Dunedin Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute

Books Archive

Month: April 2025

We All Live Here

By Jojo Moyes

April 3, 2025

Lila Kennedy has a lot on her plate. A recently broken marriage, two wayward daughters, a house that is falling apart, and an elderly stepfather who seems to have quietly moved in. Not to mention a once promising writing career that is now in freefall. So when her real dad – a man she has barely seen since he ran off to Hollywood thirty-five years ago – suddenly appears on her doorstep wanting to make amends, it feels like the final straw.

But it turns out even the family you thought you could never forgive might have something to teach you: about love, friendship, and what it actually means to be family.

Sunrise on the Reaping

By Suzanne Collins

April 3, 2025

As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honour of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes. Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances. All he cares about is making it through the day and being with the girl he loves. When Haymitch’s name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He’s torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12 tributes: a young friend who’s nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck-up girl in town. As the Games begin, Haymitch understands he’s been set up to fail. But there’s something in him that wants to fight . and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena.

Nobody’s Fool

By Harlan Coben

April 3, 2025

A year after the devastating events that took place in Fool Me Once, a secret from former Detective Sami Kierce’s college days comes back to haunt him. Present day is hard enough for Kierce, but his past isn’t through with him yet…

Sami Kierce, a young college grad backpacking in Spain with friends, wakes up one morning, covered in blood. There’s a knife in his hand. Beside him, the body of his girlfriend. Anna. Dead. He begins to scream – and then he runs.

Twenty two years later, Kierce, now a private investigator, is a new father who’s working off his debts by teaching wannabe sleuths at a night school in New York City. One evening, he recognizes a familiar face at the back of the classroom. Anna. It’s unmistakably her. But as soon as he makes eye contact with her, she bolts.

For Kierce there is no choice. He knows he must find this woman and solve the impossible mystery that has haunted his every waking moment since that terrible day.

His investigation will bring him face-to-face with his past. Soon he discovers that some secrets should stay buried

The Safe Keep

By Yael Van Der Wouden

April 3, 2025

It is fifteen years after the Second World War, and Isabel has built herself a solitary life of discipline and strict routine in her late mother’s country home, with not a fork or a word out of place. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel’s doorstep – as a guest, there to stay for the season…

In the sweltering heat of summer, Isabel’s desperate need for control reaches boiling point. What happens between the two women leads to a revelation which threatens to unravel all she has ever known…

Everything is Tuberculosis

By John Green

April 3, 2025

Tuberculosis has been entwined with hu­manity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.

In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John be­came fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequi­ties that allow this curable, preventable infec­tious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year.

In Everything Is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world—and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.