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Counting backwards / by Kirshenbaum, Binnie,author.;
"A middle-aged couple struggles with the husband's descent into early-onset Lewy Body dementia in this profound and deeply moving novel shot through with Kirshenbaum's lacerating humor. It begins with hallucinations. From their living room window, Leo sees a man on stilts, an acting troupe, a pair of swans paddling on the street. Initially, Leo believes the visions are related to visual impairment-they are something he and his wife, Addie, can joke about. Then, he starts to experience occasional, but fleeting, oddities that mimic myriad brain disorders: aphasia, the inability to perform simple tasks, Capgras Syndrome, audial hallucinations he believes to be real. The doctors have no answers. Leo, a scientist, and Addie, a collage artist, had a loving and happy marriage. But as his periods of lucidity become rarer, Addie finds herself less and less able to cope. Eventually, Leo is diagnosed with Lewy Body disease. Life expectancy ranges from 3 to 20 years. A decidedly uncharacteristic act of violence makes it clear that he cannot come home. He moves first to an assisted living facility and then to a small apartment with a caretaker where, over time, he descends into full cognitive decline. Addie's agony, anger, and guilt result in self-imposed isolation, which mirrors Leo's diminished life. And so for years, all she can do is watch him die-too soon, and yet not soon enough. Kirshenbaum captures the couple's final years, months, and days in short scenes that burn with despair, humor, and rage, tracking the brutal destruction of the disease, as well the moments of love and beauty that still exist for them amid the larger tides of loss"--
Subjects: Domestic fiction.; Psychological fiction.; Novels.; Dementia; Despair; Lewy body dementia; Love; Married people; Social isolation;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Twice as perfect / by Onomé, Louisa.;
Sophie <U+2013> or Adanna, as she's known to her Nigerian family and friends <U+2013> has better things to do than help plan her cousin's wedding<U+2026> even if it is to a fabulously wealthy music mogul, Afrobeats superstar Skeleboy, and the cake costs more than a car. Things like homework, debate practice, and studying with fellow egghead Justin. After all, if she's going to follow her ten-year plan to become a lawyer, she needs to focus. Ever since Ada's slacker brother Sam mysteriously left the family five years ago, Ada feels the full weight of her parents' expectations <U+2013> and is determined to make their sacrifice worth it. But when a chance encounter reconnects the estranged siblings, Ada begins to dream of a life beyond her precious ten-year plan. She's always been the perfect student, the perfect daughter, the perfect Nigerian <U+2013> but what happens when she decides she's done being perfect? This new novel from the author of the dazzling debut Like Home is at once both a pitch perfect vision of a deeply loving and occasionally dramatic extended immigrant family as well as a hugely relatable story about carving out your own place.LSC
Subjects: Domestic fiction.; Brothers and sisters; Families; Nigerians; Teenage girls;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Mindful of Murder A Novel - A Comedic Whodunit with a Wiccan Twist [electronic resource] : by Juby, Susan.aut; Larsen, Lisa.nrt; cloudLibrary;
Meet Helen Thorpe. She&#x2019;s smart, preternaturally calm, deeply insightful and a freshly trained butler. On the day she is supposed to start her career as an unusually equanimous domestic professional serving one of the wealthiest families in the world, she is called back to a spiritual retreat where she used to work, the Yatra Institute, on one of British Columbia&#x2019;s gulf islands. The owner of the lodge, Helen&#x2019;s former employer Edna, has died while on a three-month silent self-retreat, leaving Helen instructions to settle her affairs. But Edna&#x2019;s will is more detailed than most, and getting things in order means Helen must run the retreat for a select group to determine which of Edna&#x2019;s relatives will inherit the institute. Helen&#x2019;s classmates, newly minted butlers themselves, decide they can&#x2019;t let her go it alone and arrive to help Helen pull things off. After all, is there anything three butlers can&#x2019;t handle? As Helen carries out the will&#x2019;s instructions, she begins to think that someone had reason to want Edna dead. A reluctantly suspicious investigator, Helen and her band of butlers find themselves caught up in the mystery. With its strong female protagonist and focus on female killers like Miss Smithers and Alice MacLeod, 'Mindful of Murder' is a refreshing addition to the canon of murder mystery novels. HarperCollins 2024
Subjects: Audiobooks.; Amateur Sleuth; Humorous;
© 2022., HarperCollins,
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True biz : a novel / by Nović, Sara,1987-author.;
"True biz? The students at the River Valley School for the Deaf just want to hook up, pass their history final, and have doctors, politicians, and their parents stop telling them what to do with their bodies. This revelatory novel plunges readers into the halls of a residential school for the deaf, where they'll meet Charlie, a rebellious transfer student who's never met another deaf person before; Austin, the school's golden boy, whose world is rocked when his baby sister is born hearing; and February, the headmistress, who is fighting to keep her school open and her marriage intact, but might not be able to do both at the same time. As a series of crises both personal and political threaten to unravel each of them, Charlie, Austin, and February find their lives inextricable from one another-and changed forever. This is a story of sign language and lip-reading, cochlear implants and civil rights, isolation and injustice, first love and loss, and, above all, great persistence, daring, and joy. Absorbing and assured, idiosyncratic and relatable, this is an unforgettable journey into the Deaf community and a universal celebration of human connection"--
Subjects: Bildungsromans.; Domestic fiction.; Novels.; American Sign Language; Boarding schools; Deaf children; Deaf; Deaf; Friendship;
Available copies: 2 / Total copies: 2
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Private rites : a novel / by Armfield, Julia,author.;
"From the award-winning author of Our Wives Under the Sea, a speculative reimagining of King Lear, centering three sisters navigating queer love and loss in a drowning world. It's been raining for a long time now, so long that the land has reshaped itself and arcane rituals and religions are creeping back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their father dies. An architect as cruel as he was revered, his death offers an opportunity for the sisters to come together in a new way. In the grand glass house they grew up in, their father's most famous creation, the sisters sort through the secrets and memories he left behind, until their fragile bond is shattered by a revelation in his will. More estranged than ever, the sisters' lives spin out of control: Irene's relationship is straining at the seams; Isla's ex-wife keeps calling; and cynical Agnes is falling in love for the first time. But something even more sinister might be unfolding, something related to their mother's long-ago disappearance and the strangers who have always seemed unusually interested in the sisters' lives. Soon, it becomes clear that the sisters have been chosen for a very particular purpose, one with shattering implications for their family and their imperiled world"--
Subjects: Lesbian fiction.; Queer fiction.; Domestic fiction.; Novels.; Family secrets; Lesbians; Sisters; Sisters;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Northernmost / by Geye, Peter,author.;
"From the acclaimed author of Wintering: a thrilling ode to the spirit of adventure and the vagaries of loss and love. In 1897 Norway, Odd Einar Eide returns home from a harrowing disaster in the northernmost Arctic only to witness his own funeral in full swing. His wife Inger, stunned to see him alive, is slow to return his devoted affection: she'd spent countless sleepless nights convinced she had now lost both her husband and their daughter, Thea, who'd emigrated to America two years before and has yet to answer their many anxious letters. Further complicating their reconciliation, a newspaperman gets wind of Eide's miraculous survival and invites them both to the city of Tromsø so he can write what he is sure will be a bestselling story. In 2017 Minnesota, Greta Nansen, desperately unhappy, decides to leave her children in her father's care and follow her husband to Oslo, where he's on assignment, in order to end their marriage. But for reasons mystifying even to her, she travels instead to the upper fringe of Norway--to the town where her great-great grandmother Thea was born. A dual narrative told by blood relatives separated by five generations, Northernmost confronts the darkest recesses of the human heart and celebrates our astonishing ability to endure the most excruciating trials--
Subjects: Domestic fiction.; Families;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Shutdown : how COVID shook the world's economy / by Tooze, J. Adam,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."Deftly weaving finance, politics, business, and the global human experience into one tight narrative, a tour-de-force account of 2020, the year that changed everything--from the acclaimed author of Crashed. The shocks of 2020 have been great and small, disrupting the world economy, international relations and the daily lives of virtually everyone on the planet. Never before has the entire world economy contracted by 20 percent in a matter of weeks nor in the historic record of modern capitalism has there been a moment in which 95 percent of the world's economies were suffering all at the same time. Across the world hundreds of millions have lost their jobs. And over it all looms the specter of pandemic, and death. Adam Tooze, whose last book was universally lauded for guiding us coherently through the chaos of the 2008 crash, now brings his bravura analytical and narrative skills to a panoramic and synthetic overview of our current crisis. By focusing on finance and business, he sets the pandemic story in a frame that casts a sobering new light on how unprepared the world was to fight the crisis, and how deep the ruptures in our way of living and doing business are. The virus has attacked the economy with as much ferocity as it has our health, and there is no vaccine arriving to address that. Tooze's special gift is to show how social organization, political interests, and economic policy interact with devastating human consequences, from your local hospital to the World Bank. He moves fluidly from the impact of currency fluctuations to the decimation of institutions--such as health-care systems, schools, and social services--in the name of efficiency. He starkly analyzes what happened when the pandemic collided with domestic politics (China's party conferences; the American elections), what the unintended consequences of the vaccine race might be, and the role climate change played in the pandemic. Finally, he proves how no unilateral declaration of 'independence" or isolation can extricate any modern country from the global web of travel, goods, services, and finance"--
Subjects: COVID-19 (Disease); Economic history; Financial crises; COVID-19 (Disease);
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The other mother : a novel / by Harper, Rachel M.,1972-author.;
"Raised by a single mother in Miami, Florida, Jenry Castillo, newly arrived at Brown University on a music scholarship, finds himself searching for information about his late father Jasper Patterson, an internationally recognized principal ballet dancer who died tragically when Jenry was two. Jenry thinks his estranged grandfather, Winston Patterson, a professor of African American history at Brown and a titan in his field, might have the answers he seeks. Already more than a little intimidating, Winston explodes Jenry's world with one question: Why is the young man so interested in his son Jasper? It was Winston's daughter, Juliet, who was his mother's lover. Juliet is the parent he should be looking for--his other mother. Seamlessly moving between the past and the present to piece together the complicated web that has both bound this family together and kept them apart, The Other Mother is a profoundly moving and masterful exploration of the power of love and family; of the intersections of race, class, providence, and sexuality; the role of patriarchy in defining who belongs to whom; and of the relevance of biology in determining familial bonds and what it means to be related. Unfurling in the most surprising and satisfying of ways, revelation follows revelation as each member of Jenry's family peels back layers of a story that is at once deeply familiar-of first love, betrayal, and the selfishness of youth, of the beautiful, complicated love between parents and children-and also compelling in its centering of queer lives and people of color"--
Subjects: Domestic fiction.; Novels.; Birthfathers; Lesbian mothers; Motherhood; Music students; African Americans;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Ellie and the harpmaker / by Prior, Hazel,author.;
Dan Hollis lives a simple, solitary, but contented life, taking pleasure in the beautiful landscape around him and in his work. For the past twenty-three years he has been making gorgeous Celtic harps, each unique and built entirely by hand. In his barn tucked into the woods of Exmoor, he can be himself, untroubled by social situations that he doesn't always get right or understand. Ellie Jacobs is a lonely housewife who seeks solace in her daily walks and in the poetry she keeps secret from her controlling husband Clive. One day Ellie stumbles across Dan's barn by chance and is stunned by the enchanting workshop. Dan, taken by her enthusiasm for his harps--and her cherry-coloured socks--spontaneously gives her a beautiful cherrywood harp, and Ellie finds she has a deep desire to learn to play it. Clive refuses to let her keep the harp, but Ellie finds she cannot forget either it or its maker, and so she begins to take lessons in secret at the barn, where Dan keeps the harp for her. Gradually drawn into Dan's infectious delight in the countryside they both love, his peculiar charm, and methodical eccentricity, Ellie starts to dream of escaping her loveless marriage and refinding joy. But when she discovers an important secret relating to Dan, she must make one of the biggest decisions of her life: keep it from him and risk their friendship, or unpend his carefully constructed world and change the course of both of their lives forever?
Subjects: Domestic fiction.; Pastoral fiction.; Harp makers; Harpists; Housewives; Man-woman relationships;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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