New Releases - October Edition

Check out these highly anticipated new releases featuring fiction and nonfiction titles. Click on the title to request a copy or get your name on the waitlist. Don’t forget to watch for more featured releases next month!

NONFICTION

Sonny Boy by Al Pacino. Pacino writes a memoir about acting, and how it has been the love and light of his life. He details his youth in the South Bronx, his family life, his education in the arts, his life in avant-garde theater, and all the films that made him famous. Copyright 2024 Library Journal

Be Ready When the Luck Happens: A Memoir by Ina Garten.  Garten, also known as the Barefoot Contessa, the author of multiple bestselling cookbooks, writes about her life in food, her marriage, her business, and the lessons she has learned and wants to impart (with a handful of recipes). The 25th anniversary edition of The Barefoot Contessa cookbook will be published simultaneously with Garten's memoir. Copyright 2024 Library Journal.

Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman.  “Your limitations aren’t obstacles to a meaningful existence”—they’re key to building one, according to this refreshing guide from journalist Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks). He contends that once readers accept that “doing it all” is impossible, they can identify the handful of priorities that deserve their time and attention and better enjoy engaging in them. Laying out 28 brief lessons to be practiced over four weeks, Burkeman suggests swapping a daily to-do list for a “done list”—cataloging the tasks one has completed each day—to improve self-satisfaction; treating a to-read pile as an option rather than an obligation; and breaking tasks into “small, clearly defined packages of work” to be completed daily. Burkeman’s light touch when discussing such modern ills as doomscrolling, coupled with the smart balance he strikes between motivation and reassurance, make this an especially useful resource for burnt-out readers who want to ease their minds without upending their lives. Amid a sea of efficiency-focused, do-it-all self-help guides, this is a welcome alternative. Copyright 2024 Publishers Weekly.

 

I'll Be Waiting by Oliver Burkeman.  Armstrong shines in this nail-biting thriller that hinges on whether its protagonist is dealing with natural or supernatural evil. Nicola Laughton was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis as a child, and told she’d be lucky to live past 20. Despite this prognosis, Nicola, now in her 30s, is running her own company and happily married to Anton Novak. Then their marriage ends tragically when Anton dies in a car crash. Bystanders report his last words to Nicola—“I’ll be waiting for you”—to the press, with one claiming to have photographed Anton’s ghost as he spoke them, and the publicity makes Nicola a reluctant celebrity. To settle the matter in her own mind, she seeks out mediums to contact Anton’s spirit and plans a séance in his family’s old beach house. What starts with unsettling noises and weird phenomena, including clouds of insects, eventually leads to violence and threatens to expose secrets from Nicola’s past.(Oct.) Copyright 2024 Publishers Weekly.

The Ancients, by Joh Larison.  In a world of sea and sand, everyone looks for green land. Kushim, Maren, and Leerit are a trio of siblings who struggle to survive in the wilderness after they are abandoned by their parents in their rundown fishing village. Their mother Lilah is a captive torn away from her home by desert raiders, and she's desperate to reunite with her children. Cyrus the city-dweller grapples with conflicting loyalties and forbidden love . . .  This is a poignant climate-fiction novel that is post-apocalyptic but with a prehistoric feel. The spare writing style enhances the stark and bleak atmosphere, but it also richly captures both the bounty and brutality of the natural world and the hard lessons they learn from it. Fables are interwoven throughout the story until this novel itself becomes something of a cautionary tale, emphasizing how to learn from the past in order to create a better world for the future. Copyright 2024 Library Journal.

The Crescent Moon Tearoom by Stacy Sivinski.  The Crescent Moon Tearoom, run by the triplet Quigley sisters, dispenses tea, sympathy, and fortune-telling to the well-to-do ladies of early 20th-century Chicago. The tea is magical, the sympathy is real, and the fortunes all true, as the sisters are magically gifted seers. Then they find their peace and prosperity under threat by a mysterious curse intended to separate them—and Coven leadership is determined to hasten the process. At least that's what it seems like, as the formerly united Quigleys chase after separate paths to happiness, leaving each other behind, just as the curse intends. . . This cozy fantasy leads the sisters and readers down a primrose path of fear and foreboding—revealing villains around every corner—only to turn delightfully on its heel and magically change into a story of love and hope and a sisterhood that will endure as fate takes the hand it was meant to in each of their paths.—Marlene Harris, Copyright 2024 Library Journal.