Stop by your local branch to see Peak Picks from the past two months, with titles from June and July available now!

Starting with June’s titles, in fiction, Julia Phillips (Disappearing Earth) delivers a mesmerizing novel of two sisters whose lives are upended by an unexpected visitor–a tale of family, obsession, and a mysterious creature in the woods– in Bear; Morgan Talty (Night of the Living Rez), a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation, presents a masterful and unforgettable story of family, legacy, bloodlines, culture and inheritance, and what, if anything, we owe one another, in Fire Exit; YA author Nicola Yoon makes her adult debut with a hotly-anticipated and endlessly provocative new thriller of race and privilege set in an all-Black gated community in One Of Our Kind; Peter Swanson’s spectacularly twisty and deviously clever new novel features a newlywed librarian who begins to suspect the man she married might be a killer in A Talent for Murder; and Porochista Khakpour serves a dramatic, biting, yet full-of-heart tragicomic saga about a highly dysfunctional Iranian-American family of multimillionaires in Tehrangeles.

In nonfiction, Khushbu Shah injects an electric and irresistible energy into the story of Indian food, with 125 recipes inspired by the cooking of the diaspora, in Amrikan; Madhumita Murgia tells a riveting story of what it means to be human in a world changed by artificial intelligence, revealing the perils and inequities of our growing reliance on automated decision-making in Code Dependent; Questlove delivers a perceptive and personal reflection on the first half-century of hip-hop that only he could write in Hip-Hop is History; comedian, screenwriter, and podcaster Chelsea Devantez debuts with a dynamic memoir-in-essays, detailing her tumultuous upbringing and uproarious career path into Hollywood in I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This (But I’m Going to Anyway); and D.W. Gibson provides a definitive history of Seattle’s 1999 World Trade Organization protests, featuring over 100 original interviews and timed to the event’s twenty-fifth anniversary, in One Week to Change the World.

In July, fiction kicked off with a debut by Palestinian journalist Yasmin Zaher, The Coin, a bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman’s unraveling as she teaches at a New York City middle school, gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags, and strives to gain control over her body and mind; debut author Oisín McKenna follows a vibrant multi-generational cast of characters through a London heatwave as their simmering tensions and secrets come to a head over a feverish, life-changing weekend in Evenings and Weekends; Kate Quinn (The Diamond Eye) returns with a haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, DC, boardinghouse during the McCarthy era in The Briar Club; and in Dinaw Mengestu’s (The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears) newest, Someone Like Us, the son of Ethiopian immigrants seeks to understand a hidden family history and uncovers a past colored by unexpected loss, addiction, and the enduring emotional pull toward home.

In nonfiction, renowned climber and National Geographic photographer Cory Richards shares his incredible adventures — and the early trauma that drove him to seek such heights in The Color of Everything; Anne Appelbaum (Twilight of Democracy) provides an alarming account of how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how we should organize to defeat them, in Autocracy, Inc.; and TikTok and Spotify star Drew Afualo writes a book that is part manual, part manifesto, and part memoir in Loud.

~posted by Frank B. and Jane S. All descriptions were provided by publishers. ​