Peak Picks Current Titles Book List
A complete list of current Peak Picks titles.
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Somebody Is Walking on your Grave
Adult Nonfiction. “Argentinian horror novelist Enriquez makes her nonfiction debut with this evocative travelogue-cum-memoir chronicling the two decades she's spent visiting cemeteries. Enriquez's reports are peppered with fascinating trivia about each place. Physical descriptions are likewise full of texture and wonder, prompting graceful ruminations on the fluidity of time and memory (Enriquez admits to a ‘nostalgia for everything, especially for what I've never experienced’). The result is an eccentric and enlightening peek into how memorialization happens across the world.” -- Publishers Weekly
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The Unveiling
Adult Fiction. “Striker isn’t surprised to be the only Black passenger on the cruise to Antarctica. While her fellow tourists are wealthy sightseers, Striker is on the ship for business; she’s a location scout for the film industry, hired by a production company making a film about the disastrous Shackleton expedition. …Striker observes her extremely privileged fellow passengers with the same wry detachment as the local wildlife. But when a freak accident leaves the group stranded… and they regroup in a shelter left by some long-forgotten expedition, the natural environment quickly turns against them.” --Kirkus
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We Survived the Night
Adult Nonfiction. “NoiseCat's ambitious debut ruminates on generational trauma and resilience among Indigenous communities. It opens with a night watchman's horrific discovery at St. Joseph's Mission, an Indian residential school in B.C.: a Salish newborn, NoiseCat's father, abandoned in the garbage, ‘the only known survivor of the school's incinerator.’ With this harrowing legacy at the heart of his narrative, NoiseCat traces his family's history, including his father's achievements as an artist and struggles with alcoholism, and reflects on Coyote Stories, the oral tradition centered on the famed trickster.” --Publishers Weekly
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All the Way to the River
Adult Nonfiction. “Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) first met Rayya Elias in 2000…the pair gradually evolved from casual friends to soulmates, with Gilbert ending her second marriage to start a relationship with Elias after Elias received a terminal pancreatic cancer diagnosis. After the couple consum-mated their attraction, both fell deeper into addiction--Gilbert to love and sex, Elias to alcohol and drugs. After Elias died in 2018, Gilbert examined her addictions and arrived at a spiritual awakening. Gilbert achieves her signature intimacy through a bluntly confessional tone and an admirable ability to stare darkness in the face without losing hope.” Publishers Weekly
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Amity
Adult Fiction. “Coleman is a young New Orleanian who, newly emancipated, still works as a servant in the household he grew up in. The paterfamilias, Wyatt Harper, has taken off for the desert of northern Mexico…; he has taken Coleman’s sister, June, with him... June escapes, falling in with a guerrilla band made up of Black and Native American men and women. Resourceful and smart, she fits right in, but now Harper is on the hunt for her, employing a grandiloquent ruffian to bring Coleman to him in order to persuade June to return. A memorable, impeccably written tale that engages the reader, with its twists and turns, from beginning to end.” Kirkus
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Dark Renaissance
Adult Nonfiction. “From the pen of the award-winning scholar Greenblatt (The Swerve) comes this vivid biography of the Renaissance poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe. The son of a Canterbury cobbler, Marlowe won a place at his local school by dint of brains and energy, moved to Cambridge…found himself recruited into a network of intelligence officers for Queen Elizabeth, and then, at age 29, was mysteriously murdered in a bar fight. At the heart of Greenblatt's book, though, is not just a familiar story but a new argument: that it was really Marlowe, rather than Shakespeare, who lit the flame under the literary Renaissance of Elizabethan England.” Library Journal
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History Matters
Adult Nonfiction. “History Matters brings together selected essays by beloved historian David McCullough, some published here for the first time, written at different points over the course of his long career but all focused on the subject of his lifelong passion: the importance of history in understanding our present and future. Edited by McCullough's daughter, Dorie McCullough Lawson, and his longtime researcher, Michael Hill, History Matters is a tribute to a master historian and offers fresh insights into McCullough's enduring interests and writing life.” Publisher description
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Mother Mary Comes to Me
Adult Nonfiction. Booker Prize-winning Indian novelist Roy recounts a life of poverty and upheaval, defiance and triumph in an emotionally raw memoir, centered on her complicated relationship with her mother. Mary Roy…was a volatile, willful woman, angry and abusive. To escape her mother's demands and tantrums, Arundhati, at age 18, decided to move permanently to Delhi…she embarked on a long relationship with a filmmaker, which ignited her career as a writer. Throughout, Mrs. Roy loomed large in her daughter's life, and her death, in 2022, left the author overcome with grief. An intimate, stirring chronicle.” Kirkus
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The New Book
Adult Poetry. The late Giovanni (1943-2024)…offers a moving poetic reflection on a life lived with passion, purpose, and fierce pride. This posthumous collection pulses with emotional and political resonance, capturing the poet's unflinching voice as she traces personal history alongside broader struggles for racial justice. A sense of reverence permeates the work, and Giovanni's deep pride in her heritage is a powerful through-line. To read this collection is to witness a rich, defiant, and generous life. A fitting and electrifying final offering from one of the most vital American voices.” Library Journal
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One of Us
Adult Fiction. “Bolt and Eleanor, the teenage twins at the center of Chaon’s brilliant fifth novel, are orphans who’ve fallen under the watch of ‘Uncle Charlie,’ a con man and serial killer. They escape Charlie’s clutches with the assistance of a mysterious Mr. Jengling, who operates a circus and recruits them for his sideshow… For all that darkness, the brother and sister find a welcoming ersatz family. Set mainly in 1915, the novel captures a vanished vaudeville world… But in its latter chapters, the novel is also powerfully otherworldly, deliberately warping assumptions about life, death, and the nature of souls." Kirkus
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