Ocean State Libraries

"Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Sean Michaels's moving, innovative novel about an aging poet laureate who 'sells out' by agreeing to collaborate with a Big Tech company's poetry AI"--

There's more than one reason the new West Tisbury police chief officially made ninety-two-year-old Victoria Trumbull her deputy. For one thing, Victoria knows just about everything about everyone in Martha's Vineyard, not to mention their ancestors. Victoria may be afflicted with the usual aches and pains that descend on nonagenarians—she has a cutoff shoe to accommodate her bunion and a stout stick to help her on her walks across the fields

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When the renowned poet Fiona Skinner is asked about the inspiration behind her iconic work, The Love Poem, she tells her audience a story about her family and a betrayal that reverberates through time. It begins in a big yellow house with a funeral, an iron poker, and a brief variation forever known as the Pause: a free and feral summer in a middle-class Connecticut town. Caught between the predictable life they once led and an uncertain future that...

Cynthia Riggs has no problem making readers believe that her feisty protagonist can be almost indispensable to the new police chief. The years just seem to have sharpened ninety-two-year-old Victoria Trumbull's mind, and she's got an encyclopedic knowledge of her fellow West Tisbury residents and their forebears. But most readers do wonder how the old lady came to be made the chief's official deputy. Author Cynthia Riggs obligingly offers that

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Meet the Wu family—father Nan, mother Pingping, and son Taotao. They are arranging to fully sever ties with China in the aftermath of the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square, and to begin a new, free life in the United States. At first, their future seems well-assured. But after the fallout from Tiananmen, Nan's disillusionment turns him toward his first love, poetry. Leaving his studies, he takes on a variety of menial jobs as Pingping works

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"Jenny Weston and her mother, Dora, have been receiving strange midnight visits. Bear Falls's own elusive and highly secretive poet, Emily Sutton, has lived her life cloistered away with her sister in a house at the edge of Pewee Swamp. But now, Emily's started leaving scraps of poetry in Dora's Little Library, and Dora makes it her mission to befriend the sheltered woman. Meanwhile Zoe Zola, almost famous author, Little Person, and the Weston's quirky...

"'On academic rivalry and obsession, Byatt is delicious. On the nature of possession, the lover by the beloved, the biographer by his subject, she is profound, ' said 'The Sunday Times' (London) ... The novel traces a pair of young academics, Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, as they uncover a clandestine love affair between two long-dead Victorian poets. Interwoven in a mesmerizing pastiche are love letters and fairy tales, extracts from biographies...

A lushly imagined, sensual novel about memory, desire, and the power of storytelling, from a Booker Prize nominee. Geneviève is an outsider, raised in an orphanage, now living an isolated existence as a maid to the widowed Madame Patin in a small French village. A teller and collector of stories, she is entranced by Madame Patin's oft-told folktales, which mask cunning and doom beneath beauty. As Geneviève grows into a woman, her life becomes both...