Lake Bluff Library Adult Reading Lists

Draws on more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs, as well as interviews with family members, friends, competitors, and colleagues, to offer a look at the co-founder and leading creative force behind the Apple computer company. (Description from NoveList)

Presents a portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, who built their fortune on the sale of Valium and later sponsored the creation and marketing of one of the most commonly prescribed and addictive painkillers of the opioid crisis. (Description from catalog)

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cleopatra analyzes the Salem Witch Trials to offer key insights into the role of women in its events while explaining how its tragedies became possible. (Description from catalog)

A definitive history of the race to unravel DNA's structure, by one of our most prominent medical historians. (Description from catalog)

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, best-selling author of The Emperor of All Maladies comes a magnificent history of the gene and a response to the defining question of the future: What becomes of being human when we learn to “read” and “write” our own genetic information? (Description from NoveList)

Using unpublished manuscripts, letters, financial records, and more, Fraser gives fresh insight into the life of a woman beloved to many.
(Description from catalog)

In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both hispolitical education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency--a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil. (Description from catalog.)

Follows the experiences of a woman, who after being born on a snowy night in 1910, repeatedly dies and reincarnates into the same life to correct missteps and ultimately save the world. (Description from NoveList)

A brilliantly imagined historical fantasy in which a young con artist in eighteenth century Cairo discovers she's the last descendant of a powerful family of djinn healers. With the help of an outcast immortal warrior and a rebellious prince, she must claim her magical birthright in order to prevent a war that threatens to destroy the entire djinn kingdom.
(Description from catalog)

With her distinctive "falcon" soprano, Lilliet Berne is the uncontested star of the Paris Opera. Only one accolade has thus far eluded her: the chance to originate a leading role, ensuring that she'll never be forgotten. Her wish comes true when she's presented with a libretto that alludes to the secrets of her past. Only four other people know the details of her early life, but which one of them betrayed her? (Description from NoveList)

A blind French girl on the run from the German occupation and a German orphan-turned-Resistance tracker struggle with their respective beliefs after meeting on the Brittany coast. (Description from NoveList)

The heroes of Cloud Cuckoo Land are children trying to figure out the world around them, and to survive. In the besieged city of Constantinople in 1453, in a public library in Lakeport, Idaho, today, and on a spaceship bound for a distant exoplanet decades from now, an ancient text provides solace and the most profound human connection to characters in peril. They all learn the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to the paradise of Cloud Cuckoo Land, abetter world.
(Description from catalog)

Crossroads is the first novel in Jonathan Franzen's A Key to All Mythologies. The trilogy tells the story of a Midwestern family across three generations, mirroring the preoccupations and dilemmas of the United States from the Vietnam War to the 2020s.
(Description from catalog)

Toby is a happy-go-lucky charmer who's dodged a scrape at work and is celebrating with friends when the night takes a turn that will change his life - he surprises two burglars who beat him and leave him for dead. Struggling to recover from his injuries, beginning to understand that he might never be the same man again, he takes refuge at his family's ancestral home to care for his dying uncle Hugo.
(Description from catalog)

Ailey is reared in the north in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother’s family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging that’s made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of women—her mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuries—that urge Ailey to succeed in their stead.
(Description from Amazon)

When her husband murders their son and abducts their daughter, grief-stricken and vengeful Essun pursues him across The Stillness, a vast and dynamic super-continent on the brink of catastrophe that will usher in a "fifth season," a time of uncertainty and hardship. But Essun is as formidable as the land she traverses -- she's an orogene, which means that she can shape the contours of the land. Although she's spent much of her life hiding from those who would kill her on account of her race, Essun is about to prove how dangerous a woman on a mission can be. (Description from NoveList.)

Receiving a horrific essay from a GED student with a traumatic past, high-school English teacher Jake Epping is enlisted by a friend to travel back in time to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a mission for which he must befriend troubled loner Lee Harvey Oswald. (Description from NoveList)

Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan. So begins a sweeping saga of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history. (Description from catalog.)

Assuming the power recently lost by the disgraced Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell counsels a mercurial Henry VIII on the latter's efforts to marry Anne Boleyn against the wishes of Rome and many of his people, a successful endeavor that comes with a dangerous price. (Description from NoveList)

After the tragic death his beloved musician father, fourteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone, but others are snide, angry and full of pain. When his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous. At first, Benny tries to ignore them, but soon the voices follow him outside the house, onto the street and at school,driving him at last to seek refuge in the silence of a large public library, where objects are well-behaved and know to speak in whispers.
(Description from catalog)

Presents an impassioned novel of activism and natural-world power that is comprised of interlocking fables about nine remarkable strangers who are summoned in different ways by trees for an ultimate, brutal stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest. (Description from NoveList)

After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There, Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fifteen, she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy rancher who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe and piloting her plane over the Arctic Circle.
(Description from catalog)

Marion, fresh out of medical school, flees Ethiopia and makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him--nearly destroying him--Marion must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him. (Description from catalog)

Long ago, Nathan lived in a house in the country with his abusive father and has never told his family what happened. Long ago, Maddie was a little girl making dolls in her bedroom when she saw something she shouldn’t have. Long ago, something walked into the tunnels and the mountains and the coal mines of their hometown in rural Pennsylvania. Now, Nate and Maddie Graves are married, and they have moved back to their hometown with their son, Oliver. And now what happened long ago is happening again...and it is happening to Oliver.
(Description from Amazon)