Reading Well
Health and wellbeing collections chosen by librarians and health professionals
BorrowBox Recommendations
New eReads every month! Check out some of our October BorrowBox highlights.
Maps of our spectacular bodies by Maddie Mortimer, available in eBook & eAudio
Something gleeful and malevolent is moving in Lia’s body, learning her life from the inside out. A shape-shifter. A disaster tourist. It’s travelling down the banks of her canals. It’s spreading.
When a sudden diagnosis upends Lia’s world, the boundaries between her past and her present begin to collapse. Deeply buried secrets stir awake. As the voice prowling in Lia takes hold of her story, and the landscape around becomes indistinguishable from the one within, Lia and her family are faced with some of the hardest questions of all: how can we move on from the events that have shaped us, when our bodies harbour everything? And what does it mean to die with grace, when you’re simply not ready to let go?
The First Woman by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, available in eBook & eAudio
As Kirabo enters her teens, questions begin to gnaw at her – questions which the adults in her life will do anything to ignore. Where is the mother she has never known? And why would she choose to leave her daughter behind? Inquisitive, headstrong, and unwilling to take no for an answer, Kirabo sets out to find the truth for herself.
Her search will take her away from the safety of her prosperous Ugandan family, plunging her into a very different world of magic, tradition, and the haunting legend of ‘The First Woman’.
House of Ashes by Stuart Neville, available in eBook & eAudio
For Sara Keane, it was supposed to be a second chance.
A new country. A new house. A new beginning.
Then came the knock on the door.
Elderly Mary Jackson can’t understand why Sara and her husband are living in her home.
She remembers the fire. She remembers the house burning down. But she also remembers the children. The children who need her. The children she must protect.
‘The children will find you,’ she tells Sara, because Mary knows she needs help too. As Sara becomes obsessed with what happened in that house nearly 60 years ago, and the family wiped out in one bloody night, she begins to see things. Things that can’t be real.
The Golden Mole by Katherine Rendell, available in eBook
A pangolin’s tongue is longer than its body. It keeps it furled in a nifty pouch near the hip. A swift flies two million kilometres in its lifetime. That’s far enough to get to the moon and back twice over – and then once more to the moon. There’s a fable that storks deliver babies. In fact, the Nazis used them to air-drop propaganda.
Each of these animals is extraordinary. And each of them may soon disappear from the earth.
A lavishly illustrated compendium of the staggering lives of some of the world’s most endangered animals, The Golden Mole is a chance to be awestruck and lovestruck – to fall for the likes of the seahorse, the narwhal and, as astonishing and endangered as them all, the human.
Poetry Unbound by Padraig O Tuama, available in eBook
This inspiring collection, edited by Pádraig Ó Tuama, presents fifty poems about what it means to be alive in the world today. Each poem is paired with Pádraig’s illuminating commentary that offers personal anecdotes and generous insights into the content of the poem.
Engaging, accessible and inviting, Poetry Unbound is the perfect companion for everyone who loves poetry and for anyone who wants to go deeper into poetry but doesn’t necessarily know how to do so.
Nine Lives by Peter Swanson, available in eAudio
Nine strangers receive a list with their names on it in the mail. Nothing else, just a list of names on a single sheet of paper. None of the nine people know or have ever met the others on the list. They dismiss it as junk mail, a fluke–until very, very bad things begin happening to people on the list.
First, a well-liked old man is drowned on a beach in the small town of Kennewick, Maine. Then, a father is shot in the back while running through his quiet neighborhood in suburban Massachusetts. A frightening pattern is emerging, but what do these nine people have in common? Their professions range from oncology nurse to aspiring actor, and they’re located all over the country. So why are they all on the list, and who sent it?
FBI agent Jessica Winslow, who is on the list herself, is determined to find out. Could there be some dark secret that binds them all together? Or is this the work of a murderous madman? As the mysterious sender stalks these nine strangers, they find themselves constantly looking over their shoulders, wondering who will be crossed off next…
The Strays of Paris by Jane Smiley, available in eAudio
Paras is a spirited young racehorse living in a stable in the French countryside. That is until one afternoon, when she pushes open the gate of her stall and, travelling through the night, arrives quite by chance in the dazzling streets of Paris.
She soon meets a German shorthaired pointer named Frida, two irrepressible ducks and an opinionated crow, and life amongst the animals in the city’s lush green spaces is enjoyable for a time. But everything changes when Paras meets a human boy, Étienne, and discovers a new, otherworldly part of Paris: the secluded, ivy-walled house where the boy and his nearly-one-hundred-year-old great grandmother live quietly and unto themselves. As the cold weather of Christmas nears, the unlikeliest of friendships bloom among humans and animals alike.
But how long can a runaway horse live undiscovered in Paris? And how long can one boy keep her all to himself? Charming and beguiling in equal measure, Jane Smiley’s novel celebrates the intrinsic need for friendship, love, and freedom, whomever you may be . . .
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