Resources for Adults
Book & Resource Lists
for Adult Readers
In honor of National Library Week:
Books About Books!
FICTION
Geraldine Brooks
The People of the Book (2008)
Hanna, a book conservator, has an opportunity to work with the beautiful and mysterious Sarajevo Haggadah. While doing so, she imagines a multi-layered history of people and circumstances that at once explains how the book came to its present state and the miracles that have allowed it to survive for over 500 years.
Genevieve Cogman
The Invisible Library (2016)
The library exists alone, between alternate worlds... its mission? To collect and preserve books from all those worlds. In this suspenseful story, Irene is sent to an alternate Victorian-period London, where she encounters secret societies and operators all in search of the same unique copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
Nina George
The Little Paris Bookshop (2015)
Parisian Bookseller Jean Pardu has lived for 21 years with his own grief, devoting his life to his floating bookstore, The Literary Apothecary. One day he impulsively hauls anchor and sets off on a journey, meeting a variety of eccentric characters along the way.
Matt Haig
The Midnight Library (2020)
This library contains an infinite number of stories and allows people to discover what their lives would have been like had they made other choices. A book to lift your spirits!
Kristin Harmel
The Book of Lost Names (2020)
During WWII, Eva and her mother escape Paris with their lives and fly to Aurignon, where they lend their talents and loyalties to the French Resistance. An exacting artist, Eva becomes involved in secret projects with her partner, Remy, whose optimism and love she is never able to forget.
Anthony Horowitz
The Magpie Murders (2017)
This page-turner becomes a mystery within a mystery when an editor, searching for a missing chapter of a manuscript, delves deep into the life of its author - a popular British crime writer - and the people and places that inspired his writing.
Balli Kaur Jaswal
Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows (2017)
Nikki, a modern daughter of Indian immigrants, takes a job teaching creative writing for women in a close-knit Punjabi community in South London. Most of the widows who sign up for the class cannot write, but they are brimming with sensuous stories and want their voices to be heard, challenging the community and digging up old mysteries.
Bradford Morrow
The Forger’s Daughter (2020) A reformed forger of literature, trying to make good by helping with his wife’s rare book business, is forced to create a duplicate of Poe’s Tamerlane. Will his troubled past catch up with him and destroy his family? Sequel to The Forgers.
Jojo Moyes : Giver of Stars (2019) AND
Kim Michele Richardson: The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek (2019)
Ride through the hills and hollows of Kentucky in the 1930s with the Pack Horse Librarian Project. These two books feature resilient women who deliver books to isolated families, meeting up with challenges, adventure and romance.
Alex Pavesi
The Eighth Detective (2020)
Editor Judith Hart meets with a reclusive writer of 7 experimental detective stories, to discuss publishing the work. As they read and analyze the stories, Judith discovers clues to a larger mystery, and soon realizes that she has become the detective.
Robin Sloan
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore (2012)
There is something afoot in Mr. Penumbra’s Bookstore. Clay, a new employee on the night shift, tracks the puzzle from San Francisco to NYC, making for a technological, magical, and codebreaking adventure.
Matthew Sullivan
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore (2017)
This twisting mystery starts darkly, with a suicide in a bookstore. What secret has Joey discovered? Why leave a picture, why leave clues in books? Lydia, a clerk at the bookstore, is driven to solve the puzzle, which reaches back into a past that she has intentionally left behind.
Erika Swyler
The Book of Speculation (2015)
In a house dangerously close to a bluff edge on Long Island Sound, Simon, a librarian, receives a package containing an old book in a leather binding, and is drawn into a fantastic family history of traveling circus performers, tarot card readers, rising waters, and a curse.
Marcus Zuzak
The Book Thief (2006)
Death narrates the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster child living in Munich during the Nazi regime, as she learns the power of stories from the books that she steals
NONFICTION
Mikita Brottman
The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men’s Prison (2016)
A book group made up of convicts from the Jessup Correctional Institution in Maryland takes on ten dark, challenging classics, including Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.
Glory Edim
Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves (2018)
The creator of WRBG, an online space for Black women’s voices, gathers 21 essays by Black women writers who talk about the books that first spoke to them.
Keith Houston
The Book: A Cover-To-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time (2016)
From papyrus, parchment and paper to writing, printing, illustrations, scrolls and bindings, this resource has much to offer about the fascinating, 1500-year history of the book.
Michiko Kakutani Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread (2020)
Thought-provoking essays and books to illuminate the world around us.
Delphine Minoui
The Book Collectors (2020)
Between 2012-2015, amid exploding bombs, a group of young activists pulls books from the rubble and creates an underground library for the community of Daraya in Syria, resisting the siege of Bashar al-Assad’s forces with reading, lectures and education.
Susan Orlean
The Library Book (2018)
Daily life and times in the Los Angeles Public Library, tied together with history, biography, a terrible fire, restoration, and a strong sense of this library’s living, breathing community.
Personalized Reading Lists
We can create a personalized reading list for you! Send us an email, and our librarians will recommend some authors and titles you may enjoy.
In the email, be sure to include your name, the types of books you like to read, and the title of the last book you really enjoyed. The email subject line should be "What to Read Next."
Send your information to: Brighton.Reference.Center@libraryweb.org