if they succeeded, would the universe be better off?"
Riot baby
Summary:"Rooted in foundational loss and the hope that can live in anger, Riot Baby is both a global dystopian narrative and an intimate family story with quietly devastating things to say about love, fury, and the black American experience. Ella and Kev are brother and sister, both gifted with extraordinary power. Their childhoods are defined and destroyed by structural racism and brutality. Their futures might alter the world. When Kev is incarcerated for the crime of being a young black man in America, Ella-through visits both mundane and supernatural-tries to show him the way to a revolution that could burn it all down."
Hench : a novel
Summary:"Anna does boring things for terrible people because even criminals need office help and she needs a job. Working for a monster lurking beneath the surface of the world isn’t glamorous. But is it really worse than working for an oil conglomerate or an insurance company? In this economy? As a temp, she’s just a cog in the machine. But when she finally gets a promising assignment, everything goes very wrong, and an encounter with the so-called "hero" leaves her badly injured. And, to her horror, compared to the other bodies strewn about, she’s the lucky one. So, of course, then she gets laid off. With no money and no mobility, with only her anger and internet research acumen, she discovers her suffering at the hands of a hero is far from unique. When people start listening to the story that her data tells, she realizes she might not be as powerless as she thinks. Because the key to everything is data: knowing how to collate it, how to manipulate it, and how to weaponize it. By tallying up the human cost these caped forces of nature wreak upon the world, she discovers that the line between good and evil is mostly marketing. And with social media and viral videos, she can control that appearance. It’s not too long before she’s employed once more, this time by one of the worst villains on earth. As she becomes an increasingly valuable lieutenant, she might just save the world."–Amazon.
Bonds of brass
Summary:A young pilot risks everything to save his best friend–the man he trusts most and might even love–only to learn that his friend is secretly the heir to a brutal galactic empire. Ettian’s life was shattered when the merciless Umber Empire invaded his world. He’s spent seven years putting himself back together under its rule, joining an Umber military academy and becoming the best pilot in his class. Even better, he’s met Gal–his exasperating and infuriatingly enticing roommate who’s made the academy feel like a new home. But when dozens of classmates spring an assassination plot on Gal, a devastating secret comes to light: Gal is the heir to the Umber Empire. Ettian barely manages to save his best friend and flee the compromised academy unscathed, rattled that Gal stands to inherit the empire that broke him, and that there are still people willing to fight back against Umber rule. As they piece together a way to deliver Gal safely to his throne, Ettian finds himself torn in half by an impossible choice. Does he save the man who’s won his heart and trust that Gal’s goodness could transform the empire? Or does he throw his lot in with the brewing rebellion and fight to take back what’s rightfully theirs?
The space between worlds
Summary:"The multiverse business is booming, but there’s just one catch: no one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive. Enter Cara, whose parallel selves happen to be exceptionally good at dying-from diseases, from turf wars, from vendettas they couldn’t outrun. But on this earth, Cara’s survived. And she’s reaping the benefits, thanks to the well-heeled Wiley City scientists who ID’d her as an outlier and plucked her from the dirt. Now she’s got a new job collecting offworld data, a path to citizenship, and a near-perfect Wiley City accent. Now she can pretend she’s always lived in the city she grew up staring at from the outside, even if she feels like a fraud on either side of its walls. But when one of her eight remaining doppelgangers dies under mysterious circumstances, Cara is plunged into a new world with an old secret. What she discovers will connect her past and future in ways she never could have imagined-and reveal her own role in a plot that endangers not just her world, but the entire multiverse."
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Best Mysteries of 2020
Running out of road
Summary:""Daniel Friedman has done it again-only better."- Michael Sears, bestselling author of Black Fridays Once, Detective Buck Schatz patrolled the city of Memphis, chasing down robbers and killers with a blackjack truncheon and a .357. But he’s been retired for decades. Now he’s frail and demented, and Rose, his wife of 72 years, is ill and facing a choice about her health care that Buck is terrified to even consider. The future looks short and bleak, and Buck’s only escape is into the past. But Buck’s past is under attack as well. After 35 years on death row, convicted serial killer Chester March finally has an execution date. Chester is the oldest condemned man in the United States, and his case has attracted the attention of NPR producer Carlos Watkins, who believes Chester was convicted on the strength of a coerced confession. Chester’s conviction is the capstone on Buck’s storied career, and, to save Chester’s life, Watkins is prepared to tear down Buck’s reputation and legacy."
The missing American
Summary:"When her dreams of rising through the police ranks like her late father crash around her, 26-year-old Emma Djan is unsure what will become of her life in Accra. Through a sympathetic former colleague, Emma gets an interview with a private detective agency tracking down missing persons, thefts, and marital infidelities. It’s not the future she imagined, but it’s her best option. Meanwhile, Gordon Tilson, a middle-aged widower in Washington, DC, has found solace in an online community after his wife’s passing. Through the support group, he’s even met a young Ghanaian widow he really cares about, and when her sister gets into a car accident, he sends her thousands of dollars to cover the hospital bill–to the horror of his only son, Derek. When Gordon runs off to Ghana to surprise his new love and disappears, Derek chases after him, fearing for his father’s life. The case of the missing American man will drag both Emma and Derek into a world of Sakawa scams, fetish priests, and those willing to keep things secret through death."
The eighth detective : a novel
Summary:"There are rules for murder mysteries. There must be a victim. A suspect. A detective. The rest is just shuffling the sequence. Expanding the permutations. Grant McAllister, a professor of mathematics, once sat down and worked them all out – calculating the different orders and possibilities of a mystery into seven perfect detective stories he quietly published. But that was thirty years ago. Now Grant lives in seclusion on a remote Mediterranean island, counting the rest of his days. Until Julia Hart, a sharp, ambitious editor knocks on his door. Julia wishes to republish his book, and together they must revisit those old stories: an author hiding from his past, and an editor, keen to understand it. But there are things in the stories that don’t add up. Inconsistencies left by Grant that a sharp-eyed editor begins to suspect are more than mistakes. They may be clues, and Julia finds herself with a mystery of her own to solve."
Death in the east : a novel
Summary:1905, London. As a young constable, Sam Wyndham is on his usual East London beat when he comes across an old flame, Bessie Drummond, attacked in the streets. The next day, when Bessie is found brutally beaten in her own room, locked from the inside, Wyndham promises to get to the bottom of her murder. But the case will cost the young constable more than he ever imagined. 1922, India. Leaving Calcutta, Captain Sam Wyndham heads for the hills of Assam, to the ashram of a sainted monk where he hopes to conquer his opium addiction. But when he arrives, he sees a ghost from his life in London–a man thought to be long dead, a man Wyndham hoped he would never see again. Wyndham knows he must call his friend and colleague Sergeant Banerjee for help. He is certain this figure from his past isn’t here by coincidence. He is here for revenge.
Murder in old Bombay
Summary:"In 1892, Bombay is the center of British India. Nearby, Captain Jim Agnihotri lays in Poona military hospital recovering from a skirmish on the wild northern frontier, with little to read but newspapers. The case that catches Jim’s attention is being called the crime of the century: Two women fell from the busy university’s clock tower in broad daylight. Moved by the widower of one of the victims – his certainty that his wife and sister did not commit suicide – Jim approaches the Framjis and is hired by the Parsee family to investigate what happened that terrible afternoon. But in a land of divided loyalties, asking questions is dangerous. Jim’s investigation disturbs the shadows that seem to follow the Framji family and triggers an ominous chain of events. Based on real events, and set against the vibrant backdrop of colonial India, Nev March’s lyrical debut Murder in Old Bombay brings this tumultuous historical age to life."
A royal affair
Summary:"In London 1946, The Right Sort Marriage Bureau is just beginning to take off and the proprietors, Miss Iris Sparks and Mrs. Gwendolyn Bainbridge, are in need of a bigger office and a secretary to handle the growing demand. Unfortunately, they don’t yet have the necessary means. So when a woman arrives-a cousin of Gwen’s-with an interesting and quite remunerative proposition, they two of them are all ears. The cousin, one Lady Matheson, works for the Queen in "some capacity" and is in need of some discreet investigation. It seems that the Princess Elizabeth has developed feelings for a dashing Greek prince and a blackmail note has arrived, alluding to some potentially damaging information about said prince. Wanting to keep this out of the palace gossip circles, but also needing to find out what skeletons might lurk in the prince’s closet, the
Best Thrillers of 2020
The golden cage : a novel
Summary:Tthe story of the scorned wife of a billionaire, and her delicious plot to get her revenge and bring him to his knees"
My mother’s house : a novel
Summary:Moving his family to an immigrant enclave in New York in the hopes of starting over, an emotionally damaged Haitian man succumbs to dark impulses that have dangerous ripple effects for the others living in his home.
Little disasters : a novel
Summary:"In this novel, a doctor is faced with an ethical dilemma when her friend’s child lands in the emergency room"
Catherine house : a novel
Summary:Catherine House is a school of higher learning like no other. Hidden deep in the woods of rural Pennsylvania, this crucible of reformist liberal arts study with its experimental curriculum, wildly selective admissions policy, and formidable endowment, has produced some of the world’s best minds: prize-winning authors, artists, inventors, Supreme Court justices, presidents. For those lucky few selected, tuition, room, and board are free. But acceptance comes with a price. Students are required to give the House three years–summers included–completely removed from the outside world. Family, friends, television, music, even their clothing must be left behind. In return, the school promises a future of sublime power and prestige, and that its graduates can become anything or anyone they desire.
The illness lesson
Summary:The year is 1871. In Ashwell, Massachusetts, at the farm of Samuel Hood and his daughter, Caroline, a mysterious flock of red birds descends. Samuel, whose fame as a philosopher has waned in recent years, takes the birds’ appearance as an omen that the time is ripe for his newest venture. He will start a school for young women, guiding their intellectual development as he has so carefully guided his daughter’s. Despite Caroline’s misgivings, Samuel’s vision–revolutionary, as always; noble, as always; full of holes, as always–takes shape. It’s not long before the students begin to manifest bizarre symptoms. Rashes, fits, headaches, verbal tics, night wanderings. In desperation, the school turns to the ministering of a sinister physician–based on a real historic treatment–just as Caroline’s body, too, begins its betrayal. As the girls’ conditions worsens, long-buried secrets emerge, and Caroline must confront the all-male, all-knowing authorities around her, the ones who insist the voices of the sufferers are unreliable. In order to save herself, Caroline may have to destroy everything she’s ever known.
A hundred suns
Summary:"An evocative historical novel set in 1930’s Indochine, about the American wife of a Michelin heir who journeys to the French colony in the name of family fortune, and the glamorous, tumultuous world she finds herself in-and the truth she may be running from.
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Best Fiction for Tweens : 2020
Maya and the rising dark
Summary:"A twelve-year-old girl discovers her father is the keeper of the gateway between our world and The Dark, and when he goes missing she’ll need to unlock her own powers and fight a horde of spooky creatures set on starting a war."
Becoming Muhammad Ali : a novel
Summary:A biogrphical novel tells the story of Cassius Clay, the determined boy who would one day become Muhammad Ali, one of the greatest boxers of all time.
Everything sad is untrue : (a true story)
Summary:At the front of a middle school classroom in Oklahoma, a boy named Khosrou (whom everyone calls "Daniel") stands, trying to tell a story. His story. But no one believes a word he says. To them he is a dark-skinned, hairy-armed boy with a big butt whose lunch smells funny; who makes things up and talks about poop too much. But Khosrou’s stories, stretching back years, and decades, and centuries, are beautiful, and terrifying, from the moment his family fled Iran in the middle of the night with the secret police moments behind them, back to the sad, cement refugee camps of Italy.and further back to the fields near the river Aras, where rain-soaked flowers bled red like the yolk of sunset burst over everything, and further back still to the Jasmine-scented city of Isfahan. Like Scheherazade in a hostile classroom, Daniel weaves a tale to save his own life: to stake his claim to the truth. And it is (a true story).
Snapdragon
Summary:Snap’s town had a witch. At least, that’s how the rumor goes. But in reality, Jacks is just a crocks-wearing, internet-savvy old lady who sells roadkill skeletons online–after doing a little ritual to put their spirits to rest. It’s creepy, sure, but Snap thinks it’s kind of cool, too. They make a deal: Jacks will teach Snap how to take care of the baby opossums that Snap rescued, and Snap will help Jacks with her work. But as Snap starts to get to know Jacks, she realizes that Jacks may in fact have real magic–and a connection with Snap’s family’s past.
Before the ever after
Summary:ZJ’s friends Ollie, Darry and Daniel help him cope when his father, a beloved professional football player, suffers severe headaches and memory loss that spell the end of his career.
King and the dragonflies
Summary:"In a small but turbulent Louisiana town, one boy’s grief takes him beyond the bayous of his backyard, to learn that there is no right way to be yourself."
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Reading is Snow Much Fun!
Miracle on 133rd Street
Summary:The day before Christmas, everyone in Jose’s neighborhood seems grumpy, including his mother who is homesick for Puerto Rico, but when he and his parents return from the pizzeria where they borrowed an oven to cook their roast, the heavenly aroma reminds those they pass of all they have to celebrate.
When Christmas feels like home
Summary:"After moving from a small village in Mexico to a town in the United States, Eduardo is sure it will never feel quite like home. The other children don’t speak his language and they do not play fútbol. His family promises him that he will feel right at home by the time Christmas comes along, when "your words float like clouds from your mouth" and "trees will ride on cars." With whimsical imagery and a sprinkling of Spanish vocabulary, Gretchen Griffith takes readers on a multicultural journey with Eduardo who discovers the United States is not so different from Latin America and home is wherever family is."
Silent night
Summary:"Silent night, holy night / All is calm, all is bright." Celebrate the magic of Christmas with this beautifully illustrated book, based on the world’s best-loved carol, ‘Silent Night.’ Rediscover the nativity story in all its glory – from quaking shepherds to heaven-sent angels – as the song lyrics are brought to life on every spread.
The Christmas gift = El regalo de Navidad
Summary:When his family has to move again a few days before Christmas in order to find work, Panchito worries that he will not get the ball he has been wanting.
Everybody’s tree
Summary:"Over the course of eighty years a spruce tree grows, along with the little boy who first selected it at a tree farm. At the end of its life, the tree is chosen to be the centerpiece of a city’s holiday celebration"–
I got the Christmas spirit
Summary:As she and her mother enjoy the sights and sounds of the holiday season, a young girl feels the Christmas spirit in every jingle, yum, and ho ho ho.
The Christmas wish
Summary:Young Anja, whose greatest dream is to be one of Santa’s elves, makes friends with the animals that guide her on the journey from her home in the far North to meet Santa.
Manger
Summary:There is a legend that describes how, at midnight on Christmas Eve, all creatures are granted the power of speech for one hour. In this collection, Lee Bennett Hopkins and a dozen other poets imagine what responses they might offer.
Summary:There is a legend that describes how, at midnight on Christmas Eve, all creatures are granted the power of speech for one hour. In this collection, Lee Bennett Hopkins and a dozen other poets imagine what responses they might offer.
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Remembering John Le Carre
Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy
Summary:British agent George Smiley hunts for a mole in the Secret Service and begins his epic game of international chess with his Soviet counterpart, an agent named Karla.
Agent running in the field
Summary:"Nat, a 47 year-old veteran of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, believes his years as an agent runner are over. He is back in London with his wife, the long-suffering Prue. But with the growing threat from Moscow Centre, the office has one more job for him. Nat is to take over The Haven, a defunct substation of London General with a rag-tag band of spies. The only bright light on the team is young Florence, who has her eye on Russia Department and a Ukrainian oligarch with a finger in the Russia pie. Nat is not only a spy, he is a passionate badminton player. His regular Monday evening opponent is half his age: the introspective and solitary Ed. Ed hates Brexit, hates Trump and hates his job at some soulless media agency. And it is Ed, of all unlikely people, who will take Prue, Florence and Nat himself down the path of political anger that will ensnare them all."–
A legacy of spies
Summary:Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, is living out his old age on the family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London, and involved such characters as Alec Leamas, Jim Prideaux, George Smiley and Peter Guillam himself, are to be scrutinised under disturbing criteria by a generation with no memory of the Cold War and no patience with its justifications.
The pigeon tunnel : stories from my life
Summary:The author shares personal anecdotes from his life, discussing subjects ranging from his Cold War-era service in British intelligence to his work as a writer in Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
Absolute friends
Summary:Follows friends and fellow ex-spies, Ted Mundy and Sasha, as they attempt to change their lives and the world in which they live, covering their new escapades in Germany and the ones from their past.
A delicate truth
Summary:2008. A counter-terrorist operation, codenamed Wildlife, is being mounted on the British crown colony of Gibraltar. Its purpose: to capture and abduct a high-value jihadist arms-buyer. Its authors: an ambitious Foreign Office Minister, a private defense contractor who is also his bosom friend, and a shady American CIA operative of the evangelical far-right. So delicate is the operation that even the Minister’s personal private secretary, Toby Bell, is not cleared for it. Cornwall, UK, 2011. A disgraced Special Forces Soldier delivers a message from the dead. Was Operation Wildlife the success it was cracked up to be–or a human tragedy that was ruthlessly covered up? Summoned by Sir Christopher ("Kit") Probyn, retired British diplomat, to his decaying Cornish manor house, and closely observed by Kit’s beautiful daughter, Emily, Toby must choose between his conscience and duty to his Service. If the only thing necessary to the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing, how can he keep silent?
The mission song
Summary:
Working as an interpreter for British Intelligence, Bruno Salvador, the abandoned son of an Irish father and Congolese mother, is sent to a mysterious island to interpret a secret conference among Central African warlords.
Our kind of traitor
Summary:At an exclusive tennis resort in Antigua, Perry and Gail meet a Russian money launderer, Dima, who convinces them to help him defect.
The constant gardener : a novel
Summary:When the young and beautiful wife of a much older embassy worker and amateur gardener is found murdered near northern Kenya’s Lake Turkana, his personal pursuit of the killers not only sets him up as their next target, but as a suspect among his embassy colleagues.
A most wanted man : a novel
Summary:A half-starved young Russian man claiming to be a devout Muslim, an idealistic young German civil rights lawyer, and a sixty-year-old scion of a failing British bank based in Hamburg form an unlikely alliance as the rival spies of Germany, England and America scent a sure kill in the "War on Terror," and converge upon the innocents.
Single & single : a novel
Summary:"The high-stakes world of international finance turns deadly as a lawyer from a London banking house is murdered, a London merchant banker vanishes, a Russian freighter is intercepted in the Black Sea, and a children’s magician discovers an unexplained fortune in his daughter’s trust fund."
A perfect spy
Summary:"When British intelligence agent Magnus Pym disappears, two desperate searches are initiated–the hunt of agents, East and West, for the missing spy and Pym’s own quest to uncover the mysteries of his own past."
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