Nonfiction That Teaches and Immerses

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• Nonfiction

Manhunt: The 12 Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer
By James L. Swanson
364.1524 SWA
The murder of Abraham Lincoln set off the greatest manhunt in American history. Based on rare archival materials, obscure trial transcripts, and Lincoln's own blood relics, this book is a fully documented work, but it is also a tale of murder, intrigue, and betrayal, an hour-by-hour account told through the eyes of the hunted and the hunters.

Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength
By Roy F. Baumeister
153.8 BAU
What is willpower? Can it be depleted? Can it be strengthened and how? Baumeister, a pioneering research psychologist answers all of these questions while citing numerous scientific studies. The results of these experiments reveal that there is indeed a finite source of the mental energy known as willpower that covers not only self-control but decision making as well. The good news is that this book explains specific techniques you can use to increase your pool of willpower, strengthen the willpower you already have, and trick yourself into conserving your willpower for when you really need it.

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
By Barbara Demick
951.9305 DEM
Follows the lives of six North Koreans over fifteen years, a chaotic period that saw the rise to power of Kim Jong Il and the devastation of a famine that killed one-fifth of the population, illustrating what it means to live under the most repressive totalitarian regime today.

Romantic Suspense

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• Romance
• Suspense

Wildwood Dancing
By Juliet Marillier
YA F MARILLIE
High in the Transylvanian woods live five daughters and their doting father. It's an idyllic life for Jena, the second eldest, but best by far is the castle's hidden portal. Every Full Moon, they alone can pass through it into the enchanted world of the Other Kingdom where they dance through the night with the fey creatures of this magical realm. To save her world, Jena will be tested in ways she can't imagine--tests of trust, strength, and true love.

The Likeness
By Tana French
MYSTERY FRENCH Dublin M #2
Six months after the events of In the Woods, Detective Cassie Maddox is still trying to recover. She's transferred out of the murder squad and started a relationship with Detective Sam O'Neill, but she's too badly shaken to make a commitment to him or to her career. Then Sam calls her to the scene of his new case: a young woman found stabbed to death in a small town outside Dublin. The dead girl's ID says her name is Lexie Madison--the identity Cassie used years ago as an undercover detective--and she looks exactly like Cassie.

My Brother Michael
By Mary Stewart
MYSTERY STEWART
While traveling in Greece, a young Englishwoman finds herself a pawn in a dangerous game of love and revenge, which comes to a dramatic climax high on Mt. Parnassus.
Camilla Haven and her mysterious companion, Simon, are plunged into a deadly adventure as they search Delphi for the truth implied in a letter Simon's brother, Michael, had written before his death.

Witchling
By Yasmine Galnorn
ROMANCE GALENORN Otherwor #1
We're the D'Artigo sisters: Half-human, half-Faerie, we're savvy--and sexy--operatives for the Otherworld Intelligence Agency. But our mixed-blood heritage short-circuits our talents at all the wrong times. My sister Delilah shape shifts into a tabby cat whenever she's stressed. Menolly's a vampire who's still trying to get the hang of being undead. And me? I'm Camille--a wicked-good witch. Except my magic's as unpredictable as the weather, as my enemies are about to find out the hard way...

Someone to Watch Over Me
By Judith McNaught
ROMANCE MCNAUGHT
Leigh Kendall's life is full when on her way to join her husband at their mountain dream home, she’s involved in an accident. She awakens in the hospital asking for her husband who is nowhere to be found. The police don't take her fears seriously--they believe he's snowbound after the storm. It's not until Leigh receives a gift from the notorious Michael Valente that they believe foul play was committed. Michael and Leigh are the prime suspects in the death of her husband. As the investigation continues Leigh learns that her marriage was built on illusion and Michael steps in to help her through the pain and heartache, all the time waiting for his chance to make her his.

Thrillers Involving Secret Organizations and Conspiracies

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• Thrillers
• Suspense

The Eight
By Katherine Neville
F NEVILLE
This adventure thriller is set in two time periods: 1790 and 1972, but the backstory goes back to the 9th century when Charlemagne owned a chess set which held the key to magic, alchemy and cosmic powers. The set was hidden away in an abbey for 1,000 years—until the French Revolution. In 1790 a young novice, becomes aware of the set and its potential and disperses the pieces across Europe. Then in 1972, a computer expert working for an accounting firm with an avid interest in chess is invited to undertake an unusual assignment—locate all the pieces of this long lost chess set. And she is not the only one after the pieces: there’s an antiques dealer, a Soviet chess master, and KGB agents also hot on the trail.

The Club Dumas
By Arturo Perez-Reverte
F PEREZ-REVERTE
Nick Corso, rare book hunter, is on the trail of two extremely rare items: the original manuscript for Alexander Dumas’ The Three Musketeers and a 17th century book dealing with Satan worship, The Nine Doors to the Kingdom of Shadow. The search takes Corso from Madrid to Toledo then to Sintra (in Portugal) and on to Paris. Everywhere in his travels death follows in his wake. Perez-Reverte creates here an extremely sophisticated and clever mystery/thriller fully immersed in the world of books.

The Book of Names
By Jill Gregory and Karen Tintori
MYSTERY GREGORY
This is a fast-paced thriller involving a Kabalistic interpretation of the Book of Names. This ancient document, ostensibly written by Adam, contains an encoded text listing the names of 36 individuals of each generation whose righteousness preserves the earth and its inhabitants.
David Shepherd, a poli-sci professor at Georgetown U, has been prompted with names out of the blue since he was about 15 years old and he has been recording them in a notebook. He has no idea that the names he’s recorded are identical to those being deciphered from this Book of Names. There is an ancient, evil, organization, known as Gnoseos, working to identify and kill each of the 36 “hidden ones” in this generation. They have now nearly achieved their goal. When David Shepherd realizes that the names he has recorded over the years are all of dead people he begins to investigate—and not a moment too soon.

Humorous Teen Fantasy

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• Humor
• Action
  
• Fantasy
• Teen books
• Good books for guys

Sebastian Darke: Prince of Fools
By Philip Caveney
YA F CAVENEY Sebastia #1
Accompanied by his sardonic buffalope Max, seventeen-year-old Sebastian Darke meets a spoiled princess and a diminutive soldier who aid in his quest to become court jester to the evil King Septimus.

Dark Life
By Kat Falls
YA F FALLS
When fifteen-year-old Ty, who has always lived on the ocean floor, joins Topside girl Gemma in the frontier's underworld to seek and stop outlaws who threaten his home, they learn that the government may pose an even greater threat.

Keeper of the Grail
By Michael P. Spradlin
YA F SPRADLIN Youngest #1
In 1191, fifteen-year-old Tristan, a youth of unknown origin raised in an English abbey, becomes a Templar Knight's squire during the Third Crusade and soon finds himself on a mission to bring the Holy Grail to safety. First book in the Youngest Templar trilogy. (This one isn’t fantasy, but it fits the other criteria.)

The Amulet of Samarkand
By Jonathan Stroud
YA F STROUD Bartiame #1
Nathaniel, a magician's apprentice, summons up the djinni Bartimaeus and instructs him to steal the Amulet of Samarkand from the powerful magician Simon Lovelace; however, the snarky and smart Bartimaeus doesn't exactly want to work for a twelve-year-old magician.

The Thief
By Megan Whalen Turner
YA F TURNER Attolia #1
Gen flaunts his ingenuity as a thief and relishes the adventure which takes him to a remote temple of the gods where he will attempt to steal a precious stone.

The False Prince
By Jennifer A. Nielsen
YA F NIELSEN Ascendan #1
In the country of Carthya, a devious nobleman engages four orphans in a brutal competition to be selected to impersonate the king's long-missing son in an effort to avoid a civil war.

The Hunchback Assignments
By Arthur G. Slade
YA F SLADE Hunchbac #1
In Victorian London, fourteen-year-old Modo, a shape-changing hunchback, becomes a secret agent for the Permanent Association, which strives to protect the world from the evil machinations of the Clockwork Guild.

Dragon Castle
By Joseph Bruchac
YA F BRUCHAC
Young prince Rashko, aided by wise old Georgi, must channel the power of his ancestor, Pavol the great, and harness a magical dragon to face the evil Baron Temny after the foolish King and Queen go missing.

Fiction with Strong Storylines and Good Character Development

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• Fiction
• Strong plot
• Strong characterization

Forgotten Garden
By Kate Morton
F MORTON
Abandoned on a 1913 voyage to Australia, Nell is raised by a dock master and his wife who do not tell her until she is an adult that she is not their child, leading Nell to return to England and eventually hand down her quest for answers to her granddaughter.

The Night Circus
By Erin Morgenstern
F MORGENST
A fierce competition is underway, a contest between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood to compete in "a game," in which each must use their powers of illusion to best the other. Unbeknownst to them, this game is a duel to the death, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will.

Grown Up Kind of Pretty
By Joshilyn Jackson
F JACKSON
Ginny was 15 years old when she had her daughter Liza. When Liza turns 15 she also finds herself the teenage mother of a little girl. Now, Mosey approaches her own 15th birthday and is overwhelmed by her family’s expectation that she too will follow in Ginny and Liza’s footsteps. But before this expected trial actually occurs, real tragedy strikes when Liza suffers a debilitating stroke. Her mother and daughter manage to care for her despite her inability to interact with them. Then one day, Ginny decides to tear down her daughter’s favorite backyard tree and Liza’s terrifying and uncontrollable response takes the family on an entirely unexpected quest for truths that have been hidden through the past 30 years.

Rules of Civility
By Amor Towles
F TOWLES
A chance encounter with a handsome banker in a jazz bar on New Year's Eve 1938 catapults Wall Street secretary Katey Kontent into the upper echelons of New York society, where she befriends a shy multi-millionaire, an Upper East Side ne'er-do-well, and a single-minded widow.

Informationist
By Taylor Stevens
F STEVENS
Dealing information to wealthy clients throughout the world, Vanessa Munroe hopes to leave her unconventional past behind her until a mission to find the missing daughter of a Texas oil billionaire forces her to return to the central Africa region of her youth.

Great Romantic Teen Reads

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• Teen reads 
• Romance

Anna and the French Kiss 
By Stephanie Perkins
YA F PERKINS
When Anna's romance-novelist father sends her to an elite American boarding school in Paris for her senior year of high school, she reluctantly goes, and meets an amazing boy who becomes her best friend, in spite of the fact that they both want something more.

Divergent
By Veronica Roth
YA F ROTH
In a future Chicago, sixteen-year-old Beatrice Prior must choose among five predetermined factions to define her identity for the rest of her life, a decision made more difficult when she discovers that she is an anomaly who does not fit into any one group, and that the society she lives in is not perfect after all.

Heist Society 
By Ally Carter
YA F CARTER
A group of teenagers uses their combined talents to re-steal several priceless paintings and save fifteen-year-old Kat Bishop's father, himself an international art thief, from a vengeful collector.

The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight 
By Jennifer E. Smith
YA F SMITH
Seventeen-year-old Hadley's father is getting remarried, and while Hadley is (much) less than thrilled about it, she's traveling to England to be a part of his wedding. After missing her flight to London by just four minutes, Hadley gets rebooked on another flight...where she meets Oliver.

Captivating Medical Thrillers

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• Captivating plot
• Character development
• Medical thriller
• Clean Read

Harmful Intent

By Robin Cook

F COOK

A physician goes underground to clear his name after a pregnant mother and her child die mysteriously on his operating table, and the real murderers are out to first ruin his reputation, then take his life.

The Terminal Man

By Michael Crichton

F CRICHTON

A computer specialist who suffers from violent seizures has electrodes implanted in his brain to soothe his impulses and he soon learns to program the implants himself.

Deadly

By Julie Chibbaro

YA F CHIBBARO

In the early nineteen-hundreds, sixteen-year-old Prudence Galewski leaves school to take a job assisting the head epidemiologist at New York's Department of Health and Sanitation, investigating the intriguing case of "Typhoid Mary," a seemingly healthy woman who is infecting others with typhoid fever.

Code Orange

By Caroline B. Cooney

YA F COONEY

While conducting research for a school paper on smallpox, Mitty finds an envelope containing 100-year-old smallpox scabs and fears that he has infected himself and all of New York City.

Double Helix

By Nancy Werlin

YA F WERLIN

Eighteen-year-old Eli discovers a shocking secret about his life and his family while working for a Nobel Prize-winning scientist whose specialty is genetic engineering.

Clean Historical Fiction for Teens

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• Historical Fiction
• Teen books
• Clean reads

Once
By Morris Gleitzman
YA F Gleitzma
After living in a Catholic orphanage for nearly four years, a naive Jewish boy runs away and embarks on a journey across Nazi-occupied Poland to find his parents.

Forgotten Fire
By Adam Bagdasarian
YA F Bagdasar

In 1915, Vahan Kenderian's life of privilege is shattered when family and friends disappear or are shot before his eyes in the Armenian Genocide.

Code Name Verity

By Elizabeth Wein

YA F Wein

In 1943, a British fighter plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France and the survivor tells a tale of friendship, war, espionage, and great courage as she relates what she must to survive while keeping secret all that she can.

Rachel’s Secret

By Shelly Sanders

YA F Sanders

When a young Christian man is murdered, Rachel and her family, Jews living in Russia, find their lives threatened, as the Christians blame the Jews for the murder. Violence breaks out on Easter Sunday, 1903, and when it finally ends, Rachel finds that the person she loves most is dead and that her home has been destroyed.

Okay for Now
By Gary D. Schmidt
YA F Schmidt
As a fourteen-year-old who just moved to a new town, with no friends, an abusive father, and a louse for an older brother, Doug Swieteck has all the stats stacked against him until he finds an ally in Lil Spicer--a fiery young lady. Together, they find a safe haven in the local library, inspiration in learning about the plates of John James Audubon's birds, and a hilarious adventure on a Broadway stage.

Clean Teen Action-Adventure-Fantasy with a Dash of Mystery

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• Clean reads
• Teen books
• Action 
• Adventure 
• Fantasy 
• Mystery 

Hero
By Mike Lupica
YA F Lupica
Fourteen-year-old Zach learns he has the same special abilities as his father, who was the President's globe-trotting troubleshooter until "the Bads" killed him, and now Zach must decide whether to use his powers in the same way at the risk of his own life.

Hunchback Assignments
By Author: Arthur G. Slade
YA F Slade Hunchbac #1
In Victorian London, fourteen-year-old Modo, a shape-changing hunchback, becomes a secret agent for the Permanent Association, which strives to protect the world from the evil machinations of the Clockwork Guild.

Dark Life
By Kat Falls
YA F Falls
When fifteen-year-old Ty, who has always lived on the ocean floor, joins Topside girl Gemma in the frontier's underworld to seek and stop outlaws who threaten his home, they learn that the government may pose an even greater threat.

Incarceron
By Catherine Fisher
YA F Fisher
Finn is imprisoned in Incarceron, but when he ambushes a party of Civicry, he comes into possession of a key that allows him to communicate with someone from the Outside and gives him hope of escape.

Airborn
By Kenneth Oppel
YA F Oppel Airborn #1
Matt, a young cabin boy aboard an airship, and Kate, a wealthy young girl traveling with her chaperone, team up to search for the existence of mysterious winged creatures reportedly living hundreds of feet above the Earth's surface.

Teen Dystopia or Fantasy

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• Teen books
• Dystopia
• Fantasy

Under the Never Sky
By Veronica Rossi
YA F Rossi
Aria and Perry, two teens from radically different societies--one highly advanced, the other primitive--hate being dependent on one another until they overcome their prejudices and fall in love, knowing they can't stay together

Matched
By Ally Condie
YA F Condie
Cassia has always trusted the Society to make the right choices for her, so when Xander appears on-screen at her Matching ceremony, Cassia knows he is her ideal mate--until Ky Markham's face appears for an instant before the screen fades to black.

Graceling
By Kristin Cashore
YA F Cashore
In a world where some people are born with extreme and often-feared skills called Graces, Katsa struggles for redemption from her own horrifying Grace, and teams up with another young fighter to save their land from a corrupt king.

Entwined
By Heather Dixon
YA F Dixon
Confined to their dreary castle while mourning their mother's death, Princess Azalea and her eleven sisters join The Keeper, who is trapped in a magic passageway, in a nightly dance that soon becomes nightmarish.

Stardust
By Neil Gaiman
YA F Gaiman
Living in a Victorian countryside town overshadowed by an imposing stone barrier, Tristran is compelled to retrieve a fallen star for the woman he loves and crosses to the wondrous other side of the barrier, where he encounters dangerous rivals for the star.

Teen Adventure Suspense Set in a Fantastical Medieval World

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• Adventure
• Fantasy
• Suspense
• Medieval time period
• Teen books
• Read-alikes for John Flanagan
  

Finnikin of the Rock
By Melina Marchetta
YA F MARCHETT
Now on the cusp of manhood, Finnikin, who was a child when the royal family of Lumatere was brutally murdered and replaced by an imposter, reluctantly joins forces with an enigmatic young novice and fellow-exile, who claims that her dark dreams will lead them to a surviving royal child and a way to regain the throne of Lumatere.

The Prophecy
By Hilari Bell
YA F BELL
Guided by the words of a prophecy, Prince Perryndon, who loves books more than swords, sets out to slay the black dragon that is destroying his kingdom.

The Thief
By Megan Whalen Turner
YA F TURNER Attolia #1
Gen flaunts his ingenuity as a thief and relishes the adventure which takes him to a remote temple of the gods where he will attempt to steal a precious stone.

The Demon King
By Cinda Williams Chima
YA F CHIMA Seven Re #1
Relates the intertwining fates of former street gang leader Han Alister and headstrong Princess Raisa, as Han takes possession of an amulet that once belonged to an evil wizard and Raisa uncovers a conspiracy in the Grey Wolf Court.

Heroes of the Valley
By Jonathan Stroud
YA F STROUD
When young Halli Sveinsson takes one of his practical jokes too far, he is forced to leave the House of Svein and go on a hero's quest where he encounters highway robbers, terrifying monsters, and a girl who may be as fearless as he is.

Graceling
By Kristin Cashore
YA F CASHORE
In a world where some people are born with extreme and often-feared skills called Graces, Katsa struggles for redemption from her own horrifying Grace, the Grace of killing, and teams up with another young fighter to save their land from a corrupt king.

Grave Mercy
By Robin Lafevers
YA F LAFEVERS
In the fifteenth-century kingdom of Brittany, seventeen-year-old Ismae escapes from the brutality of an arranged marriage into the sanctuary of the convent of St. Mortain, where she learns that the god of Death has blessed her with dangerous gifts--and a violent destiny.