Southborough Staff Picks from 2024

"A young Indian woman falsely rumored to have killed her husband finds a way to make her unfortunate reputation surprisingly useful--but complications arise when other village women seek her help offing their husbands--in this provocative, razor-sharp debut. "The Bandit Queens heralds a prodigious and sophisticated literary talent." Téa Obreht, New York Times bestselling author of Inland. In the five years since her husband's disappearance, Geeta...

"A sweeping, emotionally riveting first novel -- an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home. Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother's death in childbirth and their father's disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with...

"India Allwood grew up wanting to be an actress. Armed with a stack of index cards and a hell of a lot of talent, she goes from awkward 16-year-old to Broadway ingenue to tv star. But while promoting her most recent project, a film about adoption, India does what you should never do--she tells a journalist the truth: it's a bad movie. Like so many movies about adoption, it tells only one story, a tragic one. But India's an adoptive mom herself and...

"A gripping historical mystery based on the real-life diary entries of Martha Ballard, an 18th-century midwife who defied the legal system and wrote herself into American history. Maine, 1789: When the Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As a midwife and healer, she is privy to much of what goes on behind closed doors in Hallowell. Her diary is a record of...

Aside from a delay, there will be no problems. The flight will be smooth, it will land safely. Everyone who gets on the plane will get off. But almost all of them will be forever changed. Because on this ordinary domestic flight, something extraordinary happens. People learn how and when they are going to die. How do they know? There were ostensibly more interesting people on the flight (the bride and groom, the possibly famous woman, the giant Hemsworth-esque...

A special-education teacher with thirty years of experience working with autistic people gives readers a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the neurodiverse community and looks at ways we can develop more meaningful connections with others.

"In 1950s Tehran, seven-year-old Ellie lives in grand comfort until the untimely death of her father, forcing Ellie and her mother to move to a tiny home downtown. Lonely and bearing the brunt of her mother's endless grievances, Ellie dreams of a friend to alleviate her isolation. Luckily, on the first day of school, she meets Homa, a kind, passionate girl with a brave and irrepressible spirit. Together, the two girls play games, learn to cook in...

"No one expects the police to knock on the million-dollar, two-story home of the perfect cul-de-sac housewife. But soccer mom Lara Love Hardin has been hiding a shady secret: she is funding her heroin addiction by stealing her neighbors' credit cards. Lara is convicted of thirty-two felonies and becomes inmate S32179. She learns that jail is a class system with a power structure that is somewhere between an adolescent sleepover party and Lord of the...

Eleven-year-old asthmatic Reuben Land chronicles the Land family's odyssey in search of Reuben's older brother, Davy, who has escaped from jail before he can stand trial for the killing of two marauders who came to their Minnesota farm to harm the family. A first novel. Reprint.

"From award-winning New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions. In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders, her children clinging to her legs. They never saw her again. Her abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known...