Pierce County Library System
Information & Imagination

Best bad things, The
(Carrasco, Katrina Marie)
It is 1887, and Alma is on the hunt for stolen opium. Trained in espionage by Pinkerton Detective Agency, Alma now works for Delphine Beaumond, the seductive mastermind of a smuggling ring. Alma's enjoying her dangerous game of shifting identities and double crosses as she fights for a promotion and an invitation back into Delphine's bed. But it's getting harder to keep her stories straight and to know whom to trust. One wrong move and she could be unmasked: as a woman, as a traitor, or as a spy.

Long petal of the sea, A
(Allende, Isabel)
"In the late 1930s, civil war grips Spain. When General Franco and his Fascists succeed in overthrowing the government, hundreds of thousands are forced to flee in a treacherous journey over the mountains to the French border. Among them is Roser, a pregnant young widow, who finds her life irreversibly intertwined with that of Victor Dalmau, an army doctor and the brother of her deceased love. In order to survive, the two must unite in a marriage neither of them desires. Together with two thousand other refugees, they embark on the SS Winnipeg, a ship chartered by the poet Pablo Neruda, to Chile: "the long petal of sea and wind and snow." As unlikely partners, they embrace their exile as the rest of Europe erupts in world war. Starting over on a new continent, Roser and Victor will find that home might have been closer than they thought all along. -- Provided by publisher

Paragon Hotel, The
(Faye, Lyndsay)
1921. "Nobody" Alice James is on a cross-country train, carrying a bullet wound and fleeing for her life following an illicit drug and liquor deal gone horribly wrong. Her sights are set on Oregon: the end of the line. She befriends Max, a black Pullman porter, who leads her to Portland's Paragon Hotel. It's the only all-black hotel in the city, and its lodgers seem unduly terrified of a white woman on the premises. She meets the churlish Dr. Pendleton, the stately Mavereen, and club chanteuse Blossom Fontaine. But the Ku Klux Klan has arrived in Portland, burning crosses, inciting violence, electing officials, and brutalizing blacks. And only the residents of the Paragon are willing to search for a missing mulatto child who vanished into the Oregon woods. -- adapted from jacket.

Piranesi
(Clarke, Susanna)
"From the New York Times bestselling author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an intoxicating, hypnotic new novel set in a dreamlike alternative reality. Piranesi's house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house. There is one other person in the house-a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known. For readers of Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane and fans of Madeline Miller's Circe, Piranesi introduces an astonishing new world, an infinite labyrinth, full of startling images and surreal beauty, haunted by the tides and the clouds"-- Provided by publisher

So lucky
(Griffith, Nicola)
Mara Tagarelli is, professionally, the head of a multimillion-dollar AIDS foundation; personally, she is a committed martial artist. But her life has turned inside out like a sock. She can't rely on family, her body is letting her down, and friends and colleagues are turning away--they treat her like a victim. She needs to break that narrative: build her own community, learn new strengths, and fight. But what do you do when you find out that the story you've been told, the story you'vetold yourself, is not true? How can you fight if you can't trust your body? Who can you rely on if those around you don't have your best interests at heart, and the systems designed to help do more harm than good? Mara makes a decision and acts, but her actions unleash monsters aimed squarely at the heart of her new community. This is fiction from the front lines, incandescent and urgent, a narrative juggernaut that rips through sentiment to expose the savagery of America's treatment of the disabled and chronically ill. But So Lucky also blazes with hope and a ferocious love of self, of the life that becomes possible when we stop believing lies.