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BEHAVE

From the author of The Spanish Bow comes a lush, harrowing novel based on the real life story of Rosalie Rayner Watson, one of the most controversial scientists—and mothers—of the 20th century.

“The mother begins to destroy the child the moment it’s born,” wrote the founder of behaviorist psychology, John B. Watson, whose 1928 parenting guide was revered as the child-rearing bible. For their dangerous and “mawkish” impulses to kiss and hug their child, “most mothers should be indicted for psychological murder.”

Behave is the story of Rosalie Rayner,

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ANIMALS STRIKE CURIOUS POSES

New York Times Editor’s Choice 

In Animals Strike Curious Poses, Elena Passarello channels her own potent sense of natural wonder into sixteen wondrous essays about legendary animals of history, constructing a bestiary that informs, astonishes, and delights. Passarello’s menagerie spans nearly 40 millennia, from Yuka, the 39,000-year-old wooly mammoth recently pulled from Siberian permafrost to Cecil, the beloved lion killed for sport in Zimbabwe in 2015. The collection celebrates the vibrancy of the human imagination as it approaches the animal other: Albrecht Durer’s sixteenth century woodcut Rhinocerus; Mozart’s collaborative compositions with a starling;

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THE RADIUM GIRLS

One of our recommended books for 2018 is The Radium Girls by Kate Moore

The incredible true story of the women who fought America’s undark danger.

The Curies’ newly discovered element of radium makes gleaming headlines across the nation as the fresh face of beauty, and wonder drug of the medical community. From body lotion to tonic water, the popular new element shines bright in the otherwise dark years of the First World War.

Meanwhile, hundreds of girls toil amidst the glowing dust of the radium-dial factories. The glittering chemical covers their bodies from head to toe; they light up the night like industrious fireflies. With such a coveted job,

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THE CHILBURY LADIES’ CHOIR

Through letters and journals, The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir unfolds the struggles, affairs, deceptions, and triumphs of a village choir during World War II.

As England becomes enmeshed in the early days of World War II and the men are away fighting, the women of Chilbury village forge an uncommon bond. They defy the Vicar’s stuffy edict to close the choir and instead “carry on singing,” resurrecting themselves as the Chilbury Ladies’ Choir. We come to know the home-front struggles of five unforgettable choir members: a timid widow devastated when her only son goes to fight;

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A PIECE OF THE WORLD

An Instant New York Times Bestseller

To Christina Olson, the entire world was her family’s remote farm in the small coastal town of Cushing, Maine. Born in the home her family had lived in for generations, and increasingly incapacitated by illness, Christina seemed destined for a small life. Instead, for more than twenty years, she was host and inspiration for the artist Andrew Wyeth, and became the subject of one of the best known American paintings of the twentieth century.

As she did in her beloved smash bestseller Orphan Train,

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SALT HOUSES

From a dazzling new literary voice, a debut novel about a Palestinian family caught between present and past, between displacement and home.

On the eve of her daughter Alia’s wedding, Salma reads the girl’s future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel, and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they will all soon come to pass when the family is uprooted in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967.

Salma is forced to leave her home in Nablus; 

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