Skip to main content
Homepage of Wilmette Public Library

Wilmette Public Library

9:00am-9:00pm
(847) 256-5025

Wilmette Public Library
1242 Wilmette Ave.
Wilmette , IL 60091
United States

View on Google Maps
Sun: 12:00pm-5:00pm
Mon: 9:00am-9:00pm
Tue: 9:00am-9:00pm
Wed: 9:00am-9:00pm
Thu: 9:00am-9:00pm
Fri: 9:00am-9:00pm
Sat: 9:00am-5:00pm
My Account

Main navigation

  • Books & Media
    • Borrow
      • Catalog
      • Library of Things
      • Museum Passes
    • Downloads & Streaming
      • Ebooks & Audiobooks
      • Magazines & Newspapers
      • Music, Movies & TV
    • Recommendations
      • Recommended Reads
      • Suggest a Title
      • From Our Librarians
  • Research
    • Online Resources
      • All Resources
      • Homework Help (K-8)
      • Homework Help (Teens)
      • Online Learning
    • Research by Topic
      • Business
      • Genealogy
      • Job Search
      • Local History
  • Events
    • Calendar
      • All Events
      • Kids Events
      • Teen Events
      • Adult Events
      • Newsletter Download
    • Programs & Series
      • Concerts & Presentations
      • Book Discussions
      • Storytimes
      • Technology Classes
      • Suggest a Program
    • Spotlight Programs
      • Wilmette Reads
      • Winter Reading Club
      • Let's Learn Together
  • Services
    • Services For
      • Kids & Families
      • Teens
      • Teachers
      • Local Authors
    • At the Library
      • The Studio
      • Computers & Media Stations
      • Print, Copy, Scan, Fax
      • Reserve a Room
      • Tax Information
    • Using the Library
      • Get a Library Card
      • Borrowing & Fees
      • Delivery Services
      • Notary Services
      • Accessibility
  • About Us
    • Get Involved
      • Employment
      • Volunteering
      • Friends of the Library
      • Donations
    • Information
      • Contact Us
      • Plan your Visit
      • About the Library
      • Library Updates
    • Board & Administration
      • Management Team
      • Board of Trustees
      • Policies
      • Budget & Finance
      • Projects & Initiatives
      • Strategic Plan 2023-27
  • Wilmette Reads Community Reading Series: Adults & Teens December 15–February 15 Learn More >>
  • Winter Reading Club 2026 slide
  • Collections on the Move! Improvements to the First Floor and Lower Level will impact some collections and services.   Stay up to date on the latest with this project.
  • Skip the subcription!
  • Slide promoting Black History Month
Previous
Next

From Our Librarians

M&M vote

Get out the Vote... at your library

Here are 5 ways we can support you this election season - and beyond.
Read More about Get out the Vote... at your library
images of children's books for Black History Month

Past, Present, and Future: Children’s Books for Black History Month

Books are powerful catalysts for conversation, open-ended exploration, and curiosity. In their contained way, they leave room for readers of all ages to pause, dive deeper, and keep learning more.
Read More about Past, Present, and Future: Children’s Books for Black History Month
View More

New Books

  • "wolf hour" cover

    Wolf Hour

    From “one of today’s most interesting thriller writers” (Lee Child) comes an immersive, propulsive novel in which a detective and a crime writer conduct parallel investigations, six years apart, into a series of puzzling murders.

    “[Nesbo] can heighten suspense with a single word and wrong-foot the most attentive customer.” —Wall Street Journal

    Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2016. When a small-time criminal and gun dealer is shot down in the street, all signs point to Tomas Gomez, a quiet man with a mysterious past—and deep connections to a notorious gang—who has seemingly vanished into thin air. Other murders soon follow, and it appears Gomez is only getting started. Meanwhile, Bob Oz, a down-and-out suspended police officer with a dubious past of his own, becomes fascinated by the case: he is obsessed with the notion of hunting down a serial killer who only he can understand, a killer with a story as tragic as his own.

    Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2022. An enigmatic Norwegian man with ties to Minneapolis—a self-described crime writer—has traveled to the United States to research the Gomez case, in the hopes of writing a book about it. But as his investigation progresses, the writer’s seemingly neutral position reveals itself to be more complicated than the reader is initially led to believe.

    Wolf Hour is a twisty and unforgettable thriller in classic Jo Nesbø style, which bears out Vanity Fair’s observation that “Nesbø explores the darkest criminal minds with grim delight and puts his killers where you least expect to find them. . . . His novels are maddeningly addictive.”

  • good people cover

    Good People

    Zorah Sharaf could do no wrong. Zorah Sharaf brought shame upon her family. What’s the truth? Depends on who you ask.

    The Sharaf family is the picture of success. Prosperous, rich, happy. They came to this country as refugees with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. And now, after years of hard work, they live in the most exclusive neighborhood, their growing family attending the most prestigious schools. Zorah, the eldest daughter, is the apple of her father’s eye.

    When an unthinkable tragedy strikes, everyone is left reeling and the family is thrust into the court of public opinion. There is talk that behind closed doors the Sharafs’ happy household was anything but. Did the Sharaf family achieve the American dream? Or was the image of the model immigrant family just a façade?

    Like a literary game of ping-pong, Good People compels the reader to reconsider what might have happened even on the previous page. Told through a kaleidoscope of perspectives, it is a riveting, provocative, and haunting story of family—sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, and the communities that claim us as family in difficult times.

  • Image for "Vigil"

    Vigil

    “After his spectacular Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders returns . . . with a new novel even more spectacular than the last.”—Los Angeles Times

    A “daring” (Time) novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize–winning author of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and Tenth of December, taking place at the bedside of an oil company CEO in the twilight hours of his life as he is ferried from this world into the next

    “Vibrant, fiendishly clever . . . Vigil is pure Saunders: the death of empathy, he insists, is greatly exaggerated.”—The Boston Globe 

    Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion.

    She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn’t like the others. The powerful K. J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold, epic life, and the world is better for it. Isn’t it?

    Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of a complicated man. Visitors begin to arrive (worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead), clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room; a black calf grazes on the love seat; a man from a distant, drought-ravaged village materializes; two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone’s postdeath future.

    With the wisdom, playfulness, and explosive imagination we’ve come to expect, George Saunders takes on the gravest issues of our time—the menace of corporate greed, the toll of capitalism, the environmental perils of progress—and, in the process, spins a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the thorny question of absolution.

  • Image for "Strangers"

    Strangers

    INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Burden’s searing, probing memoir explores . . . what she learned about intimacy and her own spirit.”—People​​

    “A beautifully written instant classic. Strangers is gripping and heartbreaking and a must-read for every wife—and husband.”—Graydon Carter

    “Asks us to examine life’s most perplexing questions: Can we see the invisible fault lines in a marriage or truly know the people closest to us?”—Lori Gottlieb

    It was a great love story, one for the ages. The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending felt like matching bookends. They both came out of nowhere. He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn’t.

    In March 2020, Belle Burden was safe and secure with her family at their house on Martha’s Vineyard, navigating the early days of the pandemic together—building fires in the late afternoons, drinking whisky sours, making roast chicken. Then, with no warning or explanation, her husband of twenty years announced that he was leaving her. Overnight, her caring, steady partner became a man she hardly recognized. He exited his life with her like an actor shrugging off a costume.

    In Strangers, Burden revisits her marriage, searching for clues that her husband was not who she always thought he was. As she examines her relationship through a new lens, she reckons with her own family history and the lessons she intuited about how a woman is expected to behave in the face of betrayal. Through all of it, she is transformed. The discreet, compliant woman she once was—someone nicknamed “Belle the Good”—gives way to someone braver, someone determined to use her voice.

    With unflinching honesty and profound grace, Burden charts a path through heartbreak to show the power of a woman who refuses to give up on love. Strangers is a stunning, deeply moving, compulsively readable memoir heralding the arrival of a thrilling new literary talent.

  • Image for "This Is Where the Serpent Lives"

    This Is Where the Serpent Lives

    A stunning new work from universally acclaimed Daniyal Mueenuddin, whose debut short story collection won the Story Prize and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.

    NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2026: Town & Country, Bustle, AARP, Kirkus

    Moving from Pakistan’s dazzling chaotic cities to its lawless feudal countryside, This Is Where the Serpent Lives powerfully evokes contemporary feudal Pakistan, following the destinies of a dozen unforgettable characters whose lives are linked through violence and tragedy, triumph, and love. Orphaned as a little boy and fending for himself in the city streets, Yazid rises to a place of responsibility and respect in the Lahore household of Colonel Atar, a powerful industrialist and politician, only to find that position threatened by conflicting loyalties and misplaced trust. Born on Colonel Atar’s country estate to a poor gardener, Saqib is entrusted with the management of a pioneering business, but he overreaches and finds himself an outlaw, confronting the violence of the corrupt Punjab Police. The colonel’s son competes with his cherished brother for the love of a woman and discovers that her choice colors his life with unexpected darkness as well as light.

    In matters of power and money and the heart, Mueenuddin’s characters struggle to choose between paths that are moral and just and more worldly choices that allow them to survive in the systems of caste, capital, and social power that so tightly grip their culture. Intimate and epic, elegiac and profoundly moving, This Is Where the Serpent Lives is a tour de force destined to become a classic of contemporary literature.

  • cover of lost lambs

    Lost Lambs

    Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by Vulture, Bustle, Good Housekeeping, The Times (UK), Our Culture, and Harper's Bazaar

    “I can’t remember the last time a novel made me laugh so hard or feel so much tenderness for its characters.” —Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters

    “Madeline Cash is a voice like no other.” —Lena Dunham

    “I’ve read entire books that contain less wit and inventiveness than a single one of Cash’s sentences.” —Eric Puchner, New York Times-bestselling author of Dream State

    “With a big surge of energy, Lost Lambs splits the nucleus of the American family.” —Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection

    Rippling with humor, warmth, and style, Lost Lambs is a new vision of the charms and pitfalls of family dysfunction. 

    The Flynn family is coming undone. Catherine and Bud's open marriage has reached its breaking point as their daughters spiral in their own chaotic orbits: Abigail, the eldest, is dating a man in his twenties nicknamed War Crime Wes; Louise, the middle child, maintains a secret correspondence with an online terrorist; the brilliant youngest, Harper, is being sent to wilderness reform camp due to her insistence that someone—or something—is monitoring the town’s citizens.

    Casting a shadow across their lives, and their small coastal town, is Paul Alabaster, a billionaire shipping magnate. Rumors of corruption circulate, but no one dares dig too deep. No one except Harper, whose obsession with a mysterious shipping container sends the family hurtling into a criminal conspiracy—one that may just bring them closer together.

    Irreverent and addictive, pinging between the voices of the Flynn family and those of the panorama of characters around them, Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs is a debut novel of quick-witted observation and surprising tenderness. With it, Cash has crafted a family saga for the twenty-first century, all held together with crazy glue.

  • cover for anatomy of an alibi

    Anatomy of an Alibi

    FROM THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF FIRST LIE WINS

    Two women. One dead husband. And only one alibi.

    “Elston expertly unravels a web of secrets and lies. You won’t be able to put this excellent thriller down until the final shocking page.” —Megan Miranda

    Everyone at Chantilly’s Bar noticed out-of-towner Camille Bayliss. Red lips, designer heels, sipping a Negroni. But that woman wasn’t Camille Bayliss. It was Aubrey Price.

    Camille Bayliss appears to have the picture-perfect life; she’s married to hotshot lawyer Ben and is the daughter of a wealthy Louisiana family. Only nothing is as it seems: Camille believes Ben has been hiding dirty secrets for years, but she can’t find proof because he tracks her every move.

    Aubrey Price has been haunted by the terrible night that changed her life a decade ago, and she’s convinced Benjamin Bayliss knows something about it. Living in a house full of criminals, Aubrey understands there’s more than one way to get to the truth—and she may have found the best way in.

    Aubrey and Camille hatch a plan. It sounds simple: For twelve hours, Aubrey will take Camille’s place. Camille will spy on Ben, and the two women will get the answers they desperately seek.

    Except the next morning, Ben is found murdered. Both women need an airtight alibi, but only one of them has it. And one false step is all it takes for everything to come undone.

  • "the rest of our lives" cover

    The Rest of Our Lives

    FINALIST FOR THE 2025 BOOKER PRIZE

    “Feels less like reading a novel and more like sitting in a car beside a dear friend as he navigates the road up ahead. A profoundly moving experience.” —Ann Patchett

    “Deeply human...a beautifully quiet and devastating book.” —Sarah Jessica Parker

    A triumphantly life-affirming road trip novel about marriage, middle-age, and a man at a crossroads in his life.

    When Tom Layward’s wife had an affair twelve years ago, he resolved to leave her as soon as his youngest child left the nest. Now, while driving his college-bound daughter to Pittsburgh, he remembers his promise to himself. He is also on the run from his own health issues and a forced leave from work.

    So, rather than returning to his wife in Westchester, Tom keeps driving west, with the vague plan of visiting people from his past—an old college friend, his ex-girlfriend, his brother, his son—en route, maybe, to California. He’s moving towards a future he hasn’t even envisioned yet while he considers his past and the choices he’s made that have brought him to this particular present. Pitch-perfect, tender, and keenly observed, The Rest of Our Lives is a story about what to do when the rest of your life is only just the beginning of your story.

  • "when the fireflies dance" cover

    When the Fireflies Dance

    Inspired by a shocking true story, this haunting debut novel of love, brotherhood, resilience, and redemption set in Pakistan calls to mind the modern classics The Kite Runner and The Beekeeper of Aleppo. 

    On the outskirts of Lahore, Pakistan, a large yellow moon hung low in the sky when the men came with dogs and guns and cricket bats. In front of his family’s small hut on the edge of a looming brick kiln, Lalloo’s brother was murdered.

    Unable to escape the memory of that horrible night, Lalloo’s parents and sisters remain trapped, the kiln chimney churning black smoke into the sky as the family slave, brick by brick, to pay off their debts. To rescue them, Lalloo must free himself from his past and carve out his own destiny.

  • "best offer wins" cover

    Best Offer Wins

    “It starts out feeling pretty light and fun, but I promise you, you have no idea where this story is going.” - Taylor Jenkins Reid, recommended for her Must-Read Book of 2025 in TIME Magazine 

    An insanely competitive housing market. A desperate buyer on the edge. In Marisa Kashino’s darkly humorous debut novel, Best Offer Wins, the white picket fence becomes the ultimate symbol of success—and obsession. How far would you go for the house of your dreams? 

    Eighteen months and 11 lost bidding wars into house-hunting in the overheated Washington, DC suburbs, 37-year-old publicist Margo Miyake gets a tip about the perfect house, in the perfect neighborhood, slated to come up for sale in one month. Desperate to escape the cramped apartment she shares with her husband Ian — and in turn, get their marriage, plan to have a baby, and whole life back on track — Margo becomes obsessed with buying the house before it’s publicly listed and the masses descend (with unbeatable, all-cash offers in hand).

    A little stalking? Harmless. A bit of trespassing? Necessary. As Margo infiltrates the homeowners’ lives, her tactics grow increasingly unhinged—but just when she thinks she’s won them over, she hits a snag in her plan. Undeterred, Margo will prove again and again that there’s no boundary she won’t cross to seize the dream life she’s been chasing. The most unsettling part? You’ll root for her, even as you gasp in disbelief.

    Dark, biting, and laugh-out-loud funny, Best Offer Wins is a propulsive debut and a razor-sharp exploration of class, ambition, and the modern housing crisis.

View All
Download & Stream x2 - Quick Link
Download & Stream

Download & Stream

Get a Card
Get a Card

Get a Card

Recommended Reading
Recommended Reading

Recommended Reading - Revised

Storytimes
Storytimes

Storytimes

Book a Room quick link icon
Book a Room quick link hover icon

Book a Room

Research
Research

Research

Upcoming Events

Sign up to receive emails from the library

Subscribe!

Wilmette Public Library

1242 Wilmette Ave.
Wilmette, Illinois 60091
(847) 256-5025
 

Hours

Monday-Friday 9am-9pm
Saturday 9am-5pm
Sunday 12pm-5pm

About Us

Contact Us
Donate
Employment
Board of Trustees
Accessibility

Connect with Us!

   
Library App
Back To Top