Frank Carlson Library

After seventeen-year-old Samuel "Sooley" Sooleymon receives a college scholarship to play basketball for North Carolina Central, he moves to Durham from his native, war-torn South Sudan, enrolls in classes, joins the team, and prepares to sit out his freshman season, but Sooley has a fierce determination to succeed so he can bring his family to America, working tirelessly on his game until he dominates everyone in practice, and when Sooley is called...

The Kurc family shouldn't have survived the Holocaust. In the spring of 1939 three generations are living relatively normal lives in Poland, despite the hardships Jews face. When war breaks out and the family is cast to the wind, the five Kurc siblings do everything they can to find their way through a devastated continent to freedom. Addy, a musician, charms his way into possession of a Brazilian visa and into the first class piano lounge on a ship...

"Every morning, Nuri the beekeeper rises early to hear the call to prayer before driving to his hives in the countryside. On weekends, his wife Afra, a gifted artist, sells her paintings at the open-air market in the square. They live simply, rich in family and friends, in the hills of the beautiful Syrian city of Aleppo -- until the unthinkable happens. When all they love is destroyed by war, Nuri knows they have no choice except to leave their home....

Mukesh lives a quiet life in the London Borough of Wembley after losing his beloved wife. He worries about his granddaughter, Priya, who hides in her room reading while he spends his evenings watching nature documentaries. Aleisha is a bright teenager working at the local library for the summer. She discovers a crumpled-up piece of paper in the back of To Kill a Mockingbird; it is a list of novels that she has never heard of, and she impulsively decides...

"One morning, Deming Guo's mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant named Polly, goes to her job at the nail salon and never comes home. With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left with no one to care for him. He is eventually adopted by two white college professors who move him from the Bronx to a small town upstate. Set in New York and China, the Leavers is the story of how one boy comes into his own when everything he's loved has been...

"What begins as a typical day for Officer Bernadette Manuelito serving a bench warrant, dealing with a herd of cattle obstructing traffic, and stumbling across a crime scene takes an unexpected twist when she's called to help find an old friend. Years ago, Bernie and Maya were roommates, but time and Mayas struggles with addiction drove them apart. Now Mayas brother asks Bernie to find out what happened to his sister. Tracing Mayas whereabouts, Bernie...

Three generations of Palestinian-American women in contemporary Brooklyn are torn by individual desire, educational ambitions, a devastating tragedy, and the strict mores of traditional Arab culture. Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the naïve and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married, and is soon living in Brooklyn....

"Kyuri is a heartbreakingly beautiful woman with a hard-won job at a 'room salon', an exclusive bar where she entertains businessmen while they drink. Though she prides herself on her cold, clear-eyed approach to life, an impulsive mistake with a client may come to threaten her livelihood. Her roommate, Miho, is a talented artist who grew up in an orphanage but won a scholarship to study art in New York. Returning to Korea after college, she finds...

"Written with love, told with joy. Very easy to enjoy."--Fredrik Backman, author of A Man Called Ove For fans of The Little Paris Bookshop and The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared comes a heartwarming debut about 96-year-old Doris, who writes down the memories of her eventful life as she pages through her decades-old address book. But the most profound moment of her life is still to come . . . Meet Doris, a 96-year-old woman...

"The British-born Punjabi Shergill sisters--Rajni, Jezmeen, and Shirina--were never close and barely got along growing up, and now as adults, have grown even further apart. Rajni, a school principal is a stickler for order. Jezmeen, a thirty-year-old struggling actress, fears her big break may never come. Shirina, the peacemaking "good" sister married into wealth and enjoys a picture-perfect life. On her deathbed, their mother voices one last wish:...