Ruby Sisson Library

"From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter's squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them...

Fifteen-year-old Ilya arrives in Louisiana from his native Russia for what should be the adventure of his life: a year in America as an exchange student. The abundance of his new world--the Super Walmarts and heated pools and enormous televisions--is as hard to fathom as the relentless cheerfulness of his host parents. And Sadie, their beautiful and enigmatic daughter, has miraculously taken an interest in him. But all is not right in Ilya's world:...

In 1770s Boston, a prosperous merchants daughter, Eliza Boylston, lives a charmed life -- until war breaches the walls of the family estate and forces her to live in a world in which wealth can no longer protect her. As the chaos of the Revolutionary War tears her family apart, Eliza finds herself drawn to her uncles slave, John Watkins. Their love leads to her exile in Braintree, Massachusetts, home to radicals John and Abigail Adams and Elizas midwife...

"'As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not.' In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched...

Jenn M. Jackson has been known to bring deep historical acuity to some of the most controversial topics in America today. Now, in their first book, Jackson applies their critical analysis to the questions that have long energized their work: Why has Black women's freedom fighting been so overlooked throughout history, and what has our society lost in the meantime? A love letter to those who have been minimized and forgotten, this collection repositions...

From Maylis de Kerangal comes this story of a dozen men and women éngineers, designers, machinery operators, cable riggers áll employees of an international consortium charged with building a bridge somewhere in a mythical and fantastic California. Their collective effort to complete the megaproject recounts one of the oldest of human dramas, to domesticate ánd to radically transform óur world through built form, with all the dramatic tension...

"From the author of the critically acclaimed "lively and engrossing parable for women of all generations" (Harper's Bazaar) The Regulars; comes a deeply funny and thoughtful tale of a young woman who, after discovering she has the breast cancer gene, embarks on an unforgettable bucket list adventure. Twenty-five-old Lacey Whitman is blindsided when she's diagnosed with the BCRA1 gene mutation: the "breast cancer" gene. Her high hereditary risk forces...

"A powerful, engrossing story of a biracial heiress who flees to Paris when the Haitian Revolution burns across her island home. But as she works her way into the inner circle of Robespierre and his mistress, she learns that not even oceans can stop the flames of revolution. Sylvie de Rosiers, the biracial daughter of a rich planter in 1791 Saint-Domingue, is both a lady born to privilege and a damning reminder of her father's infidelity with an enslaved...

"The Core Four have been friends since college: four men, four women, four couples. They got married around the same time, had kids around the same time, and now, fifteen years later, they've started getting divorced around the same time, too. With three of the Core Four unions crumbling to dust around them, Jessica and Mitch Butler take a long, hard look at their own marriage. Can it be saved? Or is divorce, like some fortysomething zombie virus,...

Jonathan Spence, our foremost historian of Chinese politics and culture, tells us in his new book how the West has understood China over seven centuries. Ranging from Marco Polo's own depiction of China and the mighty Khan, Kublai, in the 1270s to the China sightings of three twentieth-century writers of acknowledged genius - Kafka, Borges, and Calvino - Spence explores Western thought on China through a remarkable array of expression. Peopling Spence's...