Welcome to the New Book Blog at Springfield Township Library! Check out our new fiction, and nonfiction selections below.
As always, if you would like to place an item on hold, click on the link in each item’s description to view that item in our library catalog.
If you are having trouble placing holds, or have questions in regards to your account, please call a friendly staff member at 248-846-6550. Happy reading!
NEW IN GENERAL FICTION
THE SILVER BONE BY ANDREI KURKOV
Kyiv, 1919. World War I has ended in Western Europe, but to the East, six factions continue to vie for control of Ukraine. Amidst the political turmoil, young Samson Kolechko is forced to place his engineering career on hold. But in the city of Kyiv everything remains up for grabs and new opportunity lurks just around the corner . . .
When two Red Army soldiers commandeer his home, Samson’s life is completely upended. But as Samson juggles his personal life -including a budding romance with the ingenious Nadezhda, a statistician helping run the city’s census- with the soldiers’ intrusion, he winds up overhearing their secret plans. Deciding to report them, Samson instead finds himself unwittingly recruited as an investigator for the city’s new police force.
His first case involves two murders, a long bone made of pure silver, and a suit of decidedly unusual proportions tailored from fine English cloth. The odds stacked against him, Samson turns to Nadezhda, who proves to be more than his match. Inflected with Kurkov’s signature humor and off kilter universe, The Silver Bone takes its inspiration from the archives of Kyiv’s secret police, crafting a propulsive narrative bursting to life with rich historical detail.
Check out this book here!
MEMORY PIECE BY LISA KO
In the early 1980s, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng are three teenagers drawn together by their shared sense of alienation and desire for something different. “Allied in the weirdest parts of themselves,” they envision each other as artistic collaborators and embark on a future defined by freedom and creativity. By the time they are adults, their dreams are murkier. As a performance artist, Giselle must navigate an elite social world she never conceived of. As a coder thrilled by the internet’s early egalitarian promise, Jackie must contend with its more sinister shift toward monetization and surveillance. And as a community activist, Ellen confronts the increasing gentrification and policing overwhelming her New York City neighborhood. Over time their friendship matures and changes, their definitions of success become complicated, and their sense of what matters evolves.
Check out this book here!
LOST MAN’S LANE BY SCOTT CARSON
For a sixteen-year-old, a summer internship working for a private investigator seems like a dream come true–particularly since the PI is investigating the most shocking crime to hit Bloomington, Indiana, in decades. A local woman has vanished, and the last time anyone saw her, she was in the backseat of a police car driven by a man impersonating an officer.
Marshall Miller’s internship puts him at the center of the action, a position he relishes until a terrifying moment that turns public praise for his sharp observations and uncanny memory into accusations of lying and imperiling the case. His detective mentor withdraws, friends and family worry and whisper, and Marshall alone understands that the darkness visiting his town this summer goes far beyond a single crime. Now his task is to explain it–and himself.
Check out this book here!
CATFISH CHARLIE BY WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE
As a former Texas Ranger, Charlie ‘Catfish Charlie’ Tuttle spent the good part of his life catching outlaws. Happily retired in Wolfwater, Texas, he’s content just catching fish-namely Bubba, the wily old catfish who lives in the pond near Charlie’s shack and keeps slipping off Charlie’s hook. He also likes hanging out with his trusty tomcat Hooligan Hank and tossing back bottles of mustang berry wine. Sure, his glory days are behind him. There’s no reason for Charlie to even think about coming out of retirement . . . It starts with a jailbreak. Frank Thorson and his gang ride into Wolfwater to bust Frank’s brother out of the slammer. First, they slaughter the deputy. Then, the town marshal. Finally, they run off with the marshal’s daughter and no one’s sure if she’s dead or alive. The townsfolk are desperate enough to ask that drunken old coot Catfish Charlie to put down his fishing pole and wine bottles, pick up his Colt Army .44, and go after the bloodthirsty gang. Sure, Catfish Charlie may be a bit rusty after all these years. But when it comes to serving up justice, no one is quicker, faster-or deadlier.
Check out this book here!
NEW IN MYSTERY FICTION
A GRAVE ROBBERY BY DEANNA RAYBOURN
Lord Rosemorran has purchased a wax figure of a beautiful reclining woman and asks Stoker to incorporate a clockwork mechanism to give the Rosemorran Collection its own Sleeping Beauty in the style of Madame Tussaud’s. But when Stoker goes to cut the mannequin open to insert the mechanism, he makes a gruesome discovery: this is no wax figure. The mannequin is the beautifully preserved body of a young woman who was once very much alive. But who would do such a dreadful thing, and why?
Sleuthing out the answer to this question sets Veronica and Stoker on their wildest adventure yet. From the underground laboratories of scientists experimenting with electricity to resurrect the dead in the vein of Frankenstein to the traveling show where Stoker once toured as an attraction, the gaslit atmosphere of London in October is the perfect setting for this investigation into the unknown. Through it all, the intrepid pair is always one step behind the latest villain–a man who has killed once and will stop at nothing to recover the body of the woman he loved. Will they unmask him in time to save his next victim? Or will they become the latest figures to be immortalized in his collection of horrors?
Check out this book here!
THE DREDGE BRENDAN FLAHERTY
After some traumatic teenaged years in rural Connecticut, Cale and Ambrose Casey had nothing left to say to each other. Cale ran off to Hawaii to sell luxury real estate. Ambrose stayed behind and built up his construction company. Neither thought they’d be in touch again and were glad for it–until they learned of a real estate developer’s plan to drain and expand Gibbs Pond.
Nearly 30 years before, the Casey brothers buried a secret in that pond, which fell somewhere between self-defense and family preservation.
Lily Roy, the contractor in charge of the dredging, can also trace her roots–and her trauma–to the banks of Gibbs Pond. After a childhood that saw her and her brother yanked across the country by her abusive father, it was here where she finally stayed put, even if they didn’t. But as ambitious as Lily is, and as much as she wants answers of her own, her family also has secrets to protect.
Now, the haunted lives of Cale, Ambrose, and Lily collide once more as they reunite to unearth the devastation of the past.
Check out this book here!
NEW IN NONFICTION
A PARADISE OF SMALL HOUSES BY MAX PODEMSKI
In A Paradise of Small Houses, Podemski charts how these dwellings have evolved over the centuries according to the geography, climate, population, and culture of each city. He introduces the reader to styles like Chicago’s prefabricated workers cottages and LA’s car-friendly dingbats, illuminating the human stories behind each city’s iconic housing type. Through it all, Podemski interrogates the American values that have equated home ownership with success and led to the US housing crisis, asking, “How can we look to the past to build the homes, neighborhoods, and cities of the future that our communities deserve?”
GRIEF IS FOR PEOPLE BY SLOANE CROSLEY
How do we live without the ones we love? Grief Is for People is a deeply moving and suspenseful portrait of friendship, and a book about loss that is profuse with life. Sloane Crosley is one of our most renowned observers of contemporary behavior, and now the pathos that has been ever present in her trademark wit is on full display. After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in philosophy and art, hoping for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief. For most of her adult life, Sloane and Russell worked together and played together as they navigated the corridors of office life, the literary world, and the dramatic cultural shifts in New York City. One day, Sloane’s apartment is broken into. Along with her most prized possessions, the thief makes off with her sense of security, leaving a mystery in its place. When Russell dies exactly one month later, his suicide propels Sloane on a wild quest to right the unrightable, to explore what constitutes family and possession as the city itself faces the staggering toll of the pandemic.
MASTERS OF THE AIR BY DONALD MILLER
Masters of the Air is the deeply personal story of the American bomber boys in World War II who brought the war to Hitler’s doorstep. With the narrative power of fiction, Donald Miller takes you on a harrowing ride through the fire-filled skies over Berlin, Hanover, and Dresden and describes the terrible cost of bombing for the German people. Fighting at 25,000 feet in thin, freezing air that no warriors had ever encountered before, bomber crews battled new kinds of assaults on body and mind. Air combat was deadly but intermittent: periods of inactivity and anxiety were followed by short bursts of fire and fear. Unlike infantrymen, bomber boys slept on clean sheets, drank beer in local pubs, and danced to the swing music of Glenn Miller’s Air Force band, which toured US air bases in England. But they had a much greater chance of dying than ground soldiers. The bomber crews were an elite group of warriors who were a microcosm of America–white America, anyway. The actor Jimmy Stewart was a bomber boy, and so was the “King of Hollywood,” Clark Gable. And the air war was filmed by Oscar-winning director William Wyler and covered by reporters like Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite, all of whom flew combat missions with the men. The Anglo-American bombing campaign against Nazi Germany was the longest military campaign of World War II, a war within a war. Until Allied soldiers crossed into Germany in the final months of the war, it was the only battle fought inside the German homeland.
GRACEFUL EXITS BY GERI SUSTER
There are many exits in life – from jobs, from relationships, from life itself. Knowing how to do it gracefully can ease the transitions. Using humor, expert advice, and personal experience, Geri Reid Suster walks readers through the most graceful ways of handling goodbyes.
BLUES BROTHERS AN EPIC FRIENDSHIP BY DANIEL DE VISE
“They’re not going to catch us,” Dan Aykroyd, as Elwood Blues, tells his brother Jake, played by John Belushi. “We’re on a mission from God.” So opens the musical action comedy The Blues Brothers, which hit theaters on June 20, 1980. Their scripted mission was to save a local Chicago orphanage. But Aykroyd, who conceived and wrote much of the film, had a greater mission: to honor the then-seemingly forgotten tradition of rhythm and blues, some of whose greatest artists–Aretha Franklin, James Brown, John Lee Hooker, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles–made the film as unforgettable as its wild car chases. Much delayed and vastly over budget, beset by mercurial and oft drugged-out stars, The Blues Brothers opened to outraged reviews. However, in the 44 years since, it has been acknowledged a classic: it has been inducted into the National Film Registry for its cultural significance, even declared a “Catholic classic” by the Church itself, and re-aired thousands of times on television to huge worldwide audiences. It is, undeniably, one of the most significant films of the twentieth century.
HEALING WOUNDS BY DIANE CARLSON EVANS
In 1983, when Evans came up with the vision for the first-ever memorial on the National Mall to honor women who’d worn a military uniform, she wouldn’t be deterred. She remembered not only her sister veterans, but also the hundreds of young wounded men she had cared for, as she expressed during a Congressional hearing in Washington, D.C.: “Women didn’t have to enter military service, but we stepped up to serve believing we belonged with our brothers-in-arms and now we belong with them at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. If they belong there, we belong there. We were there for them then. We mattered. “In the end, those wounded soldiers who had survived proved to be there for their sisters-in-arms, joining their fight for honor in Evans’ journey of combating unforeseen bureaucratic obstacles and facing mean-spirited opposition. Her impassioned story of serving in Vietnam is a crucial backstory to her fight to honor the women she served beside. She details the gritty and high-intensity experience of being a nurse in the midst of combat and becomes an unlikely hero who ultimately serves her country again as a formidable force in her daunting quest for honor and justice.
BEST OF THE WORLD 1000 DESTINATIONS OF A LIFETIME NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Each of the 1,000 bucket list-worthy trips in this sumptuous volume has been carefully vetted and selected by the celebrated travel experts at National Geographic. On every page you’ll find new ways to experience beloved destinations, such as a family-friendly tour of Rome’s beloved ruins or a foodie tour of New York City, as well as hidden gems around the globe, including a cloud forest in the mountains of Ecuador and a kite surfing excursion off the coast of Spain. Plus, find detailed road trips to places near (Charleston, South Carolina) and far (a grand tour of Switzerland), along with top 10 lists from the best ski resorts to the best green hotels. Discover majestic nature escapes, family getaways, cultural hot spots, remarkable cityscapes, and one-of-a-kind thrills in this beautifully illustrated collection that will help you find your next exhilarating destination.
What's New at Springfield 