Adult Summer Reading Book Bingo Challenge at the Palisades Free Library: Suggested Titles

A thriller that unravels old secrets after a murder on an English estate.

An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

From Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, a searing, deeply personal account of enduring--and surviving--an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him

The long-buried love story of Eliza Raine, an orphan heiress banished from India to England at age six, and Anne Lister, a brilliant, troublesome tomboy, who meet at the Manor School for young ladies in York in 1805 when they are both fourteen.   Full of passion and heartbreak, the tangled lives of Anne and Eliza form a love story for the ages.

How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures?

A short, darkly funny, hand grenade of a novel about a Nigerian woman whose younger sister has a very inconvenient habit of killing her boyfriends

In Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone, a desperate family seeks a new beginning in the near-isolated wilderness of Alaska only to find that their unpredictable environment is less threatening than the erratic behavior found in human nature.

From the prize-winning author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo comes Songbirds, a stunning novel about the disappearance of a Sri Lankan domestic worker and how the most vulnerable people find their voices.

A lush, sweeping love story about a Hindu performer and a Muslim calligrapher, set against the backdrop of Partition in 20th century India and Pakistan.

In September 1883, a small town in the South Australian outback huddles under strange, vivid sunsets. Six-year-old Denny Wallace has gone missing during a dust storm, and the entire community is caught up in the search for him. As they scour the desert and mountains for the lost child, the residents of Fairly--newlyweds, farmers, mothers, Indigenous trackers, cameleers, children, artists, schoolteachers, widows, maids, policemen--confront their relationships, both with one another and with the land­scape they inhabit. The colonial Australia of The Sun Walks Down is noisy with opinions, arguments, longings, and terrors.

A rich and riveting debut spanning four generations of Eastern European Jewish women bound by blood, half-hidden secrets, and the fantastical visitation of a shapeshifting stranger over the course of 100 years

John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.

A lavish historical drama reimagining of The Island of Doctor Moreau set against the backdrop of nineteenth-century Mexico.

young woman arrives in Los Angeles determined to start over and discovers she doesn’t need to leave everything behind after all.

A spellbinding story about what may transpire when the natural world collides with a legacy of witchcraft. Weaving together the stories of three extraordinary women across five centuries, Emilia Hart's Weyward is an astonishing debut, and an enthralling novel of female resilience.

Ray McMillian is a Black classical musician on the rise—undeterred by the pressure and prejudice of the classical music world—when a shocking theft sends him on a desperate quest to recover his great-great-grandfather’s heirloom violin on the eve of the most prestigious musical competition in the world.

Welcome to Eris: an island with only one house, one inhabitant, one way out. Unreachable from the Scottish mainland for twelve hours each day. Once home to Vanessa: A famous artist whose notoriously unfaithful husband disappeared twenty years ago. Now home to Grace: A solitary creature of the tides, content in her own isolation. But when a shocking discovery is made in an art gallery far away in London, a visitor comes calling. And the secrets of Eris threaten to emerge....

From the attic of Lyntons, a dilapidated English country mansion, Frances Jellico sees them--Cara first: dark and beautiful, then Peter: striking and serious. The couple is spending the summer of 1969 in the rooms below hers while Frances is researching the architecture in the surrounding gardens. But as the hot summer rolls lazily on, it becomes clear that not everything is right between Cara and Peter. The stories that Cara tells don't quite add up, and as Frances becomes increasingly entangled in the lives of the glamorous, hedonistic couple, the boundaries between truth and lies, right and wrong, begin to blur. Amid the decadence, a small crime brings on a bigger one: a crime so terrible that it will brand their lives forever.

Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn't write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American--in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel.

A crackling, satirical debut novel about a young man given a shot at stardom as the lone Black salesman at a mysterious, cult-like, and wildly successful startup where nothing is as it seems.

A highly entertaining, sharply observed novel about sisters, their perfect lives . . . and their perfect lies.

A twisting story of love and deceit: an American man vanishes on a rural road in Vietnam, and his girlfriend follows a path that leads her home to the very hospital where they met. Set amidst the adrenaline-fueled world of the emergency room, The Red Lotus is a global thriller about those who dedicate their lives to saving people—and those who peddle death to the highest bidder.

Based on the real life of Lieutenant Annie Fox, Chief Nurse of Hickam Hospital, The Woman with a Purple Heart is an inspiring WWII novel of heroic leadership, courage, and friendship that also exposes a shocking and shameful side of history.

Almost twenty-five years after the infamous art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum--still the largest unsolved art theft in history--one of the stolen Degas paintings is delivered to the Boston studio of a young artist. Claire Roth has entered into a Faustian bargain with a powerful gallery owner by agreeing to forge the Degas in exchange for a one-woman show in his renowned gallery. But as she begins her work, she starts to suspect that this long-missing masterpiece--the very one that had been hanging at the Gardner for one hundred years--may itself be a forgery. The Art Forger is a thrilling novel about seeing--and not seeing--the secrets that lie beneath the canvas.

Stéphane Bréitwieser is the most prolific art thief of all time. He pulled off more than 200 heists, often in crowded museums in broad daylight. His girlfriend served as his accomplice. His collection was worth an estimated $2 billion. He never sold a piece, displaying his stolen art in his attic bedroom. He felt like a king. Until everything came to a shocking end. In this spellbinding portrait of obsession and flawed genius, Michael Finkel gives us one of the most remarkable true-crime narratives of our times, a riveting story of art, theft, love, and an insatiable hunger to possess beauty at any cost.

We're all familiar with the works of Claude Monet, thanks in no small part to the ubiquitous reproductions of his water lilies on umbrellas, handbags, scarves, and dorm-room posters. But did you also know that Monet and his cohort were trailblazing rebels whose works were originally deemed unbelievably ugly and vulgar? And while you probably know the tale of Vincent van Gogh's suicide, you may not be aware that there's pretty compelling evidence that the artist didn't die by his own hand but was accidentally killed--or even murdered.

Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Sebastian Smee tells the fascinating story of four pairs of artists--Manet and Degas, Picasso and Matisse, Pollock and de Kooning, Freud and Bacon--whose fraught, competitive friendships spurred them to new creative heights.

Ocean's Eleven meets The Farewell in Portrait of a Thief, a lush, lyrical heist novel inspired by the true story of Chinese art vanishing from Western museums; about diaspora, the colonization of art, and the complexity of the Chinese American identity

A mesmerizing novel about a first-generation Ivy League student who uncovers the genius work of a female artist decades after her suspicious death.

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to transform Hai's relationship to himself, his family, and a community on the brink.

Star point guard Mack Morris's senior year of high school begins with twin cataclysms: the death of Mack's father and the arrival of transfer student Liv Cooper. Playing side by side for their high school basketball team, Mack and Liv discover an electrifying, game-winning chemistry on the court. Off the court, they fall into an equally intoxicating more-than-friendship--one that feels out-of-bounds in their small Pennsylvania town. Mack teeters on the precipice of adulthood as desire and grief collide with drugs, sex, and the looming college signing deadline. Caught between the dual impulses of ambition and self-destruction, Mack must decide what kind of life they want to fight for.

Once upon a time, Ramona Riley was a student at a prestigious art school, with dreams of landing in Hollywood as a costume designer to the stars. But after her father's car accident, she had to quit and return to her small New Hampshire town to help take care of her younger sister. But when a big-budget romantic comedy comes to Clover Lake to film, she wonders if this could be her chance. There's only one problem--Dylan Monroe, her first kiss and Hollywood's favorite wild child--is the star. Dylan takes on a project at a charming lake town--she even works at the town's café (very quaint), shadowing a local waitress there. But Dylan soon realizes it's not just some small-town waitress she's getting to know--Ramona Riley is someone she's met before, someone who remembers her even more vividly. Before long, however, reality hits them, and both women must decide if the spark between them can fan the flames of their individual dreams, or if it will extinguish their light.

A moving and deeply humane story about a trans man who must relinquish the freedoms of prewar Berlin to survive first the Nazis then the Allies, all while protecting the ones he loves. Brimming with hope, resilience, and the enduring power of community, The Lilac People tells an extraordinary story inspired by real events and recovers an unknown moment of World War II and trans history.

In this collection of one novel and three stories, bestselling author Torrey Peters's keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing. In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition.

Where there's a will, there's a war. Thayer Wren, the brilliant CEO of Wrenfare Magitech and so-called father of modern technology, is dead. Any one of his three telepathically and electrokinetically gifted children would be a plausible inheritor to the Wrenfare throne. Or at least, so they like to think. On the pipeline of gifted kid to clinically depressed adult, nobody wins--but which Wren will come out on top?

When Dylan Mulvaney came out as a woman online, she was a viral sensation almost overnight, emerging as a trailblazing voice on social media. Dylan's personal coming-out story blossomed into a platform for advocacy and empowerment for trans people all over the world. In Paper Doll: Notes from a Late Bloomer, Dylan pulls back the curtain of her "It Girl" lifestyle with a witty and intimate reflection of her life pre- and post-transition. She covers everything from her first big break in theater to the first time her dad recognized her as a girl to how she handled scandals, cancellations, and . . . tucking. It's both laugh-out-loud funny and powerfully honest--and is a love letter to everyone who stands up for queer joy.

What is the difference between men and women? Jennifer Finney Boylan, bestselling author of She's Not There and co-author of Mad Honey with Jodi Picoult, examines the divisions--as well as the common ground--between the genders, and reflects on her own experiences, both difficult and joyful, as a transgender American. Cleavage provides hope for a future in which we all have the freedom to live joyfully as men, as women, and in the space between us.