Staff Favorites

"A beautifully designed guidebook to the unnoticed yet essential elements of our cities, from the creators of the wildly popular 99% Invisible podcast"-- Provided by publisher.

Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general--also known as her tough-as-talons mother--has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders. But when you're smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away ... because dragons don't bond to "fragile" humans....

Ripley is recovering from her first encounter with the deadly alien. Her account of that event is received with skepticism, but transmissions from a colony later established on the Alien's planet abruptly cease. Burke, an up-and-coming company man, talks Ripley into going back with a squad of colonial marines. Of course the Marines do not take her warnings seriously either, until they come face-to-face with the awesome alien spawn.

A family extending from Pakistan to California, deals with generations of young love, old regrets, and forgiveness. Lahore, Pakistan. Then. Misbah is a dreamer and storyteller, newly married to Toufiq in an arranged match. After their young life is shaken by tragedy, they come to the United States and open the Clouds' Rest Inn Motel, hoping for a new start. Juniper, California. Now. Salahudin and Noor are more than best friends; they are family....

A murderous android discovers itself in "All Systems Red", a tense science fiction adventure by Martha Wells that interrogates the roots of consciousness through Artificial intelligence. In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids, for their own safety. But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest...

"'The Anarchist's Design Book' is an exploration of furniture forms that have persisted outside of the high styles that dominate every museum exhibit, scholarly text and woodworking magazine of the last 200 years. ... This book explores 11 of these forms - a bed, dining tables, chairs, chests, desks, shelving - and offers a deep exploration into the two construction techniques used to make these pieces that have been forgotten, neglected or rejected"--Publisher's...

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the world for years. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. Expeditions into Area X have ended in disaster or death. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the latest expedition. The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and the narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the...

Fifteen-year-old Ari Mendoza is an angry loner with a brother in prison, but when he meets Dante and they become friends, Ari starts to ask questions about himself, his parents, and his family that he has never asked before.

A variation on the Cinderella story in which a girl named Ash grows up believing in the fairy realm that the king and his philosophers have sought to suppress, until one day she must choose between a handsome fairy cursed to love her and the King's Huntress, whom she loves.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • "Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered that she had turned into the wrong person." The woman is Rebecca Davitch, a fifty-three-year-old grandmother.
"You’ll want to turn back to the first chapter the moment you finish the last.” —PEOPLE
On the surface, Beck, as she is known to the Davitch clan, is outgoing, joyous, a natural celebrator....