A Few of Our Favorite Things 2023

Wake County Public Libraries wishes you a joyous holiday season and a Happy New Year. Our Adult Services Librarians have created our annual gift to you - this list featuring some of our favorite recent books. From novels of all genres to nonfiction and biographies, you are sure to find some books to love among these librarian favorites.

Showing 1 - 20 of 47  There are a total of 50 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "All of us together in the end"
Star rating for All of us together in the end
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"All of Us Together in the End is a lyrical, elegiac affirmation of the awesome, strange, otherworldly ways our loved ones remain alive to us, even when they are out of reach, by a writer the New York Times calls "irresistible" and "utterly convincing." Vollmer's family memoir, shimmering with wonder and enchantment, begins with the death of his mother from early-onset Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Soon after, unexplained phenomena (specifically flashing...
Book cover for "All that is mine I carry with me"
Star rating for All that is mine I carry with me
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Three grown siblings confront their father's role in their mother's disappearance in this arresting novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Defending Jacob. Jane Larkin disappeared without a trace in November 1976. When ten-year-old Miranda arrives home from school that autumn afternoon, finding her mother's pocketbook in its usual spot in the front hall, she assumes her mother will be back any minute. But as the hours tick by, alone...
Book cover for "The American roommate experiment"
Star rating for The American roommate experiment
Author:
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
"Rosie Graham has a problem. A few, actually. She just quit her well paid job to focus on her secret career as a romance writer. She hasn't told her family and now has terrible writer's block. Then, the ceiling of her New York apartment literally crumbles on her. Luckily she has her best friend Lina's spare key while she's out of town. But Rosie doesn't know that Lina has already lent her apartment to her cousin Lucas, who Rosie has been stalking--for...
Book cover for "Atalanta"
Star rating for Atalanta
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
"From the beloved, bestselling author of Elektra and Ariadne, a reimagining of the myth of Atalanta, a fierce huntress raised by bears and the only woman in the world's most famous band of heroes, the Argonauts. Princess, Warrior, Lover, Hero. When Princess Atalanta is born, a daughter rather than the son her parents hoped for, she is left on a mountainside to die. But even then, she is a survivor. Raised by a mother bear under the protective eye...
Book cover for "The beach at Summerly"
Star rating for The beach at Summerly
Average Rating:
3.6 stars
Description:
"As the residents of Winthrop Island prepare for the first summer season after the sacrifice of war, a glamorous new figure moves into the guest cottage at Summerly, the idyllic seaside estate of the wealthy Peabody family. To Emilia Winthrop, daughter of Summerly's year-round caretaker and a descendant of the island's settlers, Olive Rainsford opens a window into a world of shining possibility. While Emilia spent the war years caring for her incapacitated...
Book cover for "Beyond the wand"
Star rating for Beyond the wand
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
From the magical moments on set as Draco Malfoy to the challenges of growing up in the spotlight, get a backstage pass into Tom Felton's life on and off the big screen. Tom Felton's adolescence was anything but ordinary. His early rise to fame in beloved films like The Borrowers catapulted him into the limelight, but nothing could prepare him for what was to come after he landed the iconic role of the Draco Malfoy, the bleached blonde villain of the...
Book cover for "City under one roof"
Star rating for City under one roof
Average Rating:
2.3 stars
Description:
"A stranded detective tries to solve a murder in a tiny Alaskan town where everyone winters in the same high-rise building, in this gripping debut by Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Iris Yamashita. When a local teenager discovers a severed hand and foot washed up on the shore of the small town of Point Mettier, Alaska, Cara Kennedy is on the case. A detective from Anchorage, she has her own reasons for investigating the possible murder in this...
Book cover for "The Cloisters"
Star rating for The Cloisters
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
"When Ann Stilwell arrives in New York City, she expects to spend her summer working as a curatorial associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Instead she finds herself assigned to The Cloisters, a gothic museum and garden renowned for its medieval art collection and its group of enigmatic researchers studying the history of divination. Desperate to escape her painful past, Ann is happy to indulge the researchers' more outlandish theories about...
Book cover for "Cold people"
Star rating for Cold people
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
A mysterious force captures Earth and gives humanity thirty days to move to Antarctica, where they will be allowed to exist and survive in the planet's most extreme environment.
Book cover for "Ducks"
Star rating for Ducks
Average Rating:
2.5 stars
Description:
"Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta's oil rush-part of the long tradition of East Coasters who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can't find it in the homeland they love so much. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands, where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet is never discussed. Beaton's natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime...
Book cover for "Fairy tale"
Star rating for Fairy tale
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
"Legendary storyteller Stephen King goes into the deepest well of his imagination in this spellbinding novel about a seventeen-year-old boy who inherits the keys to a parallel world where good and evil are at war, and the stakes could not be higher--for that world or ours." --
Book cover for "The forever witness"
Star rating for The forever witness
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"After 30 years, Detective Jim Scharf arrested a teenage couple's murderer-and exposed a looming battle between the pursuit of justice and the right to privacy. When Tanya Van Cuylenborg and Jay Cook were murdered during a trip to Seattle in the 1980s, detectives had few leads. The murder weapon was missing. No one witnessed any suspicious activity. And there was only a single handprint on the outside of the young couple's van. The detectives assumed...
Book cover for "The hawk's way"
Star rating for The hawk's way
Average Rating:
2 stars
Description:
"When Sy Montgomery went to spend a day at falconer Nancy Cowan's farm, home to a dozen magnificent birds of prey, it was the start of a deep love affair. Nancy allowed her to work with Jazz, a feisty, four-year-old, female Harris's hawk with a wingspan of more than four feet. Not a pet, Jazz was a fierce predator with talons that could pierce skin and bone and yet, she was willing to work with a human to hunt. From the first moment Jazz swept down...
Book cover for "Her deadly game"
Star rating for Her deadly game
Series:
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"Keera Duggan was building a solid reputation as a Seattle prosecutor, until her romantic relationship with a senior colleague ended badly. For the competitive former chess prodigy, returning to her family's failing criminal defense law firm to work for her father is the best shot she has. With the right moves, she hopes to restore the family's reputation, her relationship with her father, and her career. Keera's chance to play in the big leagues...
Book cover for "The house of Eve"
Star rating for The house of Eve
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
"Fifteen-year-old Ruby Pearsall is on track to becoming the first in her family to attend college, in spite of having a mother more interested in keeping a man than raising her daughter. But a taboo love affair threatens to pull her back down into the poverty and desperation that has been passed onto her like a birthright. Eleanor Quarles arrived in Washington, DC with ambition and secrets. When she meets the handsome William Pride at Howard University,...
Book cover for "I kissed Shara Wheeler"
Star rating for I kissed Shara Wheeler
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
After seventeen-year-olds Chole and Shara, Chole's rival for valedictorian, kiss, Shara vanishes leaving Chole and two boys, who are also enamored with Shara, to follow the trail of clues she left behind, but during the search, Chloe starts to suspect there might be more to Shara and her small Alabama town than she thought.
Book cover for "An immense world"
Star rating for An immense world
Author:
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
"The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes us into a previously unfathomable dimension: the world as it is truly perceived by other animals. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires (and fireworks), songbirds that can see the Earth's magnetic...
Book cover for "Ink blood sister scribe"
Star rating for Ink blood sister scribe
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
"Two estranged half-sisters tasked with guarding their family's library of magical books must work together to unravel a deadly secret at the heart of their collection--a tale of familial loyalty and betrayal, and the pursuit of magic and power."--
Book cover for "Iona Iverson's rules for commuting"
Star rating for Iona Iverson's rules for commuting
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
"Every day Iona Iverson, a ... magazine advice columnist, rides the train to work with her dog, Lulu. Every day she sees the same people, whom she knows only by nickname ... Of course, they never speak. Seasoned commuters never do. Then one morning, the man she calls Smart-But-Sexist-Manspreader chokes on a grape right in front of her. He'd have died were it not for the ... intervention of Sanjay, a nurse, who gives him the Heimlich maneuver. This...
Book cover for "Killers of a certain age"
Star rating for Killers of a certain age
Series:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Older women often feel invisible, but sometimes that's their secret weapon. They've spent their lives as the deadliest assassins in a clandestine international organization, but now that they're sixty years old, four women friends can't just retire - it's kill or be killed in this action-packed thriller by New York Times bestselling and Edgar Award-nominated author Deanna Raybourn. Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie have worked for the Museum,...