F-V Adult Patron Picks 2022

This list is compiled from patron recommendations at our monthly Suggestions on the Spot meeting.

Showing 1 - 19 of 19  There are a total of 99 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "The Alice Network"
Star rating for The Alice Network
Author:
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
"Two women--a female spy recruited to the real-life Alice Network in France during World War I and an unconventional American socialite searching for her cousin in 1947--are brought together in a ... story of courage and redemption"--Amazon.com.
Book cover for "Beautiful ruins"
Star rating for Beautiful ruins
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
Follows a young Italian innkeeper and his almost-love affair with a beautiful American starlet, which draws him into a glittering world filled with unforgettable characters. A novel that spans fifty years. The Italian housekeeper and his long-lost American starlet; the producer who once brought them together, and his assistant. A glittering world filled with unforgettable characters.
Book cover for "The book of lost names"
Star rating for The book of lost names
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
Eva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, is shelving books one morning when her eyes lock on a photograph in a magazine lying open nearby. She freezes; it's an image of a book she hasn't seen in sixty-five years--a book she recognizes as The Book of Lost Names.
Book cover for "Cilka's journey"
Star rating for Cilka's journey
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Cilka is just sixteen years old when she is taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp in 1942, where the commandant immediately notices how beautiful she is. Forcibly separated from the other women prisoners, Cilka learns quickly that power, even unwillingly taken, equals survival. When the war is over and the camp is liberated, freedom is not granted to Cilka: she is charged as a collaborator for sleeping with the enemy and sent to a Siberian...
Book cover for "Circe"
Star rating for Circe
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
Follows Circe, the banished witch daughter of Helios, as she hones her powers and interacts with famous mythological beings before a conflict with one of the most vengeful Olympians forces her to choose between the worlds of the gods and mortals.
Book cover for "The clan of the cave bear"
Star rating for The clan of the cave bear
Series:
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
An injured and orphaned infant carries within her the seed and hope of mankind in this epic of survival and destiny set at the dawn of prehistory.
Book cover for "Death cloud"
Star rating for Death cloud
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
In 1868, with his army officer father suddenly posted to India, and his mother mysteriously "unwell," fourteen-year-old Sherlock Holmes is sent to stay with his eccentric uncle and aunt in their vast house in Hampshire, where he uncovers his first murder and a diabolical villain.
Book cover for "The house of silk"
Star rating for The house of silk
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
It is 1890. A year after Holmes's death, Watson--now in a retirement home--narrates a tale of Sherlockian detection that could tear apart the very fabric of society. The story opens with a train robbery in Boston, and moves to the innocuous setting of Wimbledon.
Book cover for "The Kingdom of Back"
Star rating for The Kingdom of Back
Average Rating:
4.6 stars
Description:
"Desperate to be forever remembered for her music, Nannerl Mozart makes a dangerous pact with a mysterious stranger from a magical land, which may cost her everything"--
Book cover for "The kitchen front"
Star rating for The kitchen front
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
"Two years into World War II, Britain is feeling her losses; the Nazis have won battles, the Blitz has destroyed cities, and U-boats have cut off the supply of food. In an effort to help housewives with food rationing, a BBC radio program called The Kitchen Front is putting on a cooking contest--and the grand prize is a job as the program's first-ever female co-host. For four very different women, winning the contest presents a crucial chance to change...
Book cover for "The last bookshop in London"
Star rating for The last bookshop in London
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
August 1939: London prepares for war as Hitler's forces sweep across Europe. Grace Bennett has always dreamed of moving to the city, but the bunkers and drawn curtains that she finds on her arrival are not what she expected. And she certainly never imagined she'd wind up working at Primrose Hill, a dusty old bookshop nestled in the heart of London. Through blackouts and air raids as the Blitz intensifies, Grace discovers the power of storytelling...
Book cover for "The light in the ruins"
Star rating for The light in the ruins
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
Hoping to safeguard themselves from the ravages of World War II within the walls of their ancient villa in Florence, the noble Rosati family become prisoners in their home when eighteen-year-old Cristina's courtship by a German lieutenant prompts the Nazis to take over the estate, a situation that leads to a serial murder investigation years later.
Book cover for "Magic lessons"
Star rating for Magic lessons
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
"In [a] ... novel that traces a centuries-old curse to its source, ... author Alice Hoffman unveils the story of Maria Owens, accused of witchcraft in Salem and matriarch of a line of the amazing Owens women and men featured in Practical Magic and The Rules of Magic"--
Book cover for "The other Einstein"
Star rating for The other Einstein
Average Rating:
3.6 stars
Description:
"Mitza Maric has always been a little different from other girls. Most twenty-year-olds are wives by now, not studying physics at an elite Zurich university with only male students trying to outdo her clever calculations. But Mitza is smart enough to know that, for her, math is an easier path than marriage. And then fellow student Albert Einstein takes an interest in her, and the world turns sideways"--Amazon.com.
Book cover for "The remains of the day"
Star rating for The remains of the day
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
An English butler reflects--sometimes bitterly, sometimes humorously--on his service to a lord between the two world wars and discovers doubts about his master's character and about the ultimate value of his own service to humanity The novel's narrator, Stevens, is a perfect English butler who tries to give his narrow existence form and meaning through the self-effacing, almost mystical practice of his profession. In a career that spans the second...
Book cover for "The saints of Swallow Hill"
Star rating for The saints of Swallow Hill
Average Rating:
3.4 stars
Description:
In the dense pine forests of North Carolina, turpentiners labor, hacking into tree trunks to draw out the sticky sap that gives the Tar Heel State its nickname, and hauling the resin to stills to be refined. Among them is Rae Lynn Cobb and her husband, Warren, who run a small turpentine farm together. Though the work is hard and often dangerous, Rae Lynn, who spent her childhood in an orphanage, is thankful for it--and for her kind if careless husband....
Book cover for "Soulless"
Star rating for Soulless
Series:
Average Rating:
3.9 stars
Description:
Buffy meets Jane Austen in the first book of this wickedly funny NYT bestselling series about a young woman whose brush with the supernatural leads to a deadly investigation of London's high society.
Alexia Tarabotti is laboring under a great many social tribulations. First, she has no soul. Second, she's a spinster whose father is both Italian and dead. Third, she was rudely attacked by a vampire, breaking all standards of social...
Book cover for "The sweetness at the bottom of the pie"
Star rating for The sweetness at the bottom of the pie
Series:
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
It is the summer of 1950-and at the once-grand mansion of Buckshaw, young Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison, is intrigued by a series of inexplicable events: A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Then, hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath. For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest...
Book cover for "Varina"
Star rating for Varina
Average Rating:
3.4 stars
Description:
"Her marriage prospects limited, teenage Varina Howell agrees to wed the much-older widower Jefferson Davis, with whom she expects the secure life of a Mississippi landowner. Davis instead pursues a career in politics and is eventually appointed president of the Confederacy, placing Varina at the white-hot center of one of the darkest moments in American history"--