It's December, a time when numerous outlets start publishing their "Best of" lists for the year. DPL is no different. The list below is a taste of what books DPL staff have loved most over the past twelve months. Our fiction picks include feel-good romance, nightmare-fueling horror, biting satire, poignant literary fiction, and more. You can find our nonfiction picks in almost every Dewey decimal range. To see the full list of our staff selections in our catalog click here.
Fiction | Nonfiction
In Blackwater Falls, Colorado, veteran police officer Harry Cooper is hot on the heels of some local vandals when the situation turns deadly: believing one of them has a gun, Harry opens fire and Duante Reed, a young Black man, is killed. ... Meanwhile, in nearby Denver, a drug raid goes south and a Latino teen, Mateo Ruiz, is also killed... With the Denver Police force spread thin between the two cases, protests on both sides of the cases begin.
When celebrated writer Alma Cruz inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, she turns it into a place to bury her untold stories--literally. She creates a graveyard for manuscript drafts and revisions and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her. Alma wants her characters to rest in peace, but they have other ideas, and the cemetery becomes a mysterious sanctuary for their true narratives.
A feminist political mystery set in Istanbul during the 1995 elections tells the story of two broke students who witnessed an unusual death on a scuba diving expedition. As the case deepens, they become increasingly entangled with political corruption, religious pressure, and possibly murder. They try to return to their every day, but their lives are increasingly entangled with the political corruption, religious pressure, and economic instability that results from their experience.
With her life in disarray after her Appa's extramarital affair and subsequent departure, Ji-won, plagued by horrifying yet enticing dreams of bloody rooms full of eyes, is overcome by hunger and rage that can only be sated by deceit, manipulation and murder as victims accumulate around her college campus.
A short story collection that explores Korean American womanhood, bodies, animals, and transformation as a means of survival ... Equal parts fantastical--a pair of talking dolls help twins escape a stifling home, a heart boils on the stove as part of an elaborate cure for melancholy--and true to life--a mother and daughter try to heal their rift when the daughter falls unexpectedly pregnant, a woman reexamines her father's legacy after his death--the stories in this collection are hopeful and heartbreaking, full of danger and full of joy.
When Ellie's lovingly overbearing parents ask her to attend PakCon-a food packaging conference in Chicago-to help promote their company and vie to win an ad slot in the Superbowl (no big deal), she's eager for a brief change and a delicious distraction. At the conference, she meets witty, devil-may-care Vanya Simonian. Their meet-cute is cut short, however, when Ellie's parents recognize Vanya as the daughter of the owners of their greatest rival, whose mission...is to whitewash and package Armenian food for the American health-food crowd.
Beverly Underwood and her arch enemy, Lula Dean, live in the tiny town of Troy, Georgia...Beverly is on the school board, and Lula has become a local celebrity by embarking on mission to rid the public libraries of all inappropriate books.... To replace the 'pornographic' books she's challenged at the local public library, Lula starts her own lending library in front of her home....What Lula doesn't know is that a local troublemaker has stolen her wholesome books, removed their dust jackets, and restocked Lula's library with banned books.
Stopped from jumping off a bridge by her guardian angel, a millennial woman learns she is a magical girl like the ones in manga and must wield her credit card as her magic wand to defeat monsters.
In the wake of an environmental catastrophe, January, once a principal in London's Royal Ballet, has become a refugee in Tharsis, the terraformed colony on Mars....January's job choices, housing, and even transportation are dictated by this second-class status, and now a xenophobic politician named Aubrey Gale is running on a platform that would make it all worse. Gale proposes a solution to both their problems: a five year made-for-the-press marriage.... But when January accepts the offer, he discovers that Gale is not at all like they appear in the press.
The interwoven destinies of the people of Meridian will finally be determined in this stunning conclusion to New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Roanhorse's Between Earth and Sky trilogy....Nominated for the Nebula, Lambda, Locus, and Hugo Awards, winner of the Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Ignyte Award from Fiyah magazine, the Between Earth and Sky trilogy is amongst our most lauded modern fantasy series.
Winnifred "Win" McNulty has always been wildly independent and not one to be coddled for her limb difference. Win has spent most of her life trying to prove that she can do it all on her own. With some minor adjustments, she's done just fine. Then a one-night stand at a costume party with the incredibly charming Bo changes everything. Win finds herself pregnant--and decides to keep it. While Bo is surprisingly elated to step up to the plate, Win is unsure of whether she can handle this new challenge.
In the midst of God sending her signs through Instagram and Spotify telling her to break up with her girlfriend, twenty-seven-year-old Norma meets a new therapist for one reason: she really needs to write again. With only one story left to finish her collection, Norma is desperate for an answer: should she leave her girlfriend in order to finish her manuscript?
Humanity is a dying breed, utterly reliant on artificial labor and service. When a domesticated robot gets a nasty little idea downloaded into its core programming, they murder their owner. The robot discovers they can also do something else they never did before: They can run away. Fleeing the household they enter a wider world they never knew existed, where the age-old hierarchy of humans at the top is disintegrating into ruins and an entire robot ecosystem devoted to human wellbeing is having to find a new purpose.
In ten chilling stories from an ensemble cast of contemporary Latin American writers, including Mariana Enriquez (tr. Megan McDowell), Camila Sosa Villlada (tr. Kit Maude), Claudia Hernández (tr. by Julia Sanches and Johanna Warren) and Mónica Ojeda (tr. Sarah Booker and Noelle de la Paz), horror infiltrates the unexpected, taboo regions of the present-day psyche.
A bold, feminist debut novel, reimagining Mary, Queen of Scots's darkest hour, when she was held hostage in a remote Scottish castle with a handful of loyal women while plotting a daring escape to reclaim her country and her freedom.
A deeply transformative memoir that reframes how we think about death and how it can help us lead better, more fulfilling and authentic lives, from America's preeminent death doula.
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is an odyssey of struggle and resilience. With astonishing nuance and detail, Blitzer tells an epic story about the people whose lives ebb and flow across the border, and in doing so, he delves into the heart of American life itself. This vital and remarkable story has shaped the nation’s turbulent politics and culture in countless ways—and will almost certainly determine its future.
In her evocative, genre-defying graphic memoir, Tessa Hulls tells the story of three generations of women in her family: her Chinese grandmother, Sun Yi; her mother, Rose; and herself....Extensively researched and gorgeously rendered, Feeding Ghosts is Hulls's homecoming, a vivid journey into the beating heart of one family, set against the dark backdrop of Chinese history. By turns fascinating and heartbreaking, inventive and poignant, Feeding Ghosts exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.
How do we live without the ones we love? Grief Is for People is a deeply moving and suspenseful portrait of friendship, and a book about loss that is profuse with life. Sloane Crosley is one of our most renowned observers of contemporary behavior, and now the pathos that has been ever present in her trademark wit is on full display. After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in philosophy and art, hoping for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief.
In a fiercely personal yet authoritative voice, prolific contemporary poet Mikeas Sánchez explores the worldview of the Zoque people of southern Mexico. Her paced, steely lyrics fuse cosmology, lineage, feminism, and environmental activism into a singular body of work that stands for the self and the collective in the same instant. "I am woman and I celebrate every vein," she writes, "where I guard my ancestors' secrets / every Zoque man's word in my mouth / every Zoque woman's wisdom in my spit."
Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the Manhattan-based non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. In Language City, Perlin recounts the unique history of immigration that shaped the city, and follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds.
TikTok chef Jessica's first cookbook ... includes over 150 recipes for lunch-makers of all experience levels. There are 60 lunch box ideas, each containing two to three recipes, which can be mixed and matched to create endless lunch combinations.
"An electrifying collection of poems that tells a universal tale of survival and revolution through the lens of Black femininity. Tara M. Stringfellow embraces complexity, grappling with the sometimes painful, sometimes wonderful way two conflicting things can be true at the same time. How it's possible to have a strong voice and also feel silenced. To be loyal to things and people that betray us. To burn as hot with rage as we do with love. Each poem asks how we can heal and sustain relationships with people, systems, and ourselves.
When journalist Annabelle Tometich picks up the phone one June morning, she isn’t expecting a collect call from an inmate at the Lee County Jail. And when she accepts, she certainly isn’t prepared to hear her mother’s voice on the other end of the line. However, explaining the situation to her younger siblings afterwards was easy; all she had to say was, “Mom shot at some guy. He was messing with her mangoes.” They immediately understood.
Caleb Carr...has had many close feline companions, with relationships that have outlasted most of his human ones. But only after building a three-story home in rural, upstate New York did he enter into the most extraordinary of all of his cat pairings: Masha... had hissed and fought off all previous carers and potential adopters, but somehow, she chose Caleb as her savior....The story of Caleb and Masha is an inspiring and life-affirming relationship for readers of all backgrounds and interests--a love story like no other.
Silent, dry, and barren, Earth's 4.34-billion-year-old companion is essential to life on earth....Scientists advocate for a return to the moon to do research; governments and billionaires want to return to turn a profit from its mineral resources. Who gets to decide how we use a celestial body that, Boyle argues, belongs to everyone and no one? How can we learn to protect this beautiful, spectral thing that we all share?
In Rebel Girl, Hanna's raw and insightful new memoir, she takes us from her tumultuous childhood home to her formative college years in Olympia, Washington, and on to her first years on tour, fighting hard for gigs and for her band....She also writes candidly about the Riot Grrrl movement, documenting with love its grassroots origins but critiquing its later exclusivity. In an uncut voice all her own, Hanna reveals the hardest times along with the most joyful--and how it continues to fuel her revolutionary art and music.
Chantha Nguon recounts her life as a Cambodia refugee who lost everything and everyone--her house her country, her parents, her siblings, her friends--everything but the memories of her mother's kitchen, the tastes and aromas of the foods her mother made before the dictator Pol Pot tore her country apart.
Growing up in Columbus in the '90s, Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron were forged, and countless others weren't. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tensions between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with memoir.
Wild Life follows Rae on her adventures and explorations in some of the world's most remote locales. Hers is a story about a nearly twenty-year career in the wild -- carving a niche as one of very few Black female scientists -- and the challenges she had to overcome, expectations she had to leave behind, and the many lessons she learned along the way. An incredible journey spanning the Great Plains of North America to the rainforests of Madagascar, Wild Life sheds light on our pivotal relationship and responsibility to the natural world.