MLA - Main Librarians' Picks 2023 Q2

"In a strange little home built into the branches of a grove of trees, live three robots-fatherly inventor android Giovanni Lawson, a pleasantly sadistic nurse machine, and a small vacuum desperate for love and attention. Victor Lawson, a human, lives there too. They're a family, hidden and safe. The day Vic salvages and repairs an unfamiliar android labelled "HAP," he learns of a shared dark past between Hap and Gio-a past spent hunting humans. When...

Paris, 1937. A Hungarian-Jewish architecture student arrives from Budapest with a mysterious letter he promised to deliver. But when he falls into a complicated relationship with the recipient, he becomes privy to a secret that will alter the course of his family's history. From a small Hungarian town to the grand opera houses of Budapest and Paris to an unimaginable life in labor camps, this is the story of a family shattered and remade in history's...

"Older women often feel invisible, but sometimes that's their secret weapon. They've spent their lives as the deadliest assassins in a clandestine international organization, but now that they're sixty years old, four women friends can't just retire - it's kill or be killed in this action-packed thriller by New York Times bestselling and Edgar Award-nominated author Deanna Raybourn. Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie have worked for the Museum,...

"From the author of the beloved national bestseller Migrations, a #1 IndieNext pick, a gorgeous and pulse-pounding new novel set in the wild Scottish Highlands. Inti Flynn arrives in Scotland with her twin sister, Aggie, to lead a team of biologists tasked with reintroducing fourteen gray wolves into the remote Highlands. She hopes to heal not only the dying landscape, but Aggie, too, unmade by the terrible secrets that drove the sisters out of Alaska....

Dynasties battle for the crown...Three daughter, one crown, all out war; Gaela is a ruthless commander, Regan is a master manipulator and Elia is a star-blessed priest. The island is at risk and an empire is poised for ruin; the line of Lear will be soaked in blood.

Staying busy has helped Tova cope ever since her son disappeared decades ago. So when her husband dies, she takes a job at the aquarium, where she meets Marcellus, an octopus that deduces what happened to her son. For fans of A Man Called Ove, a charming, witty and compulsively readable exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope that traces a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus. After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began...

""Rock Paper Scissors is the latest exciting domestic thriller from the queen of the killer twist, New York Times bestselling author Alice Feeney. Think you know the person you married? Think again ... Things have been wrong with Mr and Mrs Wright for a long time. When Adam and Amelia win a weekend away to Scotland, it might be just what their marriage needs. Self-confessed workaholic and screenwriter Adam Wright has lived with face blindness his...

""In a world where disease has been eliminated, the only way to die is to be randomly killed ('gleaned') by professional reapers ('scythes'). Two teens must compete with each other to become a scythe--a position neither of them wants. The one who becomes a scythe must kill the one who doesn't"--

"An esteemed veterinary oncologist battles her own cancer diagnosis as she treats her furry and slobbering patients with the same disease"--

"Hugo, Locus, and Nebula-Award winner Mary Robinette Kowal blends her no-nonsense approach to life in space with her talent for creating glittering high-society in this stylish SF mystery, The Spare Man. Tesla Crane, one of the richest women in the world,is on her honeymoon on an interplanetary space liner, cruising between Earth and Mars. She's traveling incognito and is reveling in her anonymity. Then someone is murdered and her husband is named...