New Releases - November 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!

FICTION

Silent Are the Dead by D.M. Rowell (Koyh Mi O Boy Dah).  One mystery bleeds into another as a Native woman and her cousin seek a missing headdress that may have instigated a murder. Mud Sawpole and her cousin Denny have gathered with their tribal elders to bless the Jefferson Peace Medal outside the Kiowa Museum. Cleansing the medal’s negative energy, especially after the duo had to solve a murder to recover the precious symbol, brings a healing sense of contentment to Mud. After the ceremony, she tries to get herself back into the head space of her adopted Silicon Valley home and work, but when she and Denny see that tribe leader Wyatt Walker’s office has been tossed, they know the danger isn’t over. Is this about the medal, other relics in the museum, or the fracking operation that’s commenced on tribal lands? . . .  An immersive cultural experience with Kiowa culture and language wrapped in a mystery plot. Copyright Kirkus 2024.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami.  The latest work from award-winning Murakami (Novelist as a Vocation) transports readers to a small town where residents have lost their own shadows, clocks have no hands, and the high wall surrounding the community can move and change its boundaries. A young man infatuated with a 16-year-old girl narrates. With the girl's help, he becomes a "dream reader" in a library without books or textual materials. He explores different realities as he delves into the dreams he experiences while reading. In his mid-40s, he finally finds a fulfilling position as head librarian in a rural area many miles away. Along a walking path between work, home, and the local cemetery, he frequents a coffee shop and befriends its owner. When he stops by one evening to have dinner with the coffee shop owner, she has just finished reading Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. That magical realism tale sheds a floodlight of insight into the narrator's mind, just as Murakami's book, a masterpiece, will with readers. VERDICT At times a meditation on romance, reality vs. fantasy, ghosts, and the power of written words, this metaphysical novel examines the questionable value of timekeeping while thoroughly exploring unconditional love, self-imposed constraints, and deaths of one's body and soul.—Lisa Rohrbaugh, Copyright 2024 Library Journal.

Toto, by A. J. Hackwith.  Toto always tried to be a good dog, but when he was taken by an animal control officer, all bets were off. Transported by a twister to a magical land filled with strange characters, talking animals, and magical quests, Toto is thinking that maybe he found a new place to be. Meeting some unusual people along the way, including a talking scarecrow and a boy-turned-tinman, Toto finds his human Dorothy being led further astray, and not just on a road of gold bricks. The Emerald City is not as friendly as expected, and the Wizard sends Dorothy off to recover a witch's broom, making Toto see that at least one of them needs to figure out the truth behind the curtain and the desire for a pair of fancy bedazzled shoes. A good dog may be his owner's best friend, but a bad dog knows how to get things done. VERDICT Readers will be delighted to discover this unique take on The Wizard of Oz.—Kristi Chadwick, Copyright 2024 Library Journal.

NONFICTION

How to Let Things Go by Shunmyo Masuno.  For those feeling overwhelmed, internationally bestselling Buddhist monk Masuno (The Art of Simple Living) offers a guide for stepping away from the demands of everyday life and prioritizing what really matters. Already a bestseller in Japan, this book offers lessons and practical tips for creating a calmer, more fulfilling life. Copyright 2024 Library Journal.

Bake Club by Christina Tosi/Shannon Salzano.  A single Instagram post during the 2020 pandemic from Tosi, a James Beard Award winner, cookbook author, and founder and owner of NYC's Milk Bar, led to the creation of the Bake Club newsletter and Instagram sessions. Now Tosi funnels everything she has taught that virtual band of bakers into her latest ingeniously inventive cookbook. After an overview of basic baking ingredients and tools, the book breaks down into chapters such as "DIY Pantry," "Dropoffable, Snacks," and "Fancy Desserts." Recipes themselves range from caramel sauce to English muffins to chocolate mirror cake. Perennial favorites, such as marshmallow treats (with assorted variations) and the classic condensed-milk version of fudge, are included, as well as more Milk Bar-specific recipes, including the one for cinnamon-toast cereal. Baking purists may blanche at some of Tosi's culinary approaches, such as her version of lemon bars, which uses a boxed lemon cake mix in the crust and cream cheese in the filing. But Tosi's easy, breezy writing style and welcoming tone will encourage both baking novices and longtime sweet chefs to give her way a try. VERDICT If, as Tosi believes, baking is a mechanism for magic, then she is a true culinary Houdini. Copyright 2024 Library Journal.

Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures by Katherine Rundell.  Literature, folklore, history, and science inform these profiles of 22 endangered species. The award-winning author of young adult books and a superb biography of John Donne turns her sharp literary style and wit to endangered animals in this brisk, eye-opening, thoroughly entertaining book. Animals who exhibit “everlasting flight, a self-galvanizing heart and a baby who learns names in the womb” may seem like inventions, she writes, but the natural world is "so startling that our capacity for wonder, huge as it is, can barely skim the surface." Meet the speedy swift, the American wood frog, and the dolphin. Early on, Rundell reminds us that we’ve lost “more than half of all wild things that lived.” Copyright 2024 Kirkus