November 2016 Adult Top 10 Picks

  1. Absolutely on Music
    by Haruki Murakami
    Bond Street Books
    Nov 15, 2016
    MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Classical
    Hardback
    Absolutely on Music
    by Haruki Murakami
    Bond Street Books
    Nov 15, 2016
    MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Classical
    Hardback
    A deeply personal, intimate conversation about music and writing between the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author and his close friend, the former conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.


    Haruki Murakami's passion for music runs deep. Before turning his hand to writing, he ran a jazz club in Tokyo, and from The Beatles' "Norwegian Wood" to Franz Liszt's "Years of Pilgrimage," the aesthetic and emotional power of music permeates every one of his much-loved books.
    Now, in Absolutely on Music, Murakami fulfills a personal dream, sitting down with his friend, acclaimed conductor Seiji Ozawa, to talk, over a period of two years, about their shared interest. Transcribed from lengthy conversations about the nature of music and writing, here they discuss everything from Brahms to Beethoven, from Leonard Bernstein to Glenn Gould, from record collecting to pop-up orchestras, and much more. Ultimately this book gives readers an unprecedented glimpse into the minds of the two maestros.
    It is essential reading for book and music lovers everywhere.
    View this title on BNC CataList
  2. Under the Midnight Sun
    by Keigo Higashino
    Minotaur Books
    Nov 08, 2016
    FICTION / Mystery & Detective / International Crime & Mystery
    Hardback
    Under the Midnight Sun
    by Keigo Higashino
    Minotaur Books
    Nov 08, 2016
    FICTION / Mystery & Detective / International Crime & Mystery
    Hardback

    From the acclaimed international bestseller Keigo Higashino (The Devotion of Suspect X) comes a sweeping novel in the tradition of Les Miserables and Crime and Punishment. This is the compelling story of a brutal crime and the two teenagers—Ryo, the son of the murdered man, and Yukiho, the daughter of the main suspect—whose lives remain inextricably linked over the twenty-year search for the truth behind the crime.

    In Osaka in 1973, the body of a murdered man is found in an abandoned building. Investigating the crime, Detective SasagakI is unable to find the killer. Over the next twenty years, through the lens of a succession of characters, Higashino tells the story of two teens, Ryo and Yukiho, whose lives are most affected by the crime, and the obsessed detective, Sasagaki, who continues to investigate the murder, looking for the elusive truth.

    Under the Midnight Sun is a complex, psychological novel about crime and its after-effects by one the most read and most accomplished contemporary mystery author. A twisting, compelling work that will astonish and delight Higashino’s old fans and new readers alike.

    View this title on BNC CataList
  3. Faithful
    by Alice Hoffman
    Simon & Schuster
    Nov 01, 2016
    FICTION / Women
    Hardback
    Faithful
    by Alice Hoffman
    Simon & Schuster
    Nov 01, 2016
    FICTION / Women
    Hardback
    From the New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage of Opposites and The Dovekeepers comes a soul-searching story about a young woman struggling to redefine herself and the power of love, family, and fate.

    Growing up on Long Island, Shelby Richmond is an ordinary girl until one night an extraordinary tragedy changes her fate. Her best friend’s future is destroyed in an accident, while Shelby walks away with the burden of guilt.

    What happens when a life is turned inside out? When love is something so distant it may as well be a star in the sky? Faithful is the story of a survivor, filled with emotion—from dark suffering to true happiness—a moving portrait of a young woman finding her way in the modern world. A fan of Chinese food, dogs, bookstores, and men she should stay away from, Shelby has to fight her way back to her own future. In New York City she finds a circle of lost and found souls—including an angel who’s been watching over her ever since that fateful icy night.

    Here is a character you will fall in love with, so believable and real and endearing, that she captures both the ache of loneliness and the joy of finding yourself at last. For anyone who’s ever been a hurt teenager, for every mother of a daughter who has lost her way, Faithful is a roadmap.

    Alice Hoffman’s “trademark alchemy” (USA TODAY) and her ability to write about the “delicate balance between the everyday world and the extraordinary” (WBUR) make this an unforgettable story. With beautifully crafted prose, Alice Hoffman spins hope from heartbreak in this profoundly moving novel.
    View this title on BNC CataList
  4. The Twenty-Three
    by Linwood Barclay Canada
    Doubleday Canada
    Nov 01, 2016
    FICTION / Thrillers / Suspense
    Paperback / softback
    The Twenty-Three
    by Linwood Barclay Canada
    Doubleday Canada
    Nov 01, 2016
    FICTION / Thrillers / Suspense
    Paperback / softback
    From New York Times and #1 international bestselling author Linwood Barclay comes the third and final spine-chilling thriller in the Promise Falls trilogy.


    Everything has been leading to this.
    It's the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, May 23rd, and the small town of Promise Falls, New York, has found itself in the midst of a full-blown catastrophe. Hundreds of people are going to the hospital with similar symptoms--vomiting, dizziness, loss of consciousness--and dozens are dying. And those investigating the cause of the epidemic quickly zero in on the water supply. But the question for many, including private investigator Cal Weaver, remains: Who would benefit from poisoning this town? And what is their motivation?
    Meanwhile, as tragedies mount and the number of suspects grows larger, Detective Barry Duckworth is faced with another problem. He knows that the killer of Olivia Fisher and Rosemary Gaynor is still out there. And what's more, he knows that the mystery behind the significance of the number 23 is growing and is linked to a much larger scheme than he'd originally imagined.
    Detective Duckworth will have to race to put together all the pieces of this puzzle to stop someone's sinister revenge plot.
    View this title on BNC CataList
  5. Stone Coffin
    by Kjell Eriksson
    Minotaur Books
    Nov 22, 2016
    FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Police Procedural
    Hardback
    Stone Coffin
    by Kjell Eriksson
    Minotaur Books
    Nov 22, 2016
    FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Police Procedural
    Hardback

    International suspense superstar Kjell Eriksson produces another masterful work of murder, intrigue, and page-turning action in this latest thriller, which features his popular series-detective Ann Lindell.

    One sunny summer morning a young woman and her six-year old daughter are run over by a car. Both are killed immediately. Is it an accident, or did someone kill them on purpose?

    The same morning the husband of the deceased young woman disappears. During the police investigation, it turns out that the husband had recently bought a property that nobody knew anything about. A few days later a macabre discovery is made in a forest nearby.

    Eriksson has been nominated for the Best Swedish Crime Novel many times, including for Stone Coffin—the seventh novel in his critically-acclaimed and internationally-loved Ann Lindell series.

    View this title on BNC CataList
  6. Frantumaglia
    by Elena Ferrante
    Europa Editions
    Nov 11, 2016
    BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary Figures
    Hardback
    Frantumaglia
    by Elena Ferrante
    Europa Editions
    Nov 11, 2016
    BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary Figures
    Hardback

    One of The Guardian’s Best Books of the Year: Personal writings by the anonymous author who became a literary phenomenon with My Brilliant Friend.

    The writer known as Elena Ferrante has taken pains to hide her identity in the hope that readers would focus on her body of work. But in this volume, she invites us into Elena Ferrante’s workshop and offers a glimpse into the drawers of her writing desk—those drawers from which emerged her three early standalone novels and the four installments of the Neapolitan Novels, the New York Times–bestselling “enduring masterpiece” (The Atlantic).

    Consisting of over twenty years of letters, essays, reflections, and interviews, it is a unique depiction of an author who embodies a consummate passion for writing. In these pages, Ferrante answers many of her readers’ questions. She addresses her choice to stand aside and let her books live autonomous lives. She discusses her thoughts and concerns as her novels are being adapted into films. She talks about the challenge of finding concise answers to interview questions. She explains the joys and the struggles of writing, the anguish of composing a story only to discover that that story isn’t good enough. She contemplates her relationship with psychoanalysis, with the cities she has lived in, with motherhood, with feminism, and with her childhood as a storehouse for memories, impressions, and fantasies. The result is a vibrant and intimate self-portrait of a writer at work.

    “Everyone should read anything with Ferrante’s name on it.” —The Boston Globe

    View this title on BNC CataList
  7. To Capture What We Cannot Keep
    by Beatrice Colin
    Flatiron Books
    Nov 29, 2016
    FICTION / Historical / General
    Hardback
    To Capture What We Cannot Keep
    by Beatrice Colin
    Flatiron Books
    Nov 29, 2016
    FICTION / Historical / General
    Hardback

    Set against the construction of the Eiffel Tower, this novel charts the relationship between a young Scottish widow and a French engineer who, despite constraints of class and wealth, fall in love.

    In February 1887, Caitriona Wallace and Ã?mile Nouguier meet in a hot air balloon, floating high above Paris, France--a moment of pure possibility. But back on firm ground, their vastly different social strata become clear. Cait is a widow who because of her precarious financial situation is forced to chaperone two wealthy Scottish charges. Ã?mile is expected to take on the bourgeois stability of his family's business and choose a suitable wife. As the Eiffel Tower rises, a marvel of steel and air and light, the subject of extreme controversy and a symbol of the future, Cait and Ã?mile must decide what their love is worth.

    Seamlessly weaving historical detail and vivid invention, Beatrice Colin evokes the revolutionary time in which Cait and Ã?mile live--one of corsets and secret trysts, duels and Bohemian independence, strict tradition and Impressionist experimentation.To Capture What We Cannot Keep, stylish, provocative, and shimmering, raises probing questions about a woman's place in that world, the overarching reach of class distinctions, and the sacrifices love requires of us all.

    View this title on BNC CataList
  8. Inherit the Bones
    by Emily Littlejohn
    Minotaur Books
    Nov 01, 2016
    FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Police Procedural
    Hardback
    Inherit the Bones
    by Emily Littlejohn
    Minotaur Books
    Nov 01, 2016
    FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Police Procedural
    Hardback

    “I couldn't put downInherit the Bones. Small town Colorado police detective Gemma Monroe is a human and fallible heroine I can't wait to meet again, and Littlejohn's prose is lyrical and gripping—the book is a sure bet for one of the finest debut novels of the year.”
    —Deborah Crombie

    Secrets and lies can’t stay buried forever in Cedar Valley.

    In the summer, hikers and campers pack the small Colorado town’s meadows and fields. And in the winter, skiers and snowboarders take over the mountains. Season by season, year after year, time passes and the lies, like the aspens and evergreens that surround the town, take root and spread deep.

    Now, someone has uncovered the lies, and it is his murder that continues a chain of events that began almost forty years ago. Detective Gemma Monroe’s investigation takes her from the seedy grounds of a traveling circus to the powerful homes of those who would control Cedar Valley’s future.

    Six-months pregnant, with a partner she can’t trust and colleagues who know more than they’re saying, Gemma tracks a killer who will stop at nothing to keep those secrets buried.

    Beautifully written with a riveting plot and a richly drawn cast of characters,Inherit the Bones is a mesmerizing debut from Emily Littlejohn.

    View this title on BNC CataList
  9. The Mayakovsky Tapes
    by Robert Littell
    Thomas Dunne Books
    Nov 22, 2016
    FICTION / Thrillers / Espionage
    Hardback
    The Mayakovsky Tapes
    by Robert Littell
    Thomas Dunne Books
    Nov 22, 2016
    FICTION / Thrillers / Espionage
    Hardback

    In March 1953, four women meet in Room 408 of Moscow’s deluxe Hotel Metropol. They have gathered to reminisce about Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet who in death had become a national idol of Soviet Russia. In life, however, he was a much more complicated figure.

    The ladies, each of whom could claim to have been a muse to the poet, loved or loathed Mayakovsky in the course of his life, and as they piece together their conflicting memories of him, a portrait of the artist as a young idealist emerges. From his early years as a leader of the Futurist movement to his work as a propagandist for the Revolution and on to the censorship battles that turned him against the state (and, more ominously, the state against him), their recollections reveal Mayakovsky as a passionate, complex, sexually obsessed creature trapped in the epicenter of history, struggling to hold onto his ideals in the face of a revolution betrayed.

    Written by Robert Littell, whom The Washington Post called “one of the most talented, most original voices in American fiction today, period,” The Mayakovsky Tapes is an ambitious, impressive novel that brings to life the tumultuous Stalinist era and the predicament of the artists ensnared in it.

    View this title on BNC CataList
  10. Testimony
    by Robbie Robertson Canada
    Knopf Canada
    Nov 15, 2016
    BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs
    Hardback
    Testimony
    by Robbie Robertson Canada
    Knopf Canada
    Nov 15, 2016
    BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs
    Hardback
    On the fortieth anniversary of The Band’s legendary The Last Waltz concert, Robbie Robertson finally tells his own spellbinding story of the band that changed music history, his extraordinary personal journey, and his creative friendships with some of the greatest artists of the last half-century.

    Robbie Robertson’s singular contributions to popular music have made him one of the most beloved songwriters and guitarists of his time. With songs like “The Weight,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and “Up on Cripple Creek,” he and his partners in The Band fashioned music that has endured for decades, influencing countless musicians.
    In this captivating memoir, written over five years of reflection, Robbie Robertson employs his unique storyteller’s voice to weave together the journey that led him to some of the most pivotal events in music history. He recounts the adventures of his half-Jewish, half-Mohawk upbringing on the Six Nations Indian Reserve and on the gritty streets of Toronto; his odyssey at sixteen to the Mississippi Delta, the fountainhead of American music; the wild, early years on the road with rockabilly legend Ronnie Hawkins and The Hawks; his unexpected ties to the Cosa Nostra underworld; the gripping trial-by-fire “going electric” with Bob Dylan on his 1966 world tour, and their ensuing celebrated collaborations; the formation of The Band and the forging of their unique sound, culminating with history’s most famous farewell concert, brought to life for all time in Martin Scorsese’s great movie The Last Waltz.
    This is the story of a time and place—the moment when rock 'n' roll became life, when legends like Buddy Holly and Bo Diddley crisscrossed the circuit of clubs and roadhouses from Texas to Toronto, when The Beatles, Hendrix, The Stones, and Warhol moved through the same streets and hotel rooms. It’s the story of exciting change as the world tumbled through the '60s and early '70s, and a generation came of age, built on music, love, and freedom. Above all, it’s the moving story of the profound friendship among five young men who together created a new kind of popular music.
    Testimony is Robbie Robertson’s story, lyrical and true, as only he could tell it.
    View this title on BNC CataList

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