Washoe County Library System

"Great American novelist Julia Alvarez, bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, returns with a luminescent novel about storytelling that reads like an instant classic. "Only an alchemist as wise and sure as Alvarez could swirl the elements of folklore and the flavor of magical realism around her modern prose and make it all sing . . . Lively, joyous . . . often witty, occasionally somber...

"From the bestselling, acclaimed, beloved author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories--personal and collective"-- "From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories―personal and collective. Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his life: Juan Gay. Playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian...

"A young mother speaks to her second born child. Since the drama of childbirth, all feels calm. The world is new and full of surprises, even though dangers lurk behind every corner; a car out of control, disease ever-present in the air, the unforgiving speed of time. She tells of the time before the child was born, when the world felt unsure and enveloped in darkness, of long nights with an older lover, of her writing career and the precariousness...

On a remote tropical island where villages are overrun by rebel fighting, thirteen-year-old Matilda is introduced to the Charles Dickens classic "Great Expectations" by her white school teacher and becomes enthralled with the story's main character, with whom she feels a connection. In a novel that is at once intense, beautiful, and fablelike, Lloyd Jones weaves a transcendent story that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the power...

"In twelfth century, Persia, clever and dreamy Shaherazade stumbles on the Malik's beloved wife entwined with a lover in a sun-dappled courtyard. When Shaherazade recounts her first tale, the story of this infidelity, to the Malik, she sets the Seljuk Empire on fire. Enraged at his wife's betrayal, the once-gentle Malik beheads her. But when that killing does not quench his anger, the Malik begins to marry and behead a new bride each night. Furious...