Reading Well
Health and wellbeing collections chosen by librarians and health professionals
November New Reads
Check out our new reads for this November! Each of these books are available for order online!
Everything is not enough by Lola Akinmade Akerstrom
Yasmiin cannot comprehend what the policeman is saying to her. Her friend in a coma? Attempted suicide? Discovering she’s listed as next of kin, Yasmiin looks to her friend’s past to try and understand her actions, uncovering fresh mysteries at every turn. All the while, her own life seems to be running off course.
Kemi seems to have it all: a high-powered job, a beautiful flat, a loving boyfriend. So why doesn’t she feel more settled? Unsure whether its homesickness, heartsickness or sick-and-tired-of-the-same-old-sickness, she embarks on a destructive path to try and change things up.
Brittany-Rae doesn’t remember the woman she was before she met her husband Jonny. She knows she was an ambitious, confident go-getter, but now she’s faded into Jonny’s domineering shadow. And as she unearths disturbing secrets about her husband, she’s focused on only one thing: her daughter, Maya, and ensuring she is as far away from Jonny as possible.
The Land of Lost things by John Connolly
Phoebe, an eight-year-old girl, lies comatose following a car accident. She is a body without a spirit, a stolen child. Ceres, her mother, can only sit by her bedside and read aloud to Phoebe the fairy stories she loves in the hope they might summon her back to this world.
But it is hard to keep faith, so very hard. Now an old house on the hospital grounds, a property connected to a book written by a vanished author, is calling to Ceres. Something wants her to enter, and to journey – to a land coloured by the memories of Ceres’s childhood, and the folklore beloved of her father, to a land of witches and dryads, giants and mandrakes; to a land where old enemies are watching, and waiting. To the Land of Lost Things.
The Enchanters by James Ellroy
Los Angeles. August 4, 1962. The city broils through a mid-summer heat wave. Marilyn Monroe ODs. A B-movie starlet is kidnapped. The overhyped LAPD overreacts. Chief Bill Parker’s looking for some getback. The Monroe deal looks like a moneymaker. He calls in Freddy Otash.
The freewheeling Freddy O. Tainted ex-cop, defrocked private eye, dope fiend, and freelance extortionist. A man who lives by the maxim “Opportunity is Love.” Freddy gets to work. He dimly perceives Marilyn Monroe’s death and the kidnapped starlet to be a poisonous riddle that only he has the guts and the brains to untangle. We are with him as he tears through all those who block his path to the truth. We are with him as he penetrates the faux-sunshine of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and the shuck of Camelot. We are with him as he falters, and grasps for love beyond opportunity. We are with him as he tracks Marilyn Monroe’s horrific last charade through a nightmare L.A. that he served to create – and as he confronts his complicity and his own raging madness.
It’s the Summer of ’62, baby. Freddy O.’s got a hot date with history. The savage Sixties are ready to pop. The Rolling Stones proclaim it best: We’re just a shout away.
The Running Grave by Robert Galbraith
Private Detective Cormoran Strike is contacted by a worried father whose son, Will, has gone to join a religious cult in the depths of the Norfolk countryside. The Universal Humanitarian Church is, on the surface, a peaceable organisation that campaigns for a better world.
Yet Strike discovers that beneath the surface there are deeply sinister undertones, and unexplained deaths. In order to try to rescue Will, Strike’s business partner Robin Ellacott decides to infiltrate the cult and she travels to Norfolk to live incognito amongst them. But in doing so, she is unprepared for the dangers that await her there or for the toll it will take on her.
The Lost Girl by Rosie Goodwin
Nottingham, 1875. With their father missing and their mother suddenly passing, Esme and Gabriel are forced to track down their estranged grandfather in Lincolnshire. Cold and unwelcoming, he is reluctant to take them in, but aware of his standing as the village vicar, he knows he must protect his reputation, and allow the children to stay with him.
Esme’s relief at finding refuge soon turns to despair when Gabriel is sent to boarding school, leaving her alone in their grandfather’s unhappy home. But the house isn’t as empty as it first appeared, and Esme, with her unusual gift of being able to see spirits, begins to encounter the ghosts of young women in the abandoned rooms and dark corridors of the rectory.
The women are trapped between this world and the next, seeking help from Esme and leaving her with a mystery to solve if she is to stand a chance of establishing a peaceful, happy life.
Harlem after Midnight by Louise Hare
1936, September 17th, 1am. In the middle of Harlem, in the dead of night, a woman falls from a second storey window. In her hand, she holds a passport and the name written on it is Lena Aldridge.
Nine days earlier. Lena arrived in Harlem less than two weeks ago, full of hope for her burgeoning romance with Will Goodman, the handsome musician she met on board the Queen Mary. Will has arranged for Lena to stay with friends of his, and this will give her the chance to find out if their relationship is going anywhere.
But there is another reason she’s in Harlem – to find out what happened in 1908 to make her father flee to London. As Lena’s investigations progress, not only does she realise her father lied to her, but the man she’s falling too fast and too hard for has secrets of his own. And those secrets have put Lena in terrible danger.
Bad Dolls by Rachel Harrison
In this collection of four horror stories, award-winning author Rachel Harrison explores themes of body image, female friendship, heartbreak and hauntings with her trademark humour and insight.
The Impossible search for the perfect man by Debbie Howells
Imagine for a moment, your husband leaves you. Then through a bizarre twist of events, you find yourself working with the girl he’s left you for – and even worse, she’s pregnant. Louisa’s not really up to any more complicated relationships.
Right now, she doesn’t need them. She has good friends. Okay, so one has a screwed-up husband and the other a very strange horoscope habit. Not to mention her ex-husband’s new girlfriend, who Louisa has somehow found herself giving relationship counselling to.
She doesn’t need anyone else with problems in her life right now. It would be nice, wouldn’t it? To find a straightforward man, who isn’t remotely messed up. Now there’s a thought. But does such a man even exist? She thinks not. But, she resolves, a life of helping other people find their happy-ever-afters is still something. But then handsome vet Marcus walks into her life.
The Winter List by S.G. Maclean
By the summer of 1660 the last remnants of the Republic have been swept away and the Stuarts have been restored under their king, Charles II.
A list of regicides believed to be involved in the death of Charles I is drawn up. Gruesome executions begin to take place and the hunt intensifies for those who have gone into hiding at home or abroad. Although not a regicide, staunch Republican Damian Seeker is on a list of traitors to the king.
Royalist spy, Lady Anne Winter, is employed to find evidence of guilt or innocence among the names on this Winter List. Seeker has fled England but his beloved daughter Manon remains, married to Seeker’s friend, the lawyer Lawrence Ingolby, and living in York. As the conduit to her father and to others on the Winter List and surrounded by spies and watchers, Manon lives in constant danger and fear of discovery.
The Fraud by Zadie Smith
Truth and fiction. Jamaica and Britain.
Who deserves to tell their story? Zadie Smith returns with her first historical novel. Kilburn, 1873. The ‘Tichborne Trial’ has captivated the widowed Scottish housekeeper Mrs Eliza Touchet and all of England. Readers are at odds over whether the defendant is who he claims to be – or an imposter.
Mrs Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her novelist cousin and his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects England of being a land of fades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.
Andrew Bogle meanwhile finds himself the star witness, his future depending on telling the right story. Growing up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica, he knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realise.
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