For your summer reading
Summer doesn't officially start for another three weeks, but the Mendocino Community Library has a big supply of new books to get you all the way to September. Whether you're a mystery or thriller buff, a serious novel fan, a nonfiction devotee, or a romance enthusiast, we have best sellers and hot books for you. Let me highlight a few of them for you.
From the author of the unforgettable Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier, comes The Trackers, a stunning novel that captures daily life in the Great Depression. Moving past the downtrodden communities of Depressionera America, painter Val Welch travels westward to the town of Dawes, Wyoming. Through a stroke of luck, he's landed a New Deal assignment to create a mural representing the region and its inhabitants for the new post office. When his host's wife goes missing, he learns more about the place and the people than he anticipated.
In Calling Ukraine, Johannes Lichtman tells the story of a young American who, after a relationship breakup and his dad's death, moves to Lutsk in 2018 to run a call center for an Airbnb-like start-up. This blend allows for a journey of selfdiscovery, some criticism of global capitalism, and a cross-cultural collision, all in a single book. Lichtman's light touch is a welcome reminder of the humor and wit that pervades Ukrainian culture even now, after the Russian invasion. Hannah Pylväinen, the author of the haunting We Sinners, is back with The End of Drum-Time, a saga about a renegade Lutheran minister working in 1851 to convert the native Sámi reindeer herders in the Scandinavian Arctic Circle. The repercussions of the love affair between a Sámi youth and the daughter of the minister are many and extreme. The novel examines how faith, nature, and human connection work with— and sometimes against— one another. Nearly every country seems to have a regrettable history of upending indigenous ways of life.
The Covenant of Water is the long-awaited new novel by Abraham Verghese, the author of the elegant and moving Cutting for Stone
OTHERS >> Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal; Dave Barry, Swamp Story; Julia Bartz, The Writing Retreat; Kate Morton, Homecoming; Cathleen Schine, Kunstlers in Paradise; J. Ryan Stradal, Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club.
Fossil harvesting, ancient lore, greed, rejected love, and murder combine in The Way of the Bear, a gripping new installment in Anne Hillerman's Leaphorn, Chee & Manuelito series. An unexpected death on a lonely road outside of Utah's Bears Ears National Monument raises questions for Navajo Tribal Police officers Jim Chee and Bernadette Manuelito. Why would a seasoned outdoorsman and paleontologist freeze to death within walking distance of his car?
Dennis Lehane's newest, Small Mercies, is a tale of revenge, family love, and insidious power, set against one of the most tumultuous episodes in Boston's history. In the summer of 1974, a heatwave hits Boston, and Mary Pat Fennessy is trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors in the housing projects of "Southie," the Irish-American enclave that stubbornly adheres to old tradition. The same night Mary Pat's teenage daughter doesn't come home, a young Black man is found dead, struck by a subway train under mysterious circumstances.
In Vanishing in the Haight by Max Tomlinson, private investigator Colleen Hayes has to fend off the advances of her parole officer and get by in 1978 San Francisco. She accepts a case from a wealthy, retired industrialist who is desperate to solve the brutal murder of his daughter in Golden Gate Park 11 years earlier, during the Summer of Love. The case has since gone cold, but in his final days, the man wants Hayes to find his daughter's killer so he can die peacefully.
OTHERS >> Cara Black, Night Flight to Paris; Peter Robinson, Standing in the Shadows; John Sandford, Dark Angel; Martin Cruz Smith, Independence Square; Martin Walker, Bruno's Challenge.
From the author of Killers of the Flower Moon, this story of a shipwreck, survival, and savagery culminates in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. In David Grann's The Wager, not only do the captain and crew end up on trial but so does the very idea of empire. On a January day in 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were 30 emaciated men with an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship The Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain.
Serhii Plokhy's The Russo-Ukrainian War is an authoritative history of Europe's largest military conflict since World War II. Despite repeated warnings from the U.S., Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022 shocked the world. Why did Putin start the war, and why has it unfolded in previously unimaginable ways? Plokhy is a leading historian of Ukraine and the Cold War and reminds us that the current war began eight years before the allout assault, when Russian forces seized the Crimean parliament building. The roots of the conflict can be traced back even earlier, to post-Soviet tensions and imperial collapse in the 19th and 20th centuries.
OTHERS >> Peter Maars, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness; Eric Pitsenbarger, Beaujolais in My Blood; Rebecca Boggs Roberts, Untold Power: The Rise of First Lady Edith Wilson; Kassia St. Clair, The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History.
The library is open Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays from 10:00 am until 2:00 pm. Drop in and peruse our terrific new books.