HPL Staff Picks

"Alaska, 1974. Ernt Allbright came home from the Vietnam War a changed and volatile man. When he loses yet another job, he makes the impulsive decision to move his wife and daughter north where they will live off the grid in America's last true frontier. Cora will do anything for the man she loves, even if means following him into the unknown. Thirteen-year-old Leni, caught in the riptide of her parents' passionate, stormy relationship, has little...

"Edinburgh, 1869: Modern-day homicide detective Mallory Atkinson is adjusting to her new life in Victorian Scotland. Her employers know she's not housemaid Catriona Mitchell-even though Mallory is in Catriona's body-and Mallory is now officially an undertaker's assistant. Dr. Duncan Gray moonlights as a medical examiner, and their latest case hits close to home. Men are dropping dead from a powerful poison, and all signs point to the grieving widows......

In Nottingham, England, widow Emma Taylor finds herself in desperate need of a job to provide for herself and her beloved daughter, Olivia. But with the legal restrictions prohibiting widows with children from most employment opportunities, she's left with only one option: persuading the manageress at Boots' Booklover's Library to take a chance on her. When the threat of war becomes a reality, Olivia must be evacuated to the countryside. In her daughter's...

"One of the most influential books of the twentieth century gets the graphic treatment in this first-ever adaptation of George Orwell's 1984. Orwell's best-known work of unrelenting dystopian realism warns against totalitarianism. The story is told from the point of view of Winston Smith, a functionary of the Ministry of Truth whose work involved the "correction" of all records each time the "Big Brother" decided that the truth had changed."-- Provided...

When Lula Dean, trying to rid public libraries of "pornographic" books, starts her own lending library in front of her home, Lindsay, the daughter of Lula's arch nemesis, sneaks in nightly, secretly filling it with banned books wrapped in "wholesome" dust jackets, changing the lives of those who borrow them in unexpected ways.

In the spring of 2020, Lara's three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything...

"It is eleven thousand years from now. A lot has happened, and yet a lot is still very familiar. Ariel is a boy in a small town under a wizard's rule. Like many adventurers before him, Ariel is called to explore a world full of unimaginable glories and challenges: unknown enemies, a mission to save the world, a girl. Here, as they say, be dragons. But none of this happens before Ariel comes across an artifact from an earlier civilization, a sentient,...

"A time travel romance, a spy thriller, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all: Welcome to The Ministry of Time, the exhilarating debut novel by Kaliane Bradley In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she'll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering "expats" from across history to establish...

"A gripping and atmospheric reimagining of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" from Hugo, Locus, & Nebula award-winning author T. Kingfisher. When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania. What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing...

"When ten-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot, time stopped. And when she saw her brother, Baz, lying on the floor surrounded by the shattered pieces of a centuries-old jar, life as Ebby knew it shattered as well. The crime was never solved—and because the Freemans were one of the only Black families in a particularly well-to-do enclave of New England—the case has had an enduring, voyeuristic pull for the public. The last thing the Freemans...