Posts tagged with fiction

With the start of the school year just under 4 weeks away, it’s a great time to sneak in those last summer reads before recreational reading takes the back burner to school-related reading this fall. What better way to find your next summer book than this list of books that U of M Librarians, UMSI students, and famous authors love to read?

As July begins, it feels as though the summer continues to speed by at an alarming rate – but there’s always time to pause to recognize Disability Pride Month! To mark Disability Pride Month at the library, you can find a display of books by disabled authors and/or featuring disabled characters on the first floor of Shapiro throughout July. Not on campus? This mix of fiction and nonfiction titles in the display are also available online now.

In 2021, at least partially due to the reckonings of the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings, the United States recognized Juneteenth as a national holiday. While this holiday may be new to some people, many Black Americans have been celebrating this day commemorating emancipation for centuries, and there is a wealth of writing on its history and significance. With this in mind, though Juneteenth may have passed on Monday, it’s always the right time to educate ourselves on the history of race and racism in this country.

Dance Hall of the Dead is the second book in Tony Hillerman's best-selling mystery series featuring Navajo policeman Joe Leaphorn. (It can easily be read without having read the first.) Leaphorn investigates the disappearance of two boys, one Zuñi and one Navajo. The strength of Hillerman's writing is in his descriptions of the locations in New Mexico and Arizona, and of the religion, mythology, and ceremonies of the Navajo and Zuñi. A beautifully-written book!

This is the first in a mystery series set in Bangalore, India, in the 1920s, featuring Kaveri Murthy, an independent-minded young woman with a passion for mathematics and crime-solving. Recently married to a doctor, Kaveri attends a party with her husband's colleagues. The party soon becomes a crime scene, and Kaveri and her husband must find the killer before the wrong person is executed for the murder.

In this highly entertaining Victorian mystery novel, the heroine, the American-born Frances Wynn, Countess of Harleigh, is engaged to her beloved George, her partner in crime solving, when a mysterious woman shows up, claiming to be married to George. He denies it, but then the woman ends up murdered in Frances' garden. Can Frances and George clear their names and go on with their wedding?

This is a delightful mystery novel set in Victorian England, featuring Frances Wynn, an American heiress who married a British aristocrat, and whose husband was murdered in the first book in the series. In this one, she goes to a country house owned by the family of her partner in crime-solving, to attend her sister's wedding. A series of accidents happens to the guests, but Frances realizes they're not accidental at all. Who will be the next victim?

This is a fantasy novel about Addie, a young woman in 1714 who makes a deal with a devil-like figure for eternal life, only to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Three hundred years later, in 2014, she finally meets someone who remembers her. Why does Henry, the bookseller, remember her when no one else does? You will find out in this poignant, beautifully-written novel.

This epic novel tells the story of three important figures of the French Revolution: Camille Desmoulins, Georges-Jacques Danton, and Maximilien Robespierre, from their childhoods to the tumultuous events of the Revolution. Mantel has a unique and compelling writing style that draws the reader into the world she writes about.

In this creepy novel of suspense set in 1920s Paris, American private investigator Harris Stuyvesant searches for a young woman, an artists' model, who has gone missing. His search takes him to a theater producing realistic horror plays and the studio of an artist who creates art objects out of human bones. He also encounters many famous people from the literary and artistic world of Paris at the time, including Hemingway, Picasso, Cole Porter, and the surrealist artist Man Ray, who plays an important role in the plot. Not for the squeamish, but a perfect Halloween read!