Welcome to this month's Staff Picks page, where our librarians share some of the great books they've read recently. Discover hidden gems, popular titles, and diverse recommendations that will captivate your imagination and enrich your reading experience. Happy exploring!
Fiction
The Black Tides of Heaven by Neon Yang
Mokoya and Akeha, the twin children of the Protector, were sold to the Grand Monastery as infants. While Mokoya developed her strange prophetic gift, Akeha was always the one who could see the strings that moved adults to action. While Mokoya received visions of what would be, Akeha realized what could be. What's more, they saw the sickness at the heart of their mother's Protectorate. A rebellion is growing. The Machinists discover new levers to move the world every day, while the Tensors fight to put them down and preserve the power of the state. Unwilling to continue as a pawn in their mother's twisted schemes, Akeha leaves the Tensorate behind and falls in with the rebels. But every step Akeha takes towards the Machinists is a step away from Mokoya. Can Akeha find peace without shattering the bond they share with their twin?
The Night Watch by Neil Lancaster
He'll watch you. A lawyer is found dead at sunrise on a lonely cliff top at Dunnet Head on the northernmost tip of Scotland. It was supposed to be his honeymoon, but now his wife will never see him again. He'll hunt you. The case is linked to several mysterious deaths, including the murder of the lawyer's last client - Scotland's most notorious criminal... who had just walked free. DS Max Craigie knows this can only mean one thing: they have a vigilante serial killer on their hands. He'll leave you to die. But this time the killer isn't on the run; he's on the investigation team. And the rules are different when the murderer is this close to home. He knows their weaknesses, knows how to stay hidden, and he thinks he's above the law.
Small things Like These by Claire Keegan
It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces into his busiest season. As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him - and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church. The long-awaited new work from the author of Foster, Small Things Like These is an unforgettable story of hope, quiet heroism and tenderness.
Birnam Wood is on the move... A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For years, the group has struggled to break even. To occupy the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last. But the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine also has an interest in the place: he has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker, or so he tells Birnam’s founder, Mira, when he catches her on the property. He’s intrigued by Mira, and by Birnam Wood; although they’re poles apart politically, it seems Lemoine and the group might have enemies in common. But can Birnam trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust one another?
The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I've been wanting to become the friend of the Woman in the Purple Skirt for a very long time . . . The Woman in the Purple Skirt seems to live in a world of her own. She appears to glide through crowded streets without acknowledging any reaction her presence elicits. Each afternoon, she sits on the same park bench, eating a pastry and ignoring the local children who make a game of trying to get her attention. She may not know it, but the Woman in the Purple Skirt being watched. Someone is following her, always perched just out of sight, monitoring which buses she takes; what she eats; whom she speaks to. But this invisible observer isn't a stalker - no, it's much more complicated than that.
Non Fiction
How we Love by Clementine Ford
A deeply personal exploration of love in all its forms from a feminist icon and bestselling author of Fight Like a Girl and Boys Will Be Boys. There is love in this place, just like there is love everywhere we care to look for it. There is beauty and there is hope and there is a boy and there is a mother and there is the past and there is the future but most importantly there is the now, and everything that exists between them that has got them from one moment to the next. The now is where we find the golden glow where, for the briefest of moments, the sky rips open and we see what it is we are made of. Tell me a story, he asked me. And so I began. Clementine Ford is a person who has loved deeply, strangely and with curiosity. She is fascinated by love and how it makes its home in our hearts and believes that the way we continue to surrender ourselves to love is an act of great faith and bravery. This tender and lyrical memoir explores love in its many forms, through Clementine's own experiences. With clear eyes and an open heart, she writes about losing her adored mother far too young, about the pain and confusion of first love - both platonic and romantic - and the joy and heartache of adult love. She writes movingly about the transcendent and transformative journey to motherhood and the similarly monumental path to self-love. 'We love as children, as friends, as parents and, yes, sometimes as sexual beings, and none of it is more important than the other because all of it shows us who we are.
Girls that Invest by Simran Kaur
Your step-by-step guide to financial independence-from the creator of the #1 investing education podcast, Girls That Invest. Ever wondered how on earth the stock market works, but felt too intimidated to ask "those" questions? This is the book for you! In this guide to investing in stocks (aka shares), Simran Kaur teaches the essential principles you can apply to any market, anywhere in the world.
Houseplants and Design by Liz Carlson
Houseplants have never been hotter. They have the power to instantly turn a house into a home and to create a feeling of peace and calm, transforming both your physical space and your headspace. Bringing nature inside is a simple way to maintain a connection to the outdoors. To nurture an indoor garden is to nurture ourselves. Award-winning lifestyle and travel writer Liz Carlson of Young Adventuress and NODE has created the complete guide to growing, propagating and caring for indoor plants. Offering a comprehensive catalogue of our most beloved and rare species, along with unique ways to style houseplants and troubleshoot common issues - and showcasing some of the most stylish indoor spaces in New Zealand - Houseplants and Design is the ultimate modern guide to tending a thriving indoor space.
A Forager's Life : finding my heart and home in nature by Helen Lehndorf
'Parsimonia ante dignitatem!' Helen Lehndorf would call out across the dinner table before feeding flatmates a meal made from foods she had foraged, gleaned or found. Thrift before dignity. In this searching and heartfelt memoir, Helen remembers her life through the foods and medicines she foraged: from a childhood living off the land in rural Taranaki, to scrimping and scavenging as a student, searching for ancestral connection in the English countryside, making a quiet home in Aotearoa with her family, and becoming a mother to an autistic child. Interweaving foraging recipes, principles, practices and adventures, A Forager's Life tells a story of class, care and belonging. Helen finds in nature a promise that, with the right frame of mind, much can be made of the world around us.
Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you're cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely and deeply painful. In Wintering, Katherine May recounts her own year-long journey through winter, sparked by a sudden illness in her family that plunged her into a time of uncertainty and seclusion. When life felt at its most frozen, she managed to find strength and inspiration from the incredible wintering experiences of others as well as from the remarkable transformations that nature makes to survive the cold. This beautiful, perspective-shifting memoir teaches us to draw from the healing powers of the natural world and to embrace the winters of our own lives.