The Wedding People follows a depressed, recently divorced woman who intends to end her life at a grand hotel, but is mistaken for a wedding guest. Drawn into the wedding's chaos and forming unexpected bonds with the bridal party, she finds her plans derailed and begins to reconsider her life's direction amidst the humor and tenderness of the week-long celebration.

A limited amount of copies are available for check out at the library and on Libby. Copies can also be requested through MEL.

Join us for a special screening of this 2025 documentary that tells the extraordinary story of our nation’s most beloved and most endangered public institution through the dramatic human stories within it!

Come and show your support for the Elk Rapids District Library and our new building project:

• Enjoy a Cash bar (wine & spirits) & Concessions

• Meet fellow library supporters

• Hear the latest plans & review project timeline

• Make a donation to our Capital Campaign

Join us for a night of Author readings from the Michigan Writers Chapbook winners. Support the Elk Rapids Library and enjoy a cider in a beautiful setting.

Flight attendant Allegra Patel loves her job, but today is her twenty-eighth birthday and she’d rather not be placating a plane full of passengers unhappy about a long delay. There’s the well-dressed man in seat 4C desperate not to miss his daughter’s musical. A harried mother frantically tries to keep her toddler and baby quiet. Honeymooners still in their wedding finery dream of their new lives, while a chatty emergency room nurse dreams of retirement.

Suddenly a woman traveling alone stands. She walks down the aisle making predictions about how and when passengers will die. Some dismiss her, they don’t believe in psychics. Some are delighted with her prophecies! Their lives will supposedly be long. Others are appalled.

Then: a few months later, the first prediction comes true.

Intricately plotted, with the wonderful wit Liane Moriarty has become famous for, Here One Moment brilliantly looks at friends, lovers, and family and how we manage to hold onto them in our harried modern lives.

Society has collapsed, the modern age has expired, and global mortality is curving toward 99 percent. In northern Michigan, the electrical grid has been down for over a year. Three scouts, all uninfected, start on a mission from Beaver Island to the darkened mainland. They’re on a search for allies and information, led by Keith Two-Crow, a Vietnam veteran and Ojibwe elder. Keith’s two charges, Mukwa and Miin, are foster siblings unrelated by blood but connected to the green-pulse of the planet by their adoptive grandmother, Samantha, a traditional healer and mystic. After reaching the mainland, the scouts are targeted by traffickers, befriended by eco-elves, and are astonished—as readers will be—at Mother Nature’s resurgence. Island and Main is a dark exploration of humanity and the hope and healing offered by community and our connection to nature.

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.”

You don't see rain stop, but you sense it. You sense something has changed in the frequency you've been living and you hear the quietness you thought was silence get quieter still, and you raise your head so your eyes can make sense of what your ears have already told you, which at first is only: something has changed.

The rain is stopping. Nobody in the small, forgotten village of Faha remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard was a condition of living. Now--just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of electricity--it is stopping. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is standing outside his grandparents' house shortly after the rain has stopped when he encounters Christy for the first time. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed.

This is the story of all that was to follow: Christy's long-lost love and why he had come to Faha, Noel's own experiences falling in and out of love, and the endlessly postponed arrival of electricity--a development that, once complete, would leave behind a world that had not changed for centuries.

Niall Williams' latest novel is an intricately observed portrait of a community, its idiosyncrasies and its traditions, its paradoxes and its inanities, its failures and its triumphs. Luminous and otherworldly, and yet anchored with deep-running roots into the earthy and the everyday, This Is Happiness is about stories as the very stuff of life: the ways they make the texture and matter of our world, and the ways they write and rewrite us.

When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.

Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a “literary icon” (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.