FICTION
The Chaos Agent by Mark Greaney
Someone is killing the world’s leading experts on robotics and artificial intelligence. Is it a tech company trying to eliminate the competition or is it something even more sinister? It’s an irresistible lure for most, but not for the Gray Man. His quest for a quiet life has led him to Central America where he and his lover, Zoya Zakharova, have assumed new identities. With a list of enemies that includes billionaires, terrorists, and governments, they need to keep a low profile, but the world’s deadliest assassin can’t expect to hide out forever. Now, they’re back on the run, but it’s clear that whoever’s tracking them is always going to be one step ahead. To fight is the only option left, and no one fights dirtier than the Gray Man.
Western Lane by Chetna Maroo
Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the game becomes her world. Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters. Her life is reduced to the sport, guided by its rhythms: the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot and its echo. But on the court, she is not alone. She is with her pa. She is with Ged, a 13-year-old boy with his own formidable talent. She is with the players who have come before her. She is in awe. An indelible coming-of-age story, Chetna Maroo’s first novel captures the ordinary and annihilates it with beauty.
Forbidden Notebook: A Novel by Alba De Cespedes
Valeria Cossati never suspected how unhappy she had become with the shabby gentility of her bourgeois life—until she begins to jot down her thoughts and feelings in a little black book she keeps hidden in a closet. This new secret activity leads her to scrutinize herself and her life more closely, and she soon realizes that her individuality is being stifled by her devotion and sense of duty toward her husband, daughter, and son. As the conflicts between parents and children, husband and wife, and friends and lovers intensify, what goes on behind the Cossatis’ facade of middle-class respectability gradually comes to light, tearing the family’s fragile fabric apart.
A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand
Holly Sherwin has been a struggling playwright for years, but now, after receiving a grant to develop her play Witching Night, she may finally be close to her big break. All she needs is time and space to bring her vision to life. When she stumbles across Hill House on a weekend getaway upstate, she is immediately taken in by the mansion, nearly hidden outside a remote village. It’s enormous, old, and ever-so eerie—the perfect place to develop and rehearse her play. Despite her own hesitations, Holly’s girlfriend, Nisa, agrees to join Holly in renting the house for a month, and soon a troupe of actors, each with ghosts of their own, arrive. Holly and her friends find themselves at odds not just with one another, but with the house itself.
NONFICTION
The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels by Pamela Prickett
In this extraordinary work of narrative nonfiction, sociologists Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans uncover a hidden social world. They follow four individuals in Los Angeles, tracing the paths that put each at risk of going unclaimed, and introducing us to those who care for them when no one else will. The Unclaimed lays bare the difficult truth that anyone can be abandoned. It forces us to confront a variety of social ills, yet it is also filled with unexpected moments of tenderness. In Boyle Heights, a Mexican American neighborhood not far from the glitter of Hollywood, hundreds of strangers come together each year to mourn the deaths of people they never knew.
Made in Ohio: A History of Buckeye Invention and Ingenuity by Conrade C Hinds
Ohio was and remains tailor made for commerce, transportation, invention, and manufacturing. Located between Lake Erie and the Ohio River, it was perfect for canals, railways, and, ultimately, highways, which allowed coal, iron ore, and oil into industrial centers such as Cleveland, Dayton, Akron, Youngstown, and Cincinnati. These powerhouses fostered the ingenuity and practical inventiveness that made Ohio a mecca for manufacturing. Beyond heavy industry, the state also nurtured the growth of all-American goods and brands like Quaker Oats and Smucker’s jellies and jams, Diamond matches and Sherwin Williams paints, the Etch-A-Sketch and Play-Doh, and many, many more.
The Perilous Fight by Ben Carson with Candy Carson
Does America no longer feel like home? Widespread divorce rates, the erosion of traditional marriage, the popular rise of radical ideologies, attacks on faith, and government interference are only a few of the factors contributing to the struggles of families in our culture. And because of the importance of healthy families to every part of our national life, the breakdown of the family threatens to rob us of the country we love. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Like many of us, Dr. Ben Carson fears we are losing the country we love. In this provocative and ultimately hopeful book, he gives us the facts, inspiration, and theory-to-action answers we need to restore a key foundation of America: the family.
In My time of Dying: How I came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife by Sebastian Junger
For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger frequently put his life at risk. The closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. He was visited by his dead father. “It’s okay,” his father said. “There’s nothing to be scared of. I’ll take care of you.” That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day when he was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived. In My Time of Dying is part medical drama, part searing autobiography, and part rational inquiry into the ultimate unknowable mystery.
CHILDREN’S
The Big Book of Nature Art by Yuval Zimmer
Bugs, beasts, birds and blooms: they are all part of nature, just like you. Each of the 22 craft projects in this book is inspired by the wonders of nature and is created using found natural treasures and recycled materials. This book is for all the kids who like to create and use their imaginations. It’s for the kids who collect pebbles, build sandcastles, make snow angels and find faces in clouds. Because every child is a nature artist and this means you can be one, too! You are sure to find projects in this book to spark your creativity while recycling natural materials all around you.
Ages: 8-12
LIBRARY OPEN
Lima Public Library is open to the public six days a week. Hours for the Main Library in Lima are 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. Our Cairo, Elida and Spencerville branch libraries are open 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Our Lafayette branch is open from 12 noon to 7 p.m. on Tuesday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday and 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Friday.
