Washoe County Library System

Wilson's ambition alone is exciting. . . . [His] writing has a Houdini-like perfection, wherein no matter how grim the variables, each lovely sentence manages to escape with all its parts intact." —Boston Globe

The eagerly-anticipated follow-up to the New York Times bestseller The Family Fang—a warm-hearted and moving story about a young woman making a family on her own terms.

When Isabelle

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During a typically crowded L.A. morning commute, a naked runner is dodging between the stalled cars. The strange sight makes the local news and captures the imaginations of a stunning cast of misfits and lost souls. There's Ren, just out of juvie, who travels in search of his mother. There's Owen and James, teenage twins who live in a desert commune, where their father, a self-proclaimed healer, holds a powerful sway over his disciples. There's Britt,...

aSkye Kennedy has always loved the close-knit community of Sunrise Fellowship—but when she witnesses the commune’s new leader commit a terrible crime, she flees…and finds herself in Montana, on the McGrath ranch, and drawn to the stoic yet kind man determined to help her. "Skye Kennedy has always loved the close-knit community of Sunrise Fellowship--but when she witnesses the commune's new leader commit a terrible crime, she flees...and finds...

A novel inspired by the controversial psychedelic drug experiments of Timothy Leary traces the impact of LSD and communal living on a 1960s Harvard grad student and his wife.

Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island's Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial...

"A fifty-year-old cold case involving California royalty comes back to life-with potentially fatal consequences-in this gripping standalone novel from the New York Times bestselling author of the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series. The Gardener Estate is one of the most storied and beloved places on the West Coast: a magnificent house in vast formal grounds, home to a family that shaped California-and fought hard to conceal the turmoil and eccentricities...

"In landlocked Gainesville, Florida, in the hot, fraught summer of 1999, a college dropout named David sleepwalks through his life--a dull haze of office work and Internet porn--until a run-in with a lost friend jolts him from his torpor. He is drawn into the vibrant but grimy world of Fishgut, a rundown house where a loose collective of anarchists, burnouts, and libertines practice utopia outside society and the law. Some even see their life as a...

Shevek, a brilliant physicist from the anarchist moon Anarres, risks his life by traveling to the mother planet of Urras in the hope of offering wisdom to its inhabitants and to reunite the two long-alienated worlds

"An astonishing literary debut about a young girl's coming of age in the haunting, enchanting world of an English commune -- a modern gothic novel with echoes of Room and Never Let Me Go. Foxlowe is a crumbling old house in the moors -- wild, secluded, and magical place. For Green, it is not just home, but everything she knows. Outside, people live in little square houses, with unhappy families and tedious jobs. At Foxlowe, Green runs free through...

"Based on the terrible truths of Jonestown, Jim Jones's utopian commune in Guyana, Children of Paradise is a beautifully imagined novel that interweaves history and fiction to portray a mother and daughter's escape from the rule of a religious madman. Joyce and her young daughter, Trina, have followed a charismatic preacher from California to the wilds of Guyana, where a thousand congregants have cleared a swath of dense jungle and built a utopian...