Due to the impending storm, East Brunswick Public Library will close at 4:00 PM.

Contemporary Fiction

Afterlife

A literature professor tries to rediscover who she is after the sudden death of her husband, even as a series of family and political jolts force her to ask what we owe those in crisis in our families, biological or otherwise.

Weather: A Novel

Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years, she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addictbrother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal.

Such a Fun Age

Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make things right.

Broken People

 

With his sponsor's blessing, recovering alcoholic Sam partakes in a healing ceremony involving an ancient herbal medicine administered by a shaman over the course of three days, in a novel about coming to grips with the past.

Recursion

New York City cop Barry Sutton investigates the devastating phenomenon the media has dubbed False Memory Syndrome-- a mysterious affliction that drives its victims mad with memories of a life they never lived. Neuroscientist Helena Smith dedicated her life to creating a technology that will let us preserve our most precious moments of our pasts. If she succeeds, anyone will be able to re-experience a first kiss, the birth of a child, the final moment with a dying parent. Together they face a force that attacks not just our minds but the very fabric of the past.

The Escape Room

Welcome to the escape room. Your goal is simple. Get out alive. In the lucrative world of finance, Vincent, Jules, Sylvie, and Sam are at the top of their game. They've mastered the art of the deal and celebrate their success in style--but a life of extreme luxury always comes at a cost. Invited to participate in an escape room as a team-building exercise, the ferociously competitive co-workers crowd into the elevator of a high rise building, eager to prove themselves.

The River

A masterful tale of wilderness survival in the vein of Into the Wild and The Call of the Wild. It is the story of two college friends on a wilderness canoe trip. A gripping tale of a friendship tested by fire, whitewater, starvation, and brutality.

The Guest Book

 

The bereaved matriarch of a powerful early-twentieth-century American family makes a fateful decision that reverberates throughout two subsequent generations further impacted by racism, reversed circumstances, and disturbing revelations.

Oona Out of Order

Its New Years Eve 1982, and Oona Lockhart has her whole life before her. At the stroke of midnight she will turn nineteen, and the year ahead promises to be one of consequence. Should she go to London to study economics, or remain at home in Brooklyn to pursue her passion for music and be with her boyfriend? As the countdown to the New Year begins, Oona faints and awakens thirty-two years in the future in her fifty-one-year-old body. Greeted by a friendly stranger in a beautiful house shes told is her own, Oona learns that with each passing year she will leap to another age at random.

This is Not the Jess Show

Black Mirror meets My So-Called Life in this fast-paced, timely YA thriller about separating fact from fiction--and how far we'll go to create our own version of reality.

Like any other teenager, Jess Flynn is just trying to get through her junior year without drama ... but drama seems to keep finding her. Between a new crush on her childhood best friend, overprotective parents cramping her social life, and her younger sister's worsening health, the only constant is change--and her hometown of Swickley, which feels smaller by the day.