Novels
Solar Bones
Mike McCormack
Once a year, on All Souls’ Day, it is said in Ireland that the dead may return. Solar Bones is the story of one such visit. Marcus Conway, a middle-aged
engineer, turns up one afternoon at his kitchen table and considers the events that took him away and then brought him home again.
Funny and strange, McCormack’s ambitious and other-worldly novel plays with form and defies convention. This is profound new work is by one of Ireland’s most important contemporary novelists. A
beautiful and haunting elegy, this story of order and chaos, love and loss captures how minor decisions ripple into waves and test our integrity every day.
The Silence of the Girls
Pat Barker
Pat Barker looks at war through women's eyes.
The ancient city of Troy has withstood a decade under siege of the powerful Greek army, which continues to wage bloody war over a stolen woman - Helen. In the Greek camp, another woman - Briseis - watches and waits for the war's outcome.
Briseis is just one among thousands of women living behind the scenes in this war - the slaves and prostitutes, the nurses, the women who lay out the dead - all of them erased by history. With breathtaking historical detail and luminous prose, Pat Barker brings the teeming world of the Greek camp to vivid life. She offers nuanced, complex portraits of characters and stories familiar from mythology, which, seen from Briseis's perspective, are rife with newfound revelations. Barker's latest builds on her decades-long study of war and its impact on individual lives - and it is nothing short of magnificent.
Comics
Mental Load : A Feminist Comic
Emma
In her first book of comic strips, Emma reflects on social and feminist issues by means of simple line drawings, dissecting the mental load, ie all that invisible and unpaid organizing, list-making and planning women do to manage their lives, and the lives of their family members. Most of us carry some form of mental load--about our work, household responsibilities, financial obligations and personal life; but what makes up that burden and how it's distributed within households and understood in offices is not always equal or fair.
In her strips Emma deals with themes ranging from maternity leave (it is not a vacation!), domestic violence, the clitoris, the violence of the medical world on women during childbirth, and other feminist issues, and she does so in a straightforward way that is both hilarious and deadly serious.. If you're not laughing, you're probably crying in recognition. Emma's comics also address the everyday outrages and absurdities of immigrant rights, income equality, and police violence.
How To Be Happy
Eleanor Davis
Eleanor Davis's How to be Happy is the artist's first collection of graphic/literary short stories. Davis is one of the finest cartoonists of her
generation, and has been producing comics since the mid-2000s. Happy represents the best stories she's drawn for such curatorial venues as Mome and No-Brow, as well as her own self-publishing and
web efforts. Davis achieves a rare, subtle poignancy in her narratives that are at once compelling and elusive, pregnant with mystery and a deeply satisfying emotional resonance. Happy shows the
full range of Davis's graphic skills -- sketchy drawing, polished pen and ink line work, and meticulously designed full color painted panels-- which are always in the service of a narrative that
builds to a quietly devastating climax.
Children Books
Franklin's Flying Bookshop
Jen Campbell
Franklin the dragon loves stories and loves reading stories to people, too, but everyone is scared of him. One day, he meets a girl
named Luna who, rather than being afraid, is fascinated to meet Franklin, having recently read all about dragons in one of her books. They instantly become friends and talk nonstop about what
they've read: books about roller-skating, King Arthur, spiders, and how to do kung fu. Together they hatch a plan to share their love of books with others by opening a bookshop - a flying
bookshop, that is - right on Franklin's back!
Ocean Meets Sky
Terry Fan, Eric Fan
Finn lives by the sea and the sea lives by him. Every time he looks out his window it’s a constant reminder of the stories his grandfather told him about
the place where the ocean meets the sky. Where whales and jellyfish soar and birds and castles float.
Finn’s grandfather is gone now but Finn knows the perfect way to honor him. He’ll build his own ship and sail out to find this magical place himself!
And when he arrives, maybe, just maybe, he’ll find something he didn’t know he was looking for.
