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Book List - Staff Favorite Book Covers 2024

BPLD staff voted on their favorite book cover designs of 2024. These are the top picks!

Showing 1 - 20 of 22  There are a total of 22 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "Children of anguish and anarchy"
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Description:
When Zélie seized the royal palace that fateful night, she thought her battles had come to an end. The monarchy had finally fallen. The maji had risen again. Zélie never expected to find herself locked in a cage and trapped on a foreign ship. Now warriors with iron skulls traffic her and her people across the seas, far from their homeland. Then everything changes when Zélie meets King Baldyr, her true captor, the ruler of the Skulls, and the man...
Book cover for "Martyr!"
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Description:
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields...
Book cover for "The ministry of time"
Description:
"In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she'll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering "expats" from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible–for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time. She is tasked with working as a "bridge": living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as "1847" or Commander Graham...
Book cover for "The spellshop"
Description:
"Kiela has always had trouble dealing with people. Thankfully, as librarian at the Great Library of Alyssium, she and her assistant Caz--a magically sentient spider plant--have spent the last decade sequestered among the empire's most precious spellbooks, preserving their magic for the city's elite. Then a revolution begins and the library goes up in flames. She and Caz flee with all the spellbooks they can carry and head to a remote island Kiela...
Book cover for "I cheerfully refuse"
Author:
Description:
"Set in a not-too-distant America, I Cheerfully Refuse is the tale of a bereaved and pursued musician embarking under sail on a sentient Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved, bookselling wife. Rainy, an endearing bear of an Orphean narrator, seeks refuge in the harbors, fogs, and remote islands of the inland sea. Encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, Rainy finds on land an increasingly desperate...

6. Kairos

Book cover for "Kairos"
Description:
"Tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR, through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 and then what comes after....Describes the path of the two lovers, as Katharina grows up and tries to come to terms...
Book cover for "The wedding people"
Description:
"It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years--she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with...
Book cover for "My favorite thing is monsters"
Author:
Description:
In Book Two, dark mysteries past and present continue to abound in the tumultuous and violent Chicago summer of 1968. Young Karen attends a protest in Grant Park and finds herself swept up in a police stomping. Privately, she continues to investigate Ankas recent death and discovers one last cassette tape that sheds light upon Anka's heroic activities in Nazi Germany. She wrestles with her own sexual identity, the death of her mother, and the secrets...

9. Malas

Book cover for "Malas"
Description:
In 1951, a mysterious old woman confronts Pilar Aguirre in the small border town of La Cienega, Texas. The old woman is sure Pilar stole her husband and, in a heated outburst, lays a curse on Pilar and her family. More than forty years later, Lulu Muñoz is dodging chaos at every turn: her troubled father’s moods, his rules, her secret life as singer in a punk band, but most of all her upcoming quinceañera. When her beloved grandmother passes...
Book cover for "Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop"
Description:
Yeongju is burned out. She did everything she was supposed to: go to school, marry a decent man, get a respectable job. Then it all fell apart. In a leap of faith, Yeongju abandons her old life, quits her high-flying career, and follows her dream. She opens a bookshop. In a quaint neighborhood in Seoul, surrounded by books, Yeongju and her customers take refuge. From the lonely barista to the unhappily married coffee roaster-and the writer who sees...
Book cover for "We refuse"
Description:
"Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolence and Malcolm X's "by any means necessary." In We Refuse, historian Kellie Carter Jackson urges us to move past this false choice, offering an unflinching examination of the breadth of Black responses to white oppression, particularly those pioneered by Black women. The dismissal of "Black violence" as an illegitimate form of resistance...
Book cover for "All fours"
Description:
Tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country from LA to NY. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.
Book cover for "Tehrangeles"
Description:
"From the critically-acclaimed novelist and essayist, the hilarious, heartwarming story of the Milanis-an Iranian American family who live in wealth and whose recent foray into the spotlight will force them to divulge long-kept family secrets and bring them closer than ever before When Ali and Homa Milani first immigrated from Iran to the United States, they struggled to make ends meet. Now multimillionaires and self-proclaimed American Fast-Food...
Book cover for "The eyes are the best part"
Author:
Description:
Ji-won’s life tumbles into disarray in the wake of her Appa’s extramarital affair and subsequent departure. Her mother, distraught. Her younger sister, hurt and confused. Her college freshman grades, failing. Her dreams, horrifying… yet enticing. In them, Ji-won walks through bloody rooms full of eyes. Succulent blue eyes. Salivatingly blue eyes. Eyes the same shape and shade as George’s, who is Umma’s obnoxious new boyfriend. George has...
Book cover for "Glorious exploits"
Description:
"Set in Syracuse, Sicily, during the Peloponnesian War but told in contemporary Irish dialect, Glorious Exploits follows Lampo and Gelon, best friends since childhood. Thrilled to have survived the Athenians' recent invasion and as shocked by the Syracusan victory as everyone else, these unemployed potters are in a mood to celebrate. Of course, they hate the Athenians. Still, that doesn't mean you can't love the theatre of their great playwright Euripides,...
Book cover for "The city and its uncertain walls"
Description:
We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life. Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world--a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become...

17. Godwin

Book cover for "Godwin"
Description:
"Netherland: the odyssey of two brothers crossing the world in search of an African soccer prodigy who might change their fortunes. Mark, a millennial technical writer who lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Sushila, and their toddler daughter, grew up a world apart from his much younger half-brother Geoff. Raised in the UK by the mother who deserted Mark when she divorced his dad and married a richer man, Geoff is now a fast-talking soccer agent,...
Book cover for "There is a Rio Grande in heaven"
Description:
"Ruben Reyes Jr. conjures strange dreamlike worlds to explore what we would do if we woke up one morning and our lives were unrecognizable. Boundaries between the past, present, and future are blurred. Menacing technology and unchecked bureaucracy cut through everyday life with uncanny dread. The characters, from mango farmers to pop stars to ex-guerrilla fighters to cyborgs, are forced to make uncomfortable choices--choices that not only mean life...
Book cover for "Intermezzo"
Description:
"Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old...
Book cover for "A Magical Girl Retires"
Description:

A millennial turned magical girl must combat climate change and credit card debt in this delightful, witty, and wildly imaginative ode to magical girl manga.

Twenty-nine, depressed, and drowning in credit card debt after losing her job during the pandemic, a millennial woman decides to end her troubles by jumping off Seoul's Mapo Bridge.

But her suicide attempt is interrupted by a girl dressed all in white—her

...