Lawrence's Staff Picks


Showing 1 - 13 of 13  There are a total of 61 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "Babel"
Star rating for Babel
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
"From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire. Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal. 1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious...
Book cover for "Devil in the grove"
Star rating for Devil in the grove
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
Chronicles a little-known court case in which Thurgood Marshall successfully saved a black citrus worker from the electric chair after the worker was accused of raping a white woman with three other black men. In 1949, Florida's orange industry was booming with cheap Jim Crow labor. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, vicious Sheriff McCall was fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves....
Book cover for "Ficciones"
Star rating for Ficciones
Average Rating:
5 stars
Book cover for "How the West stole democracy from the Arabs"
Star rating for How the West stole democracy from the Arabs
Description:
"When Europe's Great War engulfed the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalists rose in revolt against their Turkish rulers and allied with the British on the promise of an independent Arab state. In October 1918, the Arabs' military leader, Prince Faisal, victoriously entered Damascus and proclaimed a constitutional government in an independent Greater Syria. Faisal won American support for self-determination at the Paris Peace Conference, but other Entente...
Book cover for "The nickel boys"
Star rating for The nickel boys
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
Follows the experiences of two African-American teenagers at an abusive reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.
Book cover for "Northanger Abbey"
Star rating for Northanger Abbey
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
During an eventful season at Bath, young, naïve Catherine Morland experiences the joys of fashionable society for the first time. She is delighted with her new acquaintances: flirtatious Isabella, who shares Catherine's love of Gothic romance and horror, and sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who invite her to their father's mysterious house, Northanger Abbey. There, her imagination influenced by novels of sensation and intrigue, Catherine...
Book cover for "The priory of the orange tree"
Star rating for The priory of the orange tree
Series:
Roots of chaos volume 1.
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
A world divided. A queendom without an heir. An ancient enemy awakens. The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction--but assassins are getting closer to her door. Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she has risen to the position of lady-in-waiting, she is loyal to a hidden society of mages. Ead keeps a watchful eye on Sabran, secretly...
Book cover for "The Sandman"
Star rating for The Sandman
Author:
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
"Twenty-five years since The Sandman first changed the landscape of modern comics, Neil Gaiman's legendary series is back in a deluxe hardcover edition! The Sandman: Overture heralds New York Times best-selling writer Neil Gaiman's return to the art form that made him famous, ably abetted by artistic luminary JH Williams III (Batwoman, Promethea), whose lush, widescreen images provide an epic scope to The Sandman's origin story. From the birth of...
Book cover for "Sea of Tranquility"
Star rating for Sea of Tranquility
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
The "author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from an island off Vancouver in 1912 to a dark colony of the moon three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and planets"--
Book cover for "She who became the sun"
Star rating for She who became the sun
Series:
Radiant emperor volume 1.
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
"To possess the Mandate of Heaven, the female monk Zhu will do anything 'I refuse to be nothing...' In a famine-stricken village on a dusty yellow plain, two children are given two fates. A boy, greatness. A girl, nothingness... In 1345, China lies under harsh Mongol rule. For the starving peasants of the Central Plains, greatness is something found only in stories. When the Zhu family's eighth-born son, Zhu Chongba, is given a fate of greatness,...
Book cover for "Tess of the D'Urbervilles"
Star rating for Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
Betrayed by the two men in her life -- Alec D'Urberville, her seducer/rapist and father of her fated child; and Angel, her intellectual and pious husband -- Tess takes justice, and her own destiny, into her delicate hands.
Book cover for "Things fall apart"
Star rating for Things fall apart
Average Rating:
3.6 stars
Description:
The contemporary African writer's classic novel depicting the destruction of traditional tribal life by the white man.
Book cover for "Yellowface"
Star rating for Yellowface
Average Rating:
3.4 stars
Description:
"Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena's a literary darling. June Hayward is literally nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks. So when June witnesses Athena's death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena's just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I. So what if June edits Athena's novel...