Calvert Library's Book Bites for Adults

As World War I raged across the globe, hundreds of young women toiled away at the radium-dial factories, where they painted clock faces with a mysterious new substance called radium. Assured by their bosses that the luminous material was safe, the women themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered from head to toe with the glowing dust. With such a coveted job, these "shining girls" were considered the luckiest alive--until they began to fall mysteriously ill.

A shadowy government agency recruits linguist Melisande Stokes to help discover the reason magic left the world. Partnered with a military intelligence officer, she must travel back in time and alter events so that the Department of Diachronic Operations can preserve and protect magic.

After an epidemic causes most New Yorkers to flee, Candace Chen stays behind and continues her routine: going to work, getting paid and blogging about the deserted city. Eventually, though, Candace will have to leave--putting her at the mercy of a power-hungry IT specialist named Bob.

Evelyn Hardcastle will die every day, until Aiden Bishop can identify her killer and break the cycle. But every time the day begins again, Aiden wakes up in the body of a different guest at Blackheath. And some of his hosts are more helpful than others.

In a series of letters to God and her sister Nettie, Celie tells the story of her life--from the horrifying details of childhood sexual abuse to glorious material success as an adult.

Watch out, world. Here comes Stephanie Plum, a bounty hunter with attitude. In Stephanie's opinion, toxic waste, rabid drivers, armed schizophrenics, and August heat, humidity, and hydrocarbons are all part of the great adventure of living in Jersey.

In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet--sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, thrust into premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors--doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price.

Lady Victoria Georgiana Charlotte Eugenie, daughter to the Duke of Atholt and Rannoch, and thirty-fourth in line for the throne, finds herself broke in London. After trying to earn money incognito at a cosmetics counter and as a housekeeper, she is tasked by the Queen to spy on the heir to the throne. Soon Georgie puts her sleuthing talents to work when an arrogant Frenchman, determined to gain control of her family's eight-hundred-year-old estate, ends up dead in her bathtub. Now her most important job will be to clear her family name.

A tiny girl is abandoned on a ship headed for Australia in 1913. She arrives completely alone with nothing but a small suitcase containing a few clothes and a single book - a beautiful volume of fairy tales. She is taken in by the dockmaker and his wife and raised as their own. On her twenty-first birthday, they tell her the truth, and with her sense of self shattered and very little to go on, “Nell” sets out to trace her real identity.

In this brilliant sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, acclaimed author Margaret Atwood answers the questions that have tantalized readers for decades. When the van door slammed on Offred's future at the end of The Handmaid's Tale, readers had no way of telling what lay ahead for her--freedom, prison or death. With The Testaments, the wait is over. Margaret Atwood's sequel picks up the story more than fifteen years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three female narrators from Gilead.