At the end of each month, staff from the Airdrie Public Library send the Airdrie City View a small collection of some of the titles available at the library, along with some short synopses. The titles include both adult fiction and non-fiction selections.
Here is the September 2022 submission, showcasing some of the library's books Airdrie readers can enjoy getting lost in this fall.
Adult Fiction
Carrie Soto is Back
Taylor Jenkins Reid
https://catalogue.tracpac.ab.ca/polaris/search/title.aspx?ctx=1.1033.0.0.3&pos=3&cn=1956069
Carrie Soto is fierce, and her determination to win at any cost has not made her popular. But by the time she retires from tennis, she is the best player the world has ever seen. She has shattered every record and claimed 20 Grand Slam titles.
And if you ask Carrie, she is entitled to every one. She sacrificed nearly everything to become the best, with her father Javier as her coach. But six years after her retirement, Carrie finds herself sitting in the stands of the 1994 U.S. Open, watching her record be taken from her by a brutal, stunning player named Nicki Chan. At 37 years old, Carrie makes the monumental decision to come out of retirement for one last year in an attempt to reclaim her record.
Wrong Place Wrong Time
Gillian McAllister
https://catalogue.tracpac.ab.ca/polaris/search/title.aspx?ctx=1.1033.0.0.3&pos=2&cn=1971105
It's late October, after midnight. You're waiting up for your 17-year-old son. He's late. As you watch from the window, he emerges, and you realize he isn't alone: he's walking toward a man, and he's armed. You can't believe it when you see him do it: your funny, happy teenage son kills a stranger, right there on the street outside your house.
You don't know who. You don't know why. You only know your son is now in custody. His future is shattered.
That night, you fall asleep in despair. All is lost. Until you wake...and it is yesterday. And then you wake again...and it is the day before yesterday.
Every morning you wake up a day earlier, another day before the murder. With another chance to stop it. Somewhere in the past lies an answer. The trigger for this crime.
And you don't have a choice but to find it.
Nonfiction
The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture
Gabor Maté
https://catalogue.tracpac.ab.ca/polaris/search/title.aspx?ctx=1.1033.0.0.3&pos=2&cn=1925343
From our most trusted and compassionate authority on stress, trauma, and mental well-being comes a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness, a bracing critique of how our society breeds disease, and a pathway to health and healing.
Gabor Maté's internationally best-selling books have changed the way we look at addiction and have been integral in shifting the conversations around ADHD, stress, disease, embodied trauma, and parenting. Now, in this revolutionary book, he eloquently dissects how in western countries that pride themselves on their health-care systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise.
So what is really "normal" when it comes to health? For all our expertise and technological sophistication, western medicine often fails to treat the whole person, ignoring how today's culture stresses the body, burdens the immune system, and undermines emotional balance.
In The Myth of Normal, co-written with his son Daniel, Maté brings his perspective to the great untangling of common myths about what makes us sick, connects the dots between the maladies of individuals and the declining soundness of society, and offers a compassionate guide for health and healing. The result is Maté's most ambitious and urgent book yet.
Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again
Johann Hari
https://catalogue.tracpac.ab.ca/polaris/search/title.aspx?ctx=1.1033.0.0.3&pos=3&cn=1924439
Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding it much harder to focus than he used to. He found that a life of constantly switching from device to device, from tab to tab, is diminishing and depressing.
He tried all sorts of self-help solutions-even abandoning his phone for three months. But in the long-term, nothing seemed to work.
So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention and to study their scientific findings. On this journey, he learned that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong. We think this inability to focus is a personal flaw, an individual failure to exert enough willpower over our devices.
The truth is even more disturbing: Our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces, and the science shows that these forces have been ramping up for decades, leaving us uniquely vulnerable, when social media arrived, to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit.
