New items are available at the Hancock County Public Library.
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
“The French Girl,” by Lexie Elliott
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]
Six university students from Oxford — friends and sometimes more than friends — spend an idyllic week together in a French farmhouse. It was supposed to be the perfect summer getaway — until they met Severine, the girl next door. For Kate Channing, Severine was an unwelcome presence, her beauty undermining the close-knit group’s loyalties amid the already simmering tensions. And after a huge altercation on the last night of the holiday, Kate knew nothing would ever be the same. There are some things you can’t forgive. And there are some people you can’t forget — like Severine, who was never seen again. Now, a decade later, the case is reopened when Severine’s body is found in the well behind the farmhouse. Questioned along with her friends, Kate stands to lose everything she’s worked so hard to achieve as suspicion mounts around her. Desperate to resolve her own shifting memories, she is fearful she will be forever bound to the woman whose presence still haunts her.
Adult Nonfiction
“The Gospel of Trees,” by Apricot Irving
Apricot Irving grew up as a missionary’s daughter in Haiti—a country easy to sensationalize but difficult to understand. Her father was an agronomist, a man who hiked alone into the hills with a macouti of seeds to preach the gospel of trees in a deforested but resilient country. Her mother and sisters, meanwhile, spent most of their days in the confines of the hospital compound they called home. As a child, this felt like paradise to Irving, but as a teenager, the same setting felt like a prison. As she grew into womanhood, an already confusing process made all the more complicated by Christianity’s demands, Irving struggled to understand her father’s choices. His commitment to his mission and the anger and despair that followed failures threatened to splinter his family. Told against the backdrop of Haiti’s long history of — often unwelcome — intervention, “The Gospel of Trees” grapples with the complicated legacy of those who wish to improve the world.
