The following items are available at the Hancock County Public Library, 900 W. McKenzie Road. For more information on the library’s collection or to reserve a title, visit hcplibrary.org.
Adult Fiction
“Future Home of the Living God,” by Louise Erdrich
The world as we know it is ending. Evolution has reversed itself, affecting every living creature on earth. Science cannot stop the world from running backwards, as women give birth to infants that appear to be primitive species of humans. Cedar Hawk Songmaker, the adult adopted daughter of Minneapolis liberals, is as disturbed and uncertain as the rest of America around her, but for Cedar, this change is deeply personal. She is four months pregnant. She wants to tell her adoptive parents, but she must first find her birth mother, an Ojibwe Indian living on the reservation, to understand her origins. As Cedar returns to her biological beginnings, society begins to disintegrate, fueled by panic about the end of humanity. There are rumors of martial law, of Congress confining pregnant women, of a registry and rewards for those who turn in these wanted women. Cedar witnesses a family wrenched apart when police violently drag a mother from her husband and child in a parking lot. The streets of her neighborhood have been renamed with Bible verses. A stranger answers the phone when she calls her adoptive parents, who have vanished without a trace. It will take all Cedar has to avoid the prying eyes of informants and keep her baby safe.
Adult Nonfiction
“Ghosts of the Tsunami” by Richard Lloyd Parry
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On March 11, 2011, an earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of northeast Japan. By the time the sea retreated, more than 18,000 people had been crushed, burned to death or drowned. It was Japan’s greatest single loss of life since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. It set off a national crisis and the meltdown of a nuclear power plant. And even after the immediate emergency had abated, the trauma of the disaster continued to express itself in bizarre and mysterious ways. Richard Lloyd Parry, an award-winning foreign correspondent, lived through the earthquake in Tokyo and spent six years reporting from the disaster zone. There he encountered stories of ghosts and hauntings and met a priest who exorcised the spirits of the dead. He spent time in the village that had suffered the greatest loss of all. What really happened to the local children waiting in the schoolyard moments before the tsunami? Why didn’t their teachers evacuate them to safety? Why was the truth being so stubbornly covered up?
