It’s time to enjoy some balmy spring temps, and wrap up the lengthening days curled up with a great read. Whether you’re inside to hide from the pollen count or spring showers or reading on the metro on the way to a Nats game, there’s plenty of reads to choose from. Check out some of the newest additions to the county collection below.
Fiction
The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances by Glenn Dixon
In a near-future where an all-knowing AI network called the Grid controls homes, vehicles, and daily life, retired couple Harold and Edie Winters live quietly in their family. When Edie passes away, the Grid moves to displace Harold and claim the house, deeming it too large for one elderly man. The unlikely hero standing in the Grid’s way is Scout, a sentient Roomba who understands that a “House without Humans was really no House at all.” Joining forces with the other appliances, Harold’s estranged daughter Kate, and a neighbor boy named Adrian, Scout sets out to protect what the Grid wants to erase. Blending cozy domestic warmth with quietly unsettling questions about technology, privacy, and autonomy, this is heartfelt, funny, and surprisingly hopeful. Available April 7. Library catalog link here.
Year of the Mer by L.D. Lewis
Yemi’s grandmother Arielle got her fairy-tale ending, but generations later, the mermaid kingdom is still dealing with the repercussions. Her father’s been assassinated, her mother is slowly turning to stone, and her subjects distrust her entire bloodline. When a coup strips her of everything and drives her into exile, Yemi does what her grandmother did before her and turns to the sea witch Ursula. This dark sequel to The Little Mermaid features an expansive world where magic, mythology, and burgeoning technology collide, and where legacy, grief, and vengeance threaten to pull everyone under. The first in a duology, it starts slowly and builds to a bloody, unsparing conclusion that leaves Yemi with no guarantees. Available April 7. Library catalog link here.
The Lost Book of Elizabeth Barton by Jennifer N. Brown
Henry VIII ordered the execution of Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent, in 1534. Nearly 400 years later, the discovery of a lost manuscript of her prophecies catapults historian Alison Sage to academic stardom. An elite gathering of scholars for a conference, held at a crumbling English manor beside the ruins of the very priory where Barton once lived, takes a dark turn when a colleague is found murdered. Whispers circulate about a cache of hidden Tudor treasure tied to Barton’s legend. Dual timelines weave Alison’s cutthroat academic present against the dangerous world of Barton’s sixteenth-century England, where visions could get you killed and knowing who to trust was a matter of survival. This crackling debut folds deep Tudor history detail with a propulsive mystery. Available April 14. Library catalog link here.
Mrs. Shim is a Killer by Kang Jiyoung translated from Korean by Paige Morris
When the widowed Mrs. Shim loses her job as a butcher, she worries how she’ll afford to send her son to college. She applies for a job at the Smile Detective Agency, assuming she’ll be following people and taking photos. But her ability to go unnoticed coupled with her amazing knife skills has her being trained as a killer for hire, instead. She’s startlingly good at it, drawing the attention of rivals who want her out of the game. Told through a kaleidoscope of interlocking vignettes following various characters orbiting Mrs. Shim’s world, Kang’s darkly comic English-language debut weaves together grim humor, family love, and genuinely surprising plot turns into something both bloody and oddly cozy. Available April 21. Library catalog link here.
Nonfiction
London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe
In the early hours of November 29, 2019, surveillance cameras captured 19-year-old Zac Brettler pacing a fifth-floor balcony of a luxury Thames-side tower before jumping into the river. His parents were devastated and then blindsided by what his death revealed—Zac had been living a double life as “Zac Ismailov,” fictitious heir to a Russian oligarch’s fortune, consorting with a slippery businessman and a violent gangland enforcer. Scotland Yard’s investigation went nowhere, and the Brettlers spent years pursuing the truth themselves. Keefe’s latest might be his best yet as he layers the intimate tragedy of one family’s grief against a sweeping portrait of modern London as a city remade by dirty money, deregulation, and an underworld that operates in plain sight. In his hands, it’s exhaustive, humane, and devastating. Available April 7. Library catalog link here.
Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life by Alex Mayyasi and the Host’s of NPR’S Planet Money
Fans of NPR’s popular Planet Money podcast will already be familiar with the engaging and chatty tone the authors take when explaining economics. Mixing stories covered in the podcast to new reporting, topics covered include everything from commodities to AI and explore how economics touches all parts of our lives. Loyal listeners and those new to the world of econ will all learn something new in this enjoyable entertaining read. Available April 7. Library catalog link here.
Empire of Skulls: Phrenology, the Fowler Family, and a New Nation’s Quest to Unlock the Secrets of the Mind by Paul Stob
Phrenology (the pseudoscience of reading the bumps on people’s skulls to determine character, potential, and mental capacity) had a large following in the United States in the years following the Civil War. The Fowler family built an empire reading people’s skulls, tapping into a core American belief that the self can be measured, understood, and improved. It hardly mattered that the science was utter nonsense. What lingers is the darker story of how that same hopeful message was co-opted to justify racism and xenophobia. Witty, cinematic, and packed with oddball anecdotes, this is far more gripping than a history of skull-reading has any right to be. Available April 14. Library catalog link here.
Salt, Sweat and Steam: The Fiery Education of an Accidental Chef by Brigid Washington
After a soul-crushing office job and a heartbreak that sent her adrift, Trinidadian food writer Brigid Washington arrived at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, with a suitcase full of ambition and an island girl’s relationship to food that the school’s Euro-centric curriculum wasn’t quite built for. What followed was two years of military-style discipline, brutal internships, and instructors who often mistook cruelty for rigor, but also the genuine thrill of mastering technique, editing the student paper, and interviewing luminaries like Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller. Washington doesn’t spare the institution: she’s clear-eyed about the gap between the CIA’s six-figure price tag and the modest salaries awaiting most graduates, and about a culinary culture that consistently prized fussy European refinement over the soulful traditions of her Trinidadian childhood. Rich, candid, and full of flavor, this is both a love letter to cooking and a bracingly honest reckoning with the industry built around it. Available April 28. Library catalog link here.
Middle Grade
Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters: A Graphic Memoir by Yevgenia Nayberg
In 1986, all 11-year-old Genya wants is to pass the entrance exam for Kyiv’s prestigious art school, the same one her exacting mother attended. The school’s unofficial quota limiting Jewish students is just one of the quiet indignities of Soviet life—adults speak carefully over tapped phone lines, official radio insists everything is under control, and nobody says out loud what everyone knows. Then the reactor at Chernobyl explodes, and Genya’s family evacuates the city, her exam and her future suddenly uncertain. Nayberg tells her coming-of-age story through the narrow, honest lens of the child she was, more worried about social dynamics and her mother’s approval than the history unfolding around her. Her extraordinary watercolor and collage art shifts from muted earth tones to frenetic scribbled lines to luminous double-page cityscapes as Genya’s emotional world expands and contracts. An intimate, quietly devastating, and utterly unforgettable graphic memoir. Available April 14. Library catalog link here.
Teen
Hmong : a Graphic History by Vicky Lyfoung translated by Kao-Ly Yang
Growing up in France as the daughter of Hmong refugees, Vicky Lyfoung discovered that nobody, including herself, knew much about the Hmong people. This graphic memoir is her answer to that ignorance. It traces the history of the Hmong from their origins as nomadic mountain people in ancient China through centuries of displacement, French colonization, the wars that tore through Laos, the refugee camps, and finally the diaspora that scattered Hmong communities across the world. Lyfoung anchors this sweeping history in her own family’s story and in the humiliations of her French childhood giving an intimate emotional core to an enormously complex narrative. Her manga-influenced black-and-white art shifts between intimate family moments and high-stakes historical drama with warmth and expressive ease. An accessible, illuminating, and deeply personal story. Available April 7. Library catalog link here.
Jennie Rothschild is a collection engagement librarian for Arlington Public Library.