Looking for new books, audiobooks, and movies?
Under Explore, click on New Titles.
You can move between tabs to see new titles that have Just Arrived and new titles that are On Order.
Once you’ve chosen whether you want to see new titles that have Just Arrived or new titles that are On Order, click on the View All New Titles link at the bottom right.
After clicking on View All New Titles, you can also click boxes in the Filter your results by… column to find the library materials you are most interested in, such as Fiction for Adults.
If you are logged in to your PPL account, you can scroll through these search results and Place Holds on all the new titles you’re interested in.
This is one great way to discover new library materials (and to get in line now for upcoming titles by new and favorite authors).
For more ideas, try our Your Next Great Read service for kids and adults.
We hope you enjoy many new books (and movies, audiobooks, databases, story times, programs and more) from PPL in 2024!
“October is all slanting honey-gold midday sun enveloped by chilly darkness. I am watching my garden shrink back to its bones, and remembering—so very wistfully—each time I floated in the Atlantic this summer. It’s bittersweet season, and I am happily carrying the ache of one of my favorite summer reads as we voyage into fall.” —from Aprill’s Picks
In October, we bring you quotes and characters, poetry and picture books. Plus: cats, cookbooks, nature, magic, and much more! As you start to squirrel away your books for fall, hope you discover a new read or two in all our finds and favorites.
Cindy’s Picks
We just got in SO MANY new children’s books!
The Dinosaur in the Garden is written and illustrated by Deb Pilutti and told from the perspective of an extinct Tyrannosaurus Rex. “I used to live here,” he begins, “back when this was a lush and leafy forest. Flowers bloomed, insects buzzed, and trees towered.” Now it is a pleasant garden where a little girl lives. The ghostly dinosaur compares humans and their differences to the dinosaurs and marvels at how alike they are in some ways. When the little girl’s dog finds a huge dinosaur tooth in the garden, he tells her to “Keep looking. It might take a while, but I will wait…for my story to become part of your story.” The illustrations are sweet and approachable, and this book would be fantastic for a curious 3-to-5-year-old.
Another brand-new picture book is A Big Day for Bike, written by Emily Jenkins and illustrated by the wonderful G. Brian Karas. It is Bike’s first day on the job as a City Bike rental in Seattle, and Bike is nervous that she won’t be able to keep up like the older bikes can. Explore the sights and sounds of the city of Seattle through the perspectives of this adorable teal bike as she successfully navigates her first day on the job!
My final recommendation is a new middle grade novel by Ronnie Riley called Asking for a Friend. Eden Jones has exactly three friends. And they’re all fake. Eden has social anxiety and until now, they have pretended they are best friends with three real kids from school. Everything seems just great, until Eden’s mom announces that she is throwing them a birthday party and all of their “friends” are invited! Now Eden needs to do whatever they can to convince these three kids, Duke, Ramona and Tabitha, to be friends with them before the party happens. What will happen? Read this book to find out!
Julia F.’s Pick
A wonderful read for both Indigenous Peoples’ Day and Halloween (and the return of MaineCat!), Darcie Little Badger’s Sheine Lende tells the story of Lipan Apache teen Shane as she searches for her mother and two missing children in 1970s Texas. Sheine Lende is a prequel to Little Badger’s debut novel, Elatsoe, and is set in the same alternate America shaped by magic, where fairy rings are a common form of transport, and monsters may lurk in the woods. Shane, like all the women in her family line, can raise the ghosts of animals, and she and her mother, Lorenza, lead search-and-rescue missions with the aid of their devoted ghostly bloodhound. Then Lorenza disappears while on a mission, and Shane must call on all her bravery and survival skills to find her. She is a loving and determined protagonist, who draws strength from her family, ancestors, and memories, even the painful ones. She will need to face those memories and travel farther than she thought possible to bring her mother home.
Emily’s Picks
In the realm of kids’ books, Emma Hunsinger’s graphic novel How It All Ends makes me (and my kids) laugh out loud a LOT! When Tara’s told she can skip eighth grade, going right from seventh into her first year of high school, she doesn’t see the big deal. But when she starts, she’s immediately overwhelmed—the students are out of control and she’s convinced she’ll get lost forever in the endless hallways. Then Tara meets a new friend who gets her sometimes over-the-top sense of humor and makes jokes right alongside her, making school suddenly a lot less lonely. It’s goofy and thoroughly engaging, with some of the best scenes playing out in Tara’s rich imaginary world, and is full of beautifully expressive illustrations and characters you can’t help but love.
The cover and title of Someone You Can Build A Nest In were immediately intriguing to me—and once I picked it up and started the first page, I had to keep reading. It’s a story of hunting down monsters, from the monster’s point of view, and what a monster she is. Shesheshen has been hibernating all winter when she’s disturbed by intruders, monster hunters coming to slay her. She slithers and slides out of her watery den, drawing hard objects into her body to give her a more human form, hiding a bear trap in her chest just in case. And things get weirder from there. It’s a wonderful combination of fantasy, horror, and romance, with welcome perspectives on disability and queerness, and extremely funny to boot.
Fionna’s Picks
If scary isn’t your speed, why not celebrate the fall with the strange and bizarre?
I loved listening to The Ministry of Time by Kailane Bradley and The Husbands by Holly Gramazio on CloudLibrary. Both books were a great mix of sci-fi/fantasy with romantic storylines and the result was just delightful.
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher was sharp, funny, and devastating. Don’t be fooled by this slim volume, you’ll be flipped upside down by the time you’re through.
Sarah M.’s Pick
“This is the memory he keeps but doesn’t see, the one that lives in him, in a room he has all but abandoned.”
I recently read and LOVED Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange.
Aprill’s Picks
October is all slanting honey-gold midday sun enveloped by chilly darkness. I am watching my garden shrink back to its bones, and remembering—so very wistfully—each time I floated in the Atlantic this summer. It’s bittersweet season, and I am happily carrying the ache of one of my favorite summer reads as we voyage into fall. Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland tells the story of Adina Giorno, an alien who was sent to earth to live as a human. At age four, she is “activated” and begins communicating with her home planet via a salvaged fax machine, conveying her observations of human life on Earth. Bertino writes details with incredible but gentle precision, from the shade of pantyhose that Adina’s mother pinches pennies to buy, to Black Sheep’s The Choice is Yours as background to a Wildwood, New Jersey-set summer, to the date night meal of salad and sesame pizza that adult Adina and her best friend share. Time and place—1980s working-class Philadelphia, and New York City just before, during, and after 9/11—are delivered to us like precious gifts. Beyond all its specificity, there is the wry comedy, distance, connection, loss, and the eventual heartbreak of Adina’s time on Earth. Not since my childhood fixation on Robin William’s Mork have I felt humanity’s fumbles and foibles celebrated quite like this, and that feels quite bittersweet too.
October is also the time of year when I tend to see horror in possibly unlikely places. In the horror genre, a final girl is the character who faces the monster and lives to tell the tale. It’s been said that Sarah Manguso’s Liars is dazzling autofiction, or the autopsy of a marriage, or a whodunnit with patriarchy as the bad guy. I think we can also read it as a horror novel: the monster a grotesque nesting doll of husband inside marriage inside compulsory gender roles inside capitalism inside—yes—patriarchy. Manguso gives us a fresh and blood-boiling take on a tale old as time: a brilliant woman subsumed by a not-quite-so-brilliant husband, her career put on the far back burner in the interest of his mediocre and unsuccessful one. The nightmare begins when Jane falls for John and her promising future as a writer threatens to outshine his directionless creative pursuits. Like many a final girl, Jane doesn’t necessarily ignore the relationship’s many, many (MANY!) red flags —in fact she keeps meticulous record of them —collecting each one to alert the rest of us to the myriad dangers of matrimony. It’s not surprising that things get worse and worse the deeper Jane gets, and marriage and parenthood threaten to completely undo her. I found Liars impossible to put down. Each page vibrates with hot rage, although there are also interstitial moments of sweetness in Jane’s relationship with her son. Manguso’s voice reads with an immediacy and force that I felt in my bones.
Mikayla’s Picks
These five interconnected novellas follow the cleric Chih as they travel the mythical empire of Ahn in search of stories to record. Although these books are each only about one hundred pages long, they pack a punch thanks to Vo’s skillful storytelling. One book tells the tale of an empress’ rise to power, another sees Chih captured by a band of tigers, yet another details Chih’s eventful return home after long years away. My favorite titles are The Empress of Salt and Fortune and Mammoths at the Gates, but you can’t go wrong!
These two books are a collaboration prompted by the removal of nature words like “acorn,” “fern,” and “otter” from a popular children’s dictionary. The books attempt to honor and revive those words by featuring them as “spell-poems” with accompanying artwork. I was particularly entranced by Morris’ vivid illustrations and the double meaning of “spell” as a form of orthography and magic-casting. Each time I read the books aloud I feel like I’m part of keeping these words and beings alive. Perfect for kids and grownups alike!
Elizabeth’s Picks
These days, I keep coming back to a quote from Vanessa Angélica Villarreal in her book Magical/Realism:
“Magical realism is of the heart; how the heart sees the world, how the heart thinks, reads, remembers, what it calls out for to stay alive. Magical realism is seeing what the heart believes possible in the real world, even after it’s broken. Maybe even especially then.”
Fall stirs up all kinds of feelings—something in the temperatures dropping, light fading, kicking through all those bright leaves, the world changing so starkly at each step. The new book The Lantern of Lost Memories might win Most Autumnal Title for me this year. (Or maybe Moon of the Turning Leaves? Ghostroots? Monster Locker? Sorcery and Small Magics? Night Magic? Creepy Crafts? Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions?) Similarly, is there a book cover more Autumnally Evocative than The Teller of Small Fortunes—a cat, a bonfire, a starry night? As I read this seasonal stack I’ll also be checking out Purr: The Science of Making Your Cat Happy, which is an ongoing (and joyous) project for me, my cat’s person.
Dark nights call for comfort food cookbooks: a few new titles at the library include Bodega Bakes, Jang, Peaceful Kitchen, Amrikan, Doma, Second Generation, Warm Your Bones, and Roots, Heart, Soul. For curling up with a comfort-foodie romance, there’s Adib Khorram’s I’ll Have What He’s Having.
In more new nonfiction, Edwidge Danticat’s sharp and stunning essay collection We’re Alone sweeps from childhood to motherhood, through hurricanes, heroes, and Haiti. Determined to Stay is a richly illustrated book about the Palestinian children of Silwan, while Recognizing the Stranger shares award-winning author Isabella Hammad’s Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture. How Women Made Music brings readers a compelling new history from NPR music. Everything to Play For critiques videogames and Tattoo You offers almost 700 images of the vibrant work of 75 artists.
In The Age of Loneliness, Laura Marris explores human relationships and responses to environmental loss with writing on marshes and horseshoe crabs, birdsong and airplanes—a book one reviewer described as “showing your love for the places you live by giving them your attention.” Loving the North Woods is a look at forest conservation in Maine. Housing the Nation offers numerous new perspectives on social equity, architecture, and affordable housing. And The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer reimagines community and reciprocity: “All flourishing is mutual.”
Thanks for reading! You can find all of our staff picks and place your holds in the booklist Wandering Stars: October Staff Picks.
For more reading ideas, check out books from our booklists, search our new books, or try our Your Next Great Read reading service for a personalized booklist of reading ideas from our staff.
In August we plunge into nonfiction and novels, movies and music and adventures, fire and water! Here are our recent reads and staff picks for the last bright weeks of summer.
Cindy’s Picks
I have three recommendations for August. Desert Queen is a biography by Jyoti Rajan Gopal that’s lavishly illustrated with a vibrant desert palette by Svabhu Kohli. It’s a beautiful story of a young boy from India who was captivated by dance. He became the drag performer Queen Harish, the “Whirling Desert Queen of Rajasthan”! Desert Queen is a touching (and at times harrowing) story of metamorphosis and self-acceptance.
From author Joshua S. Levy comes The Jake Show, a novel about seventh-grader Jake Lightman, whose parents’ divorce is tearing him in half. His “mother wants him to play the role of ‘Yaakov, a Torah-loving kid who never watches TV.’ His secular father wants ‘Jacob’ to focus on science and math.” As Jake thinks,”There was one thing all versions of me had in common—Yaakov, Jacob, Jake. They were all by the book. No ad-libbing. No improv. This wasn’t reality TV. I couldn’t storm off, scream at the camera, form alliances they’d never expect. This wasn’t a documentary either. The story couldn’t go anywhere, be anything, depending on what I chose to do next. I was a character, not a person. And only people have choices.” But Jake makes two new, awesome friends. When they invite him to go to Camp Gershoni with them for the summer, he knows he has to do it, whether his parents want him to or not.
My final recommendation is from the author of Roll with It: Jamie Sumner. “The problem with letting someone else tell your story is that they always get it wrong…which means the one thing you can never do is let another person speak for you.” Deep Water is the story of 12-year-old, Tully Birch, who wants to brave the waters of Lake Tahoe to break the record for the youngest person ever to complete the famous “Godfather” swim. She’s hoping maybe her mother will come back if she does. This beautiful novel in verse promises to be heart-rending and compelling.
Emily’s Pick
As a kid, I loved reading any Choose Your Own Adventure books I could get my hands on (and seeing if I could find the right path to keep the characters alive), so I was very excited to hear about Peng Shepherd’s All This And More.
Marsh has lost her job, is recently divorced, has failed at dating, and is worried about her changing relationship with her teenage daughter. Then she gets the chance to change her life on an astounding reality TV show that uses a new technology, “quantum bubbling.” Marsh and the bubbly host Talia travel back to key points in her life, where Marsh makes different choices, trying to find the right path to her perfect life. And of course, it’s all streaming live nonstop to a worldwide audience who are commenting about her every move.
Readers follow Marsh’s story down different paths, but things definitely aren’t straightforward. Surprising people and elements keep popping up in every timeline, some changes aren’t sticking, and some relationships are harder to mend. Plus…what about everyone else who gets dragged along with her? The reader can make choices, too. It’s a well thought out and addicting read – I kept wanting to flip ahead and see if I’d made the right choice, and definitely started it all over again once I got to an end!
Fionna’s Picks
Here are a few titles I’ve enjoyed recently:
Mostly on the serious side…
…but with a nice helping of romance:
Irene’s Pick
This graphic novel is a good read for the summer!
More Picks by Staff
Vicky’s Pick
As I write this, the Park Fire in California is now the fifth largest in the state’s history, and so far this year, wildfires have burned over 3.5 million acres across North America. With these sobering statistics in the air, along with so very much smoke, I’d like to recommend Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, by John Vaillant. In it he chronicles the 2016 Fort McMurray fire in the heart of northern Alberta’s tar sands country. He describes fires that can create their own weather, that require new metrics and new vocabulary, that burn for months. Moving back and forth between the science of fire and the people and events in and around Fort McMurray, Vaillant pens a gripping, horrifying, unforgettable narrative. He also delivers a damning history of science’s awareness that our dependence on burning fossil fuels could affect our planet’s ability to sustain us: and it has. He holds out a few morsels of hope, though: one of them being South Portland’s Clear Skies ordinance, which in 2014 blocked the transportation of tar-sands oil to Portland Harbor. Anyone who talks to me for more than a few minutes stands likely to hear me mention Fire Weather as one of the most important books I’ve read in a long time. Now you’ve heard me too.
Elizabeth’s Picks
Maybe it’s the heat or the thunderstorms this summer—these picks are brought to you by the ocean, sea creatures, the rain, even titles that simply reference water. There are ships at sea, there is drought, there are floods, there are stories of who gets water—water that is safe to drink—and who controls it or can’t control it at all. And there is swimming, science, music, life underwater, fictional futures. Lots to read!
Shark scientist Jasmin Graham’s book Sharks Don’t Sink is a great summer book (and a recent 2×2 Tuesday pick, along with Why We Swim and When the Island Had Fish). Here are a few more titles for kids, teens, and adults that caught my eye. You can also reach out to our library workers for more on a particular subject.
- Kids and Teens: The Silence of Water, Almost Nothing, Yet Everything, When You Can Swim, We Are Water Protectors, Luz Makes a Splash, Crab Cake, Swim Team, Murray Out of Water, Lakelore, Salt the Water, Hello, Rain!
- Adult Nonfiction and Fiction: There Are Rivers In the Sky, Deep Water, My Life With Sea Turtles, Kings of Their Own Ocean, What the Eyes Don’t See, Voice of the Fish, Sing Like Fish, What the Wild Sea Can Be, Sea Change, Whale Fall, Lost Ark Dreaming
As always, thanks for reading! You can find all the titles we reference here in the booklist Deep Water: August Staff Picks.
For more reading ideas, check out books from our booklists, search our new books, or try our Your Next Great Read reading service for a personalized booklist of reading ideas from our staff.
