MCPL March 2026 Seasonal Pick

A woman learns the astonishing truth of her family's ties to a vanished American Kingdom in this riveting new novel from the New York Times bestselling, NAACP Image Award-winning author of Take My Hand.

Nikki hasn't seen her grandmother in years, due to a mysterious estrangement inherited from her mother. So when the elder calls out of the blue with an urgent request for Nikki to visit her in the hills of western North Carolina, Nikki hesitates only for a moment. After years of silence in her family, she's determined to learn the truth while she still can.

But instead of answers about the recent past, Mother Rita tells Nikki an incredible story of a kingdom on this very mountain, and of her great-great-great grandmother, Luella, who would become its queen.

It sounds like the makings of a fairy tale--royalty among a community of freed people. But the more Nikki learns about the Kingdom of the Happy Land, and the lives of those who dwelled in the ruins she discovers in the woods, the more she realizes how much of her identity and her family's secrets are wrapped up in these hills. Because this land is their legacy, and it will be up to her to protect it before it, like so much else, is stolen away.

Inspired by true events, Happy Land is a transporting multi-generational novel about the stories that shape us and the dazzling courage it takes to dream.

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MCPL March 2026 Seasonal Pick

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Quindlen is as observant and as wonderfully readable as ever, attuned to women’s lives and the nuances of their voices.”—Jennifer Weiner, The New York Times Book Review

A woman confronts the surprising results of an ancestry test and begins to question the meaning of family and friendship in this wise, tender novel teeming with life—from the beloved #1 New York Times bestselling author of After Annie

No one knows you like your book club.

High school English teacher Polly Goodman can talk about everything and anything with the women in her book club, which is why they’ve become her closest friends and, along with her veterinarian husband, the bedrock of her life. Her students, her fraught relationship with her mother, her struggles with IVF—Polly’s book club friends have heard about it all.

But when they give Polly an ancestry test kit as a joke, the results match her with a stranger. It is clear to Polly that this match is a mistake, but still she cannot help but comb through her family history for answers. Then, when it seems that the book club circle of four will become three, Polly learns how friendships can change your life in the most profound ways.

Written with Anna Quindlen’s trademark warmth, humor, and insight into the power of love and hope, More Than Enough explores how we find ourselves again and again through the relationships that define us.

MCPL March 2026 Seasonal Pick

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • From Pulitzer Prize–winning author Elizabeth Strout comes a “stunner” (People) of a novel about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world.

“Tell Me Everything hits like a bucolic fable. . . . A novel of moods, how they govern our personal lives and public spaces, reflected in Strout’s shimmering technique.”—The Washington Post

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time, NPR, Vogue, Parade

With her remarkable insight into the human condition and silences that contain multitudes, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters—Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess, and more—as they deal with a shocking crime in their midst, fall in love and yet choose to be apart, and grapple with the question, as Lucy Barton puts it, “What does anyone’s life mean?”

It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known—“unrecorded lives,” Olive calls them—reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.

Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.”

MCPL March 2026 Seasonal Pick

A READ WITH JENNA TODAY SHOW BOOK CLUB PICK • “A wildly good time . . . a swoony, funny, romantic novel” (Rebecca Serle, New York Times bestselling author of In Five Years) about a woman thrown a curveball by fate, and the family secret that makes her question everything.

“Warm, lush, addictive, with just the right amount of magic.” —Veronica Roth, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Divergent

“Meet my new favorite book!” —Katherine Center, New York Times bestselling author of The Bodyguard

She knows what her happily ever after looks like. And it’s not him.

Cassia Park believes in soul mates. Fated love stories. It’s her family business, after all—for centuries, from Korea to Los Angeles, Park women have peered into clients’ past lives to find their one true love, their fated. This magical secret is why One & Only Matchmaking has a 100% guarantee…for everyone but Cassia.

For ten years, Cass has been searching for her fated, a man named Daniel Nam. But he’s still nowhere to be found.

And so, on the eve of her 40th birthday, Cass decides to do something for herself. She impulsively has a fling with Ellis. He’s twenty-eight, indecently handsome, and not destined to be the love of her life. But she’s surprised by their connection and their fling feels like something more—up to the moment he introduces her to his boss…Daniel Nam.

As she battles between fate and chance, head and heart, a family secret is revealed that will make her question everything she’s ever known. Cassia will have to decide if she’ll follow her fate…or make her own.

MCPL March 2026 Seasonal Pick

This is a true David versus Goliath sports story that occurred in Kentucky High school basketball during the 1958-59 basketball season. Read about a small Western Kentucky school, North Marshall, which took on all the traditional Kentucky basketball powers in a special, memorable run to the Kentucky Sweet Sixteen.

With Shirttails Flying is a first hand account of that memorable season, written by a member of the 1959 North Marshall team. There are many names that basketball fans everywhere will recognize throughout the book. You can read about future college stars that went on to play major college basketball at such schools as the University of Kentucky, Mississippi State, Cincinnati, Western Kentucky, Vanderbilt, Murray State, Virginia Tech, and many other colleges.

MCPL March 2026 Seasonal Pick

"As the person most responsible for creating the phenomenon that is University of Kentucky basketball, Adolph Rupp (1901-1977) is a legend in Kentucky and in the larger world of Division I college basketball. As UK's coach from 1930-1972, Rupp led the program to four NCAA championships and is the third most winning coach in NCAA history, behind Bobby Knight and Dean Smith. Rupp's record is not without blemish, however. In the late 1940s, three of his players were indicted in a point-shaving scandal, and in more recent years his legacy has been tarnished by claims that he was a racist. He was portrayed as such in the 2006 film Glory Road, which dramatized the 1966 defeat of the popular (and all-white) Rupp's Runts to an all-black Texas Western team in the NCAA championship game. In Adolph Rupp and the Rise of Big-Time College Basketball in America, James Duane Bolin sets the record straight by presenting a balanced picture of Rupp, with all of his faults-and incredible successes-firmly intact. Drawing upon a wealth of primary sources--including game summaries, correspondence, business and legal records, and hundreds of hours of recorded interviews with Rupp's relatives, former players, assistant coaches and administrators, and even the man himself--Bolin is able to provide an unprecedented level of insight into Rupp's life. The book begins with Rupp's youth in Kansas, including accounts of his interactions with James Naismith, basketball's inventor. Subsequent chapters examine his professional life, both before and during his tenure at UK; his most storied teams, including the Fabulous Five, which won championships in 1948 and 1949; and his many other business interests, such as his 500-acre farm and bourbon distilling"--

MCPL March 2026 Seasonal Pick

A Pulitzer Prize–winning, #1 New York Times bestseller, Angela’s Ashes is Frank McCourt’s masterful memoir of his childhood in Ireland—now with a new introduction by Patrick Radden Keefe. 

“When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”

So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank’s mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank’s father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy—exasperating, irresponsible, and beguiling—does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father’s tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies.

Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank’s survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig’s head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors—yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance, and remarkable forgiveness.

Angela’s Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt’s astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic.

MCPL March 2026 Seasonal Pick

From the award-winning author of The Master, a hauntingly compelling novel—by far Tóibín’s most accessible book—set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s about a young woman torn between her family in Ireland and the american who wins her heart.

Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the years following World War Two. Though skilled at bookkeeping, Eilis cannot find a proper job in the miserable Irish economy. 

When an Irish priest from Brooklyn visits the household and offers to sponsor Eilis in America—to live and work in a Brooklyn neighborhood "just like Ireland"—she realizes she must go, leaving her fragile mother and sister behind. 

Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and studies accounting at Brooklyn College, and, when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, a blond Italian, slowly wins her over with persistent charm. He takes Eilis to Coney Island and Ebbets Field, and home to dinner in the two-room apartment he shares with his brothers and parents. Eilis is in love. But just as she begins to consider what this means, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her new life. 

With the emotional resonance of Alice McDermott’s At Weddings and Wakes, Brooklyn is by far Tóibín’s most inviting, engaging novel. 

MCPL March 2026 Seasonal Pick

NOW AN EMMY-NOMINATED HULU ORIGINAL SERIES • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • “A stunning novel about the transformative power of relationships” (People) from the author of Conversations with Friends, “a master of the literary page-turner” (J. Courtney Sullivan).
 
“[A] novel that demands to be read compulsively, in one sitting.”—The Washington Post

ONE OF ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY’S TEN BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE

TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: People, Slate, The New York Public Library, Harvard Crimson

Connell and Marianne grew up in the same small town, but the similarities end there. At school, Connell is popular and well liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation—awkward but electrifying—something life changing begins.

A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. And as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.

Normal People is the story of mutual fascination, friendship, and love. It takes us from that first conversation to the years beyond, in the company of two people who try to stay apart but find that they can’t.
 
WINNER: The British Book Award, The Costa Book Award, The An Post Irish Novel of the Year, Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award

BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Oprah Daily, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Vogue, Esquire, Glamour, Elle, Marie Claire, Vox, The Paris Review, Good Housekeeping, Town & Country

MCPL March 2026 Seasonal Pick

On March 23, 2024, Lyon County won the Kentucky high school basketball state championship.

Given that more than a hundred such titles have been claimed over the years it would be easy to dismiss this fact, writing it off as a footnote soon to be lost to history, an agate line in a dusty record book.

Except that this story refuses to be tamped down.

This story of a kid who dared break Kentucky’s most treasured milestone, the all-time scoring record held nearly seven decades by a larger-than-life mountain icon.

This story of three lifelong friends and the common bond of basketball always at the root of celebrating the best times and grieving tragedies endured much too soon.

This story of a father and son navigating a tricky coach-player relationship; another teenager playing for a lofty family legacy; and still another forced to mature beyond his years when cancer stole his lynchpin.

This story of a tiny, tiny high school – there were only 37 boys in the senior class – where its coach took a smattering of thread and wove a state championship basketball team, a peculiar patchwork of five seniors and five sophomores.

This story so implausibly magical that for six winters it captivated every heart, every soul in a small western Kentucky hamlet, turning game nights into festive community celebrations that packed the old gymnasium to bursting.

This story of destiny, now a narrative of legacy.

Lyon Pride.

MCPL March 2026 Seasonal Pick

“Move over, hockey romance fans.  There’s a new game in town.  Jamie Harrow’s debut novel sails through the net with the perfect blend of romance, spice, and a healthy dollop of a serious issue that bears addressing.”—Jodi Picoult, #1 New York Times bestselling author

They call it March Madness for a reason: Anything can happen on the way to a national championship.

Eight years after graduation, Annie Radford is not happy to be back at her alma mater in her old job with the Ardwyn Tigers’ basketball team. Worse, her coworker from back in college, Ben Callahan, is still on the Tigers staff, and he’s annoyingly wholesome, hot, and clinging to a grudge against Annie for abandoning him and the team their senior year.

But as Ardwyn becomes the season’s Cinderella Story, things start heating up between Annie and Ben, too. And while neither of them can deny this could be something special, Annie’s afraid to tell Ben the truth about why she left basketball—the thing she loves most—in the first place. She’ll have to learn to trust him if they have a shot at being together.

In addition to being funny, romantic, and sexy, One on One examines the pressure put on college athletes, challenges the sexism in the world of sports, and exposes the dangers in whole communities idolizing the big men on campus.

For readers of The Hating Game and The Ex Talk, a workplace, enemies-to-lovers debut for anyone yearning for a courtside romance, perfect for anyone who can’t get enough sports rom-coms.

MCPL March 2026 Seasonal Pick

"Readers will treasure this series." --RT Book Reviews

Nothing gives Anna and Felty Helmuth greater satisfaction than seeing their grandchildren happily married--except for planning their next matchmaking venture. And as springtime comes to Huckleberry Hill, Wisconsin, the air is filled with promise. . .

Ever since the Helmuths' grandson, Ben, abruptly broke his engagement and moved to Florida, Emma Nelson has kept busy tending her vegetable garden and raising award-winning pumpkins. She can put her heartache aside to help Ben's Mammi with her own pumpkin patch. At least until Ben shows up to lend support to his ailing Dawdi. . .

Gardening side by side with pretty, nurturing Emma is a sweet kind of torture for Ben. She could have her pick of suitors who can offer what he can't, and he cares too much to burden her with his secret. Leaving once more is the only option. Yet Emma's courage is daring him to accept the grace that flourishes here, and the love that has been calling him back to Huckleberry Hill. . .

Praise for Jennifer Beckstrand's Huckleberry Hill

"A delightful cast of characters in a story that overflows with Amish love and laughter." --Charlotte Hubbard

"A warm romance with two likable main characters and ultimately a great ending for all." --Parkersburg News & Sentinel

MCPL March 2026 Seasonal Pick

By the New York Times bestselling author of Room: A small Irish village is mystified by what appears to be a miracle but may actually be murder in this "fine, fact-based, old-school page-turner" (Stephen King).

In this masterpiece by Emma Donoghue, an English nurse brought to a small Irish village to observe what appears to be a miracle -- a girl said to have survived without food for months -- soon finds herself fighting to save the child's life.

Tourists flock to the cabin of eleven-year-old Anna O'Donnell, who believes herself to be living off manna from heaven, and a journalist is sent to cover the sensation. Lib Wright, a veteran of Florence Nightingale's Crimean campaign, is hired to keep watch over the girl.

Written with all the propulsive tension that made Room a huge bestseller, THE WONDER works beautifully on many levels--a tale of two strangers who transform each other's lives, a powerful psychological thriller, and a story of love pitted against evil.

MCPL March 2026 Seasonal Pick

Named Book of the Month Club's Book of the Year, 2017
Selected one of New York Times Readers’ Favorite Books of 2017
Winner of the 2018 Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award 

From the beloved New York Times bestselling author of The Boy In the Striped Pajamas, a sweeping, heartfelt saga about the course of one man's life, beginning and ending in post-war Ireland

Cyril Avery is not a real Avery -- or at least, that's what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn't a real Avery, then who is he?

Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead. At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime coming to know himself and where he came from - and over his many years, will struggle to discover an identity, a home, a country, and much more.

In this, Boyne's most transcendent work to date, we are shown the story of Ireland from the 1940s to today through the eyes of one ordinary man. The Heart's Invisible Furies is a novel to make you laugh and cry while reminding us all of the redemptive power of the human spirit.

MCPL March 2026 Seasonal Pick

1911, Long Island, New York 

Faced With an Uncertain Future, Sometimes
All You Have Left Is the Courage to Dream

Brianna and Colleen O'Leary know their Irish immigrant father expects them to marry well. Recently he's put even more pressure on them, insinuating that the very future of their Long Island horse farm, Irish Meadows, rests in their ability to land prosperous husbands. Both girls, however, have different visions for their futures.

Brianna, a quiet girl with a quick mind, dreams of attending college. Vivacious Colleen, meanwhile, is happy to marry--as long as her father's choice meets her exacting standards of the ideal groom. When former stable hand Gilbert Whelan returns from business school and distant relative Rylan Montgomery visits Long Island during his seminary training, the two men quickly complicate everyone's plans. 

As the farm slips ever closer to ruin, James O'Leary grows more desperate. It will take every ounce of courage for both sisters to avoid being pawns in their father's machinations and instead follow their hearts. And even if they do, will they inevitably find their dreams too distant to reach?