Each month, the Columbia Public Library offers selections from its collection related to a current bestseller or hot topic. Adult and Community Services Manager Lauren Williams compiled this month’s selections.
If you could trade two dollars and a little DNA to know your life’s true potential, would you do it?
This year’s community-wide reading selection, “The Big Door Prize” by M.O. Walsh (Putnam, 2020), explores this question and more. This offbeat and charming novel about small-town life, relationships and the power of dreams narrowly beat out the exuberant work of historical fiction “Deacon King Kong” by James McBride (Riverhead Books, 2020).
Before the public vote on the 2022 One Read title, a panel of community members considered a varied list of finalist books, from works of historical fiction to books exploring a range of marginalized identities.
A gorgeous meditation on love, grief and destiny, the novel “Hamnet” by Maggie O’Farrell (Knopf, 2020) tells the moving story of the death of William Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son and the years leading up to the production of the tragedy Hamlet, largely through the keenly observant eyes of his wife Agnes.
“The Indigo Girl” by Natasha Boyd (Blackstone, 2017) likewise fictionalizes the life of an actual historical figure, this time in 18th-century South Carolina. Teenager Eliza Lucas, defying expectations of her age and sex, runs her family’s plantations and discovers they might lose everything. Refusing…
