The Girls with No Names is a beautiful tale of hope, courage and sisterhood, inspired by the real House of Mercy and the girls confined there for daring to break the rules.  Growing up in New York City in the 1910s, Luella and Effie Tildon realize that even as young women, their freedoms come with limits.   Luella, the brazen older sister, becomes emboldened to do as she pleases.  Her rebellion comes with consequences, and one morning Luella is mysteriously gone.  Effie suspects that her father has sent Luella to the House of Mercy & hatches a plan to get herself committed to save her sister.

Selena Burdick expertly weaves together the stories of women affected by the asylum, telling a mesmerizing tale of strength, subterfuge, and the unbreakable bond between sisters.  This atmospheric, heartwarming story explores not only the historical House of Mercy, but the lives-and secrets-of the girls who stayed there.  A spellbinding thriller.

GPL: F Burdick

“This is a random universe,” Reacher says.  Once in a blue moon things turn out just right.”  This isn’t one of those times.

Reacher is on a Greyhound bus, minding his own business, with no particular place to go & all the time in the world to get there.  Then he steps off the bus to help an old man who is obviously just a victim waiting to happen.  But you know what they say about good deeds.  Now Reacher wants to make it right.  An elderly couple has made a few well-meaning mistakes & now they owe big money to some very bad people.  One brazen move leads to another & suddenly Reacher finds himself a wanted man in the middle of a brutal turf war between rival Ukrainian & Albanian gangs.

Reacher has to stay one step ahead of the loan sharks, the thugs, & the assassins.  He teams up with a fed-up waitress who knows a little more than she’s letting on, & sets out to take down the powerful & make the greedy pay.  It’s a long shot.  The odds are against him.  But Reacher believes in a certain kind of justice…the kind that comes along once in a blue moon.

GPL:  F Child

Far beneath the surface of the earth, upon the shores of the Starless Sea, there is a labyrinthine collection of tunnels and rooms filled with stories.  The entryways that lead to this sanctuary are often hidden, sometimes on forest floors, sometimes in private homes, sometimes in plain sight.  But those who seek will find.  Their doors have been waiting for them.

Zachary Ezra Rawlins is searching for his door.  When he discovers a mysterious book in the stacks of his campus library, he begins to read & is entranced by tales of lovelorn prisoners, lost cities, nameless acolytes.  Suddenly a turn of the page brings Zachary to a story from his own childhood, impossibly written in this book that is older than he is.  Zachary meets two people who will change the course of his life.  The three of them venture deeper into an intoxicating world searching for answers.  A timeless love story unspools, casting a spell of pirates, painters, lovers, liars, & ships that sail upon a Starless Sea.

Erin Morgenstern is the author of The Night Circus, a number one national bestseller that has been sold around the world & translated into 37 languages.

GPL:  F MORGENST

Alone At Dawn—Medal of Honor recipient John Chapman and the Untold Story of the World’s Deadliest Special Operations Force

In the pre-dawn hours of March 4, 2002, just below the 10,496-foot peak of a mountain in eastern Afghanistan, a fierce battle raged.  Outnumbered by Al Qaeda fighters, Air Force Combat Controller John Chapman & a handful of Navy SEALs struggled to take the summit in a desperate bid to find a lost teammate. Believing he was dead, his SEAL leader ordered a retreat.  Chapman regained consciousness alone, with the enemy closing in on three sides.

Chapman knowing he was mortally wounded, single-handedly engaged two dozen hardened fighters to save the lives of an incoming rescue squad.  This posthumously earned him the Medal of Honor.  Chapman is the first airman in nearly 50 years to be given the distinction reserved for America’s greatest heroes.

Written by Dan Schilling, a 30-year special operations & Combat Control veteran, and  Lori Chapman Longfritz, sister of John Chapman, was a long-time advocate for John’s Medal of Honor & is proud to share the story of her brother, who stood out from the ordinary long before he ever put on a uniform.

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An AIR FORCE LOADMASTER  in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan.

An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut.

A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another.

These, and other strangers—each summoned in different ways by trees—are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest.  From the roots to the crown and back to seeds, The Overstory,   by  Richard Powers unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, exploring the essential conflict on this planet:  the one taking place between humans and nonhumans.  There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected,resourceful, magnificently inventive, & almost invisible to us.  This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world & who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.  If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us?

GPL:  F Powers