River Readers

In 1942, Europe remains in the relentless grip of war. Just beyond the tents of the Russian refugee camp she calls home, a young woman speaks her wedding vows. It's a decision that will alter her destiny...and it's a lie that will remain buried until the next century.

*Starred Review* In 1967, an escaped prisoner, drifter, and racist, while voluntarily working on the presidential campaign for George Wallace in California, got the idea of stalking and killing Martin Luther King Jr. Using the alias Eric Galt, he traveled to his native South and kept track of King as the civil rights leader marched in Memphis for the striking garbage collectors. Galt, whose real name was James Earl Ray, methodically planned and executed the assassination then fled to Canada and Europe, hoping eventually to immigrate to South Africa.

Levin, the national editor of Slate, writes a stunning account of Linda Taylor, the woman famously tagged as a welfare queen in the 1970s. His powerful work of narrative nonfiction shows how Taylor victimized a slew of vulnerable people, was a victim herself, and was the cause of Black welfare recipients being stereotyped as welfare cheats.

In the tradition of The Paris Wife and Mrs. Poe, The Other Einstein offers us a window into a brilliant, fascinating woman whose light was lost in Einstein's enormous shadow. This is the story of Einstein's wife, a brilliant physicist in her own right, whose contribution to the special theory of relativity is hotly debated and may have been inspired by her own profound and very personal insight.

It is the summer of 1964. In Tupelo, Mississippi, the town of Elvis's birth, tensions are mounting over civil-rights demonstrations occurring ever more frequently-and violently-across the state. But in Paige Dunn's small, ramshackle house, there are more immediate concerns. Challenged by the effects of the polio she contracted during her last month of pregnancy, Paige is nonetheless determined to live as normal a life as possible and to raise her daughter, Diana, in the way she sees fit-with the support of her tough-talking black caregiver, Peacie.

As the Great War continues to take its toll, headstrong twenty-one-year-old Emily Bryce is determined to contribute to the war effort. She is convinced by a cheeky and handsome Australian pilot that she can do more, and it is not long before she falls in love with him and accepts his proposal of marriage.

It is 1914, and the world has been on the brink of war so often, many New Yorkers treat the subject with only passing interest. Eliza Ferriday is thrilled to be traveling to St. Petersburg with Sofya Streshnayva, a cousin of the Romanovs. The two met years ago one summer in Paris and became close confidantes. Now, Eliza embarks on the trip of a lifetime, home with Sofya to see the splendors of Russia: the church with the interior covered in jeweled mosaics, the Rembrandts at the tsar's Winter Palace, the famous ballet.

Lord Henry “Monty” Montague, young, handsome, and charming, has one last year of fun and freedom, before his father expects him to settle down and help run the family estate. Monty along with his best friend and secret crush Percy, are to have a Grand Tour of Europe. They are to drop Monty’s sister, Felicity, off at a finishing school along the way. Though bred to be a gentleman, Monty escapes these strictures by flinging himself into hedonistic pleasure, excessive drinking, bedding women and men, and flouting social expectations where he can.

Lida thought she was safe. Her neighbors wearing the yellow star were all taken away, but Lida is not Jewish. She will be fine, won't she?

But she cannot escape the horrors of World War II.

Lida's parents are ripped away from her and she is separated from her beloved sister, Larissa. The Nazis take Lida to a brutal work camp, where she and other Ukrainian children are forced into backbreaking labor. Starving and terrified, Lida bonds with her fellow prisoners, but none of them know if they'll live to see tomorrow.

Alice is angry at having to move to Rainbow, Georgia - a too small, too hot, dried-up place she's sure will never feel like home. Then she gets put in charge of walking her elderly neighbor's dog. But Clarence won't budge without Miss Millie, so Alice and Miss Millie walk him together.

When it is suggested to those who are white that society is racist, the reaction is often some mixture of defensiveness and anger. The reason: white fragility. Racism, argues the author, is not only done by bad people; it is a condition when society is structured to accept a white perspective as the norm. She uses multiple examples and anecdotes to knock down assumptions and objections. This is a powerful book filled with challenging ideas.

From the internationally bestselling author Pam Jenoff, The Lost Girls of Paris is an emotional and powerful journey through friendship and betrayal during the second world war, inspired by true events.

1940s. With the world at war, Eleanor Trigg leads a mysterious ring of female secret agents in London. Twelve of these women are sent to aid the resistance.

They never return home.

1946. Passing through Grand Central Station, Grace Healey finds an abandoned suitcase tucked beneath a bench. The case is filled with a dozen photographs, each of a different woman.

Layla Amin knew things weren't going to go well, when they had to put on the census that they were Muslim, essentially creating a registry. Soon, Muslims around the country were put on restrictions for jobs, curfews and more. It all came to a head when Layla and her family were arrested and taken to Mobius, the first internment camp for Muslims.

Bri wants to be a rapper. Growing up in Garden Heights, the daughter of the legendary underground rapper, Lawless, Bri has a lot to prove. Her daddy was murdered, a victim of gang violence, and her mama lost it after she lost him. Driven by her grief into drug addiction, Bri and her brother, Trey, lived with their grandparents for a time. Jay, Bri's mom, fought hard to win her kids back but the struggle is still real, they are all fighting just to exist. Then the other shoe drops and Jay gets fired from her job. Bri want her rapping to save them.

*Starred Review* I liked my java so black, the police planted evidence on it, says the wry, self-aware, yet ultimately self-defeating narrator of this trenchant satire. Hired (after a humiliating competition) as the black face of a racist corporation, he embarks on a relentless, single-minded quest to medically demelanize his biracial son, Nigel. Nothing, not the contempt of his wife and mother nor the physical and psychological anguish of his child, will deter him from rescuing the teenager from life as a black man.