Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities

On the shelves - Jan. 19

These books are available at the Clovis-Carver Public Library:

In conjunction with the city of Clovis Floodplain Management Program, the library maintains a collection of materials on National Flood Insurance programs including manuals for designing or retrofitting structures, handbooks on residential repair, guidelines for erosion control, and similar topics. Librarians will assist users in locating these materials.

“The Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny” by Daisy Dunn: When Pliny the Elder perished at Stabiae during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, he left behind his thirty-seven-volume Natural History, and a teenaged nephew who revered him as a father. Grieving his loss, Pliny the Younger inherited the Elder’s notebooks and his legacy. At its heart, The Shadow of Vesuvius is a literary biography of the younger man and chronicler of the Roman Empire from the dire days of terror under Emperor Domitian to the gentler times of Emperor Trajan.

“Permanent Record” by Edward Snowden: In 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden shocked the world when he revealed that the United States government was secretly pursuing the means to collect every single phone call, text message, and email. The result would be an unprecedented system of mass surveillance with the ability to pry into the private lives of every person on earth. Six years later, Snowden reveals for the very first time how he helped to build this system and why he was moved to expose it.

“Trail of Broken Wings” by Sejal Badani: When her father falls into a coma, Indian American photographer Sonya reluctantly returns to the family she’d fled years before. Since she left home, Sonya has lived on the run. Her soft-spoken sister, Trisha, has created a perfect suburban life and their ambitious sister, Marin, has built her own successful career. But as these women come together, their various methods of coping with a terrifying history can no longer hold their memories at bay. Buried secrets rise to the surface as their father--the victim of humiliating racism and perpetrator of horrible violence--remains unconscious.

“Beneath the Surface” by Lynn H. Blackburn: After a harrowing experience with an obsessed patient, oncology nurse practitioner Leigh Weston needed a change. She thought she’d left her troubles behind when she moved to Carrington, North Carolina, and took a job in the emergency department of the local hospital but then someone tampers with her brakes. She reaches out to homicide investigator Ryan Parker for help. When the body of a wealthy businessman is discovered in Lake Porter, the investigation uncovers a possible serial killer--one with a terrifying connection to Leigh Weston.

“The Last Train to London” by Meg Waite Clayton: In 1936, the Nazi are little more than loud, brutish bores to fifteen-year old Stephan Neuman, the son of a wealthy and influential Jewish family. Stephan’s best friend is the brilliant Îofie-Helene, a Christian girl whose mother edits a progressive, anti-Nazi newspaper. But the two adolescents’ carefree innocence is shattered when the Nazis take control. There is hope in the darkness, though. Truus Wijsmuller, a member of the Dutch resistance, risks her life smuggling Jewish children out of Nazi Germany to the nations that will take them.

These books are available at the Portales Public Library:

“Genesis” by Robin Cook: At first appearance, the dead body of twenty-eight-year-old social worker Kera Jacobsen seems to be the cause of a tragic drug overdose. For Chief New York City Medical Examiner Laurie Montgomery and her new pathology resident, Dr. Aria Nichols, however, the details of the supposed overdose don’t seem to add up to a clean explanation during their autopsy. For one thing, Kera’s family and friends all swear that Kera had never used drugs before, and the administrators from the hospital that Kera worked at refuse to give out any additional information, insisting that the case be kept silent. And not only was Kera ten weeks pregnant at the time of her death, but no one has any idea of who the father of the baby is either. Although neither Aria nor Laurie know what to make of the secrets of Kera’s death, Aria takes on the case alone when Laurie is saddled with a medical emergency, and Aria turns to the controversial technique of using DNA databases to try to track down the identity of the baby’s father in order to find some clarity in how Kera really died, and why. But as she gets closer to answers through the baby’s DNA, she may be getting closer to a killer who wants to may sure Kera’s secrets stay secret.

“Stranger Things: Suspicious Minds” by Gwenda Bond: In this prequel to the popular Netflix series, the first official Stranger Things novel focuses on the story of Eleven’s biological mother, Terry Ives, during the summer of 1969. In the midst of two very different kinds of war, the Cold War and the Vietnam War, Terry is a young student at an Indiana college who isn’t sure how to feel about the changing world around her or the conflicts it brings. When she hears about a government experiment about to take place in the nearby small town of Hawkins, Terry decides to do her part to help her country and signs up as a test subject for the project. Within the walls of the top-secret Hawkins National Laboratory Terry meets her fellow test subjects, the project’s mysterious director, Dr. Martin Brenner, and a little girl known only as “008” who can do extraordinary things, things that should be impossible for humans. When Terry starts digging into the truth of what the drug trial is meant to accomplish, the more she realizes that she has become part of a conspiracy far more dangerous than she could have ever imagined.

“Five Feet Apart” by Rachel Lippincott, Mikki Daughtry, and Tobias Iaconis: Stella Grant hates being out of control in any part of her life, including the fact that her lungs won’t work properly due to living with cystic fibrosis, causing her to have to live in a hospital for weeks at a time. Right now, her only duty to wait for a lung transplant, which is easier said than done when she must stay away from anyone or anything that might possibly give her an infection, therefore making her too ill to be eligible for a transplant. She knows she has to keep six feet between herself and anyone else with CF, but when she meets the infuriating Will Newman in the hospital-who also has CF-she suddenly finds her strict lifelong rule much harder to maintain. Will, on the other hand, waits impatiently to turn eighteen so that he can finally release himself from the hospital and move on with his life, however long he might have. When he meets Stella, however, both teens are tempted to inch just a little closer than six feet in order to spend time together, knowing full well that either of them could die if they get close enough for cross-infection.

— Summaries provided by library staff

 
 
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