Library Reads announces the top books published in March that librarians across the country love!

Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy by Rachel Joyce

When Queenie Hennessy is told she has days to live she sends a letter to Harold Fry. It is a letter that inspires an unlikely walk, a cast of well-wishers and the examination of many lives unlived. But there is a second letter, a longer, quieter more complicated letter which she will never send. (Publisher Summary)

Sequels are often slippery things, books readers welcome a bit hesitantly, fearful that the second installment won't hold a candle to the first. In telling Queenie's side of the story, Joyce accomplishes the rare feat of endowing her continuing narrative with as much pathos and warmth, wisdom and poignancy as her debut. Harold was beloved by millions; Queenie will be, too.(Booklist *Starred Review*)

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson

A chronicle of the sinking of the Lusitania discusses the factors that led to the tragedy and the contributions of such figures as Woodrow Wilson, bookseller Charles Lauriat, and architect Theodate Pope Riddle. ~ (Publisher Summary)

Reader engrossment is tightly sustained as we move back and forth between the Lusitania on its return from New York City to its home port of Liverpool under a black cloud of warnings that the imperial German government considered the waters around Britain to be a war zone, and the rapacious German submarine U-20, stalking the seas for prey like a lion on the Serengeti. Factual and personal to a high degree, the narrative reads like a grade-A thriller.  ~ (Booklist *Starred Review*)

Prudence by Gail Carriger

Raised in London as the adopted daughter of the vampire Lord Akeldama, Prudence has inherited a variation of her mother Alexia's preternatural abilities: she can borrow the powers of any werewolf or vampire that she touches. Her father sends her on a mission to India to investigate a possible new source for tea, and Prudence sails by airship to Bombay where she becomes embroiled in a conflict between the local vampires and shapeshifters. This opener, a spin-off of the recently completed steampunk "Parasol Protectorate" series that began with Soulless, has a younger heroine but a similar narrative voice.  A fun launch for a new line of steampunk adventures from the popular Carriger.  (Library Journal Reviews)

The Witch of Painted Sorrows by M. J. Rose

This haunting tale of possession, set in 1894 Paris, from M.J. Rose inaugurates a new trilogy. "I did not cause the madness, the deaths, or the rest of the tragedies... I had help." So says New York socialite and artist Sandrine Salome, who bears the scars of her first traumatic experience with love. At 15, she was caught, naked, with 18-year-old Leon Ferre. When Leon's father learned of the nature of their relationship, he slapped his son, accidentally triggering a fatal asthma attack in the boy. Ten years later, to escape her treacherous husband, Sandrine flees New York for her grandmother's home in Paris, where her grandmother reminds Sandrine that the City of Lights is "poison" to her. Sure enough, Sandrine finds herself taken over by the spirit of La Lune, the woman of "moon dreams, of legends and of nightmares  (Publisher Weekly Reviews)

Cat Out of Hell by Lynne Truss

Alec Charlesworth, a librarian suddenly facing the loss of his job, the death of his wife, and his sister's disappearance, hears a shocking tale of dark forces from his sister's cat, Roger, who is the only witness to what happened to her. ~ (Publisher Summary)

In this novel, British author Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves) presents a potent and darkly humorous tale featuring a demonic cat and a murder. Written in impeccable, grammatically refined sentences, this book has a tinge of a 19th-century gothic sensibility. ~ (Publisher Weekly Reviews)




Delicious Foods by James Hannaham

Hannaham's seductive and disturbing second novel grips the reader from page one. In the prologue, 17-year-old Eddie has escaped from a farm somewhere in Louisiana, terrified he's headed closer to a place "where someone might capture or kill him, away toward freedom." Hannaham safely delivers Eddie into a new life, though one full of agonizing memories, "like dark birds poised to attack him." The narrative then shifts back to the story of Eddie's mother, Darlene, an educated woman devastated by the loss her husband. In her grief, Darlene disappears into a fog of drug use. When Darlene is lured into taking a job on a mysterious farm, "it felt like the first luck Darlene had touched in the whole six years since she lost Nat." Instead, it's a horror show of human suffering, through which Darlene and Eddie struggle to reunite. (Publisher Weekly Reviews)


Fifth Gospel by Ian Caldwell

The Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church are the largest branches of the Christian-religion tree. Almost unknown are Eastern Catholics, who follow Eastern traditions but proclaim their loyalty to the pope. Brothers Simon and Alex are priests, though Simon is climbing the Vatican ladder, while Alex has followed his father into the Eastern Catholic priesthood. Allowed to marry before ordination, Alex has a young son, Peter, which makes him even more of an oddity in Vatican City, where he lives. His life takes a dangerous turn when a friend, the curator of a Shroud of Turin exhibit, is murdered on the eve of the show's opening. There are secrets here, slowly revealed, that could change the face of Christianity. (Booklist *Starred Review*)


Where All Light Tends to Go by David Joy

Jacob has always been resigned to play the cards that were dealt him, but when a fatal mistake changes everything, he’s faced with a choice: stay and appease his father, or leave the mountains with the girl he loves. ~ (Publisher Summary)

Joy's first novel is an uncompromising noir, its downward thrust pulling like quicksand on both the characters and the reader. And, yet, there is poetry here, too, as there is in Daniel Woodrell's novels, the kind of poetry that draws its power from a doomed character's grit in the face of disaster. And Jacob McNeely, the son of a meth dealer in hardscrabble North Carolina, is surely doomed, as is his stoned mother and even his all-powerful father. It's only a question of what form that doom will take. (Booklist Reviews)