We are avid readers and, just like you, we love to get personal reading recommendations! So here are some more staff picks for you to enjoy as winter makes another appearance. There is a wide variety here, and as always we would LOVE if you would post YOUR picks in the comments!
We the Animals by Justin Torres
Three brothers tear their way through childhood— smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn—he’s Puerto Rican, she’s white—and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times.
War and Peace: original version by Leo Tolstoy
A new version ' the one Tolstoy originally intended, but has been hitherto unpublished ' of Russia's most famous novel; with a different ending, fewer digressions and an altered view of Napoleon ' it's time to look afresh at one of the world's favourite books. War and Peace is a masterpiece ' a panoramic portrait of Russian society and its descent into the Napoleonic Wars which for over a century has inspired reverential devotion among its readers. This new version is certain to provoke controversy and devotion in equal measures.
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . .Working as a lady's companion, the heroine of Rebecca learns her place. Life begins to look very bleak until, on a trip to the South of France, she meets Maxim de Winter, a handsome widower whose sudden proposal of marriage takes her by surprise. She accepts, but whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to the ominous and brooding Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory of his dead wife Rebecca is forever kept alive by the forbidding Mrs Danvers . . .Not since Jane Eyre has a heroine faced such difficulty with the Other Woman. An international bestseller that has never gone out of print, Rebecca is the haunting story of a young girl consumed by love and the struggle to find her identity.
Dark Fire by C. J. Sansom
Matthew Shardlake, the marvelous hunchbacked 16th-century attorney who first appeared in Sansom's Dissolution, returns in this spellbinding Tudor-era tale of murder, conspiracy and betrayal. Shardlake normally handles property cases and the occasional dangerous mission for Lord Thomas Cromwell, the king's high counselor. Now he is engaged to defend a young woman accused of a curious murder, and the case seems hopeless. The girl refuses to speak and, under English law, unless she offers a plea in court she will be slowly crushed to death. Cromwell offers Shardlake a two-week stay of execution if he will agree to undertake a secret mission. Desperate to save the girl's life, Shardlake agrees. Rumors abound of a new and terrifying weapon called Greek Fire, and Cromwell orders Shardlake to find it, along with its secret formula and the two alchemists who possess it. Before Shardlake can even speak to the alchemists, they are brutally murdered, the formula and Greek Fire go missing, and horror and death are unleashed.
Death in Holy Orders by P. D. James
On a desolate stretch of the East Anglian coast, high atop a sweep of cliffs, sits the theological college of St. Anselm's. Down below, smothered by a fall of sand, lies the body of a young ordinand, the son of a powerful business mogul who wants Scotland Yard to investigate his death. Dalgliesh, doubting there is much to uncover in the case, agrees to go, motivated only by a desire to revisit a place where he spent several happy summers in his boyhood. Yet no sooner does he arrive than the college is torn apart by a sacrilegious murder and Dalgliesh finds himself embroiled in one of the most puzzling and horrific cases of his career: no one is above suspicion, and suspects abound.
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: a modest bestiary by David Sedaris
Featuring David Sedaris's unique blend of hilarity and heart, this new collection of keen-eyed animal-themed tales is an utter delight. Though the characters may not be human, the situations in these stories bear an uncanny resemblance to the insanity of everyday life.