NCW Libraries

"An intellectual and emotional jigsaw puzzle of a novel for readers of A.S. Byatt's Possession and Geraldine Brooks's People of the Book Set in London of the 1660s and of the early twenty-first century, The Weight of Ink is the interwoven tale of two women of remarkable intellect: Ester Velasquez, anemigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi, just before the plague hits the city; and Helen Watt, an ailing historian with a...

"When art historian Cate Adamson leaves her troubled family to complete her doctorate in New York, she finds herself dismissed by her sexist advisor and becomes increasingly desperate to salvage her career. When she finds a hidden painting in a university basement, possibly a seventeenth-century masterpiece, she takes the painting to Spain, against her better judgment. There she meets Antonio, an impoverished nobleman struggling to restore his family's...

"Years after a breakdown and a diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder derailed her historical preservationist career, Kenetria Nash and her alters have been given a second chance they can't refuse: a position as resident caretaker of a historic home. Having been dormant for years, Ken has no idea what led them to this isolated Hudson River island, but she's determined not to ruin their opportunity. Then a surprise visit from the home's conservation...

"Europe, 1940: Posing as a friar, a British operative talks his way into the monastery at Villers-devant-Orval just before Nazi art thieves plan to sweep through the area and whisk everything of value back to Berlin. But the ersatz man of the cloth is no thief. Instead, that night he adds an old leather Bible to the monastery's library and then escapes. London, 2018: A construction worker makes a grisly discovery--a skeletal arm bone with a rusty...

When a murder occurs in Landon Mansion, docent and historian Allison Leigh works with Agent Tyler Montague to discover if the ghost of British Lord "Butcher" Bedford has resurfaced or if there is another malevolent force at work.

"Maud is a talented garden historian and devoted mother to daughters Ella and Louise. Motivated to reinvigorate her career and escape her troubled marriage, she accepts a summer job restoring the garden of a lush, nineteenth-century Hudson Valley estate. While waiting for her daughters to join her at the end of their school year, Maud meets coworker and archaelogist Gabriel Crews, whose passion for landscape history matches her own. When their immediate...

"Nora Kelly, a young but successful curator at the Santa Fe Archaeological Institute, is approached by a historian, Clive Benton, with the opportunity to lead an expedition unlike any other. It begins with the story of the ill-fated Donner Party, who became permanently lodged in the American consciousness in the winter of 1847, when the first skeletonized survivors of the party stumbled out of the California mountains, replete with tales of courage,...

Joan Blakely had an unconventional childhood: the daughter of a globe-trotting supermodel and a world-famous artist. Her artist father died on 9/11, and Joan--an art historian by training--has spent more than a decade maintaining his legacy. Life in the art world is beginning to wear on her--and then one fateful afternoon her husband drops a bombshell: he's fathered twins with another woman. Furious but secretly pleased to have a reason to blow up...

"After traveling through time in Shadow of Night, the second book in Deborah Harkness's enchanting series, historian and witch Diana Bishop and vampire scientist Matthew Clairmont return to the present to face new crises and old enemies. At Matthew's ancestral home at Sept-Tours, they reunite with the cast of characters from A Discovery of Witches--with one significant exception. But the real threat to their future has yet to be revealed, and when...