PORTSMOUTH — The Portsmouth Public Library would like to recommend these book titles. Each title is available to borrow with your library card! For more book recommendations or information on applying for a library card go to www.yourppl.org or call 740-354-5688.
The Book of Lost Names by Kristen Harmel – 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. The accompanying article discusses the looting of libraries by the Nazis across Europe during World War II—an experience Eva remembers well—and the search to reunite people with the texts taken from them so long ago. The book in the photograph, an eighteenth-century religious text thought to have been taken from France in the waning days of the war, is one of the most fascinating cases. Now housed in Berlin’s Zentral- und Landesbibliothek library, it appears to contain some sort of code, but researchers don’t know where it came from—or what the code means. Only Eva holds the answer—but will she have the strength to revisit old memories and help reunite those lost during the war? As a graduate student in 1942, Eva was forced to flee Paris after the arrest of her father, a Polish Jew. Finding refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone, she begins forging identity documents for Jewish children fleeing to neutral Switzerland. But erasing people comes with a price, and along with a mysterious, handsome forger named Rémy, Eva decides she must find a way to preserve the real names of the children who are too young to remember who they really are. The records they keep in The Book of Lost Names will become even more vital when the resistance cell they work for is betrayed and Rémy disappears. Readers might also enjoy The Last Train to London by Meg Waite Clayton or The Baker’s Secret by Stephen P. Kiernan.
Before I Go by Colleen Oakley – Twenty-seven-year-old Daisy already beat breast cancer four years ago. How can this be happening to her again? On the eve of what was supposed to be a triumphant “Cancerversary” with her husband Jack to celebrate four years of being cancer-free, Daisy suffers a devastating blow: her doctor tells her that the cancer is back, but this time it’s an aggressive stage four diagnosis. She may have as few as four months left to live. Death is a frightening prospect—but not because she’s afraid for herself. She’s terrified of what will happen to her brilliant but otherwise charmingly helpless husband when she’s no longer there to take care of him. It’s this fear that keeps her up at night, until she stumbles on the solution: she has to find him another wife. With a singular determination, Daisy scouts local parks and coffee shops and online dating sites looking for Jack’s perfect match. But the further she gets on her quest, the more she questions the sanity of her plan. As the thought of her husband with another woman becomes all too real, Daisy’s forced to decide what’s more important in the short amount of time she has left: her husband’s happiness—or her own? Readers might also enjoy Three Amazing Things About You by Jill Mansell or Before Everything by Victoria Redel.
Why Would I Lie?, a new novel by Adi Rule, drops us into the world of Viveca North. She is an overachiever, doing the best that she can to succeed and graduate at the top of her class. However, another student who just transferred in, Jamison Sharpe, is also trying to reach valedictorian. Viveca thinks that she can see past all his lies, but she needs some proof if she is going to prove it to all of her peers. Readers might also enjoy Such a Good Girl by Amanda Morgan or Ace of Spades by Faridah Abike-lyimide.
