What's New This Week at the Durham Library (Plus Staff Picks!)

Books

The Drop, by Michael Connelly

Explosive Eighteen, by Janet Evanovich

The Impossible Dead, by Ian Rankin

DVDs

Luther

Super 8

Conan the Barbarian

Sarah’s Key

Soul Surfer

This Week's Staff Picks

Valerie's picks:

A Discovery of Witches, by Deborah Harkness:

Scholar Diana Bishop, a descendant of witches who has rejected her heritage, discovers a long lost magical manuscript in Oxford's library.  Inadvertently, she unleashes a fantastical underworld of daemons, witches, and vampires whose activities center on an enchanted treasure. She also attracts the interest of a devastatingly handsome (aren’t they all?) fifteen hundred year old vampire. The romance, which dominates the center of the almost 600 page book, is trite, the characters are caricatures, the prose banal – however, it improves with additional characters, scenes and unresolved plotlines. The first volume of a proposed three book series, entitled “All Souls Trilogy,” I find myself a little impatient for the next installment to arrive.

Love Hangs Out, by Amy Bloom

Bloom's latest collection looks at love in many forms through a keenly perceptive lens.  Two sets of stories that read much like novellas form the book's soul; each explores the complicated nature of love, compromise and acceptance, which often comes too late.