Peak Picks Current Titles Book List
New titles from the Peak Picks collection that are currently in rotation. Stop by any branch to see what's available today!
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Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional
NEW FOR JULY! Adult Nonfiction. “Fitzgerald weaves a raucous mosaic of a rough-and-ready New England rarely seen with a transfixing story of his path to finding himself. In a series of essays, he recounts his impoverished childhood and follows his escape from it through a litany of jobs and identities. A poster child of the ‘classic New England family’…Fitzgerald buried his past in drinking, drugs, and porn. As he takes readers along on his search for salvation, he barrels through many venues--from San Francisco to Southeast Asia to Brooklyn to Kilimanjaro--recounting the ‘conversations that changed me.’ The result is a marvelous coming-of-age story that's as wily and raunchy as it is heartfelt.” – Publishers Weekly
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A Cosmic Quest From Zero to Infinity
NEW FOR JULY! Adult Nonfiction. “Numbers explain the universe in the electrifying debut from Padilla, a theoretical physicist and YouTuber on the math channel Numberphile. Using metaphors, analogies, and carefully constructed commentary, Padilla tackles such subjects as general and special relativity, black holes, the elusive Higgs boson particle, quantum mechanics, and string theory. He's a stellar guide, shifting from playful to serious with ease, and his love for his subject is infectious and his knowledge vast in a way that is fitting for the material.” Publishers Weekly
Format: Book
Availability: On order
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The Half Life of Valery K
NEW FOR JULY! Adult Fiction. “British novelist Pulley… builds a thriller on the true story of a 1957 nuclear explosion near Chelyabinsk, a city in Siberia. In 1963, Valery K, a biochemist sent to the gulag for political crimes, is reassigned to a lab in the center's ‘chocolate factory,’ where radiation research is ongoing. Very quickly he catches on to the explosive dangers bubbling in the lake where waste from 1957 was dumped. The people in charge pooh-pooh his concerns but he snags the attention of the resident KGB director. Pulley has given the nuclear noir genre a fresh and stimulating take on Chernobyl-style terror.” – Library Journal
Format: Book
Availability: On order
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Honey and Spice: A Novel
NEW FOR JULY! Adult Fiction. “As the host of the popular advice show at her college, sharp-tongued Kiki has plenty of relationship advice to dispense, but when it comes to her own dating life, she guards her heart fiercely. Everything changes when she meets the new guy on campus, Malakai, whose player ways are creating waves among the Black student body. When Kiki and Malakai are thrown together for an academic project, they decide to start a fake relationship in order to ensure the success of their assignments. A beautiful and witty novel that's a celebration of love, friendship and Black joy that will wend its way into readers' hearts.” – Library Journal
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir
NEW FOR JULY! Adult Nonfiction. “Though guerrilla and drug warfare forced Rojas Contreras's family to leave Colombia in 1998 when she was 14, the specters of their past remained present. After a bicycle accident in Chicago nine years later rendered Rojas Contreras amnesiac for eight weeks, [Rojas recounts] in mesmerizing prose family stories of magic and survival, starting with that of her grandfather, Nono, a curandero who could tell the future, heal the sick, and change the weather. In grappling with the violence embedded in her family's DNA, Rojas Contreras affectingly reveals how darkness can only be vanquished when it's brought to the light.” Publishers Weekly
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
NEW FOR JULY! Adult Fiction. “In this exhilarating novel… two friends come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality. On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration... Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even 25 years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.” – Publisher description
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Upgrade: A Novel
NEW FOR JULY! Adult Fiction. “At first, Logan Ramsay isn’t sure if anything’s different. He just feels a little… sharper. Better able to concentrate. Better at multitasking. Reading a bit faster, memorizing better, needing less sleep. But before long, he can’t deny it: Something’s happening to his brain. To his body. He’s starting to see the world, and those around him—even those he loves most—in whole new ways. The truth is, Logan’s genome has been hacked. And there’s a reason he’s been targeted for this upgrade. A reason that goes back decades to the darkest part of his past, and a horrific family legacy. Worse still, what’s happening to him is just the first step in a much larger plan, one that will inflict the same changes on humanity at large—at a terrifying cost.” – Publisher description
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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The Colony: Faith and Blood in A Promised Land
Adult Nonfiction. “A shocking massacre in 2019 sparks a probing investigation into the strange, violent history of a polygamist Mormon outpost in Mexico. The victims were fundamentalist Mormons whose forebears broke from the LDS Church and settled in Mexico when polygamy was outlawed. Sally Denton…tells the violent history of the LeBaron clan and their homestead, from the first polygamist emigration to Mexico in the 1880s to the LeBarons' internal blood feud in the 1970s to the family's recent alliance with the NXIVM sex cult. Denton creates a mesmerizing work of investigative journalism in the tradition of Under the Banner of Heaven and Going Clear.” – Publisher description
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Counterfeit: A Novel
Adult Fiction. “When Ava Wong reconnects with her college roommate, she doesn’t expect to get caught up in an international crime ring. Winnie Fang—who left Stanford in disgrace after a cheating scandal—is back in San Francisco and making money hand over fist. Winnie purchases high-end bags… sells them on eBay and then returns her purchases, swapping them with quality replicas from China. Ava gets involved while on a trip to China with her young son. Chen’s third novel is sly and subversive, an examination of motherhood and an incisive look at culture and class.” – Booklist
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Cult Classic
Adult Fiction. “One night in New York City’s Chinatown, a woman is at a work reunion dinner with former colleagues when she excuses herself to buy a pack of cigarettes. On her way back, she runs into a former boyfriend. And then another. And . . . another. Nothing is quite what it seems as the city becomes awash with ghosts of heartbreaks past. Hilariously insightful and delightfully suspenseful, Cult Classic is an original: a masterfully crafted tale of love, memory, morality, and mind control, as well as a fresh foray into the philosophy of romance.” – Publisher description
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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