Concord Reads, the one city-one book, community-building program launched in 2002, has awakened from its pandemic hibernation, shaken off sleep, and leapt into 2024 with its choice of Unlikely Animals, by Massachusetts writer Annie Hartnett.

The novel is set in Everton, a fictional Newport, New Hampshire. At its heart is a loving but tortured family, a small town where everyone minds everyone else’s business, Corbin Park, the state’s 19th century private game park for a classroom’s worth of ultra-wealthy, and the opioid crisis that has ravaged so many of the nation’s communities.

This year’s choice will be added to a growing list of works chosen by Concord Reads, a program run by the Concord Public Library with the support of the Concord Monitor and a host of volunteers. Many of the past selections, but not all, have a tie to New Hampshire or New England. The first book selected was The Bridge of San Luis Rey, the 1927 Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Thornton Wilder, who won another Pulitzer for Our Town, a play written at the MacDowell Colony and set in the town of Peterborough. The people interred at that town’s cemetery played a central role in Thornton’s tale of life and death in “Grover’s Corners.”

The same is true of Unlikely Animals, written while Hartnett was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony. The people interred at Everton’s Maple Street Cemetery narrate, comment and care about the everyday events in the lives of the living in their community. Hartnett entwined her book’s fictional characters with those of real, historic figures. They include Austin Corbin, the 19th century local Newport boy made good who built the giant yellow mansion that lies just over the covered bridge named for him. His game park, with its famous escaping wild boars that figure in the tale, still exists. It is still a hyper-exclusive, secretive place where privileged sports indulge their passion for privacy and hunting.

The cast of Hartnett’s novel includes Ernest Harold Baynes, the real-life Corbin Park naturalist whose ghost plays a central role in the book and whose writings and photos, complete with the critters he shared his home with, appear in it.

At times Harnett’s novel is a laugh-out-loud satiric romp, at times a Pink Panther-like act of detective buffoonery, at times a touching story of family love and loss. Hovering over it, grim-reaper like, like novelist John Irving’s “Undertoad,” is the opioid epidemic. Irving, author of many books including The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire and A Prayer for Owen Meany, inspire Hartnett’s writing. She cites him, her experience teaching a succession of fifth-graders, the true-life story of an old woman who fed bears, and her first sight of Corbin’s mansion while visiting friends in Newport, as the inspiration for her second novel.

Hartnett will be in Concord for the signature event of Concord Reads 2024 on Tuesday, May 14 at the Bank of New Hampshire Stage on Main Street for a discussion led by former public radio host Laura Knoy. Two other events keyed to the book, a discussion of conservationist Baynes’ work at the library at 6 p.m. on May 7, and a 6 p.m. historic tour of Concord’s Old North Cemetery on May 9 will also be held.

Please visit the Concord Public Library’s website, http://www.concordnh.gov/588/Library, for updates and additional information.