Adult Fiction

Absolution

by Alice McDermott

available after October 31

American women—American wives—have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form a wary alliance as they balance the era’s mandate to be “helpmeets” to their ambitious husbands with their own inchoate impulse to “do good” for the people of Vietnam.

Sixty years later, Charlene’s daughter, spurred by an encounter with an aging Vietnam vet, reaches out to Tricia. Together, they look back at their time in Saigon, taking wry account of that pivotal year and of Charlene’s altruistic machinations, and discovering how their own lives as women on the periphery—of politics, of history, of war, of their husbands’ convictions—have been shaped and burdened by the same sort of unintended consequences that followed America’s tragic interference in Southeast Asia.



Middle Grade Non-Fiction

Invincible: Fathers and Mothers of Black America

by Wade Hudson

place hold here

We’re familiar with the founding fathers of white America, but who are the founding fathers (and mothers!) of Black America?

In a poetic narrative of the origins of Black America, acclaimed Black author and publisher Wade Hudson teaches us about the little-known men and women who had a profound effect on the history of the nation. Black America was built by brave pioneers—men and women taken from Africa, who suffered and struggled to build a country, a culture, and institutions. Emphasizing that freedom didn’t ring for all when the United States gained its independence from Great Britain, Hudson shows the slow process by which Black Americans fought for justice over the course of many generations.