Life constantly seems to be wavering between really good and really bad for Owen, a lonely sixteen-year-old still reeling from the unexpected death of his mother and a fresh move to Toronto. After ducking into an old bookstore to escape high school bullies, Owen discovers that he can travel to a parallel, twisted version of…
Category: First Read
The Party by Elizabeth Day
Martin Gilmour is an outsider. When he wins a scholarship to Burtonbury School, he doesn’t wear the right clothes or speak with the right kind of accent. But then he meets the dazzling, popular and wealthy Ben Fitzmaurice, and gains admission to an exclusive world. Soon Martin is enjoying tennis parties and Easter egg hunts…
Borne by Jeff VanderMeer
“Am I a person?” Borne asked me. “Yes, you are a person,” I told him. “But like a person, you can be a weapon, too.” In Borne, a young woman named Rachel survives as a scavenger in a ruined city half destroyed by drought and conflict. The city is dangerous, littered with discarded experiments from…
The Things We Don’t Say by Ella Carey
Nearly sixty years ago, renowned London artist Patrick Adams painted his most famous work: a portrait of his beloved Emma Temple, a fellow bohemian with whom he shared his life. Years after Patrick’s death, ninety-year-old Emma still has the painting hanging over her bed at their country home as a testament to their love. To…
Off to Be the Wizard by Scott Meyer
It’s a simple story. Boy finds proof that reality is a computer program. Boy uses program to manipulate time and space. Boy gets in trouble. Boy flees back in time to Medieval England to live as a wizard while he tries to think of a way to fix things. Boy gets in more trouble. Oh,…
A Thousand Perfect Notes by C.G. Drews
Beck hates his life. He hates his violent mother. He hates his home. Most of all, he hates the piano that his mother forces him to play hour after hour, day after day. He will never play as she did before illness ended her career and left her bitter and broken. But Beck is too…
Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden
When Liza Winthrop first lays eyes on Annie Kenyon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she knows there’s something special between them. Soon, their close friendship develops into a deep and intimate romance. Neither imagined that falling in love could be so wonderful, but as Liza and Annie’s newfound sexuality sparks conflict in both their…
The Girl on the Ferryboat by Angus Peter Campbell
I loved her from the moment I saw her, and that love has never wavered. It has encased every choice I have ever made, and I have never done anything in my life which didn’t involve her image somewhere… I’m so sorry for it all. This is the latest English-language novel from award-winning Gaelic poet,…
Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel
Elizabeth Wurtzel writes with her finger in the faint pulse of an over-diagnosed generation whose ruling icons are Kurt Cobain, Xanax, and pierced tongues. In this famous memoir of her bouts with depression and skirmishes with drugs, Prozac Nation is a witty and sharp account of the psychopharmacology of an era for readers of Girl,…
The Music of The Deep by Elizabeth Hall
Fleeing an abusive marriage and tormented by her past, Alexandra Turner finds solace in a small coastal town on Puget Sound and a job with a local marine biologist studying orcas. After befriending a group of locals, Alex learns that she has moved to a place that has a reputation of being the “most haunted…
One Star Awake by Andrew Meehan
A young woman comes to in the Paris restaurant in which she apparently works – she has survived some kind of trauma, but her memories haven’t. Something tells her there has been a reprieve. Yet when she crosses paths with a mysterious man called Eagleback, she becomes convinced that he holds the key to her…
Game Players by Anita Waller
When a gang of six children playing in their den in the woods spot a man burying drugs nearby, it marks the beginning of the end of their childhoods. Unsure what to do, the children dig up the drugs and take them away. But when the dealer, who they watched bury the stash, shows up…
