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Love warrior
by
Glennon Doyle Melton
ISBN: 9781250128546
Traces the author's journey of self-discovery after the dissolution of her marriage, revealing how she found healing by rejecting gender standards and refusing to settle for a "good-enough" life.
The Underground Railroad
by
Colson Whitehead
ISBN: 9780385542364
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens.
Ruby
by
Cynthia Bond
ISBN: 9780804139090
Ephram Jenkins has never forgotten the beautiful girl with the long braids running through the piney woods of Liberty, their small East Texas town. Young Ruby, "the kind of pretty it hurt to look at," is already quite damaged, but Ephram is forcibly drawn to her. As soon as she becomes a young woman and has any power of her own, Ruby flees suffocating Liberty for the bright pull of 1950s New York City. Years later, when a funeral forces her to return home, 30-year-old Ruby will find herself reliving the devastating violence of her girlhood. With the terrifying realization that she might not be strong enough to fight her way back out, Ruby struggles to survive her memories of the town's dark past. Meanwhile, Ephram must choose between loyalty to the sister who raised and stood by him and the chance for a life with the woman he has loved since he was a boy.
The Invention of Wings
by
Sue Monk Kidd
ISBN: 9780670024780
The story follows Hetty "Handful" Grimke, a Charleston slave, and Sarah, the daughter of the wealthy Grimke family. The novel begins on Sarah's eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership over Handful, who is to be her handmaid. "The Invention of Wings" follows the next thirty-five years of their lives. Inspired in part by the historical figure of Sarah Grimke (a feminist, suffragist and, importantly, an abolitionist), Kidd allows herself to go beyond the record to flesh out the inner lives of all the characters, both real and imagined.
The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
by
Ayana Mathis
ISBN: 9780804127257
In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. She vows to prepare them for the calamitous difficulty they are sure to face in their later lives, to meet a world that will not love them, a world that will not be kind. Captured here in twelve luminous narrative threads, their lives tell the story of a mother's monumental courage and the journey of a nation.
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
by
Cheryl Strayed
ISBN: 9780307592736
Traces the personal crisis the author endured after the death of her mother and a painful divorce, which prompted her ambition to undertake a dangerous 1,100-mile solo hike that both drove her to rock bottom and helped her to heal.
A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations
by
Charles Dickens
ISBN: 9780142196588
Two of the most beloved novels in all of English literature-together in one extraordinary volume. Presents the classic tale of love, courage, and sacrifice set against the cataclysmic events of the French Revolution, and the story of the orphan Pip and his rise in Victorian society when a mysterious benefactor allows him to be educated as a gentleman.
Freedom
by
Jonathan Franzen
ISBN: 9780374158460
The idyllic lives of civic-minded environmentalists Patty and Walter Berglund come into question when their son moves in with aggressive Republican neighbors, green lawyer Walter takes a job in the coal industry, and go-getter Patty becomes increasingly unstable and enraged.
Say You’re One of Them
by
Uwem Akpan
ISBN: 9780316086370
Each story in this jubilantly acclaimed collection pays testament to the wisdom and resilience of children, even in the face of the most agonizing circumstances. A family living in a makeshift shanty in urban Kenya scurries to find gifts of any kind for the impending Christmas holiday. A Rwandan girl relates her family's struggles to maintain a facade of normalcy amid unspeakable acts. A young brother and sister cope with their uncle's attempt to sell them into slavery. Aboard a bus filled with refugees - a microcosm of today's Africa - a Muslim boy summons his faith to bear a treacherous ride across Nigeria. Through the eyes of childhood friends the emotional toll of religious conflict in Ethiopia becomes viscerally clear. Uwem Akpan's debut signals the arrival of a breathtakingly talented writer who gives a matter-of-fact reality to the most extreme circumstances in stories that are nothing short of transcendent.
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
by
David Wroblewski
ISBN: 9780061768088
Born mute, speaking only in sign, Edgar Sawtelle leads an idyllic life on his family's farm in remote northern Wisconsin where they raise and train an extraordinary breed of dog. But when tragedy strikes, Edgar is forced to flee into the vast neighboring wilderness, accompanied by only three yearling pups. Struggling for survival, Edgar comes of age in the wild, and must face the choice of leaving forever or revealing the terrible truth behind what has happened. A riveting family saga as well as a brilliant exploration of the limits of language, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is destined to become a modern classic.
A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose
by
Eckhart Tolle
ISBN: 9780525950882
An illustrated edition of the best-selling Oprah Book Club Pick features author-selected inspirational passages from the original work enhanced by four-color commissioned artwork, a ribbon marker, and a gift-appropriate design.
The Pillars of the Earth
by
Ken Follett
ISBN: 9780451225245
Set in twelfth-century England, this epic of kings and peasants juxtaposes the building of a magnificent church with the violence and treachery that often characterized the Middle Ages.
Love in the Time of Cholera
by
Gabriel García Márquez
ISBN: 9781400034680
Set in a country on the Caribbean coast of South America, this is a story about a woman and two men and their entwined lives. From the author of the legendary One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Middlesex
by
Jeffrey Eugenides
ISBN: 9780312427733
Calliope's friendship with a classmate and her sense of identity are compromised by the adolescent discovery that she is a hermaphrodite, a situation with roots in her grandparents' desperate struggle for survival in the 1920s.
The Road
by
Cormac McCarthy
ISBN: 9780307387899
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food - and each other.
The Measure of a Man
by
Sidney Poitier
ISBN: 9780061357923
The acclaimed actor reveals the passion, spirituality, and intellectual fervor that have driven his life and career, citing the elements of his childhood that gave him his sense of worth and ethics.
Night
by
Elie Wiesel
ISBN: 9780374500016
Night is Elie Wiesel’s masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie’s wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author’s original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man’s capacity for inhumanity to man.
A Million Little Pieces
by
James Frey
ISBN: 9780385507752
A searing memoir of drug and alcohol abuse and the rehabilitation experience offers a provocative look at addiction and recovery through the eyes of a man who had taken his addictions to deadly extremes, describing the torments of withdrawal and detoxification, the desperate urge to use chemicals, and the battle to confront the consequences of his life and redefine his future.
The Sound and the Fury
by
William Faulkner
ISBN: 9780075536666
Retells the tragic times of the Compson family, including beautiful, rebellious Caddy; manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant.
As I Lay Dying
by
William Faulkner
ISBN: 9780940450264
One of William Faulkner's finest novels, "As I lay dying" was originally published in 1930, and remains a captivating and stylistically innovative work. The story revolves around a grim yet darkly humorous pilgrimage, as Addie Bundren's family sets out to fulfill her last wish: to be buried in her native Jefferson, Mississippi, far from the miserable backwater surroundings of her married life.
Light in August
by
William Faulkner
ISBN: 9780679732266
Tells the stories of a mourning family remembering its past, a vicious gangster, a young pregnant woman searching for her child's father, and barnstorming pilots at an air show
The Good Earth
by
Pearl S. Buck
ISBN: 9780743272933
A Chinese peasant overcomes the forces of nature and the frailties of human nature to become a wealthy landowner.
Anna Karenina
by
Leo Tolstoy
ISBN: 9780143035008
A new translation of the classic nineteenth-century Russian novel in which a young woman is destroyed when she attempts to live outside the moral law of her society.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
by
Carson McCullers
ISBN: 9780618526413
A quiet, sensitive girl searches for beauty in a small, but damned Southern town.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by
Gabriel García Márquez
ISBN: 9780060740450
Tells the story of the Buendia family, set against the background of the evolution and eventual decadence of a small South American town.
Cry, The Beloved Country
by
Alan Paton
ISBN: 9780743262170
novel depicting the racial ferment in the beautiful country of South Africa in 1948.
East of Eden
by
John Steinbeck
ISBN: 9780142004234
The biblical account of Cain and Abel is echoed in the history of two generations of the Trask family in California.
Sula
by
Toni Morrison
ISBN: 9780452283862
The intense friendship shared by two African American women raised in an Ohio town changes when one of them leaves to roam the countryside and returns ten years later.
Fall on Your Knees
by
Ann-Marie MacDonald
ISBN: 9781587242588
Spanning five generations and moving from Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, to the bleak landscape of World War I, and to the emerging jazz scene in New York City, this epic tale tells the story of four sisters.
A Fine Balance
by
Rohinton Mistry
ISBN: 9781400030651
In India during the mid-1970s, after a "state of internal emergency" is declared, four very different people--a widowed seamstress, a student, and a man and his nephew who have fled their village's caste violence--find their lives becoming inextricably intertwined.
The Corrections
by
Jonathan Franzen
ISBN: 9780374100124
Enid Lambert begins to worry about her husband when he begins to withdraw and lose himself in negativity and depression as he faces Parkinson's disease.
Cane River
by
Lalita Tademy
ISBN: 9780446615884
Follows four generations of African American women from slavery to the early twentieth century as they struggle for economic security and the future of their families along the Cane River in rural Louisiana.
Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail
by
Malika Oufkir
ISBN: 9780786868612
The daughter of a former aide to the king of Morocco, who was executed after a failed assassination attempt on the ruler, describes how she, her five siblings, and her mother were imprisoned in a desert penal colony for twenty years.
Icy Sparks
by
Gwyn Hyman Rubio
ISBN: 9780142000205
After years of living in a children's asylum for having spontaneous jerks and spasms, Icy returns home and is quickly befriended by Miss Emily, who cares for her and teachers her the ways of life, transforming Icy into a new person and forever changing her view of the world.
We Were the Mulvaneys
by
Joyce Carol Oates
ISBN: 1587240432
The Mulvaneys, at first a close and very lucky family, drift apart over the years, until the youngest son, Judd, discovers the secret of their downfall and sets out to help reunite the family.
House of Sand and Fog
by
Andre Dubus III
ISBN: 9780783288093
When a former colonel of the Iranian Air Force and his family purchase a small California home at auction, they are faced with a great conflict as the former owner, who has wrongly lost the home, fights to get it back.
Drowning Ruth
by
Christina Schwarz
ISBN: 0385502532
Worn out from nursing soldiers at a Milwaukee hospital and struggling to recover from a traumatic love affair, Amanda Starkey returns to her family's rural Wisconsin farm to stay with her beloved sister, Mattie, and young niece, Ruth.
Open House
by
Elizabeth Berg
ISBN: 9780345435163
Samantha is abandoned by her husband in the opening pages of this three-handkerchief special, and the resultant tremors keep her off-balance for most of the novel. There are practical problems aplenty, of course, including a shortage of money and an 11-year-old son to raise. But Sam's sense of emotional bereavement is far worse, despite the fact that her husband had been giving her the conjugal cold shoulder for years. The loneliness in her "as constant and as irrefutable" as circulating blood, Sam begins to rebuild her life. She finds a job and takes in a couple of boarders to help meet her mortgage payments--one of them, a depressed student named Lavender Blue, informs her that "life was nothing but one major disappointment after the other"--The sort of homily that Sam is understandably reluctant to hear these days. She also starts dating, with disastrous results.
The Poisonwood Bible
by
Barbara Kingsolver
ISBN: 9780060175405
The family of a fierce evangelical Baptist missionary--Nathan Price, his wife, and his four daughters--begins to unravel after they embark on a 1959 mission to the Belgian Congo, where they find their lives forever transformed over the course of three decades by the political and social upheaval of Africa.
While I Was Gone
by
Sue Miller
ISBN: 9780375411786
Having moved on with her life after a friend was brutally murdered, Jo Becker is now married with a grown family, but when an old housemate moves into the neighborhood, Jo rekindles a relationship that takes her back to the past and threatens her future.
The Bluest Eye
by
Toni Morrison
ISBN: 9780375411557
Relates the story of Pecola Breedlove, an eleven-year-old Black girl growing up in an America that values blue-eyed blondes, and the tragedy that results from her longing to be accepted.
Back Roads
by
Tawni O'Dell
ISBN: 9780670894185
With his mother in jail for killing his abusive father, nineteen-year-old Harley Altmyer is charged with caring for his three sisters in a backwards Pennsylvania coal town, but despite his fatherly responsibilities, he is still a teenage boy and lusts after the mother of two who lives down the road.
Daughter of Fortune
by
Isabel Allende
ISBN: 9780061565335
Raised in the British colony of Valparaiso, Chile, after being abandoned as a baby, a pregnant Eliza follows her lover, Joaquin Andieta, to California at the height of the Gold Rush and finds adventure and adversity on her road to independence and love.
Gap Creek
by
Robert Morgan
ISBN: 9781565122963
There is a most unusual woman living in Gap Creek. Julie Harmon works hard, "hard as a man," they say, so hard that at times she's not sure she can stop. People depend on her to slaughter the hogs and nurse the dying. People are weak, and there is so much to do. She is just a teenager when her little brother dies in her arms. That same year she marries and moves down into the valley where floods and fire and visions visit themselves on her, and con men and drunks and lawyers come calling.
A Map of the World
by
Jane Hamilton
ISBN: 9780553527377
While under the care of Alice Goodwin, a neighbor's child drowns in the Goodwins' pond, a devastating accident that has profound repercussions for the entire Goodwin family, in a story set in a small Midwestern farm town.
Vinegar Hill
by
A. Manette Ansay
ISBN: 9780380730131
Ellen Grier returns with her husband and children to their midwestern Catholic hometown to live with her narrow-minded in-laws, coping with the family's eccentricity and confronting a hidden secret festering in her husband's past.
River, Cross My Heart
by
Breena Clarke
ISBN: 9780316899987
After the drowning death of their daughter in the Potomac River, a family leaves their rural North Carolina world in search of a better life among friends and relatives in Georgetown, as they grapple with their loss and struggle to move forward.
Tara Road
by
Maeve Binchy
ISBN: 9780786218370
Thanks to a chance phone call, Ria from Dublin and Marilyn from New England switch houses for the summer with extraordinary results when they are drawn into lifestyles vastly different than their own.
Mother of Pearl
by
Melinda Haynes
ISBN: 9780671774677
In a small Mississippi town during the late 1950s, Even Grade, a twenty-eight-year-old black man who grew up as an orphan, and Valuable Korner, the teenage white daughter of the local prostitute, search for love, family, and commitment as their lives intersect with that of Joody Two Sun, a seer who becomes Even's lover.
White Oleander
by
Janet Fitch
ISBN: 9780316569323
The struggle to build an authentic identity lies at the heart of Astrid's life as a foster child in Los Angeles after her poet mother, who has kept Astrid isolated from the world, is imprisoned for murder.
The Pilot’s Wife
by
Anita Shreve
ISBN: 9780316789080
When her husband, a pilot, dies in an airplane crash off the Irish coast, Kathryn Lyons finds herself in the media spotlight as rumors abound of her husband's shocking secret past.
The Reader
by
Bernhard Schlink
ISBN: 9780307473462
At the age of fifteen, Michael Berg falls in love with a woman named Hanna who disappears, and while observing a trial as a law student years later, he is shocked to discover the same woman as the defendant in a horrible crime.
Jewel
by
Bret Lott
ISBN: 9780671038236
A mother fights for the dignity of her youngest daughter against the backdrop of a pure and simple way of life in the backwoods of Mississippi in 1943.
Where the Heart Is
by
Billie Letts
ISBN: 9780446603652
An award-winning novel features a pregnant teenaged mother who is stranded in a small town in Oklahoma, where a quirky cast of characters, from a blue-haired Baptist to an eccentric librarian, changes her life.
Midwives
by
Chris Bohjalian
ISBN: 9780375706776
In the winter of 1981, trapped by unpassable roads, midwife Sibyl Danforth makes a life-altering decision when she performs an emergency cesarean section on a woman she fears has died of a stroke.
What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day
by
Pearl Cleage
ISBN: 0060538449
After more than a decade of living the high life, Ava Johnson returns home to the quiet northern Michigan community in which she grew up with a dark secret, but Ava cannot turn her back on friends and family who need her, nor help falling deeply in love.
I Know This Much Is True
by
Wally Lamb
ISBN: 9780061469084
Dominick Birdsey, a forty-year-old housepainter living in Three Rivers, Connecticut, finds his life greatly disturbed when his identical twin brother Thomas, a paranoid schizophrenic, commits a shocking act of self-mutilation.
Breath, Eyes, Memory
by
Edwidge Danticat
ISBN: 9780375705045
At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from the impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York to be reunited with her mother, where she gains a legacy of shame that can only be healed when she returns to Haiti, to the woman who first reared her.
Black and Blue
by
Anna Quindlen
ISBN: 9780385333139
After her passionate marriage deteriorates into a violent nightmare, Fran Benedetto is forced to start a new life, complete with a new identity.
Here on Earth
by
Alice Hoffman
ISBN: 9780425167311
A middle-aged woman, along with her fifteen-year-old daughter, returns to her small Massachusetts hometown for the funeral of the housekeeper who raised her and finds herself thrust into the lives of the people she left behind.
Paradise
by
Toni Morrison
ISBN: 9780679433743
Captures the dreams, memories, conflicts, and complex interior lives of the citizens of a small, all-Black town as four young women are brutally attacked in a convent near the town during the 1970s, in a novel that blends past, present, and future.
The Best Way to Play
by
Bill Cosby
ISBN: 9780590956178
Longing for the new Space Explorers video game, Little Bill and his friends are disappointed when their parents refuse to buy the game and wonder how they can still have fun without it.
The Treasure Hunt
by
Bill Cosby
ISBN: 9780590956185
One rainy day while his father listens to his old records, his mother polishes a silver platter, and his brother enjoys his baseball card collection, Little Bill discovers his own treasure, a talent for storytelling.
A Virtuous Woman
by
Kaye Gibbons
ISBN: 9781565122062
A young widower looks back on his memories of his wife and their life together.
Ellen Foster
by
Kaye Gibbons
ISBN: 9780375703058
After the death of her mother, an eleven-year-old girl finds that life with her father is too dangerous and tries to find a new home.
A Lesson Before Dying
by
Ernest J. Gaines
ISBN: 9780375702709
Grant Wiggins, a college-educated man who returns to his hometown to teach, forms an unlikely bond with Jefferson, a young Black man convicted of murder and sentenced to death, when he is asked to impart his learning and pride to the condemned man.
The Meanest Thing to Say
by
Bill Cosby
ISBN: 9780590956161
When a new boy in his second grade class tries to get the other students to play a game that involves saying the meanest things possible to one another, Little Bill shows him a better way to make friends.
Songs in Ordinary Time
by
Mary McGarry Morris
ISBN: 9780670860142
The acclaimed author of A Dangerous Woman returns with a novel set in a small town in Vermont in 1960--the story of lonely and vulnerable Marie Fermoyle, her three children, and a dangerous con man.
The Heart of a Woman
by
Maya Angelou
ISBN: 9780553380095
This engaging book chronicles the changes in Maya Angelou's life as she enters the hub of activity that is New York. There, at the Harlem Writers Guild, she rededicates herself to writing, and finds love at an unexpected moment. Reflecting on her many roles--from northern coordinator of Martin Luther King's history-making quest to mother of a rebellious teenage son--Angelou eloquently speaks to an awareness of the heart within us all.
The Rapture of Canaan
by
Sheri Reynolds
ISBN: 9780425162446
Ninah Huff, the teenage granddaughter of the founder of an isolated religious community, causes controversy when she is discovered to be pregnant with what she claims is a holy child.
Stones from the River
by
Ursula Hegi
ISBN: 9780684844770
Follows Trudi Montag, a dwarf who serves as her town's librarian, unofficial historian, and recorder of the secret stories of her people, in a novel that charts the course of German history in the first half of the twentieth century.
She’s Come Undone
by
Wally Lamb
ISBN: 9780671021009
Eating herself into obesity in the wake of her lost childhood and over-anxious mother, Dolores Price finds herself facing adulthood in a cruel world and resolves to rise to the occasion.
The Book of Ruth
by
Jane Hamilton
ISBN: 9780395866504
The black sheep of her troubled family, Ruth struggles to keep the peace between her mother, her young son, and her slightly off-the-wall husband and to put the pieces back together when a heated situation boils over.
Song of Solomon
by
Toni Morrison
ISBN: 9780452260115
Macon Dead, Jr., called Milkman, son of the richest Negro in town, moves from childhood into early manhood, searching, among the disparate, mysterious members of his family, for his life and reality.
The Deep End of the Ocean
by
Jacquelyn Mitchard
ISBN: 9780140286274
The disappearance of her three-year-old son Ben threatens to drive a wedge between Beth Cappadora and her husband, Pat, and transforms her older son into a troubled delinquent, until one day nine years later when Ben comes back into their lives.
