Britt's Staff Picks


Showing 1 - 20 of 60  There are a total of 170 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "The three-body problem"
Star rating for The three-body problem
Author:
Series:
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
"With the scope of Dune and the commercial action of Independence Day, this near-future trilogy is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience this multple-award-winning phenemonenon from China's most beloved science fiction author. 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...
Book cover for "The deep"
Star rating for The deep
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
"Yetu holds the memories for her people--water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by slave owners--who live idyllic lives in the deep. Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly, is forgotten by everyone, save one--the historian. This demanding role has been bestowed on Yetu. Yetu remembers for everyone, and the memories, painful and wonderful, traumatic and terrible and miraculous, are destroying her....
Book cover for "The cretaceous past"
Star rating for The cretaceous past
Author:
Description:
When a Tyrannosaurus rex suffers pain from meat trapped between its enormous teeth, a nearby colony of ants risks entering the great creature's maw to make their own repast from the remains of the dinosaur's most recent meal. From this humble beginning, over the course of millennia, a symbiotic civilization achieves amazing advances, reaching dizzying heights in countless endeavors scientific and social, facing dangers and exploiting opportunities...
Book cover for "They were here before us"
Star rating for They were here before us
Description:
From the author of the viral sensation Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke comes They Were Here Before Us, a novella written in pieces, designed to be consumed as a single, thematically cohesive work. The only thing more brutal than nature is love.
Book cover for "Convenience store woman"
Star rating for Convenience store woman
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
Keiko Furukura had always been considered a strange child, and her parents always worried how she would get on in the real world, so when she takes on a job in a convenience store while at university, they are delighted for her. For her part, in the convenience store she finds a predictable world mandated by the store manual, which dictates how the workers should act and what they should say, and she copies her coworkers' style of dress and speech...
Book cover for "City of the lost"
Star rating for City of the lost
Series:
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:

Casey Duncan is a homicide detective with a secret: when she was in college, she killed a man. She was never caught, but he was the grandson of a mobster and she knows that someday this crime will catch up to her. Casey's best friend, Diana, is on the run from a violent, abusive ex-husband. When Diana's husband finds her, and Casey herself is attacked shortly after, Casey knows it's time for the two of them to disappear again.
Diana has heard

...
Book cover for "What moves the dead"
Star rating for What moves the dead
Series:
Sworn soldier volume 1.
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
"From T. Kingfisher, the award-winning author of The Twisted Ones, comes What Moves the Dead, a gripping and atmospheric retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's classic "The Fall of the House of Usher." When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania. What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed...
Book cover for "Bloodbath nation"
Star rating for Bloodbath nation
Description:
"Each year, approximately forty thousand Americans are killed by gunshot wounds, which is roughly equivalent to the annual rate of traffic deaths on American roads and highways. Of those forty thousand gun fatalities, more than half of them are suicides, which in turn account for half of all suicides per year. Add in the murders caused by guns, the accidental deaths caused by guns, the law enforcement killings caused by guns, and the average comes...
Book cover for "Under the broken sky"
Star rating for Under the broken sky
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
When Soviet troops invade Japanese-occupied Manchuria during the last days of World War II, twelve-year-old Natsu Kimura must care for her younger sister as they struggle to survive and return to Japan.
Book cover for "The good son"
Star rating for The good son
Description:
"Who can you trust if you can't trust yourself? Early one morning, twenty-six-year-old Yu-jin wakes up to a strange metallic smell, and a phone call from his brother asking if everything's all right at home--he missed a call from their mother in the middle of the night. Yu-jin soon discovers her murdered body, lying in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs of their stylish Seoul duplex. He can't remember much about the night before; having suffered...
Book cover for "The disordered cosmos"
Star rating for The disordered cosmos
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is one of the leading physicists of her generation, at work on the origins of spacetime at the intersection of particle physics and astrophysics. She is also one of the fewer than one hundred Black women to earn a PhD in physics. In [this book], Prescod-Weinstein shares with readers her love for physics, from the Standard Model of Particle Physics and what lies beyond it, to the physics of melanin in skin, to the latest...
Book cover for "An elderly lady is up to no good"
Star rating for An elderly lady is up to no good
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
"Maud is an irascible 88-year-old Swedish woman with no family, no friends, and no qualms about a little murder. This funny, irreverent story collection by Helene Tursten, author of the Irene Huss investigations, features two-never-before translated stories that will keep you laughing all the way to the retirement home. Ever since her darling father's untimely death when she was only eighteen, Maud has lived in the family's spacious apartment in downtown...
Book cover for "Several people are typing"
Star rating for Several people are typing
Description:
"A mid-level employee of a New York-based public relations firm finds his consciousness uploaded into the company's internal Slack channel"--
Book cover for "The darkness outside us"
Star rating for The darkness outside us
Series:
Average Rating:
4.6 stars
Description:
"Two boys, alone in space: sworn enemies sent on the same rescue mission. Ambrose wakes up on the Coordinated Endeavor with no memory of a launch. There's more that doesn't add up: evidence indicates strangers have been on board, the ship's operating system is voiced by his mother, and his handsome, brooding shipmate has barricaded himself away. But nothing will stop Ambrose from making his mission succeed--not when he's rescuing his own sister. In...
Book cover for "The secret talker"
Star rating for The secret talker
Author:
Description:
"Hongmei is the perfect Asian wife: beautiful, diligent, and passive. She lives a quiet life in Northern California with her husband, Glen, an intelligent and caring college professor. But when a mysterious person begins to email her, Hongmei can't resist and soon finds herself enthralled in a psychological cat-and-mouse game. Who is stalking her? And why does s/he know her deepest, darkest secrets? As Hongmei is forced to confront her own dark past...
Book cover for "Being mortal"
Star rating for Being mortal
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession's ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families of the terminally ill.
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 "Milk and honey"
Star rating for Milk and honey
Author:
Average Rating:
3.6 stars
Description:
"A collection of poetry and prose about survival, about the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity"--Amazon.com.
Book cover for "Educated"
Star rating for Educated
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
"An unforgettable memoir about a young girl who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University"--Amazon.com.
Book cover for "White fragility"
Star rating for White fragility
Average Rating:
2 stars
Description:
Explores counterproductive reactions white people have when discussing racism that serve to protect their positions and maintain racial inequality