September 2021 eBook Deals: 10 Entertaining Reads for Your Digital Library

Juliette Fay—“one of the best authors of women’s fiction” (Library Journal)—transports us back to the Golden Age of Hollywood and the raucous Roaring Twenties, as three friends struggle to earn their places among the stars of the silent screen—perfect for fans of La La Land and Rules of Civility.

It’s July 1921, “flickers” are all the rage, and Irene Van Beck has just declared her own independence by jumping off a moving train to escape her fate in a traveling burlesque show. When her friends, fellow dancer Millie Martin and comedian Henry Weiss, leap after her, the trio finds their way to the bright lights of Hollywood with hopes of making it big in the burgeoning silent film industry.

At first glance, Hollywood in the 1920s is like no other place on earth—iridescent, scandalous, and utterly exhilarating—and the three friends yearn for a life they could only have dreamed of before. But despite the glamour and seduction of Tinseltown, success doesn’t come easy, and nothing can prepare Irene, Millie, and Henry for the poverty, temptation, and heartbreak that lie ahead. With their ambitions challenged by both the men above them and the prejudice surrounding them, their friendship is the only constant through desperate times, as each struggles to find their true calling in an uncertain world. What begins as a quest for fame and fortune soon becomes a collective search for love, acceptance, and fulfillment as they navigate the backlots and stage sets where the illusions of the silver screen are brought to life.

With her “trademark wit and grace” (Randy Susan Meyers, author of The Murderer’s Daughters), Juliette Fay crafts another radiant and fascinating historical novel as thrilling as the bygone era of Hollywood itself.

Nasar’s biography of mathematical genius John Nash is a drama about the mystery of the human mind and the power of love. By the age of thirty, Nash was a legend—and already suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Remarkably, Nash triumphed over adversity, won world acclaim and a Nobel Prize.

* * * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * * *

“Engrossing…Deliciously savage and wildly entertaining.”—People Magazine (Book of the Week)

NO ONE EVER SUSPECTS THE GOOD ONE.

Brett and Kelly have always toed the line between supportive sisters and bitter rivals. Growing up, Brett was the problem child, in the shadow of the brilliant and beautiful Kelly. In adulthood, all that has changed. Kelly is a struggling single mother and Brett has skyrocketed to such meteoric success, which has been chronicled on a reality TV show called Goal Diggers.

When Kelly manipulates herself onto the show and into Brett’s world, Brett is right to be threatened. Kelly, and only Kelly, knows her younger sister's appalling secret, and it could ruin her.

Still, when the truth comes out in the explosive final weekend of filming, neither of them ever expected that the season would end in murder.

It was Little Bee’s voice that first knocked me out. It’s musical, it’s magical, and it’s joyful. And yet, this sixteen-year-old Nigerian girl has experienced unspeakable horrors. Chris Cleave’s novel is brutal and beautiful at the same time.

Really any Philippa Gregory novel will fill the “Outlander”-sized hole in your heart, but THE OTHER QUEEN will probably fit best, given that it centers around Mary, Queen of Scots. Set two hundred years before the events of “Outlander” (well, the parts featuring Jamie, anyway), THE OTHER QUEEN is filled with scheming, opulence, and lush historical detail.

An unforgettable story of friendship and feuds in a remote Armenian mountain village

In an isolated village high in the Armenian mountains, a close-knit community bickers, gossips and laughs. Their only connection to the outside world is an ancient telegraph wire and a perilous mountain road that even goats struggle to navigate.

As they go about their daily lives – harvesting crops, making baklava, tidying houses – the villagers sustain one another through good times and bad. But sometimes all it takes is a spark of romance to turn life on its head, and a plot to bring two of Maran's most stubbornly single residents together soon gives the village something new to gossip about...

Three Apples Fell from the Sky is an enchanting fable that brilliantly captures the idiosyncrasy of a small community. Sparkling with sumptuous imagery and warm humour, this is a vibrant tale of resilience, bravery and the miracle of everyday friendship.

In “master of the legal thriller” (Chicago Sun-Times) John Lescroart’s electrifying novel, attorney Dismas Hardy is called to defend the least likely suspect of his career: his trusted assistant who is suddenly being charged as an accessory to murder.

Dismas Hardy knows something is amiss with his secretary, Phyllis. Her out-of-character behavior and sudden disappearances concern Hardy, especially when he learns that her convict brother—a man who had served twenty-five years in prison for armed robbery and attempted murder—has just been released.

Things take a shocking turn when Phyllis is suddenly arrested for allegedly abetting the murder of Hector Valdez, a coyote who’d been smuggling women from El Salvador and Mexico until he was shot to death on the very same day that Phyllis first disappeared from work. Hardy realizes that if his cherished colleague has any chance of going free, he must figure out how all these strands connect—and fast.

Proving that he is a “certifiable A-Lister” (Booklist), John Lescroart crafts yet another whip-smart, roller coaster of a novel that will keep you on your toes until the very last page.

Carrie Fisher’s second memoir is the ultimate story from a Hollywood insider. As the daughter of Hollywood royalty, Carrie grew up with a firsthand view of stardom. In this memoir, she shares never-before-heard tales of Hollywood gossip, moments of celebrity desperation, familiar relationships of Hollywood royalty, and scandalous run-ins with noteworthy politicians, all while providing an intimate portrait of herself.

This “fascinating” (Malcolm Gladwell, New York Times bestselling author of Outliers) examination of literary inventions through the ages, from ancient Mesopotamia to Elena Ferrante, shows how writers have created technical breakthroughs—rivaling scientific inventions—and engineering enhancements to the human heart and mind.

Literature is a technology like any other. And the writers we revere—from Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, and others—each made a unique technical breakthrough that can be viewed as both a narrative and neuroscientific advancement. Literature’s great invention was to address problems we could not solve: not how to start a fire or build a boat, but how to live and love; how to maintain courage in the face of death; how to account for the fact that we exist at all.

Wonderworks reviews the blueprints for twenty-five of the most significant developments in the history of literature. These inventions can be scientifically shown to alleviate grief, trauma, loneliness, anxiety, numbness, depression, pessimism, and ennui, while sparking creativity, courage, love, empathy, hope, joy, and positive change. They can be found throughout literature—from ancient Chinese lyrics to Shakespeare’s plays, poetry to nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and crime novels to slave narratives.

A “refreshing and remarkable” (Jay Parini, author of Borges and Me: An Encounter) exploration of the new literary field of story science, Wonderworks teaches you everything you wish you learned in your English class, and “contains many instances of critical insight....What’s most interesting about this compendium is its understanding of imaginative representation as a technology” (The New York Times).