By Tari Hendrickson, Book Reviewer
CULPABILITY BY BRUCE HOLSINGER
Holsinger's novel opens with tragedy: the Cassidy-Shaw family's self-driving minivan swerves and kills an elderly couple in the oncoming car. Seventeen-year-old Charlie was technically behind the wheel, but the vehicle's Artificial Intelligence had taken over at the moment of impact, and both parents, Noah and Lorelei, were distracted in ways they would rather not admit. As they retreat to a rented house on the Chesapeake Bay to recover, each family member's secrets, along with Lorelei's published research on AI morality, begin to surface.
This is a smart, fast-moving novel that uses the crash as a lens for bigger questions: when a machine and a person share responsibility for harm, who is actually to blame? Is omission as harmful as a lie in a relationship? Holsinger, an academic at the University of Virginia, writes with a scholar's interest in ethics but never loses the pulse of the family drama at the story's center. I found myself invested in the reckonings of each family member about the larger puzzle of what really happened on that highway. Culpability is the Lincoln City Libraries’ One Book One Lincoln selection for 2026.
Lincoln City Libraries has 111 copies of this book; also available electronically.
WHISTLER BY ANN PATCHETT
In this tender novel, Patchett returns to her favorite subject: how a family holds together, and how it comes apart, over decades. Fifty-three-year-old Daphne Fuller is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with her husband when she notices the stepfather she hasn't seen in nearly forty-five years. Eddie Triplett was only briefly married to Daphne's mother, but the year they spent together, and the accident that ended it, shaped the rest of both their lives. Patchett moves between that fateful night in the past and the pair's tentative reunion in the present, letting Daphne finally set down a guilt she has carried since childhood.
Patchett writes about ordinary people with such warmth and precision that you feel you have known them for years. This isn't a plot-driven book so much as a meditation on memory and forgiveness, and on how a short relationship can leave a lasting mark. If you loved Patchett’s Tom Lake or The Dutch House, Whistler would feel like familiar, welcome territory, with the reminder that it's never too late to be truly known by someone again.
Lincoln City Libraries has 57 copies of this book; also available electronically.
THERE ARE RIVERS IN THE SKY BY ELIF SHAFAK
Shafak imagines a single drop of water as it falls and
re-forms across centuries, connecting three lives along two rivers. Arthur is a self-taught scholar born into poverty on the banks of the Thames in Victorian London who grows up to help decode the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh. Narin is a young Yazidi girl in present-day Turkey, racing to complete a sacred family ritual by the Tigris, even as ISIS closes in on her community. Zaleekhah is a hydrologist in modern London, rebuilding her life after her marriage ends. Shafak braids these threads together, suggesting that water, like people, carries memory forward.
I appreciated how the novel honors Yazidi history and culture, a story too often overlooked. Shafak's prose is lyrical and she trusts readers to sit with big questions about what survives destruction—of a library, a civilization, or a family. Some of the connections among the three timelines felt more poetic than logical, but that never diminished the emotional pull of the story. This is a book that will make you think differently about a raindrop, the trickle of a stream, or the next time you turn on a tap.
Lincoln City Libraries has 108 copies of this book; also available electronically.
Tari Hendrickson is a member of two book clubs, one of which she founded over 20 years ago. She remembers the thrill when letters and words came together and made sense in first grade.