Delivering library books to New Ulm Assisted Living Facilities is one less-known but super important service library staff offers to the community. Interacting with residents and helping them find books in the collection we haul to the facilities are services I love delivering. During these outreach visits, residents get help identifying and obtaining books not only from the New Ulm Public Library, but also from the Traverse de Sioux Regional Library System (TDS) and library systems throughout Minnesota. Many residents are voracious readers so I’m given the opportunity to stretch my reader’s advisory skills. Finding new books that appeal to outreach patrons but also have not been read previously is a challenge!

Because so many New Ulm library patrons visiting the library–physically or online–are also so well-read, suggesting new books to patrons in the library can be challenging, too. For me, meeting this challenge usually involves using a computer to do research. So, in the spirit of finding new and unknown reading suggestions, I have compiled a list of highly anticipated new or soon to be published books by debut authors, with descriptions from the publishers. Unless you obtained an advanced reader copy–a copy supplied by publishers before the publication date–you have not read these books! All of these titles have been purchased and will be circulating soon. Place a hold online at www.newulmlibrary.org or call the library at 507-359-8331 for assistance placing a hold.

“Women of Good Fortune” by Sophie Wan. “Set against a high-society Shanghai wedding, a heartfelt, funny, dazzling novel about a reluctant bride and her two best friends, each with their own motives and fed up with the way society treats women, who forge a plan to steal all the gift money on the big day.”–

“The Other Valley” by Scott Alexander Howard. “Set in an unnamed valley-surrounded by other valleys, each twenty years apart in time-a masterful, moving literary speculative novel in which the Conseil determines if a bereaved resident can cross the border to the past or the future on a “mourning tour.”

“Martyr!” by Kaveh Akbar. “A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.”

“Great Expectations” by Vinson Cunningham. “This is a novel of so many things…but, ultimately, it is about the human ambition to make sense of the troubled waters of our times. Brilliantly written, piercingly smart, quietly subversive, this book will be one of the talked-about novels of the year.”

“The Extinction of Irena Rey” by Jennifer Croft

From the International Booker Prize-winning translator and Women’s Prize finalist, an utterly beguiling novel about eight translators and their search for a world-renowned author who goes missing in a primeval Polish forest.”

“Victim” by Andrew Boryga. This book “is an original, biting satire about the contradictions of class and race in America…a deep dive into identity cynicism that somehow never loses its heart.”

“Piglet” by Lottie Hazell. “When Piglet’s fiancée reveals a horrible betrayal two weeks before their wedding day, she decides to proceed with the event, but her life slowly starts unraveling in the lead-up to the big day.”

“Pelican Girls” by Julia Malye. “For fans of sweeping historical literature … an extraordinary US literary debut set in Paris and colonial New Orleans and based on a true story.”

“Worry” by Alexandra Tanner. This book “writes toward truth in the time of the internet, it uncovers the absolute horror of ‘buying things, ‘ and it does what novels are meant to do: hauntingly display the dark and familiar sides of human behavior.

“A Short Walk Through A Wide World” by Douglas Westerbeke. “This is the rare book that immediately becomes a dear friend…a beautiful ode to wanderlust, the intrepid spirit, and the changing planet.” The author is a librarian!

New Ulm Public Library is located at 17 North Broadway and is open Monday-Thursday from 9:30 a.m.-8 p.m. and Friday-Saturday from 9:30 a.m.-5 p.m.