For Adults
Library Closed for Independence Day
NPL will be closed Thursday, July 4 for the Independence Day holiday. Our Fell Avenue lot bookdrop and off-site bookdrops will remain available. We will reopen at 9 am on July 5.
Browse our regularly updated lists of staff picks, bestsellers, genre selections, and more.
New for Adults
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Don't Let the Devil Ride
Addison McKellar isn't clueless--she knows she and her husband Dean don't have the perfect marriage--but she's still shocked when he completely vanishes from her life. At first Addison is annoyed, but as days stretch into a week and she's repeatedly stonewalled by Dean's friends and associates, her frustration turns into genuine alarm. When even the police seem dismissive of her concerns, Addison turns to her father's old friend, legendary Memphis PI Porter Hayes. Dean angered some very dangerous people before he disappeared--people who have already killed to get what they want--and they won't hesitate to come after his family to even the score.
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Incidents Around the House
To eight-year-old Bela, her family is her world. There’s Mommy, Daddo, and Grandma Ruth. But there is also Other Mommy, a malevolent entity who asks her every day: “Can I go inside your heart?” When horrifying incidents around the house signal that Other Mommy is growing tired of asking Bela the question over and over, Bela understands that unless she says yes, her family will soon pay. Other Mommy is getting restless, stronger, bolder. Only the bonds of family can keep Bela safe, but other incidents show cracks in her parents’ marriage. The safety Bela relies on is about to unravel. But Other Mommy needs an answer.
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Code Dependent
On the surface, a British poet, an UberEats courier in Pittsburgh, an Indian doctor, and a Chinese activist in exile have nothing in common. But they are in fact linked by a profound common experience—unexpected encounters with artificial intelligence. In Code Dependent, Murgia shows how automated systems are reshaping our lives all over the world, from technology that marks children as future criminals, to an app that is helping to give diagnoses to a remote tribal community.
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Stowaway
Rats are creatures which inspire fear and fascination in equal measure. Their lives are more closely entwined with humans than any other animal, but they remain the most misunderstood of all species. In Stowaway, Joe Shute, explores our complex and often contradictory relationship with the rat. He travels the world from sub-Saharan Africa to the Rocky Mountains and visits some of the most rodent-infested cities on earth to unpick the myths we tell ourselves about rats and investigate the unexplored secrets of their own extraordinary lives.
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Parade
Midway through his life, the artist G begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success. In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas. At the age of twenty-two, the painter G leaves home for a new life in another country, far from the disapproval of her parents. Her paintings attract the disapproval of the man she later marries. When a mother dies, her children confront her legacy: the stories she told, the roles she assigned to them, the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom.
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Same As It Ever Was
Julia Ames, after a youth marked by upheaval and emotional turbulence, has found herself on the placid plateau of mid-life. Having nearly derailed herself several times, making desperate bids for the kind of connection that always felt inaccessible to her, she finally feels, at age fifty seven, that she has a firm handle on things. She's unprepared, though, for what comes next: a surprise announcement from her straight-arrow son, an impending separation from her spikey teenaged daughter, and a seductive resurgence of the past, all of which threaten to draw her back into the patterns that had previously kept her on a razor's edge.
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The Great River
In this landmark work of natural history, Boyce Upholt tells the epic story of the wild and unruly Mississippi, and the centuries of efforts to control it. Over thousands of years, the Mississippi watershed was home to millions of Indigenous people who regarded "the great river" with awe and respect, adorning its banks with astonishing spiritual earthworks. The river was ever-changing, and Indigenous tribes embraced and even depended on its regular flooding. But the expanse of the watershed and the rich soils of its floodplain lured European settlers and American pioneers, who had a different vision: the river was a foe to conquer.
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BoyMom
Ruth Whippman digs into the impossibly contradictory pressures boys now face; and the harmful blind spots of male socialization that are leaving boys isolated, emotionally repressed, and adrift. Feminist gonzo-style, she spends months interviewing incels, reports on a conference for boys accused of sexual assault; crashes at a residential therapy center for young men in Utah, talks to a wide range of psychologists and other experts, and gets boys of all backgrounds to open up about sex, consent, porn, body image, mental health, cancel culture, screens, friendship and loneliness. Along the way, she finds her simple certainties about male privilege seriously challenged.
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The Stars Too Fondly
Cleo and her friends really, truly didn't mean to steal this spaceship. They just wanted to know why, twenty years ago, the entire Providence crew vanished without a trace. But then the stupid dark matter engine started all on its own, and now these four twenty-somethings are en route to Proxima Centauri, being harangued by a snarky hologram that has the face and attitude of the ship's missing captain, Billie. As the ship gets deeper into space, the laws of physics start twisting, old mysteries come crawling back to life, and Cleo's initially combative relationship with Billie turns into something deeper and more desperate than either woman was prepared for.
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Service Model
Humanity is a dying breed, utterly reliant on artificial labor and service. When a domesticated robot gets a nasty little idea downloaded into its core programming, they murder their owner. The robot discovers they can also do something else they never did before: They can run away. Fleeing the household they enter a wider world they never knew existed, where the age-old hierarchy of humans at the top is disintegrating into ruins and an entire robot ecosystem devoted to human wellbeing is having to find a new purpose. Sometimes all it takes is a nudge to overcome the limits of your programming.
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The Borrowed Hills
In early 2001, a lethal disease breaks out on the hill farms of northern England, emptying the valleys of sheep and filling the skies with smoke as they burn the carcasses. Two neighboring shepherds, Steve Elliman and William Herne, lose everything and set their sights on a wealthy farm in the south with its flock of prizewinning animals. Their sheep rustling leads to more and more difficult decisions. Steve’s only distraction is his growing fascination with William’s enigmatic and independent wife, Helen. When their mountain home comes under the sway of a lawless outsider, Colin Tinley, it is left to Steve to save himself and Helen in a savage conflict that threatens the ancient ways of the Lakeland fells.
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A Letter to the Luminous Deep
A beautiful discovery outside the window of her underwater home prompts the reclusive E. to begin a correspondence with renowned scholar Henerey Clel. Together, they uncover a mystery from the unknown depths, destined to transform the underwater world they both equally fear and love. But by no mere coincidence, a seaquake destroys E.'s home, and she and Henerey vanish. A year later, E.'s sister Sophy, and Henerey's brother Vyerin, are left to solve the mystery, piecing together the letters, sketches and field notes left behind--and learn what their siblings' disappearance might mean for life as they know it.
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A Walk in the Park
A few years after quitting his job to follow an ill-advised dream of becoming a guide on the Colorado River, Kevin Fedarko was approached by his best friend, the National Geographic photographer Pete McBride, with a vision as bold as it was harebrained. Together, they would embark on an end-to-end traverse of the Grand Canyon, a journey that, McBride promised, would be “a walk in the park.” Against his better judgment, Fedarko agreed to the scheme, unaware that the small cluster of experts who had completed the crossing billed it as “the toughest hike in the world.”
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The Asteroid Hunter
On September 11, 1999, humanity made a monumental discovery in the vastness of space. Scientists uncovered an asteroid of immense scientific importance they christened Bennu. Hurtling through space, it threatens to collide with our planet on September 24, 2182. Dr. Dante Lauretta, the Principal Investigator of NASA's audacious OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return Mission, embarked with his team on a daring quest to retrieve a precious sample from the asteroid's surface -- one that held the potential to not only unlock the secrets of life's origins but also to avert an unprecedented catastrophe.
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Look on the Bright Side
Lark Smith has always had a plan for her life: find a fantastic guy, create a marriage as blissful as her parents’, pop out a couple of kids and build a rewarding career as an oncologist. Things aren’t going so well. A potential solution comes from the foul-tempered and renowned surgeon Lorenzo Santini (aka Dr. Satan). He needs a date this summer for his sister’s wedding. In exchange, he could make a few introductions and maybe get Lark back into the field of her choice. As a sucker for old people and fake relationships, Lark agrees. Meanwhile, Lark’s mom has moved in with Lark’s colorful landlady, Joy, and an unlikely friendship blossoms. The three women have a long summer and a big beautiful house on the ocean to figure out that the best things in life aren’t planned at all.
Romance Me Book Club Picks
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The Proposal
Romance Me Book Club - June 2024
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Dial A for Aunties
Romance Me Book Club - May 2024
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Before I Let Go
Romance Me Book Club - April 2024
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The Kiss Quotient
Romance Me Book Club - March 2024
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The House in the Cerulean Sea
Romance Me Book Club - February 2024
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Pride and Prejudice
Romance Me Book Club Pick - January 2024
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It Ends with Us
Lily has come a long way from the small town where she grew up. When she feels a spark with a gorgeous neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid, everything in Lily’s life seems too good to be true. Ryle is assertive, stubborn, maybe even a little arrogant but also sensitive and brilliant with a total soft spot for Lily. But Ryle’s complete aversion to relationships is disturbing. Even as Lily finds herself becoming the exception to his “no dating” rule, she can’t help but wonder what made him that way in the first place. When questions about her new relationship overwhelm her, so do thoughts of Atlas Corrigan, her first love and a link to the past she left behind. He was her kindred spirit, her protector. When Atlas suddenly reappears, everything Lily has built with Ryle is threatened.
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The Dead Romantics
Florence Day, the ghostwriter for one of the most prolific romance authors in the industry, no longer believes in love thanks to a terrible break-up. When her new editor won't give her an extension on her book deadline, Florence prepares to kiss her career goodbye. But then she gets a phone call she never wanted to receive, and she must return home for the first time in a decade to help her family bury her beloved father. Then she finds the ghost of her new editor standing at the funeral parlor’s front door, just as infuriatingly handsome as ever, and he’s just as confused about why he’s there as she is. Romance may be dead, but so is her new editor. His unfinished business will have her second-guessing everything she’s ever known about love stories.
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Island Affair
When social media influencer Sara Vance's unreliable boyfriend is a no-show for a Florida family vacation, Sara recruits Luis Navarro, a firefighter paramedic and dive captain willing to play the part of her smitten fiancé. Luis’s big Cuban familia has been in Key West for generations, and his quiet strength feeds off the island’s laidback style. Though guarded after a deep betrayal, he’ll always help someone in need, especially a spunky beauty with a surprising knowledge of Spanish curse words. Soon, he and Sara have memorized their “how we met” story and are immersed in family dinners, bike tours, private snorkeling trips and slow, melting kisses. But when it’s time for Sara to return home, will their fake relationship fade like the stunning sunset or blossom into something beautiful?
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Part of Your World
After a wild bet, gourmet grilled-cheese sandwich, and cuddle with a baby goat, Alexis Montgomery has had her world turned upside down. The cause: Daniel Grant, a ridiculously hot carpenter who's ten years younger than her and as casual as they come, the complete opposite of sophisticated city-girl Alexis. Every minute she spends with Daniel and the tight-knit town where he lives, she's discovering just what's really important. Yet letting their relationship become anything more than a short-term fling would mean turning her back on her ultra-wealthy family and the opportunity to help thousands of people. Bringing Daniel into her world is impossible, and yet she can't just give up the joy she's found with him either.
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Get a Life, Chloe Brown
Chloe Brown is a chronically ill computer geek with a goal, a plan, and a list. After almost—but not quite—dying, she’s made a 'Get a Life' list with six directives for spicing up her life. What Chloe needs is a teacher, and she knows just the man for the job. Redford ‘Red’ Morgan is a handyman with tattoos, a motorcycle, and more sex appeal than ten-thousand Hollywood heartthrobs. He’s also an artist who paints at night and hides his work in the light of day, which Chloe knows because she spies on him occasionally. But when she enlists Red in her mission to rebel, she learns things about him that no spy session could teach her, like what really lies beneath his rough exterior.
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It Happened One Summer
When too much champagne and an out-of-control rooftop party lands Piper Bellinger in the slammer, her stepfather decides enough is enough. So he cuts her off, and sends Piper and her sister to learn some responsibility running their late father's dive bar in Washington. Piper hasn't even been in Westport for five minutes when she meets big, bearded sea captain Brendan, who thinks she won't last a week outside of Beverly Hills. The fun-loving socialite and the gruff fisherman are polar opposites, but there's an undeniable attraction simmering between them. Piper doesn't want any distractions, especially feelings for a man who sails off into the sunset for weeks at a time. LA is calling her name, but Brendan--and this town full of memories--may have already caught her heart.
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Girl Gone Viral
One minute, Katrina King's enjoying an innocent conversation with a random guy at a coffee shop; the next, a stranger has live-tweeted the entire encounter with a romantic meet-cute spin and #CafeBae has the world swooning. Going viral isn't easy for anyone, but Katrina has painstakingly built a private world for herself, far from her traumatic past. With the internet on the hunt for the identity of #CuteCafeGirl, Jas Singh, bodyguard and possessor of the most beautiful eyebrows Katrina's ever seen, offers his family's farm as a refuge. Alone with her unrequited crush feels like a recipe for hopeless longing, but Katrina craves the escape. She's resigned to being just friends with Jas--until they share a single electrifying kiss. Now she can't help but wonder if her crush may not be so unrequited after all.
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The Love Hypothesis
As a third-year Ph.D. candidate, Olive Smith doesn't believe in lasting romantic relationships, but her best friend Anh does. Scientists require proof. So, like any self-respecting biologist, Olive panics and kisses the first man she sees. That man is none other than Adam Carlsen, a young hotshot professor--and well-known ass. Which is why Olive is floored when Stanford's reigning lab tyrant agrees to keep her charade a secret and be her fake boyfriend. But when a big science conference goes haywire, putting Olive's career on the Bunsen burner, Adam surprises her again with his unyielding support. Suddenly their little experiment feels dangerously close to combustion. And Olive discovers that the only thing more complicated than a hypothesis on love is putting her own heart under the microscope.
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The Bromance Book Club
Nashville Legends second baseman Gavin Scott's marriage is in major league trouble. He’s recently discovered a humiliating secret: his wife Thea has always faked the Big O. When he loses his cool at the revelation, it’s the final straw on their already strained relationship. Thea asks for a divorce, and Gavin realizes he’s let his pride and fear get the better of him. Distraught and desperate, Gavin finds help from an unlikely source: a secret romance book club made up of Nashville's top alpha men. With the help of their current read, a steamy Regency titled Courting the Countess, the guys coach Gavin on saving his marriage. But it'll take a lot more than flowery words and grand gestures for this hapless Romeo to find his inner hero and win back the trust of his wife.
Stranger than Fiction: A Nonfiction Book Club Picks
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The Great Displacement
Stranger Than Fiction: A Nonfiction Book Club - June 2024
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Happy-Go-Lucky
Stranger Than Fiction: A Nonfiction Book Club - May 2024
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The Home That Was Our Country
Stranger Than Fiction: A Nonfiction Book Club - April 2024
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Fun Home
Stranger Than Fiction: A Nonfiction Book Club - March 2024
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Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
Stranger Than Fiction Book Club pick - February 2024
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A Fever in the Heartland
Stranger Than Fiction Book Club pick - January 2024
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The Last Black Unicorn
Stranger Than Fiction Book Club pick - December 2023
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Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
Stranger Than Fiction Book Club Pick - November 2023
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People Who Eat Darkness
Stranger Than Fiction Book Club Pick - October 2023
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The Line Becomes a River
Stranger Than Fiction Book Club Pick - September 2023
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Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
Stranger Than Fiction Book Club Pick - August 2023
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I Live a Life Like Yours
Stranger Than Fiction Book Club Pick - July 2023
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This is Your Brain on Music
Stranger than Fiction Book Club Pick - June 2023
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Trick Mirror
Stranger than Fiction Book Club pick - May 2023
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Brain on Fire
Stranger than Fiction Book Club pick - April 2023
Adult Reading Challenge Book Brunch
Join us to discuss what you are reading for this month's Adult Reading Challenge. Tell us what you loved (or didn't) about the month's theme and get some recommendations from others, too!
This event will take place in-person and virtually on Zoom. Registration is required. To find out more and to register visit our events calendar.
Romance Me Book Club
Love is in the air! We will be discussing mostly romantic fiction, along with some love-related nonfiction.Our choices will reflect romance between various couples and cultures, and all genders are welcome to respectfully attend these discussions. Be prepared to talk about sweet, steamy, or downright hilarious content as we spill our thoughts about this month's read.
Registration is required. To find out more and to register visit our events calendar.
Stranger than Fiction
Non-Fiction Book Club
This group will meet once a month to discuss memoirs, biographies, true crime and other nonfiction titles.
Registration is required. To find out more and to register visit our events calendar.