The Art of Baking Blind by Sarah Vaughan

The Art of Baking Blind by Sarah Vaughan

There are many reasons to bake: to feed; to create; to impress; to nourish; to define ourselves; and, sometimes, it has to be said, to perfect. But often we bake to fill a hunger that would be better filled by a simple gesture from a dear one. We bake to love and be loved. 

In 1966, Kathleen Eaden, cookbook writer and wife of a supermarket magnate, published The Art of Baking, her guide to nurturing a family by creating the most exquisite pastries, biscuits and cakes. Now, five amateur bakers are competing to become the New Mrs. Eaden. There's Jenny, facing an empty nest now that her family has flown; Claire, who has sacrificed her dreams for her daughter; Mike, trying to parent his two kids after his wife's death; Vicki, who has dropped everything to be at home with her baby boy; and Karen, perfect Karen, who knows what it's like to have nothing and is determined her facade shouldn't slip. (Publisher Summary)


Romantic Suspense Fiction

Check out our display on the lower level of the library that features romantic suspense fiction this month!
Do or Die by Suzanne Brockman

Ultimate Sins by Lora Leigh

Against the Wild by Kat Martin

Do or Die by Suzanne Brockman
Sent on a mission to rescue two kidnapped children being held in a South American embassy, former Navy SEAL Ian Dunn teams up with intelligent young lawyer Phoebe Kruger in a race against time that is complicated by a mob hit. By the award-winning author of Born to Darkness. (Publisher Summary)

Ultimate Sin by Lora Leigh
When he has an affair with Amelia Sorenson, the daughter of his family's sworn enemy, Marine Crowe Callahan must protect her from her father, Wayne Sorenson, who, a brutal killer and one of the deadliest foes he has ever faced, is determined to exact revenge on them both. (Publisher Summary)

Against the Wild by Kat Martin
When Lane Bishop travels to Dylan Brodie's remote Alaskan fishing lodge to help him renovate it, she finds herself drawn to Dylan, concerned by his daughter's silence, and puzzled by the mysteries that surround the lodge. (Publisher Summary)

Librarian Picks

Browse our "Librarian Picks" bookshelves, where every book has been thoughtfully selected by one of our librarians. This month's picks feature the following:

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
Traces the author's adventurous trek along the Appalachian Trail past its natural pleasures, human eccentrics, and offbeat comforts. (Publisher Summary)

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
The award-winning author of Everything Is Illuminated exposes common misconceptions about how animals are slaughtered and processed for food, drawing on sources from popular culture to national tradition to reveal how the meat industry misrepresents its practices. (Publisher Summary)

Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel 
In an exploration of the limitations of language in understanding and describing the Holocaust, the award-winning, best-selling author of The Life of Pi presents a tale about a novelist and a taxidermist who collaborate on a play about a donkey and a howler monkey who have survived a genocide. (Publisher Summary)

Join the Book Discussion

I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai
Wednesday, September 16th (between 2PM and 4PM) for a discussion of I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai.

Malala will tell the inspirational story of a remarkable teenage girl who risked her life to stand up to the Taliban for her right to go to school. It will also be the story of her unusual family who refused to be cowed or silenced as Islamic militants turned their homeland into hell: an enlightened father from a poor background who overcame a terrible stammer to win a speaking contest, and follow his dream of opening a school, and a beautiful and illiterate mother from an important political family. (Publisher Summary)

Registration is going on now! Copies of the book are available at the Circulation Desk.

The Final Novel from a Great American Storyteller


Last Bus to Wisdom by Ivan Doig
Donal Cameron is being raised by his grandmother, the cook at the legendary Double W ranch in Doig’s beloved Two Medicine Country of the Montana Rockies, a landscape that gives full rein to an eleven-year-old’s imagination. But when Gram has to have surgery for “female trouble” in the summer of 1951, all she can think to do is to ship Donal off to her sister in faraway Manitowoc, Wisconsin. There Donal is in for a rude surprise: Aunt Kate–bossy, opinionated, argumentative, and tyrannical—is nothing like her sister. She henpecks her good-natured husband, Herman the German (as Donal discovers him to be), and Donal can’t seem to get on her good side either. After one contretemps too many, Kate decides to pack him back to the authorities in Montana on the next Greyhound.

But to Donal’s surprise, he’s not traveling solo: Herman the German has decided to fly the coop with him. In the immortal American tradition, the pair light out for the territory together, meeting a classic Doigian ensemble of characters and having rollicking misadventures along the way. Charming, wise, and slyly funny, Last Bus to Wisdom is another treasure of a novel from the best storyteller of the West. (Publisher Summary)


The Best Boy by Eli Gottlieb

Best Boy by Eli Gottlieb
Sent to a “therapeutic community” for autism at the age of eleven, Todd Aaron, now in his fifties, is the “Old Fox” of Payton LivingCenter. A joyous man who rereads the encyclopedia compulsively, he is unnerved by the sudden arrivals of a menacing new staffer and a disruptive, brain-injured roommate. His equilibrium is further worsened by Martine, a one-eyed new resident who has romantic intentions and convinces him to go off his meds to feel “normal” again. Undone by these pressures, Todd attempts an escape to return “home” to his younger brother and to a childhood that now inhabits only his dreams. 

Written astonishingly in the first-person voice of an autistic, adult man, Best Boy—with its unforgettable portraits of Todd’s beloved mother, whose sweet voice still sings from the grave, and a staffer named Raykene, who says that Todd “reflects the beauty of His creation”—is a piercing, achingly funny, finally shattering novel no reader can ever forget. (Publisher Summary)

The Girl Who Slept with God

The Girl Who Slept with God by Val Brelinski
Set in Arco, Idaho, in 1970, Val Brelinski’s powerfully affecting first novel tells the story of three sisters: young Frances, gregarious and strong-willed Jory, and moral-minded Grace. Their father, Oren, is a respected member of the community and science professor at the local college. Yet their mother’s depression and Grace’s religious fervor threaten the seemingly perfect family, whose world is upended when Grace returns from a missionary trip to Mexico and discovers she’s pregnant with—she believes—the child of God.

Distraught, Oren sends Jory and Grace to an isolated home at the edge of the town. There, they prepare for the much-awaited arrival of the baby while building a makeshift family that includes an elderly eccentric neighbor and a tattooed social outcast who drives an ice cream truck.

The Girl Who Slept with God is a literary achievement about a family’s desperate need for truth, love, purity, and redemption.

2015 Hugo Award Winner Announced!

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
The 2015 Hugo Award best novel winner is The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liv! The Hugo Awards are awarded annually for the best in science fiction and fantasy.

Set against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision. (Publisher Summary)

Click here to view a complete list of winners!

New Titles on 'The New York Times' Best Sellers List

Here are the hardcover fiction titles that are new to The New York Times Best Sellers list. These titles were listed in the August 23, 2015 issue of The New York Times Book Review.
Alert by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge

Wind/Pinball by Haruki Murakami

Dragonbane by Sherrilyn Kenyon

The Marriage of Opposites by Alice Hoffman

Deadly Assets by W.E.B. Griffin

Magic Shifts by Ilona Andrews

Alert by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge
Pursuing well-disguised terrorists behind two high-tech attacks and an assassination, detective Michael Bennett realizes that the attacks are escalating toward an ultimate threat. By the authors of Burn. (Publisher Summary)

Wind/Pinball by Haruki Murakami
An omnibus release of the Japanese author's debut short novels, nearly thirty years out of print, includes a retranslation and a first English-language release of stories exploring the loneliness, obsessions, and eroticisms of two young men. (Publisher Summary)

Dragonbane by Sherrilyn Kenyon
Cursed by a powerful enemy and boarding in Sanctuary to hide his 50-foot wingspan, were-dragon Drago learns that the wife he thought died centuries earlier is still alive and being threatened by Fate. (Publisher Summary)

The Marriage of Opposites by Alice Hoffman
Dreaming of an exotic life in Paris while coming of age in a St. Thomas refugee community, young Rachel is forced to marry a widower before falling scandalously in love and becoming the mother of Impressionist master Camille Pissarro. By the best-selling author of Here on Earth. (Publisher Summary)

Deadly Assets by W.E.B. Griffin and William E. Butterworth IV
Tensions between the Philadelphia Police Department and its Citizens Oversight Committee reach a boiling point during an investigation into shootings by young Homicide Sergeant Matt Payne, who investigates the murders of an investigative reporter and his family. (Publisher Summary)

Magic Shifts by Ilona Andrews
Accepting their former Pack's stake in the Mercenary Guild, Kate and Curran confront an ancient enemy that is threatening their city. By the #1 New York Times best-selling author of Magic Breaks. (Publisher Summary)

Late Summer Beach Read

Thrill Me by Susan Mallery
Maya Farlow learned the hard way to depend only on herself, so when she fell too deeply for the bad-boy charms of Del Mitchell, she did the only thing she couldshe ran. Stunned, Del left Fool's Gold to make his name and fortune in extreme sports.

Now ten years later, Maya's been hired to promote her hometown's new slogan, The Destination for Romance. The celebrity spokesman is none other than Del, the man she dumped but never forgot. Awkward!

Although Del's not the type to hold a grudge, he's determined to avoid falling a second time for the woman who broke his heart. He's a daredevil, not an idiot. Trouble is, in all his adventures, he never found a rush as exhilarating as Maya's kiss. Maybe risking his heart will prove to be the biggest thrill of all.


Thrill Me just landed on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Click here to place your hold today!

Who Loves Chick Lit?!


Who Do You Love by Jennifer Weiner
An unforgettable story about true love, real life, and second chances…

Rachel Blum and Andy Landis are just eight years old when they meet one night in an ER waiting room. Born with a congenital heart defect, Rachel is a veteran of hospitals, and she’s intrigued by the boy who shows up alone with a broken arm. He tells her his name. She tells him a story. After Andy’s taken back to a doctor and Rachel’s sent back to her bed, they think they’ll never see each other again.

A sweeping, warmhearted, and intimate tale, Who Do You Love is an extraordinary novel about the passage of time, the way people change and change each other, and how the measure of a life is who you love. (Publisher Summary)

Click here to place your hold today!

New Trigiani Releasing in October!

All the Stars in Heaven by Adriana Trigiani
Place your hold today for the new Adriana Trigiani novel releasing in October!

Adriana Trigiani returns with her biggest and boldest novel yet, a hypnotic tale based on a true story and filled with her signature elements: family ties, artistry, romance, and adventure. Born in the golden age of Hollywood, All the Stars in Heaven captures the luster, drama, power, and secrets that could only thrive in the studio system—viewed through the lives of an unforgettable cast of players creating magic on the screen and behind the scenes.

Anchored by Trigiani's masterful storytelling that takes you on a worldwide ride of adventure from Hollywood to the shores of southern Italy, this mesmerizing epic is, at its heart, a luminous tale of the most cherished ties that bind. Brimming with larger-than-life characters both real and fictional—including stars Spencer Tracy, Myrna Loy, David Niven, Hattie McDaniel and more—it is it is the unforgettable story of one of cinema's greatest love affairs during the golden age of American movie making. (Publisher Summary)

The Folded Clock: a Diary


The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits
Like many young people, Heidi Julavits kept a diary. Decades later she found her old diaries in a storage bin, and hoped to discover the early evidence of the person (and writer) she’d since become. Instead, "The actual diaries revealed me to possess the mind of a paranoid tax auditor." The entries are daily chronicles of anxieties about grades, looks, boys, and popularity. After reading the confessions of her past self, writes Julavits, "I want to good-naturedly laugh at this person. I want to but I can't. What she wanted then is scarcely different from what I want today." 

Thus was born a desire to try again, to chronicle her daily life as a forty-something woman, wife, mother, and writer. The dazzling result isThe Folded Clock, in which the diary form becomes a meditation on time and self, youth and aging, betrayal and loyalty, friendship and romance, faith and fate, marriage and family, desire and death, gossip and secrets, art and ambition. (Publisher Summary)

New Margaret Atwood Releasing Next Month

The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood
Stan and Charmaine are a married couple trying to stay afloat in the midst of an economic and social collapse. Job loss has forced them to live in their car, leaving them vulnerable to roving gangs. They desperately need to turn their situation around—and fast. The Positron Project in the town of Consilience seems to be the answer to their prayers. No one is unemployed and everyone gets a comfortable, clean house to live in . . . for six months out of the year. On alternating months, residents of Consilience must leave their homes and function as inmates in the Positron prison system. Once their month of service in the prison is completed, they can return to their "civilian" homes.

At first, this doesn't seem like too much of a sacrifice to make in order to have a roof over one's head and food to eat. But when Charmaine becomes romantically involved with the man who lives in their house during the months when she and Stan are in the prison, a series of troubling events unfolds, putting Stan's life in danger. With each passing day, Positron looks less like a prayer answered and more like a chilling prophecy fulfilled. (Publisher Summary)

The Heart Goes Last releases next month, click here to place your hold today!

Modern Romance

Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari
Check out comedian Aziz Ansari's hilarious New York Times bestselling book, Modern Romance

At some point, every one of us embarks on a journey to find love. We meet people, date, get into and out of relationships, all with the hope of finding someone with whom we share a deep connection. 

This seems standard now, but it’s wildly different from what people did even just decades ago. Single people today have more romantic options than at any point in human history. 

With technology, our abilities to connect with and sort through these options are staggering. 

So why are so many people frustrated?


Room: Official Teaser Trailer

Check out the teaser trailer for Room, based on Emma Donoghue’s best selling book, below! You have plenty of time to read the book before the movie hits the theaters in October - click here to place your hold today!
To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years. Through determination, ingenuity, and fierce motherly love, Ma has created a life for Jack. But she knows it's not enough...not for her or for him. She devises a bold escape plan, one that relies on her young son's bravery and a lot of luck. What she does not realize is just how unprepared she is for the plan to actually work.

Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, ROOM is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another. (Publisher Summary)

If You Like Romance, You Might Want to Read...

The Beekeeper's Ball by Susan Wiggs

The Matchmaker by Elin Hilderbrand

The Wanderer by Robyn Carr

Change of Heart by Jude Deveraux

The Longest Ride by Nicholas Sparks

County by Danielle Steele

The Beekeeper's Ball by Susan Wiggs
While transforming Bella Vista, her childhood home, into a destination cooking school, celebrated chef Isabel Johansen finds her plans interrupted by war-torn journalist Cormac O'Neill who has arrived to dig up old history. (Publisher Summary)

The Matchmaker by Elin Hilderbrand
A touching novel from bestselling author Elin Hilderbrand in which a dying woman sets out to find love for those closest to her - before it's too late. (Publisher Summary)

The Wanderer by Robyn Carr
When newcomer Hank Cooper inherits beachfront property in Thunder Point, Oregon, he holds the fate of an entire community in his hands as he decides whether this small town of rocky beaches and rugged charm is the place he can finally call home. (Publisher Summary)

Change of Heart by Jude Deveraux
Best friends Elijah J. Harcourt and Chelsea Hamilton, who were separated when they were teenagers, are reunited in Edilean, Virginia, where they overcome the distance that has grown between them by investigating a tragic story together. (Publisher Summary)

The Longest Ride by Nicholas Sparks
After being trapped in an isolated car crash, the life of an elderly widower becomes entwined with that of a young college student and the cowboy she loves in this new romance from the New York Times best-selling author. (Publisher Summary)

Country by Danielle Steele
Struggling to achieve an independent life when her stale marriage abruptly ends, Stephanie Adams embarks on an impulsive road trip and discovers herself in the course of a whirlwind relationship with a famous country music star. (Publisher Summary)

Among the Ten Thousand Things

Among the Ten Thousand Things by Julia Pierpont
Jack Shanley is a well-known New York artist, charming and vain, who doesn’t mean to plunge his family into crisis. His wife, Deb, gladly left behind a difficult career as a dancer to raise the two children she adores. In the ensuing years, she has mostly avoided coming face-to-face with the weaknesses of the man she married. But then an anonymously sent package arrives in the mail: a cardboard box containing sheaves of printed emails chronicling Jack’s secret life. The package is addressed to Deb, but it’s delivered into the wrong hands: her children’s.

"Pierpont is a strong, confident writer, and her well-observed characters feel deeply human. Among the Ten Thousand Things is an impressive debut—a family drama alternately bright and bleak from a gifted young author." BookPage Reviews

Culper Ring Series

Have you been reading the Culper Ring Series? The third book has been released and is available at the Community Library! Here's a look at the books in order:


The Inner Circle by Brad Meltzer
Book #1 - The Inner Circle
A young archivist working in the National Archives and his childhood crush accidentally happen upon a priceless artifact--a 200-year-old dictionary that once belonged to George Washington--hidden inside a desk chair. Eager to discover why the President is hiding this important national treasure, the two soon find themselves entangled in a web of deception, conspiracy, and murder that will reveal the most well kept secret of the U.S. Presidency. (Publisher Summary)


The Fifth Assassin by Brad Meltzer
Archivist Beecher White discovers a connection that may link the individuals responsible for the only four successful assassinations of American Presidents after discovering a modern-day killer who is recreating the assassins' crimes. (Publisher Summary)




The President's Shadow by Brad Meltzer
Book #3 - The President's Shadow
Investigating human remains found in the White House's Rose Garden, Beecher White discovers that the crime was committed as a warning to the president and to reveal dark truths about Beecher's father's death. (Publisher Summary)

2015 RITA Award Winners Announced

As stated on the Romance Writers of America website, the purpose of the RITA award is to promote excellence in the romance genre by recognizing outstanding published romance novels and novellas.

Here are the winners in the contemporary, historical, romance suspense and paranormal categories:

Contemporary
Baby, It's You by Jane Graves
Runaway bride Kari Worthington gets more than she bargained for when her search for a job—and a new life—brings her to the doorstep of a gorgeous winery owner in Texas hill country. (Publisher Summary)

Fool Me Twice by Meredith Duran
Historical
Fool Me Twice by Meredith Duran
When Olivia Mather realizes that the Duke of Marwick might hold the secrets of her family's past, she does the unthinkable, infiltrating his household as a maid, and gets unexpected results. (Publisher Summary)



Concealed in Death by J.D.Robb
Romantic Suspense
Concealed in Death by J.D. Robb
When her husband discovers evidence of twelve murders while demolishing a former New York shelter for troubled teens, Lieutenant Eve Dallas tracks down the stories of each victim only to realize that they are connected by someone Eve knows. (Publisher Summary)


Evernight by Kristen Callihan
Paranormal
Evernight by Kristen Callihan
As he loses grip on reality, his sanity slowly being drained away by a force he cannot control, assassin-for-hire Will Thorne finds salvation in the arms of his next target, the mysterious Holly Evernight, who is the only one who can tame his bouts of madness. (Publisher Summary) 


Click here to view the full list of winners.

New Titles on 'The New York Times' Best Sellers List

Here are the two hardcover fiction titles that are new to The New York Times Best Sellers list. These titles will be listed in the August 9, 2015 issue of The New York Times Book Review.

The Good Girl by Mary Kubica
The Good Girl by Mary Kubica
The daughter of a prominent Chicago judge and his socialite wife, inner-city art teacher Mia Dennett is taken hostage by her one-night stand, Colin Thatcher, who, instead of delivering her to his employers, hides her in a secluded cabin in rural Minnesota to keep her safe from harm. (Publisher Summary)

Speaking in Bones by Kathy Reichs
Speaking in Bones by Kathy Reichs
When an online detective offers a possible lead in an unsolved case, Tempe's ensuing investigation reveals the activities of a cult that practices ritual sacrifices tied to a famous unexplained light phenomenon. (Publisher Summary)

Click here to view the complete list. 

Debut Novel

Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll
In a riveting debut novel that reads like Prep meets Gone Girl, a young woman is determined to create the perfect life--husband, home, and career--until a violent incident from her past threatens to unravel everything and expose her most shocking secret of all. 

Twenty-eight-year-old New Yorker Ani FaNelli seems to have it all: she's a rising star at The Women's Magazine, impossibly fit, perfectly groomed, and about to marry Luke Harrison, a handsome blueblood. But behind that veneer of perfection lies a vulnerability that Ani holds close and buries deep--a very violent and public trauma from her past that has left her constantly trying to reinvent herself. 

And only she knows how far she would go to keep her secrets safe. (Publisher Summary)

Psychological Thrillers

Pretty Baby by Mary Kubica
The charitable Heidi Wood horrifies her husband and daughter by inviting an apparently homeless teenager and her infant to take refuge in their home, a situation that quickly devolves as details from the girl's past begin to surface.

"As bits and pieces of Willow's story are revealed, the other characters keep the story moving forward toward what the reader knows will be disastrous results. Kubica's debut novel, The Good Girl (2014), also employed multiple points of view and timelines, but Kubica serves up a much more cohesive tale this time around—the story is almost hypnotic and anything but predictable." Kirkus Reviews

Don't forget to check out Mary Kubica's first novel, The Good Girl:

The Good Girl by Mary Kubica
Born to a prominent Chicago judge and his stifled socialite wife, Mia Dennett moves against the grain as a young inner-city art teacher. One night, Mia enters a bar to meet her on-again, off-again boyfriend. But when he doesn't show, she unwisely leaves with an enigmatic stranger. With his smooth moves and modest wit, at first Colin Thatcher seems like a safe one-night stand. But following Colin home will turn out to be the worst mistake of Mia's life. (Publisher Summary) 

I just added these 3 books to my summer reading list...

what's on your list?

The Guest Cottage by Nancy Thayer
The Guest Cottage by Nancy Thayer

Renting a Nantucket cottage after discovering her husband's infidelity, Sophie arrives with her children to discover that a recently widowed single father, Trevor, has also rented the house. By the best-selling author of the Hot Flash Club series.


A Small Indiscretion by Jon Ellison
A Small Indiscretion by Jon Ellison

At nineteen, Annie Black abandons California for a London winter of drinking to oblivion and looking for love in the wrong places. Twenty years later, she is a happily married mother of three living in San Francisco. Then one morning, a photograph arrives in her mailbox, and an old obsession is awakened.


The Status of All Things by Liz Fenton

After her fiance breaks off their engagement, Kate discovers she can use her Facebook status to change her life and time travel, but all of her attempts to help herself and her friends fail and she suspects that her obsession with social media may be the problem.


Click here to see who I got the recommendations from!

Circling the Sun

Circling the Sun by Paula McLain
Paula McLain, author of the phenomenal bestseller The Paris Wife, now returns with her keenly anticipated new novel, transporting readers to colonial Kenya in the 1920s. 

Circling the Sun brings to life a fearless and captivating woman—Beryl Markham, a record-setting aviator caught up in a passionate love triangle with safari hunter Denys Finch Hatton and Karen Blixen, who as Isak Dinesen wrote the classic memoir Out of Africa.

Brought to Kenya from England as a child and then abandoned by her mother, Beryl is raised by both her father and the native Kipsigis tribe who share his estate. Her unconventional upbringing transforms Beryl into a bold young woman with a fierce love of all things wild and an inherent understanding of nature’s delicate balance. But even the wild child must grow up, and when everything Beryl knows and trusts dissolves, she is catapulted into a string of disastrous relationships. (Publisher Summary)