 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Vintage and Anchor Books have designed
Reading Group Guides to enhance a group's reading and discussion of a
book. They include a description of each book, questions, discussion
topics, and author biographies. From fiction to memoir, award winners
to bestsellers, we've got books and reading group guides for every
interest! |
 |
| Can't find a Reading Group Guide for your book club's latest
selection? To facilitate your meeting, use our Discussion Resources
for fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and poetry, and you can
have lively and engaging discussions no matter which book you choose.
For more help choosing a selection, browse our list of suggested Discussion Resource titles.
|
 |
| A | B | C | D | E |
F | G | H | I | J |
K | L | M | N O | P | Q-R | S | T | U | V | W |X-Z |
|
1491 Written by Charles C. Mann 1491 is a groundbreaking study that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492, and a necessary book for understanding the long, remarkable story of the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. Traditionally, Americans have... Read More The 7 Stages of Motherhood Written by Ann Pleshette Murphy Being a mother is exhilarating and exhausting, a balancing act in which expectations clash with reality and well-laid plans give way to spur-of-the-moment improvisations. From the moment the small “bundle of joy” arrives home to the day a young adult takes... Read More 72 Hour Hold Written by Bebe Moore Campbell When Keri Whitmore’s daughter, Trina, a straight-A student headed for a prestigious university, suddenly turns impulsive, needy, and irrational, leaving home at all hours to hook up with drug dealers, Keri is bewildered and frightened. A psychiatrist tells Keri that Trina... Read More Abide With Me Written by E. Lynn Harris The life Raymond long dreamed about has become a reality. He is living openly and happily with Trent, a successful architect, in Seattle, and his high-powered legal career has earned him a nomination for a federal judgeship. On the other side... Read More The Abortionist's Daughter Written by Elisabeth Hyde Two weeks before Christmas, Diana Duprey, an outspoken abortion doctor, is found floating in her pool, a bruise the size of a golf ball visible through her dark curls. A national figure, Diana inspired passion and ignited tempers, never more so... Read More Above the Thunder Written by Renee Manfredi Devastated by the loss of her beloved husband and numb over the callous disappearance of her drug-addicted daughter, Anna has buried her grief in her medical work and wants nothing more than to be left blissfully alone. Yet when her son-in-law... Read More Absalom, Absalom! Written by William Faulkner When he completed Absalom, Absalom! in May 1936, Faulkner said, "I think it's the best novel yet written by an American." He described it as "the story of a man who wanted a son through pride, and got too many of... Read More The Accidental Written by Ali Smith Unhappily ensconced in a substandard summer cottage in Norfolk, England, the Smart family is in a fragile, volatile condition. Eve Smart, author of the bestselling Genuine Articles, a series of semifictional accounts of historical figures, is suffering from writer’s block. Her... Read More Acts of Faith Written by Philip Caputo Sudan is in the midst of an endless civil war between Muslim Arabs in the north and Christian and pagan blacks in the south. The fundamentalist Islamic government has imposed a blockade on humanitarian aid in the south, barring UN agencies... Read More Adam and Eve and Pinch Me Written by Ruth Rendell Ali and Nino Written by Kurban Said In the Transcaucasian town of Baku on the eve of World War I, Ali Khan Shirvanshir and forty other Muslim, Armenian, Polish, Russian, and Sectarian students are asked by their Russian geography professor whether they wish to belong to "progressive Europe... Read More Alias Grace Written by Margaret Atwood In Alias Grace, bestselling author Margaret Atwood has written her most captivating, disturbing, and ultimately satisfying work since The Handmaid's Tale. She takes us back in time and into the life of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the nineteenth... Read More All Over but the Shoutin' Written by Rick Bragg Rick Bragg was born in the pinewoods of Alabama to a mean-tempered, hard-drinking father and a strong-willed, loving mother, who struggled to protect her sons from the effects of poverty and ignorance that had constricted her own life. After years of... Read More All the Pretty Horses Written by Cormac McCarthy At once a Western, a picaresque adventure, and a coming-of-age novel, suspenseful, wryly funny, and elegiac, All the Pretty Horses is the story of John Grady Cole, the last of a long line of west Texas ranchers. Upon his grandfather's death... Read More Almost a Woman Written by Esmeralda Santiago At the age of thirteen Esmeralda must leave the familiarity, warmth, and vibrancy of Puerto Rico to live in a three-room apartment in Brooklyn shared by ten family members. Challenged by language barriers, cultural stereotypes, and her strict and fiercely protective... Read More Altered States Written by Anita Brookner Alan Sherwood considers himself rather a dull man, absorbed in the familiar routine of his law practice, his modest social life, and visits to his widowed mother. But then he encounters Sarah Miller and his orderly life is thrown into frightening... Read More The Amalgamation Polka Written by Stephen Wright Wright seems to have written this book with an eye on James Joyce’s dictum that “history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.” In this case the history is America’s, and the nightmare slavery and the ideology of... Read More American Pastoral Written by Philip Roth Seymour "Swede" Levov comes of age just after World War II, in a thriving and triumphant America. A legendary high school athlete, the diligent and successful inheritor of his father's glove factory, the proprietor of an eighteenth-century stone house in the... Read More American Priestess Written by Jane Fletcher Geniesse Until now, few have known the true story of the house that became the American Colony Hotel, a retreat for foreign correspondents, diplomats, pilgrims and spies, or its bizarre history of tragedy, religious extremism, emotional blackmail, and peculiar sexual practices. After... Read More Amsterdam Written by Ian McEwan "When it comes to being reasonable, they rather go over the top." Though this character in Amsterdam is referring specifically to the Dutch people, going over the top is something McEwan does well. Lucky for readers, he vaults high and makes his... Read More Amy and Isabelle Written by Elizabeth Strout In the small New England town of Shirley Falls, the arrival of Isabelle Goodrow and her infant daughter, Amy, stirs a bit of curiosity. Declaring she is a widow simply in search of a place to earn a living, Isabelle is... Read More An American Story Written by Debra J. Dickerson The daughter of sharecroppers who migrated north during the Great Migration of blacks in the first half of the twentieth century, Dickerson grew up in a strict Southern Baptist family. Her father was a former Marine who lived by his hatred... Read More Anil's Ghost Written by Michael Ondaatje Anil Tissera is a forensic anthropologist who returns to Sri Lanka, the island of her birth, after fifteen years in the West. As a member of an international human rights organization, her task is to investigate possible "extrajudicial executions" by the... Read More Any Human Heart Written by William Boyd Here is the “riotous and disorganized reality” of Mountstuart’s eighty-five years in all their extraordinary, tragic, and humorous aspects. In his journals he recounts his boyhood in Montevideo, Uruguay; his college years during the 1920s at Oxford, where he published his... Read More Any Way the Wind Blows Written by E. Lynn Harris Basil Henderson, the good-looking, bisexual sports agent who left his wife-to-be at the altar in Harris’s previous book, Not a Day Goes By, is back and “ripe for another ride on the rough-and-ready freeway of love” [p. 15]. He’s on the... Read More Anywhere but Here Written by Mona Simpson Mona Simpson's ambitious first novel Anywhere But Here became a national bestseller upon its publication in 1987. It traces the difficult childhood and coming-of-age of Ann August, the daughter of a woman whose quest for the American dream moves the two... Read More April in Paris Written by Michael Wallner What happens when a young translator for the Nazi SS in occupied Paris decides he wants to spend his off-hours blending in with the locals, gives himself a French identity, and falls in love with a beautiful resistance fighter? This intriguing... Read More Arabian Nights and Days Written by Naguib Mahfouz Arranged Marriage Written by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Divakaruni's exquisitely wrought debut collection of stories chronicles the assimilation--and rebellion--that Indian-born girls and women in America undergo as they balance old treasured beliefs and surprising new desires. For the young girls and women brought to life in these stories, the... Read More The Art of the Personal Essay Written by Phillip Lopate For more than four hundred years, the personal essay has been one of the richest and most vibrant of all literary forms. Distinguished from the detached formal essay by its friendly, conversational tone, its loose structure, and its drive toward candor... Read More Arthur & George Written by Julian Barnes Julian Barnes brings his unparalleled narrative and investigative skills to the story of two men born in Britain in the late nineteenth century. Arthur, the son of an improvident father and an intelligent, capable Scottish mother, trains as an eye doctor... Read More Articles of War Written by Nick Arvin Exploring the actions and consciousness of a single ordinary soldier as he navigates the violence of World War II, Articles of War gives readers an unflinching look at what war demands of the young men who are thrust into the hell... Read More As I Lay Dying Written by William Faulkner Faulkner drafted As I Lay Dying in six weeks while he was working the night shift at a power plant. He later said, "I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force. Before I ever put pen to paper and set down... Read More Asylum Written by Patrick McGrath Stella Raphael, a cultured and elegant but restless young woman, lives with her husband, Max, a forensic psychiatrist, and their small son, Charlie, at a high-security mental hospital in rural England. Isolated from the urban excitement she craves, Stella is unhappy... Read More Atonement Written by Ian McEwan The novel opens on a sweltering summer day in 1935 at the Tallis family’s mansion in the Surrey countryside. Thirteen-year-old Briony has written a play in honor of the visit of her adored older brother Leon; other guests include her three... Read More Atonement (Movie Tie-in Edition) Written by Ian McEwan The novel opens on a sweltering summer day in 1935 at the Tallis family’s mansion in the Surrey countryside. Thirteen-year-old Briony has written a play in honor of the visit of her adored older brother Leon; other guests include her three... Read More Attachment Written by Isabel Fonseca After more than twenty years of life in London, Jean and Mark Hubbard decamp to a remote tropical island in the Indian Ocean. But when Jean, a health columnist, discovers a salacious love letter addressed to her husband, she realizes that... Read More The Attack Written by Yasmina Khadra Translated by John Cullen Dr. Amin Jaafari is an Arab-Israeli surgeon at a hospital in Tel Aviv. As an admired and respected member of his community, he has carved a space for himself and his wife, Sihem, at the crossroads of two troubled societies. Jaafari’s... Read More Audition Written by Barbara Walters After more than forty years of interviewing heads of state, world leaders, movie stars, criminals, murderers, inspirational figures and celebrities of all kinds, Barbara Walters has turned her gift for examination on herself to reveal the forces that shaped her extraordinary... Read More Autobiography of Red Written by Anne Carson Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile, tormented soul in an autobiography he begins at the age of five. As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate... Read More The Autograph Man Written by Zadie Smith When twelve-year old Alex Li-Tandem meets Joseph Klein at a wrestling match in London, he couldn’t have possibly predicted that their conversation about collecting autographs would change the course of his life. Alex grows up to be an Autograph Man, making... Read More Ava's Man Written by Rick Bragg “Since I never really had a grandfather,” Bragg writes in the prologue, “I decided to make me one. . . . I built him up from dirt level, using half-forgotten sayings, half-remembered stories and a few yellowed, brittle, black-and-white photographs that... Read More The Avengers Written by Rich Cohen In 1944, a band of Jewish guerrillas emerged from the Baltic forest to join the Russian army in its attack on Vilna, the capital of Lithuania. They called themselves the Avengers, and were led by a charismatic young poet named Abba... Read More Babel Tower Written by A.S. Byatt It is 1964, and Frederica, a fiercely intellectual young woman, realizes that her marriage has become a prison. Her husband, Nigel Reiver, is determinedly philistine, resentful of her brain and her interests outside the home; Frederica's slightest efforts at independence provoke... Read More Babylon Rolling Written by Amanda Boyden Amanda Boyden's Babylon Rolling is the tale of five families who call the same New Orleans street home. The residents' lives overlap and collide over the course of a year, from summer 2004 to summer 2005. Through their voices, we hear... Read More Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress Written by Dai Sijie In 1971, as Mao’s Cultural Revolution swept over China, shutting down universities and banishing “reactionary intellectuals” to the countryside, two teenage boys are sent to live on the remote and unforgiving mountain known as Phoenix in the Sky. Even though the... Read More The Banyan Tree Written by Christopher Nolan Covering the eighty-plus years of the life of Minnie O'Brien, The Banyan Tree is a rich saga of rural Ireland in the twentieth century. In distinctly layered prose that has been compared to that of James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, and... Read More The Beauty of the Husband Written by Anne Carson In this powerful and moving portrait of a doomed marriage, Carson introduces the tango as a poetic form and revisits John Keats's claim that "beauty is truth, truth beauty," in a moving and often wryly amusing exploration of how people become... Read More Bee Season Written by Myla Goldberg Like most families, the Naumanns have settled comfortably into a routine, each member playing an accepted role in the day-to-day family drama. Saul, a cantor who devotes himself to the study of Jewish mysticism, is the family anchor, preparing the meals... Read More Before the Frost Written by Henning Mankell Fans of Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series have two reasons to rejoice at the appearance of his new novel, Before the Frost. Kurt Wallander is back, as good as ever, and now he is joined by his daughter Linda, who has... Read More Before You Know Kindness Written by Chris Bohjalian The Beginning and the End Written by Naguib Mahfouz Beyond Belief Written by Elaine Pagels In Beyond Belief, Elaine Pagels, one of the world’s most esteemed scholars of religion, takes readers back to the beginning of Christianity. In light of the Nag Hammadi texts, suppressed by the Church in 367 A.D. and discovered in Egypt in... Read More The Big Girls Written by Susanna Moore Susanna Moore's The Big Girls takes readers inside the Sloatsburg Correctional Institution. More particularly, it takes readers into the minds of Louise Forrest, a staff psychiatrist, and Helen, an inmate serving a life sentence for the murder of her two small... Read More The Biographer's Tale Written by A.S. Byatt The Biographer's Tale is the story of Phineas G. Nanson, a disenchanted graduate student who, yearning for reality, decides to abandon his arcane studies in postmodern literary theory and write a biography, for what could be more concrete than a biography... Read More Birds Without Wings Written by Louis de Bernières Set on the eve of World War I, Birds Without Wings tells the story of Eskibahçe, a charming and vibrant ethnically mixed town in present-day Turkey, and how it is irrevocably changed by the ravages of nationalism, war, and religious fervor... Read More Birdsong Written by Sebastian Faulks In 1910 a young Englishman, Stephen Wraysford, goes to Picardy, France, to learn the textile business. While there he plunges into a love affair with the young wife of his host, a passion so imperative and consuming that it changes him... Read More Black & White Written by Dani Shapiro For fourteen years, Clara Brodeur has cloaked herself in a cocoon of white lies and evasions in an effort to wipe out her own history. The simple life she has built with her husband and daughter in small-town Maine retains no... Read More The Black Book Written by Orhan Pamuk In Istanbul, a lawyer called Galip comes home from work to find his beloved wife Rüya—who is also his first cousin—missing. She has taken no suitcases, and she has left a brief note that doesn’t say where she’s gone or why... Read More Black Dogs Written by Ian McEwan "I am uncertain whether our civilization at this turn of the millennium is cursed by too much or too little belief, whether people like Bernard and June cause the trouble, or people like me." Two young Communist Party members, June and Bernard... Read More The Blind Assassin Written by Margaret Atwood Iris Chase Griffen is nearing the end of her life and is determined to set down her version of the stories and scandals that have long swirled around her and her family. In a narrative that spans the twentieth century, Iris... Read More Blood and Thunder Written by Hampton Sides In the summer of 1846, the Army of the West marched through Santa Fe en route to invade and occupy the Western territories claimed by Mexico. Fueled by the new ideology of “Manifest Destiny,” this land grab would lead to a... Read More Blue Genes Written by Christopher Lukas Blue Shoes and Happiness Written by Alexander Mccall Smith With Blue Shoes and Happiness, Alexander McCall Smith returns to Botswana, where the offices of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency are firmly ensconced at Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. Precious Ramotswe is sharing the space with her assistant, Grace Makutsi. With... Read More The Boat Written by Nam Le In stories scattered around the globe, Nam Le takes us from the slums of Colombia to the streets of Tehran; from New York City to Iowa City; from a tiny fishing village in Australia to a foundering vessel in the South... Read More Bodily Harm Written by Margaret Atwood A powerfully and brilliantly crafted novel, Bodily Harm is the story of Rennie Wilford, a young journalist whose life has begun to shatter around the edges. Rennie flies to the Caribbean to recuperate, and on the tiny island of St. Antoine... Read More The Body Project Written by Joan Jacobs Brumberg The Body Projectwill interest a wide variety of readers. Mothers and daughters of all ages will find it fascinating. Mothers and fathers of adolescent girls can use it to begin a dialogue with their daughters about sensitive issues, including puberty, menstruation... Read More Bold Spirit Written by Linda Lawrence Hunt Helga Estby was born in Norway in 1860, emigrated with her mother to Michigan in 1871, became pregnant out of wedlock at age fifteen, was a pioneer homesteader on the prairies of Minnesota by age sixteen, gave birth to many children... Read More The Book of Revelation Written by Rupert Thomson Set in Amsterdam, The Book of Revelation is both a crime novel and an extended, complex, and often disturbing exploration of sexual abuse and its aftermath. When the unnamed narrator, a highly successful English dancer/choreographer, goes out to buy a pack... Read More The Book of Ruth Written by Jane Hamilton "I learned, slowly, that if you don't look at the world with perfect vision, you're bound to get yourself cooked." Having come within an inch of her life, Ruth Dahl is determined to take a good look at it—and to figure... Read More Bound Feet & Western Dress Written by Pang-Mei Chang The Brambles Written by Eliza Minot In her first novel, The Tiny One, Eliza Minot explored the world of a precocious eight year-old as she struggles to make sense of the sudden death of her mother. Now, in The Brambles, Minot extends her range to portray an... Read More Breaking Clean Written by Judy Blunt At eighteen, Blunt married a neighboring rancher twelve years her senior and for nearly thirteen years she followed the rules of that world. She gave birth to three children and tended to their needs and her husband’s expectations, took on the... Read More Breath, Eyes, Memory Written by Edwidge Danticat Danticat's heroine is Sophie Caco, who has spent a happy childhood in rural Haiti with her grandmother and her beloved aunt Atie, who raised her as her own child. Sophie's mother, Martine, lives in New York City and supports the family... Read More The Bridegroom Written by Ha Jin With these tales—three of which have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories—he returns to Muji City, the same provincial city in northern China that was the setting of his National Book Award-winning novel Waiting. The stories take... Read More Bridge of Sighs Written by Richard Russo Louis Charles “Lucy” Lynch has spent his whole life in Thomaston, a small town in upstate New York. He’s married to Sarah, the girl he fell in love with in high school, owns and operates three convenience stores, including the corner... Read More The Brief History of the Dead Written by Kevin Brockmeier Kevin Brockmeier’s ambitious new novel takes readers deep into the Antarctic wilderness, to a future where the human race is devastated by a deadly virus and to a city of the dead— whose denizens will exist there only as long as... Read More A Brief History of the Flood Written by Jean Harfenist Lillian Anderson is a strong-minded, backwoods-Minnesota girl, well-versed in the basics of survival. She can find air to breathe under a capsized boat, drive in a blizzard, or capture a wild duck. As part of a large struggling family, she tiptoes... Read More Brother, I'm Dying Written by Edwidge Danticat When she was four, Edwidge Danticat's mother left Haiti to join her father who had gone to New York two years earlier, leaving her and her younger brother, Bob, in the care of her father's brother, Joseph. Edwidge came to think... Read More The Buffalo Soldier Written by Chris Bohjalian Two years after her nine-year-old daughters are killed in a raging flood, Laura Sheldon is beginning to emerge from her cocoon of grief. She has returned to her job at the Humane Society, teaches Sunday school classes, and spends time in... Read More The Burn Journals Written by Brent Runyon To fourteen-year-old Brent Runyon, life has become a haze of small failures. He hates himself for liking the same girl his best friend likes. His recent suicide attempts–sliced wrists, handfuls of pills, hangings–have left him very much alive and feeling stupid... Read More Burning Marguerite Written by Elizabeth Inness-Brown Waking to the chill of a snow-cloaked morning, carpenter James Jack Wright finds ninety-four-year-old Marguerite Deo lying dead in the woods outside his cabin. As he confronts the mystery of her death—why would Marguerite, his “Tante” since his infancy, walk out... Read More By the Lake Written by John McGahern Joe Ruttledge and his wife Kate have left their jobs in London to live on a farm in Ireland, near where Joe was born. In doing so, they enter into a community in which people know each other’s ways intimately, but... Read More The Cadence of Grass Written by Thomas McGuane This is the story of the Whitelaws, a family whose values are as far-flung as the territory they helped settle, and whose most recent generations have pioneered the landscape of dysfunction. The patriarch, Sunny Jim, exerts his perverse control even posthumously... Read More Caprice and Rondo Written by Dorothy Dunnett Winter 1474 finds Nicholas exiled in the frozen port of Danzig, Poland. His Machiavellian exploits in Scotland have cost him friends and family--not to mention countless riches. As the ice melts, temptations arise. Will he assist the Muslim Prince Uzum Hasan... Read More Caramelo Written by Sandra Cisneros Born the seventh child and only daughter to Zoila and Inocencio Reyes, Celaya Reyes spends her childhood traveling back and forth between her family’s home in Chicago to her father’s birth home in Mexico City, Mexico. Celaya’s intimidating paternal grandmother, adored... Read More Caramelo Written by Sandra Cisneros Translated by Liliana Valenzuela Born the seventh child and only daughter to Zoila and Inocencio Reyes, Celaya Reyes spends her childhood traveling back and forth between her family’s home in Chicago to her father’s birth home in Mexico City, Mexico. Celaya’s intimidating paternal grandmother, adored... Read More The Careful Use of Compliments Written by Alexander Mccall Smith Full-time philosopher and occasional sleuth Isabel Dalhousie, now the mother of a baby boy, is getting used to the new rhythms of her life, caring for little Charlie with the sometimes unsettling aid of her forthright housekeeper, Grace, having dinners with... Read More Casa Rossa Written by Francesca Marciano Set against the political turmoil of the twentieth century, it portrays the fantasies and the hopes, true and false, that the women carry with them as they journey from the starkly beautiful landscape of southern Italy to the glamorous, trend-setting Rome... Read More Cast of Shadows Written by Kevin Guilfoile Davis Moore is a fertility doctor in Chicago specializing in reproductive cloning, a controversial and closely regulated new practice, when his seventeen-year-old daughter is brutally raped and murdered. The case is investigated but never solved. Months later, Moore retrieves her belongings... Read More Cat's Eye Written by Margaret Atwood Considered to be her most autobiographical work, Cat's Eye, Margaret Atwood's critically acclaimed seventh novel, is the story of Elaine Risley, the daughter of a forest entomologist and controversial artist in her fifties who returns to Toronto for a retrospective of... Read More Charlotte Gray Written by Sebastian Faulks Charlotte Gray revolves around a young Scottish woman's war-time odyssey as she becomes involved with an RAF pilot whose plane is lost over France during World War II. Charlotte contrives to go to France herself by working in the resistance and... Read More Chasing Windmills Written by Catherine Ryan Hyde From the bestselling author of Pay It Forward comes a provocative and unlikely love story that starts on a New York subway car and blossoms under the windmills of the Mojave Desert. Both Sebastian and Maria live in worlds ruled by fear... Read More Checkmate Written by Dorothy Dunnett Sixth in the legendary Lymond Chronicles Francis Crawford returns to France to lead an army against England. But even as the soldier-scholar succeeds brilliantly on the battlefield, his haunted past becomes a subject of intense interest to forces in both the French... Read More Children of the Alley Written by Naguib Mahfouz The Children's War Written by Monique Charlesworth It is the spring of 1939, and Germany has become a ticking time bomb for anyone of Jewish heritage. Desperate to find a temporary haven for her daughter Ilse, Lore Lindemann sends the teenager to Morocco, where she will live with... Read More Cities of the Plain Written by Cormac McCarthy The time is the early 1950s, the place the Border country of New Mexico. Nearby, in Alamogordo, the nuclear tests that resulted in the first hydrogen bomb have recently been conducted. The cowboy and his horse are a thing of the... Read More A Civil Action Written by Jonathan Harr Two of the nation's largest corporations stand accused of causing the deaths of children. In Woburn, Massachusetts, several young children have been stricken with leukemia and one of the mothers, suspecting that their drinking water was polluted with industrial waste, initiates... Read More Class Action Written by Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy Gansler When Lois Jenson went to work at Eveleth Mines in 1975, she saw her new job as a lifesaver–a way to bring herself, and her young son, out of minimum-wage poverty. But she soon discovered that the comfortable paychecks came with... Read More Clearcut Written by Nina Shengold Set in the rugged Pacific Northwest in the 1970s, Clearcut is the story of Earley Ritter, who at twenty-nine ekes out a living on the margins of the lumber industry, and two college-age kids who unexpectedly cross his path. After a... Read More The Clearing Written by Tim Gautreaux The Clearing is set deep in the Louisiana swamp in 1923, in the isolated town of Nimbus, a place hard to get to and even harder to get out of alive. Nimbus is a raw place, filled with snakes, alligators, hard-fighting... Read More The Colony of Unrequited Dreams Written by Wayne Johnston The two meet as children in school and grow to realize that their lives are irreversibly intertwined, bound together by a secret they don't know they share. Smallwood, always on the make, torn between love of country and fear of failure... Read More The Color of a Dog Running Away Written by Richard Gwyn Lucas, a musician and translator, comes home one day to find a cryptic postcard on his doorstep. This postcard sets in motion a series of bizarre, seemingly interconnected events, leading Lucas and his girlfriend, Nuria, to be kidnapped by a religious... Read More Colors of the Mountain Written by Da Chen The youngest of five children, Da Chen was born in 1962 in the small village of Yellow Stone. His family, once one of the most respected in the village, loses everything under the brutal policies of the Cultural Revolution. His grandfather... Read More The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday Written by Alexander Mccall Smith In this latest installment in the adventures of moral philosopher Isabel Dalhousie, the wife of a formerly prominent doctor asks for Isabel's help in rescuing her husband's damaged reputation. Marcus Moncrieff has been disgraced by allegations of fraud concerning his role... Read More Coming Through Slaughter Written by Michael Ondaatje First published in 1976, Coming Through Slaughter is one of the best loved of Michael Ondaatje's novels. At the turn of the century, the Storyville district of New Orleans had some 2000 prostitutes, 70 professional gamblers, and 3 piano players. But... Read More The Commoner Written by John Burnham Schwartz The Commoner is a poignant tale of formidable tradition, unspoken sacrifice, and invincible courage. When Haruko is chosen to become the Crown Prince's consort, her family reluctantly allows the marriage. What follows for their daughter is an austere life of ritual... Read More A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers Written by Xiaolu Guo Zhuang is a 23-year-old Chinese language student who has come to London to learn English; she calls herself Z because no one can pronounce her name. When the book begins, she can barely ask for a cup of tea and spends... Read More Confederates in the Attic Written by Tony Horwitz Tony Horwitz returns home from reporting on foreign war zones to discover a different conflict raging on his own doorstep. Though the Civil War ended in 1865, it remains very much aflame in the hearts and minds of Americans, Southerners in... Read More Confess, Fletch Written by Gregory Mcdonald With Confess, Fletch, the second novel to appear in the Fletch series, Gregory Mcdonald puts his relentlessly inquisitive hero smack-dab in the middle of a multimillion-dollar art heist and the murder of a beautiful young woman. Just a few hours after... Read More The Confessions of Nat Turner Written by William Styron In rich and evocative language, Styron relates the life of Turner, a brilliant, enraged slave: his plantation childhood in Tidewater Virginia, his abrupt expulsion from the plantation as it comes apart during the depression of the 1820s, and the series of... Read More The Confessions Written by St. Augustine Preface by Patricia Hampl Augustine has had the most enduring theological influence on Christianity in the West to the present day. The first true autobiography in Western literature, Confessions is a wondrously candid account by Augustine of his sins, errors, and moral failings and temptations... Read More Consuming Kids Written by Susan Linn Enticing ads on prime-time television, special promotions with McDonald’s and other fast-food outlets, and corporate symbols and slogans on T-shirts, caps, backpacks, and more–they’re all part of our children’s everyday world. Once dominated by a few entertainment and toy companies, the... Read More Consumption Written by Kevin Patterson Born in the 1950s, Victoria knows nothing but the nomadic life of the Inuit until, at age ten, she is sent to a sanitorium to recover from tuberculosis. Six years later, she returns to a radically different world, a stranger to... Read More Corelli's Mandolin Written by Louis de Bernières De Bernieres's story takes place on Cephallonia, a small Greek island that is still, in the years before World War II, touched with all the magic of Greek legend, and suffused with a light that is "as though straight from the... Read More A Country Called Home Written by Kim Barnes A lyrical novel deeply attuned to the rhythms of nature and of human consciousness, A Country Called Home contains a vast range of human experience and emotion—birth and death, kindness and cruelty, passion and numbness, hope and despair. In telling the... Read More The Crazed Written by Ha Jin In this luminous new novel, the author of the National Book Award-winning Waiting deepens his portrait of Chinese society while exploring the perennial conflicts between convention and individualism, integrity and pragmatism, loyalty and betrayal. Professor Yang, a respected teacher of literature... Read More The Crossing Written by Cormac McCarthy On the day that Billy Parham leaves his father's house to trap a wolf that has been preying on the herds, he crosses from the time we measure with calendars into an older, immeasurable dream-time--and into a world in which the... Read More Cuando Era Puertorriquena Written by Esmeralda Santiago Santiago describes herself and her family with affection and sadness. She sees the beauty as well as the poverty in the Puerto Rican countryside where she spent her childhood, and she writes of her hardworking mother, her errant, romantic father, and... Read More The Cure for Death by Lightning Written by Gail Anderson-Dargatz Beth is fourteen years old when her world begins to spin out of control. Her father, badly shaken by an eerie encounter with a savage bear, has become violent and unpredictable, and the family is shunned by all but Bertha Moses... Read More The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Written by Mark Haddon Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. Although gifted... Read More The Da Vinci Code Written by Dan Brown While in Paris on business, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum. Near the body, police have found a baffling cipher. Solving the enigmatic riddle, Langdon... Read More Daisy Bates in the Desert Written by Julia Blackburn For twenty-five years Julia Blackburn was fascinated by the haunting figure of Daisy Bates, an Englishwoman who emigrated to Australia in the early part of the century, was briefly married to the famous Breaker Morant, and returned to England to marry... Read More Dancing After Hours Written by Andre Dubus In illuminating issues of love and loss, desire and fear, many of these stories focus upon women characters: Catherine, who discovers her husband is having an affair; Rusty, who is dealing with the aftermath of a horrific shark attack during a... Read More Daniel Isn't Talking Written by Marti Leimbach A Note from the Author Daniel Isn’t Talking is a novel about a woman who discovers her young son is autistic. It is taken in part from my own life as I went through a similar experience five years ago, when my... Read More The Dark Room Written by Rachel Seiffert The Darwin Conspiracy Written by John Darnton Charles Darwin cracked the world open with an idea so powerful that our society is still fighting over it. But why did he wait twenty-two years between the time he first conceived of the theory of evolution and actually published it?... Read More Dead Man Walking Written by Helen Prejean One day in 1982 the Prison Coalition of Louisiana asked Sister Helen Prejean, a Catholic nun who lived and worked among the poor of New Orleans, to correspond with a death-row inmate-- a convicted killer of two teenagers. As she got... Read More Dear Exile Written by Hilary Liftin and Kate Montgomery Newly married and full of a desire to make the world a better place, Kate Montgomery and her husband, Dave, travel to Kenya where, after three months of language training and cultural studies, they move to various villages to teach high school. Their temporary... Read More The Dearly Departed Written by Elinor Lipman With her latest work, Elinor Lipman expertly serves up her usual delicious dish of entertainment. When the story opens, the not-so-sunny Sunny Batten has just received news that causes her to be even more morose than usual: her mother, Margaret Batten... Read More Delirium Written by Laura Restrepo Aguilar, a literature professor reduced to selling dog food after losing his job at the university, returns from a short trip to find his wife, Agustina, transformed into “someone terrified and terrifying, a being I barely recognized” [p. 1]. The daughter... Read More Descartes' Bones Written by Russell Shorto Sixteen years after René Descartes' death in Stockholm in 1650, a pious French ambassador exhumed the remains of the controversial philosopher to transport them back to Paris. Thus began a 350-year saga that saw Descartes' bones traverse a continent, passing between... Read More The Desert Fathers Written by Helen Waddell Preface by Basil Pennington By the end of the fifth century, a pattern had emerged among early Christian communities in Egypt and the Middle East of men and women leaving their cities, towns, and villages to seek God through radical self-abnegation and solitude. These men... Read More Desire of the Everlasting Hills Written by Thomas Cahill "A stunning success." —The New York Times Book Review The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading and discussion of Thomas Cahill's Desire of the Everlasting Hills. Jewish or Christian, believer or atheist, most... Read More The Devil in the White City Written by Erik Larson In The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson takes readers into a richly complex moment in American history, a moment that would draw together the best and worst of the Gilded Age, the grandeur and triumph of the human imagination... Read More The Dew Breaker Written by Edwidge Danticat A book that asks hard questions about truth, deception, responsibility, and redemption, The Dew Breaker is a powerful exploration of the way history, both personal and political, affects those who are swept up in its sometimes violent path. As the book... Read More The Diagnosis Written by Alan Lightman Alan Lightman, author of the widely acclaimed Einstein's Dreams, portrays a man caught in the grip of a mysterious affliction that affects his ability to function and undermines his most basic assumptions about the world. Bill Chalmers, a junior executive at... Read More Diary Written by Chuck Palahniuk Diary is the eerie tale told by Misty Marie Wilmot, a waitress in a hotel, as her husband lies in a coma after a suicide attempt. Once she was an art student dreaming of creativity and freedom, but she hasn’t painted... Read More The Diary of a Young Girl Written by Anne Frank Edited by Otto M. Frank and Mirjam Pressler Translated by Susan Massotty Anne Frank's story succeeds because it is a personal story that enables individuals to understand one of the watershed events of our time, and because it communicates what can happen when hate and intolerance prevail. The essence of Anne Frank's message... Read More The Diary of an American Au Pair Written by Marjorie Leet Ford After losing her advertising job in San Francisco and canceling her wedding (though not her engagement) to an overprotective artist, Melissa heads off to a new job as au pair to the family of a member of Parliament. She harbors grand... Read More Disobedience Written by Jane Hamilton When seventeen-year-old Henry Shaw inadvertently logs onto his mother's e-mail account, he discovers a secret that turns his previously stable sense of his family--and of himself--inside out. Mrs. Shaw is having an affair with Richard Polloco, a Ukrainian violin maker whose... Read More The Disorderly Knights Written by Dorothy Dunnett Through machinations in England and abroad, Lymond is dispatched to Malta to assist the Knights Hospitallers in the island's defense against Turkish corsairs. But he shortly discovers that the greatest threat to the knights lies within their own ranks. One of... Read More The Dive From Clausen's Pier Written by Ann Packer Carrie Bell and Mike Mayer have been a couple forever; dating at fourteen and engaged after graduating from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, they have settled into a comfortable relationship. However, Carrie is beginning to struggle with feelings of doubt about... Read More Divisadero Written by Michael Ondaatje Anna, Claire, and Coop grow up together on a ranch near Petaluma, California, at a time when people still hunt for gold residue in nearby rivers. Anna is her father's natural child; Claire is her adopted sister, whose mother, like Anna's... Read More The Double Bind Written by Chris Bohjalian When Laurel Estabrook is attacked while riding her bicycle through Vermont's back roads, her life is forever changed. Formerly outgoing, Laurel withdraws into her photography, spending all her free time at a homeless shelter. There she meets Bobbie Crocker, a man... Read More The Dying Animal (Movie Tie-In Edition) Written by Philip Roth “A man,” says David Kepesh, “wouldn’t have two-thirds of the problems he has if he didn’t venture off to get fucked. It’s sex that disorders our normally ordered lives” [p. 33]. And no life was more ordered than Kepesh’s. Unmarried, unobligated... Read More The Dying Animal Written by Philip Roth “A man,” says David Kepesh, “wouldn’t have two-thirds of the problems he has if he didn’t venture off to get fucked. It’s sex that disorders our normally ordered lives” [p. 33]. And no life was more ordered than Kepesh’s. Unmarried, unobligated... Read More The Edible Woman Written by Margaret Atwood The Edible Woman is the first published novel by Margaret Atwood. Rich in metaphor, deliciously comic, and glittering with insight, the story chronicles the fantastic and dramatic ego disintegration of Marian McAlprin, who seems at first to be a perfectly conventional... Read More An Eighth of August Written by Dawn Turner Trice An Eighth of August Built by the first generation of liberated slaves and named in honor of the legend that Halley's Comet landed there, the town of Halley's Landing, Illinois, celebrates the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation every August 8th with the... Read More Elements of Style Written by Wendy Wasserstein The Upper East Side urban gentry are all in a tizzy. Not only must they worry about who will be seated beside whom at the next big dinner party and when the next shipment of Birkin bags arrives, now they have... Read More Elizabeth and Mary Written by Jane Dunn Elizabeth I of England and her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, have fascinated biographers and readers for more than four centuries. Even before they gained their respective thrones, their lives were relentlessly observed and commented upon; as queens, they battled deep-seated... Read More Ella Minnow Pea Written by Mark Dunn In Ella Minnow Pea, Mark Dunn transports readers to the imaginary island of Nollop, named for Nevin Nollop, inventor of the pangram (a sentence using all letters of the alphabet) “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” It is... Read More Ellen Foster Written by Kaye Gibbons "When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy," [p. 1] says eleven-year-old Ellen. Thus the young narrator begins her life-story, in the process painting an extraordinary self-portrait: Ellen is a child whose courage and humor win... Read More Embers Written by Sándor Márai Henrik, a retired general of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, has lived for years as a recluse in his castle in the Hungarian forest waiting for the arrival of Konrad, the best friend of his youth, whom he has not seen for forty-one... Read More Emma's War Written by Deborah Scroggins Tall, striking and adventurous, young British relief worker Emma McCune came to Sudan determined to make a difference in a country decimated by the longest-running civil war in Africa. She became a near legend in the bullet-scarred, famine-ridden country, but her... Read More The Emperor of Ocean Park Written by Stephen L. Carter When the brilliant and controversial black judge, Oliver Garland, is found dead in his study, not everyone believes it was a heart attack. Mystery, secrecy, and misfortune seemed to surround the judge during his life—his daughter was killed in a hit-and-run... Read More The Emperor's Children Written by Claire Messud At the novel’s center are two young women and a young man, friends since college, who are now entering their thirties. Marina Thwaite is a beautiful “It” girl who, by virtue of her looks and connections, has been given a contract... Read More Empire Falls Written by Richard Russo Dominated by the Whiting family, the founders of the three mills that provided employment for most of the town’s residents, Empire Falls finds itself in sharp decline at the turn of the twenty-first century. Its mills are closed, stores are boarded... Read More Encore Provence Written by Peter Mayle Summer after summer, the Mayles had fled London in search of two or three weeks under the Mediterranean sun, promising themselves that one day they would make Provence their home. "We had talked about it," Mayle writes in A Year in... Read More End in Tears Written by Ruth Rendell At first, there was no reason to link the killings. The first one, months earlier, seemed totally random: a lump of concrete pushed off an overpass onto a passing car. By contrast, the gruesome bludgeoning death of Amber Marshalson, returning home... Read More The End of Manners Written by Francesca Marciano Maria Galante—rule-abiding, shy, a perfectionist—and larger-than-life journalist Imo Glass are on assignment in Afghanistan: Imo to interview girls who've attempted suicide rather than be married off to older men, Maria to photograph them. But in a culture in which women shroud... Read More Enduring Love Written by Ian McEwan "What idiocy, to be racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness." The opening chapter of this novel plunges readers into the story. Joe Rose and his wife, Clarissa, celebrate a work-imposed separation of six weeks with a... Read More English Passengers Written by Matthew Kneale English Passengers presents the diverse and often conflicting perspectives of a remarkable cast of characters—including British convicts, government officials, missionaries who impose their European standards and self-serving rules on the native population, aboriginal Tasmanians caught in a desperate struggle for survival... Read More The English Patient Written by Michael Ondaatje It is 1944, and the war in central Italy is over. It has moved north, leaving in its wake a landscape of ruined places and people. In an isolated Tuscan villa that served as a military hospital, two people remain, forgotten by the... Read More The Epicure's Lament Written by Kate Christensen Self-avowed misanthrope and trust-fund beneficiary Hugo Whittier has decided to live out the brief remainder of his middle age in his decaying family home, Waverley, in upstate New York. He fills his days making runs to town to maintain his supply... Read More An Equal Music Written by Vikram Seth While a music student in Vienna, violinist Michael Holme falls in love with pianist Julia McNicholl. They play together in a string trio, but when Michael has a nervous breakdown because of tensions with his stern and demanding violin teacher he... Read More Evening Written by Susan Minot Ann Lord is dying of cancer. As she lies in bed, drifting in and out of consciousness, visited by friends and family members, we enter the twilight world of her memories, dreams, and regrets. Although she has had three husbands and... Read More Evening (Movie Tie-in Edition) Written by Susan Minot Ann Lord is dying of cancer. As she lies in bed, drifting in and out of consciousness, visited by friends and family members, we enter the twilight world of her memories, dreams, and regrets. Although she has had three husbands and... Read More Eventide Written by Kent Haruf In many ways, Eventide is about the pain of separation. As the novel opens, Victoria Roubideaux is preparing to move away from the McPherons’ ranch to attend college in Fort Collins. Harold and Raymond had taken her in back when she... Read More Everyman Written by Philip Roth “Old age isn’t a battle, old age is a massacre” [p. 156] has become the most frequently quoted line from Everyman. In this brief but expansive novel, Roth turns his gaze on human mortality, offering an intimate yet universal story of... Read More The Exception Written by Christian Jungersen An internationally bestselling thriller, The Exception dissects the nature of evil and the paranoia that drives ordinary people to commit unthinkable acts. Four women work together for a small nonprofit in Copenhagen that disseminates information on genocide. When two of them... Read More Faceless Killers Written by Henning Mankell When Kurt Wallander is suddenly wakened from an erotic dream at 5:13 a.m. and summoned to the scene of a crime outside the village of Lunnarp, he thinks the whole thing might be little more than a senile farmer’s overactive imagination... Read More Family Written by J. California Cooper Family is a stunning, often painfully graphic re-creation of the realities of slavery: black women raped by white masters; black children sold to sustain failing plantations--or to satisfy the whims of a petulant mistress; strong men humiliated, whipped, and beaten because... Read More Family History Written by Dani Shapiro Rachel Jensen seems to have it all: a husband she adores, challenging work in art restoration, a beloved teenage daughter, and a new baby on the way. But when Rachel’s delivery of her infant son turns dangerous and frightening, requiring an... Read More Family Matters Written by Rohinton Mistry When Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance was published in 1996, it was greeted with unanimous praise, and, in December 2001, it was selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club. Now, Mistry gives us a novel that confirms him as a... Read More The Family Orchard Written by Nomi Eve Spanning nearly two hundred years in the life of a passionate, eccentric, and altogether extraordinary family, The Family Orchard begins in 1837 when the beautiful and sensuous Esther Herschell, granddaughter of the chief rabbi of the British Empire, marries the Eastern... Read More Family Tree Written by Barbara Delinsky The Famished Road Written by Ben Okri A Far Country Written by Daniel Mason In the impoverished backlands of an unnamed country, an unusual child is born into the family of a cane cutter. Isabel is born with an “open” body—the ability to see the future at times, to sense spirits others cannot see, to... Read More The Feast of Love Written by Charles Baxter Charlie Baxter, frustrated with his stalled book-in-progress, goes out for a midnight stroll and runs into a friend named Bradley Smith. Bradley tells Charlie to call his book The Feast of Love. He says, "You should put me in your novel... Read More The Feast of Love (Movie Tie-in Edition) Written by Charles Baxter Charlie Baxter, frustrated with his stalled book-in-progress, goes out for a midnight stroll and runs into a friend named Bradley Smith. Bradley tells Charlie to call his book The Feast of Love. He says, "You should put me in your novel... Read More The Fifth Book of Peace Written by Maxine Hong Kingston In 1991, Kingston was returning from her beloved father’s funeral when she was confronted with the destructive Oakland-Berkeley fires. In these terrible fires, Kingston lost her house and all her worldly possessions, including her unfinished fictional Book of Peace set during... Read More Final Exam Written by Pauline W. Chen In Final Exam, Pauline Chen tells the story of her own medical education and the many crucial experiences with patients that led her to become a more empathic, more compassionate, and more patient-oriented doctor. “I never intended,” Chen writes, “to make... Read More A Fine Balance Written by Rohinton Mistry The time is 1975; the place is India, in an unnamed city by the sea. The corrupt and brutal government has just declared a State of Emergency, and the country is on the edge of chaos. In these precarious circumstances, four... Read More Fire in the Blood Written by Irene Nemirovsky Set in the idyllic French countryside just prior to World War II, Fire in the Blood is a classic love story, a tale of youth and age, passion and regret, truth and deception. It is also a novel about adultery-the great... Read More Firewife Written by Tinling Choong Nin, a photographer, embarks on a five-month journey to photograph women around the world. Her travel turns into a search for the truth about women: the women of fire and the women of water. Each of her subjects' lives echoes a... Read More The First American Written by H.W. Brands Benjamin Franklin was perhaps the most beloved and celebrated American of his age, or indeed of any age. His circle of friends and acquaintances ranged geographically from America to Europe, and in personality from Cotton Mather to Voltaire, from Edmund Burke... Read More First Comes Love Written by Marion Winik In First Comes Love, her dramatic, unsentimental memoir, Marion Winik gives an eloquent account of her very unconventional marriage. Her husband, Tony Heubach, was gay, but Marion and Tony were sure that their love and devotion would make their marriage work... Read More The First Desire Written by Nancy Reisman Missing: woman, 33 years old, of Jewish descent, 5’2”, dark hair and eyes, slim, last seen Sunday or Monday, possibly wearing a blue shirtwaist. May have visited Niagara Falls [p.16]. Goldie Cohen, the eldest daughter of Abe Cohen, has always helped... Read More The First Man Written by Albert Camus The incomplete manuscript of The First Man, which Camus had referred to as "the novel of my maturity," was found in a mud-spattered briefcase near the wreckage of the car in which Camus died in January of 1960, when he was... Read More Fletch Written by Gregory Mcdonald First published in 1974, Gregory Mcdonald's Fletch introduces I. M. Fletcher, a top-notch undercover reporter in southern California. While staking out a story about drugs on the beach, he is mistaken for an addict himself by millionaire Alan Stanwyk, president of... Read More Fletch's Fortune Written by Gregory Mcdonald Tanning himself on the Riviera, living off a stolen fortune, sleeping with his neighbor's wife--life seems perfect for Gregory Mcdonald's irreverent ex-journalist I. M. Fletcher. But when the C.I.A. shows up with a list of Fletch's tax evasions, a suitcase full... Read More Flights of Love Written by Bernhard Schlink These tales weave around the idea of love—love to seek and love to flee; love as desire, as guilt, as confusion or self-betrayal; love as habit, as affair, and as life-changing rebellion. With remarkable deftness, intelligence and sensitivity, Schlink exposes the... Read More Flirting with Danger Written by Siobhan Darrow Flirting with Danger is more than just the story of Darrow's rise to journalistic eminence. With humor and unflinching honesty, Darrow describes her own troubled childhood and complicated family situation. The daughter of an emotionally cool, well-to-do Scotch-Irish mother and an... Read More Flux Written by Peggy Orenstein At thirty-four, Peggy Orenstein faced a series of dilemmas shared by many women of her generation: She was unsure whether she wanted children, uncertain what the impact of motherhood would be on her career, her relationships, and her sense of self... Read More For Fidelity Written by Catherine M. Wallace For Fidelity will interest a wide variety of readers because Wallace combines scholarly insight with the practical wisdom of a battle-scarred parent of teenagers. Parents who must contend with the skepticism and the probing questions of adolescents and pre-adolescents will find... Read More For the Relief of Unbearable Urges Written by Nathan Englander Members of a fabled Hasidic sect, rounded up to be sent to a concentration camp, avoid their fate by posing as acrobats on a circus train; an aging wigmaker pursues a young delivery man in New York City so that she... Read More Foreign Correspondence Written by Geraldine Brooks We are products of our environment. And some of us rebel against that environment--perhaps traveling the world and then living far from home if we grew up in a place that felt too small, or creating a cocoon of family and... Read More The Forgetting Written by David Shenk David Shenk’s The Forgetting is one of those rare books that manages to be about nearly everything at the same time that it sharply illuminates a single topic, in this case, Alzheimer’s disease. Yet it does not ignore the fascinating issues... Read More The Fortress of Solitude Written by Jonathan Lethem The Fortress of Solitude is both a poignant coming-of-age story and an unforgettable evocation of an urban neighborhood poised on the knife-edge of gentrification. When young Dylan Ebdus and his bohemian Jewish parents, Rachel and Abraham, move into a brownstone on... Read More Founding Brothers Written by Joseph J. Ellis In a lively and engaging narrative, Ellis recounts the sometimes collaborative, sometimes archly antagonistic interactions between these men and shows us the private characters behind the public personas: Adams, the ever-combative iconoclast, whose closest political collaborator was his wife, Abigail; Burr... Read More A Free Life Written by Ha Jin Nan Wu is a Chinese graduate student in political science at Brandeis University when the Tiananmen Square massacre changes everything for him. Because of his activity with a prodemocracy group, it is now impossible for him to return to China to... Read More Friends, Lovers, Chocolate Written by Alexander Mccall Smith Isabel Dalhousie, editor of the Review of Applied Ethics and occasional sleuth, agrees to run her niece Cat’s delicatessen while Cat goes to a wedding in Italy. One day a customer named Ian tells her something strange about himself: since his... Read More Fugitive Pieces Written by Anne Michaels In Poland during World War II, seven-year-old Jakob Beer's parents are murdered by Nazi soldiers and his adored elder sister, Bella, is abducted. The mourning child flees and is miraculously rescued by Athos Roussos, a Greek geologist. Athos smuggles Jakob to his native... Read More The Full Cupboard of Life Written by Alexander Mccall Smith The Full Cupboard of Life continues the adventures of Precious Ramotswe, the remarkable proprietress of an unusual detective agency in Botswana. Still engaged to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni but with no wedding date set, Mma Ramotswe understands that she should not put... Read More The Future Has a Past Written by J. California Cooper From her first collection of short stories, A Piece of Mine, to the recently published The Future Has a Past, J. California Cooper has introduced an appealing and diverse cast of characters struggling to make the right choices and find happiness... Read More The Future of Life Written by Edward O. Wilson Our world is far richer than previously conceived, yet so ravaged by human activity that half its species could be gone by the end of the present century. These two contrasting truths–unexpected magnificence and underestimated peril–have become compellingly clear during the... Read More Gabriel's Story Written by David Anthony Durham Gabriel Lynch is fifteen when his mother, after the death of her husband, decides to move the family from a comfortable brownstone in Baltimore to a sod hut on the plains of Kansas. Here she is reunited with Solomon, a man... Read More The Game of Kings Written by Dorothy Dunnett In 1547 Lymond returns to his native Scotland, which is threatened by an English invasion and by the bloody rivalries of its nobles. Accused of treason, hunted by friend and enemy alike, he leads a company of outlaws in a desperate... Read More The Gargoyle Written by Andrew Davidson An international sensation published in twenty-seven languages, The Gargoyle is the mesmerizing story of one man's descent into a personal hell and his quest for salvation. On a dark road in the middle of the night, a car plunges into a ravine... Read More Geek Love Written by Katherine Dunn Like many of the best American novels of the past fifty years, Geek Love tells the story of a family. But this image of family is misshapen and bizarre, a reflection cast back at us from the distorting surface of a... Read More Gemini Written by Dorothy Dunnett The final volume in the spectacular House of Niccol?. Scotland, 1477. As Nicholas de Fleury and his clever wife Gelis move between the countries where his bank has made its mark (Burgundy, Flanders, Germany, France, and England), he finally unlocks the... Read More The Gifts of the Jews Written by Thomas Cahill The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of the second book in Thomas Cahill's The Hinges of History series, The Gifts of the Jews. In The Gifts of the Jews, Thomas Cahill... Read More The Girl at the Lion d'Or Written by Sebastian Faulks In The Girl at the Lion d'Or we witness the compromise and unease of France in the years leading up to the Second World War through the eyes of Anne Louvet, a courageous and passionate young girl. When Anne was still... Read More The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Written by Stieg Larsson This spellbinding amalgam of murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue was a sensation across Europe, with millions of copies sold. It's about the disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger—a young scion of one of the wealthiest families... Read More Girl, Interrupted Written by Susanna Kaysen As she recounts her two-year sojourn in a Boston psychiatric hospital and her experience of what she calls the "parallel universe" of madness, Kaysen compels readers to consider how thin the line is that separates "madness" from "sanity," deviance from normalcy... Read More Gob's Grief Written by Chris Adrian George Washington--"Gob"--Woodhull and Thomas Jefferson--"Tomo"--Woodhull, are the twin sons of the real historical figure Victoria Woodhull, the nineteenth-century feminist and spiritualist. At age eleven, Tomo runs away from his family home in Homer, Ohio, to join the Union soldiers, but gripped... Read More God: A Biography Written by Jack Miles Although Miles is a former Jesuit and has a formidable background in philosophy, archaeology, and Near Eastern languages, the purpose of his inquiry is not theological but literary. Using the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, as his text, Miles sets out to... Read More Good Faith Written by Jane Smiley Joe Stratford is a good and trustworthy guy who makes an honest living helping nice people buy and sell nice houses. He’s recently divorced, not yet forty-years-old, and pretty happy with his life. Felicity Ornquist, the married daughter of his business... Read More The Good Husband of Zebra Drive Written by Alexander Mccall Smith All is not going well for Mma Ramotswe at the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, nor for her husband Mr J.L.B. Matekoni at Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, since the smooth running of their offices has been disrupted by restless assistants. Grace... Read More The Good People of New York Written by Thisbe Nissen It’s love with an edge in this sharp tale of would-be urban sophisticates who embark on a mismatched marriage and have a daughter. As the story unfolds, Nissen depicts the relationships and conversations of the well-meaning but slightly neurotic inhabitants of... Read More The Good Women of China Written by Xinran Goodnight, Nebraska Written by Tom McNeal When seventeen-year-old Randall Hunsacker arrives in the Great Plains town of Goodnight, Nebraska, pop. 1680, it is with the knowledge that here he has a second chance. Here he can escape violent events back home in Salt Lake City—a shooting, a... Read More The Great Man Written by Kate Christensen Oscar Feldman, the renowned figurative painter, has passed away. As his obituary notes, Oscar is survived by his wife, Abigail, their son, Ethan, and his sister, the well-known abstract painter Maxine Feldman. What the obituary does not note, however, is that... Read More The Great Transformation Written by Karen Armstrong In the period from the ninth century to the second century BCE, the peoples of four distinct regions of the civilized world created the religious and philosophical traditions that have continued to nourish humanity to the present day: Confucianism and Daoism... Read More The Hakawati Written by Rabih Alameddine In 2003, Osama al-Kharrat returns to Beirut after many years in America to stand vigil at his father's deathbed. The city is a shell of the Beirut Osama remembers, but he and his friends and family take solace in the things... Read More Half a Life Written by V.S. Naipaul Half a Life is the story of Willie Chandran, whose father, heeding the call of Mahatma Gandhi, turned his back on his Brahmin heritage and married a woman of low caste–a disastrous union he would live to regret, as he would... Read More Half of a Yellow Sun Written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Half of a Yellow Sun returns to a critical moment in the modern history of Nigeria, a time shortly after gaining their independence from Britain when, following a massacre of their people, the Igbo tribes of the southeast seceded and established... Read More The Hand I Fan With Written by Tina Mcelroy Ansa A Handbook to Luck Written by Cristina Garcia In the late 1960s, Enrique Florit is a dutiful boy living in Southern California with his father, a flamboyant magician who, when he isn't chasing down a career break or a pair of shapely legs, is pining for their native Cuba... Read More The Handmaid's Tale Written by Margaret Atwood Of The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood's dystopian, futuristic novel, New York Times editor Christopher Lehmann-Haupt warns, "It's a bleak world . . . how bleak and even terrifying we will not fully realize until the story's final pages." Set in Cambridge, Massachusetts... Read More The Harafish Written by Naguib Mahfouz Harbor Written by Lorraine Adams The story centers on Algerian stowaway Aziz Arkoun, from his near-death arrival in frigid Boston harbor to his acclimation to life first in gritty East Boston and then in Brooklyn. Throughout the chronicle of Aziz’s confused and lonely years in America... Read More A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius Written by Dave Eggers Dave Eggers was only twenty-one when his parents died of cancer within weeks of each other. In the aftermath of their deaths, Eggers became the acting parent of his eight-year-old brother, Toph. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the story... Read More The Heartsong of Charging Elk Written by James Welch As a young boy in South Dakota, Charging Elk watches his people, the Oglala Sioux, defeat Custer at Little Big Horn. When the Sioux are defeated and forced onto reservations, Charging Elk elects to live in the Stronghold, a campsite in... Read More Heat Written by Bill Buford Heat started out as an article Buford wrote for The New Yorker food issue in 2002 about working in the kitchen of Mario Batali’s three-star restaurant, Babbo. The impetus for the article—Buford’s desire to learn how professional chefs are different than... Read More The Hidden Writer Written by Alexandra Johnson "Whom do I tell when I tell a blank page?" Virginia Woolf's question is one that generations of readers and writers searching to map a creative life have asked of their own diaries. No other document quite compares with the intimacies... Read More Highwire Moon Written by Susan Straight Serafina Mendez, a Mexican Indian, is fifteen when she sneaks across the border into California looking for work. Only days after she gets a job at Angeles Linen, immigration officials sweep through the laundry in search of illegal workers. Larry Foley... Read More The Hills at Home Written by Nancy Clark Aging matron Lily Hill lives unobtrusively and comfortably alone in her large, old, and quintessentially New England Federalist-style house on the edge of town. But in the summer of 1989, a sudden and strange thing happens: various family members come for... Read More His Illegal Self Written by Peter Carey Set in 1972, His Illegal Self tells the story of an unusual family, split apart by the radical culture of the 1960s. Seven-year-old Che has been raised by his maternal grandmother in the comforts of her quiet lake house and her... Read More Hitler's Willing Executioners Written by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen "Against much of the literature on the Holocaust, my book shifts the focus of the investigation of the Holocaust from where it has been--namely, on abstract structures like the S.S., the Nazi Party, and the terror apparatus--to the human beings who... Read More Homecoming Written by Bernhard Schlink Homecoming, Bernhard Schlink's first novel since his international bestseller The Reader, is the story of one man's odyssey and another man's pursuit. A child of World War II, Peter Debauer grew up in Germany without a father. As an adult, Peter... Read More Honky Written by Dalton Conley In America, being white usually means being a member of the majority. But for Dalton Conley, son of artistic but impoverished "middle-class" parents, the situation is reversed: he is virtually the only white kid in the housing complex in which he... Read More Hotel Du Lac Written by Anita Brookner Edith Hope is an astute, watchful Englishwoman approaching middle age, a writer of romance novels who secretly believes in the happy endings they offer. After Edith embarrasses her London friends by transgressing their strict but unwritten sexual and emotional codes, they... Read More Hottentot Venus Written by Barbara Chase-Riboud Barbara Chase-Riboud’s previous historical novels won her critical praise and established her as a writer who daringly transforms the hidden truths of the past into compelling fiction. In Hottentot Venus, Chase-Riboud recounts the tragic life of Sarah Baartman, re-creating in vivid... Read More A House for Mr. Biswas Written by V.S. Naipaul A House for Mr. Biswas follows the life of Mr. Mohun Biswas, a protagonist inspired by Naipaul's father, as he struggles to find his freedom and a house of his own. The son of a poor laborer in Trinidad, Mr. Biswas... Read More House of Sand and Fog Written by Andre Dubus III "Elegant and powerful...an unusual and volatile...literary thriller." --Washington Post Book World In this riveting novel of almost unbearable suspense, three fragile yet determined people become dangerously entangled in a relentlessly escalating crisis. Colonel Behrani, once a wealthy man in Iran, is now... Read More The House on Mango Street Written by Sandra Cisneros Growing up in the Latino section of Chicago, Esperanza is ashamed of the rickety house on Mango Street where her family lives, she is ashamed of her name (it is too Mexican), and she is ashamed of her poverty. As Esperanza... Read More How the Irish Saved Civilization Written by Thomas Cahill "Charming and poetic . . . an entirely engaging, delectable voyage into the distant past." —The New York Times The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of the first book in Thomas Cahill's... Read More How to Breathe Underwater Written by Julie Orringer In “Pilgrims,” two children of a terminally ill mother travel on Thanksgiving with their parents to an eerie home where other suffering families gather for dinner. In “When She Is Old and I Am Famous,” an aspiring artist spends a pivotal... Read More The Human Stain Written by Philip Roth Set in the summer of 1998, with Bill Clinton's impeachment hovering in the background, The Human Stain chronicles the disgrace and downfall of Coleman Silk, an eminent classics professor at New England's small Athena College. When Silk asks about two absent... Read More Human Traces Written by Sebastian Faulks Human Traces is the engrossing tale of two men and their quest to discover what it means to be human. Set during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Faulks's novel brilliantly captures the drama behind the intellectual and social controversies... Read More Hurry Down Sunshine Written by Michael Greenberg Hurry Down Sunshine is an extraordinary family story and a memoir of exceptional power. In it, Michael Greenberg recounts in vivid detail the remarkable summer when, at the age of fifteen, his daughter was struck mad. It begins with Sally's sudden... Read More I Don't Know How She Does It Written by Allison Pearson A fiercely ambitious and talented thirty-five-year-old hedge-fund manager at the London firm of Edwin Morgan Forster, Kate Reddy is a successful woman in a notoriously sexist business. Her trouble is that her other life, as a married mother of two young... Read More I Feel Bad About My Neck Written by Nora Ephron Nora Ephron feels bad about her neck, but she doesn't want to have surgery, either. She worries that she'll end up looking in the mirror and seeing someone unrecognizable who looks like a drum pad. She does try to stop the... Read More I Married a Communist Written by Philip Roth Ira Ringold grew up a Newark roughneck, blighted by a violent history from which he is always in flight. During his service in World War II, though, he comes under the tutelage of a dedicated Communist, who makes him passionately political... Read More I Say a Little Prayer Written by E. Lynn Harris As a young man, Chauncey Greer sang with a boy band that was headed for superstardom, until a lover’s betrayal tore the group apart. Now thirty-eight, he’s the owner of a successful greeting card company in Atlanta, comfortable with his sexuality–“basically... Read More I See You Everywhere Written by Julia Glass From National Book Award winner Julia Glass comes an intimate work of fiction: a richly nuanced tale about the intertwined lives of two sisters. I See You Everywhere is the remarkable story of the Louisa and Clement Jardine, told in their... Read More I Was Amelia Earhart Written by Jane Mendelsohn Jane Mendelsohn has revisited the mystery of Amelia Earhart's legendary final flight, to continue the story from the glorious windy day when Earhart and her navigator disappeared into history somewhere over the mid-Pacific. In this novel, charged with lyricism and longing, Amelia... Read More I'm Not Scared Written by Niccolo Ammaniti Translated by Jonathan Hunt When Michele Amitrano stumbles onto a boy held prisoner in a hole deep in the Italian countryside, he begins a journey that will lead him to a series of startling discoveries. I’m Not Scared explores the playful and volatile world of... Read More The Icarus Girl Written by Helen Oyeyemi The Imitation of Christ Written by Thomas Kempis The Imitation of Christ, which first appeared in the late fifteenth century, has without exaggeration been called the most widely read work of devotion ever written. It encourages us to live a life devoid of worldly vanities and, in the words... Read More In a Dark Wood Written by Amanda Craig London native Benedick Hunter is a recently divorced, out-of-work actor and the ambivalent father of two young children, who is battling loneliness and depression. While going through the motions of packing his possessions to move from his house, Benedick finds a... Read More In Defense of Elitism Written by William A. Henry From the Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic for Time magazine comes the tremendously controversial, yet highly persuasive, argument that our devotion to the largely unexamined myth of egalitarianism lies at the heart of the ongoing "dumbing of America." Americans have always stubbornly clung... Read More In Lucia's Eyes Written by Arthur Japin According to brief references in his autobiography, the adult Casanova happens upon his lost adolescent love, Lucia, in an Amsterdam brothel where he is shocked to find that she has become, in his own words, “repulsive.”* Japin imagines this chance meeting... Read More In My Hands Written by Irene Gut Opdyke As told to Jennifer Armstrong When the Nazi army invades Poland in 1939, Irene Gut is a seventeen-year-old student nurse. She is studious, young, and pretty, a good Catholic girl and close to her loving parents and three younger sisters--her life thus far is as remote... Read More In Revere, In Those Days Written by Roland Merullo Roland Merullo’s powerful novel eloquently explores how, in the aftermath of a devastating tragedy, a young boy, already disadvantaged by place and circumstance, can grow into a happy, successful man. Narrated by the protagonist, Anthony Benedetto, In Revere, In Those Days... Read More In Search of Satisfaction Written by J. California Cooper Cooper blends the informal, conversational style of traditional folk narratives and a deep moral sensibility in the novel In Search of Satisfaction, a provocative and moving exploration of good and evil, need and desire. Set in Yoville, a town dominated by... Read More In the Company of Cheerful Ladies Written by Alexander Mccall Smith Now married to Mr J. L. B. Matekoni, Precious Ramotswe has moved the office of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency to Tlokweng Road. The story opens with Precious Ramotswe and Grace Makutsi struggling to keep up with their investigative work... Read More In the Fall Written by Jeffrey Lent In the last days of the Civil War, Vermonter Norman Pelham receives a head wound that leaves him unconscious and separated from his regiment. He is found and nursed back to health by Leah, an escaped slave. When the war ends... Read More In the Pond Written by Ha Jin In the Pond is the story of Shao Bin, a young man who works as a pipe fitter in a fertilizer factory in a northern provincial commune. He is also a self-taught scholar and artist, convinced he is worthy of a... Read More In the River Sweet Written by Patricia Henley From the world of jasmine tea, cyclo drivers and paper lanterns in trees to the heartland of America, Patricia Henley takes us on a journey into the hearts of one woman and her family. It is the story of one woman’s... Read More Independence Day Written by Richard Ford Frank Bascombe, who made his first appearance in Ford's 1986 novel The Sportswriter, continues his narrative five years later. Frank-- now forty-four, divorced, "residential specialist," former sportswriter, parent, Democrat, and occasional Presbyterian with a fear of "disappearing"-- finds his life at... Read More The Information Written by Martin Amis Richard Tull, at forty, considers himself a failure: his novels, never very successful, have become so abstract as to be unpublishable, and he ekes out a living writing book reviews. With growing bitterness and rage he contemplates the very different trajectory... Read More The Ingenuity Gap Written by Thomas Homer-Dixon The Inn at Lake Devine Written by Elinor Lipman In the spring of 1962, in response to her inquiry about summer vacation accommodations at a lakeside Vermont inn, Natalie Marx's mother receives a letter saying "our guests who feel most comfortable here, and return year after year, are Gentiles." Feisty... Read More The Innocent Written by Ian McEwan "He was not certain whether this time spent traveling between his two secret worlds was when he was truly himself, when he was able to hold the two in balance and know them to be separate from himself; or whether this... Read More Inspired Sleep Written by Robert Cohen Can individual human beings control the condition of their own lives, or are they at the mercy of the long-reaching arms of the pharmaceutical industry and all of its pawns--doctors, research scientists, politicians--who are driven by the desire for power and... Read More Invisible Life Written by E. Lynn Harris Handsome, athletic, and smart, Raymond Tyler is about to graduate from college and is anticipating a comfortable future as a lawyer and family man when, despite his deep love for his longtime girlfriend, he is swept into an affair with Kelvin... Read More Invisible Man Written by Ralph Ellison From the moment of its publication in 1952, Invisible Man generated the impact of a cultural tidal wave. Here was a pioneering work of African-American fiction that addressed not only the social, but the psychic and metaphysical, components of racism: the nvisibility... Read More Island Written by Alistair MacLeod In Island , the fishermen, farmers, and miners whose families immigrated to Canada to make better lives for themselves dwell side-by-side with raw nature, at once lushly generous and mercilessly cruel. Young mothers live with the possibility of their husbands' imminent... Read More Istanbul Written by Orhan Pamuk Blending reminiscence with history; family photographs with portraits of poets and pashas; art criticism, metaphysical musing, and, now and again, a fanciful tale, Orhan Pamuk invents an ingenious form to evoke his lifelong home, the city that forged his imagination. He... Read More An Italian Affair Written by Laura Fraser When Laura Fraser’s husband of one year leaves her for his high school sweetheart, she decides on impulse to take a trip to Italy to soothe her broken heart. An excursion to the island of Ischia lands her face-to-face with a... Read More Jack Maggs Written by Peter Carey From the Booker Prize-winning author, a vivid and robust novel of Dickensian London--a place and a story teeming with mystery, science, and passion. The time, the 1830s. Jack Maggs, a foundling trained in the fine arts of thievery, cruelly betrayed and deported... Read More John Henry Days Written by Colson Whitehead Immortalized in folk ballads, John Henry has long been a favorite American hero. According to legend, he was a black laborer for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, a man of superhuman strength and stamina. He proved his mettle in a contest... Read More The Journey Home Written by Olaf Olafsson When she learns that she has only twelve months to live, Disa decides to abandon the safety of the successful summer hotel she runs with her friend Anthony and return to the village in Iceland where she was born. In traveling... Read More The Journey of Ibn Fattouma Written by Naguib Mahfouz July and August Written by Nancy Clark When Lily Hill’s family all returns to Towne, Massachusetts, for the months of July and August, a summer filled with comedy and drama ensues. There’s Sally, who stirs up trouble with Cam—a local girl who seems to be an honorary member... Read More Juneteenth Written by Ralph Ellison Preface by Charles Johnson The story opens in the 1950s, with the first stirrings of the Civil Rights Movement. Adam Sunraider, a.k.a. Bliss, a white racist senator from New England, is gunned down by a young black man while making a speech on the Senate... Read More Just As I Am Written by E. Lynn Harris After several years in New York and at his father's Birmingham law office, Raymond is in Atlanta, working as a sports lawyer for an up-and-coming black-owned firm. He has retreated into the closet, fearful of telling his parents about his sexual... Read More Kafka on the Shore Written by Haruki Murakami Kafka on the Shore is structured around the alternating stories of Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old boy who runs away from home to escape an awful oedipal prophecy, and Nakata, an aging and illiterate simpleton who has never completely recovered from a... Read More The Kalahari Typing School for Men Written by Alexander Mccall Smith For some time, Precious Ramotswe has had the private investigation field to herself. She’s had not just the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency but the only private detective agency in Gaborone, Botswana. But competition arrives when Mr. Cephas Buthelezi—an ex-policeman with... Read More The Keep Written by Jennifer Egan In The Keep, two cousins whose lives have been haunted by an incident of childhood cruelty are reunited at a crumbling, centuries-old castle somewhere in Eastern Europe. Howard, retired from bond trading and fabulously rich at thirty-five, wants to turn the... Read More The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara Written by David I. Kertzer At nightfall one June evening in 1858, a knock sounds at the door of a Jewish family in Bologna, Italy, then part of the Papal States. The dumbfounded couple, Momolo and Marianna Mortara, find a phalanx of police awaiting them. Their... Read More The Killer Inside Me Written by Jim Thompson The Killer Inside Me is a chilling portrait of Lou Ford, the twenty-nine-year-old deputy sheriff of a small town in the oil fields of West Texas. Ford is experiencing a recurrence of "the sickness" that triggered a crime in his youth... Read More The Ladies' Man Written by Elinor Lipman Nineteen sixty-seven was a defining year for Adele, Lois, and Kathleen Dobbin. That March, Harvey Nash failed to attend the party at which he and Adele were to announce their engagement. Thirty years later, the three sisters—graying, stolid, content (albeit lonely)—blame... Read More Lady Oracle Written by Margaret Atwood Lady Oracle is Margaret Atwood's third novel, a comic masterpiece in its parodies of literary forms and subversion of literary expectations. Our heroine is Joan Foster, who has spent her life on the run, albeit quietly. Her adolescent obesity and the constant... Read More Lambrusco Written by Ellen Cooney Lambrusco is the story of Sicilian-born Signora Lucia Fantini, a notorious Italian opera singer who failed in her career ambitions due to performance anxiety, and performs instead at Aldo's, her late husband's restaurant, now run by her son Beppi. When Italy... Read More The Language of Life Written by Bill Moyers "Poets live the lives all of us live," says Bill Moyers, "with one big difference. They have the power--the power of the word--to create a world of thoughts and emotions other can share. We only have to learn to listen." In a... Read More The Last Day of the War Written by Judith Claire Mitchell Eighteen-year-old Yael Weiss reinvents herself as Yale White to work in the YMCA soldiers’ canteens in Paris. Dub Hagopian is the soldier she barely knows whom she follows across the Atlantic. He is also the patriotic child of immigrants living in... Read More Last Orders Written by Graham Swift Four men gather in a London pub. They have taken it upon themselves to carry out the last orders of Jack Dodds, master butcher, and deliver his ashes to the sea. As they drive towards the fulfillment of their mission, their... Read More The Law of Similars Written by Chris Bohjalian In his widely acclaimed, controversial novel, Midwives, Chris Bohjalian described the trial of a midwife who is accused of manslaughter when a home birth goes tragically wrong. In The Law of Similars, Bohjalian weaves a compelling tale around homeopathy, an arena... Read More The Lay of the Land Written by Richard Ford In The Lay of the Land, the author reintroduces readers to Frank Bascombe, the protagonist of his earlier novelsThe Sportswriter and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Independence Day. He is a man of mild aspect and strong, sometimes violent feelings, capable of kindnesses... Read More Learning to Drive Written by Mary Hays A luminous, gently funny novel, Learning to Drive is the story of Charlotte McGuffey, her children, her sisters, and her unfolding relationship with Christian Science, the faith in which she was raised. Just before Christmas one year, Charlotte tells her husband... Read More Leonardo's Swans Written by Karen Essex A Lesson Before Dying Written by Ernest J. Gaines A Lesson Before Dying is about the ways in which people insist on declaring the value of their lives in a time and place in which those lives count for nothing. It is about the ways in which the imprisoned may... Read More Lie in the Dark Written by Dan Fesperman In a city where death from mortars, bombs, and sniper fire has become routine, Inspector Vlado Petric works as a homicide detective. Despite ridicule from friends, who liken him to a plumber fixing leaky faucets in the midst of a flood... Read More Life Before Man Written by Margaret Atwood "Moving flawlessly from wit to pathos and back, Atwood constructs a superb living exhibit in which the artifacts are unique . . . there is ample treasure in this novel." --Chicago Tribune In Margaret Atwood's fourth novel, Life Before Man, Elizabeth... Read More Life Class Written by Pat Barker A haunting tribute to the experience of poet Siegfried Sassoon and others during the Great War, Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy established her as one of the foremost fiction writers of our time, culminating in The Ghost Road, the Booker Prize-winning novel... Read More Life Estates Written by Shelby Hearon Sarah and Harriet, friends since boarding school days, have gone through the rites of passage simultaneously: proms, marriage, childbirth, young motherhood--they even both had boys followed by girls. Now aged fifty-five, they have become widowed in the same year, and the... Read More Light in August Written by William Faulkner Light in August interweaves the stories of several major characters. Lena Grove, orphaned as a young girl and living with her brother’s family, becomes pregnant by a man named Lucas Burch. Burch has gone away, supposedly to look for work, promising... Read More Light Years Written by James Salter Light Years is not so much the story of a marriage (it may not be a story at all, in the familiar sense of that word) as it is a time-lapse portrait of one, the kind of portrait that might have... Read More The Lighthouse Written by P. D. James Combe Island, off the southwestern edge of England, is a beautiful wind-worn place with a dark history of slave trading and piracy. In the present, it has become a highly secure getaway for world leaders and the very rich, and the... Read More The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi Written by St. Francis of Assisi More than a century after his death in 1226, a collection of stories about the life of St. Francis of Assisi was translated from original Latin accounts into Italian and became known as "The Little Flowers." While their form is often... Read More The Little Friend Written by Donna Tartt Harriet Cleve Dufresnes was only six months old when her nine-year-old brother, Robin, was found hanging from the black-tupelo tree in the family’s backyard. Twelve years later, the still-unexplained tragedy holds the Cleve-Dufresnes clan in an inescapable grip. Overcome by guilt... Read More A Little Love Story Written by Roland Merullo Jake Entwhistle waits a year after the sad end of his troubling last relationship to begin dating again. When he meets the beautiful Janet Rossi by accident, the timing seems right to take another chance at romance. Both Janet and Jake... Read More Living a Life that Matters Written by Harold S. Kushner Most of us need to feel that we matter in some way; perhaps this explains the high value placed on titles, corner offices, and even fleeting celebrity. But most of us also need to feel that we are good people. In... Read More Living to Tell the Tale Written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Translated by Edith Grossman With Living to Tell the Tale, Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez offers the first volume of his life story, a tale as rich in humor and fantastic incident as any of his unforgettable novels. It takes the reader from his birth... Read More Lolita Written by Vladimir Nabokov The shocks that Lolita delivers are not solely moral ones. Humbert Humbert kidnaps and seduces (if not rapes) his fourteen-year-old stepdaughter, Dolores Haze; estranges his victim from her family and friends and robs her of her childhood; plots one murder and... Read More The Long Goodbye Written by Raymond Chandler The sixth in the Philip Marlowe series, The Long Goodbye is significant not only as the last book Raymond Chandler wrote but as a personal consummation of craft that brought his detective novels into the realm of distinguished fiction. "The first... Read More Look at Me Written by Jennifer Egan Questions of identity in an age marked by a preoccupation with appearances permeate Look at Me, which takes place in a time in which the most frightful aspects of the virtual revolution have entirely derailed age-old notions of self and identity... Read More The Lord Is My Shepherd Written by Harold S. Kushner Harold Kushner was compelled in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, to offer a book of practical spirituality based on the well-loved Twenty-third Psalm. Having read the prayer at countless funerals and memorial services throughout his life as... Read More Lost Boys Written by James Garbarino The last few years have seen American youth violence reach epidemic proportions, spreading out from urban war zones into apparently peaceful middle-class communities such as Littleton, Colorado and West Paducah, Kentucky. As the haunting images of one school massacre after another... Read More The Lost Father Written by Mona Simpson In The Lost Father Mona Simpson again takes up the story of Ann August, who has begun calling herself Mayan, the name her Egyptian father gave her. Now age twenty-eight and a medical student in New York City, Mayan gives in... Read More Love Written by Toni Morrison Love tells the story of Bill Cosey and the women who love him, fight over him, make him miserable, and finally drive him to his grave. As the novel begins, Mr. Cosey has long-since died under suspicious circumstances, but his memory... Read More Love Among the Ruins Written by Robert Clark It is 1968: one year after the Summer of Love. Bobby Kennedy has just been killed, and the antiwar riots of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago are about to break out. In the midst of this social and political... Read More Love and Louis XIV Written by Antonia Fraser Louis XIV, the highly-feted “Sun King,” was renowned for his political and cultural influence and for raising France to a new level of prominence in seventeenth-century Europe. And yet, as Antonia Fraser keenly describes, he was equally legendary in the domestic... Read More Love and Other Impossible Pursuits Written by Ayelet Waldman Love in the Present Tense Written by Catherine Ryan Hyde For five years Pearl has managed to keep the past from catching up to her and her bright, frail five-year-old son, Leonard. Life has given her every reason to mistrust people, but circumstances force her to trust her neighbor, Mitch, with... Read More Love Invents Us Written by Amy Bloom As an adolescent, Elizabeth Taube is shy and chubby. She escapes her remote parents and the antiseptic atmosphere of her too-perfect Long Island home in books and by stealing from the local five-and-dime. But as she matures she discovers a smoldering... Read More The Love of a Good Woman Written by Alice Munro Time stretches out in some of the stories: a man and a woman look back forty years to the summer they met--the summer, as it turns out, that the true nature of their lives was revealed. In others time is telescoped... Read More The Love Wife Written by Gish Jen The Wong family lives in a lovely old farmhouse in a town outside of Boston. Carnegie, a second-generation Chinese American, has a good job at a high-tech company. Blondie, the perfect embodiment of Midwestern farm-girl looks and New England WASP manners... Read More Love in the Time of Cholera (Movie Tie-in Edition) Written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez In the late 1800s, in a Caribbean port city, a young telegraph operator named Florentino Ariza falls deliriously in love with Fermina Daza, a beautiful student. She is so sheltered that they carry on their romance secretly, through letters and telegrams... Read More Love in the Time of Cholera Written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez In the late 1800s, in a Caribbean port city, a young telegraph operator named Florentino Ariza falls deliriously in love with Fermina Daza, a beautiful student. She is so sheltered that they carry on their romance secretly, through letters and telegrams... Read More Loving Graham Greene Written by Gloria Emerson Lying Awake Written by Mark Salzman In a Carmelite monastery outside present-day Los Angeles, life goes on in a manner virtually unchanged for centuries. Sister John of the Cross has spent years there in the service of God. And there, she alone experiences visions of such dazzling... Read More The Maltese Falcon Written by Dashiell Hammett Published in 1930, The Maltese Falcon was Dashiell Hammett's third novel in two years. Here he creates a new detective, Sam Spade. When the intriguing Miss Wonderly appears in his office and asks him to tail a fellow named Floyd Thursby... Read More The Map of Love Written by Ahdaf Soueif Lady Anna Winterbourne, an English widow, arrives in British-occupied Cairo in 1900. Fascinated by Egyptian culture, Anna bridles at the prejudices and parochial attitudes of the colonial community and follows her sense of curiosity to places few Europeans venture. During one... Read More A Map of the World Written by Jane Hamilton In the tradition of The Good Mother by Sue Miller and Before and After by Rosellen Brown, A Map of the World is the riveting story of how a single mistake can forever change the lives of everyone involved--in ways that... Read More Maps for Lost Lovers Written by Nadeem Aslam The novel’s setting is a town known only by the name given it by its Asian-born residents: Dasht-e-Tanhaii, or “Desert of Loneliness.” Its Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs live at odds with one another, united only by their suspicion of the affluent... Read More Marie Antoinette Written by Antonia Fraser France’s beleaguered Queen, Marie Antoinette, wrongly accused of uttering the infamous “Let them eat cake,” was even before her death the subject of ridicule and curiosity; she has since been the object of debate and speculation and the fascination so often... Read More The Mark of the Angel Written by Nancy Huston In 1957, a young German girl arrives in Paris, a city still recovering from World War II and on the brink of another period of violence and intolerance fomented by escalating tensions between France and Algeria. Saffie, however, is indifferent to... Read More Martha Peake Written by Patrick McGrath Summoned to the gloomy, decaying Drogo Hall by his dying uncle, William, Ambrose Tree listens to William’s disjointed tale of Harry Peake, a poet and performer known as the “Cripplegate Monster.” Harry, his back broken in a fire that took the... Read More Martin Dressler Written by Steven Millhauser It is the late nineteenth-century, "when on any streetcorner in America you might see some ordinary-looking citizen who was destined to invent a new kind of bottlecap or tin can, start a chain of five-cent stores, sell a faster and better... Read More Mating Written by Norman Rush Set in Botswana in the early 1980s, Mating is narrated by an American graduate student in anthropology who feels a compulsion to “tell everything,” to record everything that happens to her. The result is a sprawling, complex, confessional narrative that explores... Read More Matrimony Written by Joshua Henkin It's 1987, and Julian Wainwright, aspiring writer and waspy son of New York City old money, meets beautiful, Jewish Mia Mendelsohn in the laundry room at Graymont College. So begins a relationship that spans twenty years, as it takes Julian and... Read More The Matter Is Life Written by J. California Cooper From her first collection of short stories, A Piece of Mine, to the recently published The Future Has a Past, J. California Cooper has introduced an appealing and diverse cast of characters struggling to make the right choices and find happiness... Read More Me and Shakespeare Written by Herman Gollob The compelling story of how a distinguished editor's postretirement passion for the the works of history's greatest literary genius became an inspiring intellectual and spiritual adventure. Memoirs of a Geisha Written by Arthur Golden The strikingly pretty child of an impoverished fishing family, Chiyo is taken to faraway Kyoto and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house where she is renamed Sayuri. Initially reluctant, Sayuri must finally invent and cultivate an image of herself... Read More Memoirs of a Geisha Written by Arthur Golden The strikingly pretty child of an impoverished fishing family, Chiyo is taken to faraway Kyoto and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house where she is renamed Sayuri. Initially reluctant, Sayuri must finally invent and cultivate an image of herself... Read More Memories of My Melancholy Whores Written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Translated by Edith Grossman On the eve of his ninetieth birthday, the unnamed narrator of Memories of My Melancholy Whores is seized by an inspiration: to give himself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin. An undistinguished journalist and author... Read More Men in the Off Hours Written by Anne Carson In the poems and prose pieces of Men in the Off Hours, Anne Carson deftly deploys her signature mixture of opposites--the classical and the modern, cinema and print, narrative and verse. Reinventing figures as diverse as Oedipus, Emily Dickinson and Audubon... Read More A Mercy Written by Toni Morrison Set in the 1680s, in the early stages of the slave trade, A Mercy gives voice to a remarkable group of characters: Jacob, an Anglo-Dutch farmer, trader, and lender; his wife, Rebekka, newly arrived from England; their servant woman, the Native... Read More Midaq Alley Written by Naguib Mahfouz Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil Written by John Berendt Never before in the history of publishing has a fiction or non-fiction book spent as much time on The New York Times Bestseller List as Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. With 2.5 million copies in print, publication in... Read More Midwives Written by Chris Bohjalian On an icy winter night of 1981 in the rustic community of Reddington, Vermont, seasoned midwife Sibyl Danforth is forced to make a life-or-death decision that will change her world forever. Trapped by the weather in an isolated farmhouse, cut off... Read More A Million Little Pieces Written by James Frey James Frey wakes up with a broken nose, missing teeth, a hole in his cheek, and eyes so swollen he can hardly open them. His clothes are "covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood" [p. 1]... Read More A Million Nightingales Written by Susan Straight Born on a sugarcane plantation in southern Louisiana, Moinette is the daughter of Marie-Thérèse, an African-born slave, and a white man, a visiting sugar broker who was given Marie-Thérèse as “a gift for one week, a nighttime present” [p. 5]. Moinette... Read More The Ministry of Special Cases Written by Nathan Englander Kaddish Poznan grew up as an hijo de puta among the Jewish pimps, whores, and gangsters of Buenos Aires who called themselves the Society of the Benevolent Self. His mother was a prostitute, his father unknown, and to make a living... Read More The Miracle at Speedy Motors Written by Alexander Mccall Smith The Miracle at Speedy Motors begins as Mma Ramotswe's invaluable but sometimes prickly assistant, Grace Makutsi, opens an unsigned letter. Its message is threatening, and there will be more troubling messages to follow. The agency undertakes the search for the identity... Read More The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint Written by Brady Udall At the beginning of this high-spirited and inexhaustibly inventive novel of the American West, a seven-year-old boy on an Apache Indian reservation has his head run over by a mail truck. Though his skull is crushed, Edgar miraculously survives the accident... Read More Miramar Written by Naguib Mahfouz Misconceptions Written by Naomi Wolf In The Beauty Myth the fearless Naomi Wolf revolutionized the way we think about beauty. In Misconceptions, she demythologizes motherhood and reveals the dangers of common assumptions about childbirth. With uncompromising honesty she describes how hormones eroded her sense of independence... Read More The Mistress of Spices Written by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni In The Mistress of Spices, Divakaruni tells the story of Tilo, a young woman born in another time, in a faraway place, who is trained in the ancient art of spices and ordained as a mistress charged with special powers. Once... Read More The Moor's Last Sigh Written by Salman Rushdie The Moor lives out a unique fate; he is doomed to go through his life at double-speed. Aged thirty-six, but with the physique of a seventy-two-year-old, he narrates the fantastic story of his life within a family who exemplify the glorious... Read More Moral Disorder and Other Stories Written by Margaret Atwood One of our best-loved storytellers, Margaret Atwood writes with a wry wit and a keen understanding of human nature. In Moral Disorder, she has created a series of interconnected stories that illuminate a lifetime of emotions, crossroads, and ironic fates. From... Read More Morality for Beautiful Girls Written by Alexander Mccall Smith At the end of Tears for the Giraffe, the previous novel in the series, Precious Ramotswe is engaged to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, the No 1. Ladies’ Detective Agency is firmly established, and all seems to be well. But now, as Morality... Read More Mortals Written by Norman Rush Ray Finch is a forty-eight-year-old American who teaches literature in a boarding school in Botswana. He is ardently in love with Iris, his wife of seventeen years—yet he worries that she is slipping away from him. Iris’s dissatisfaction with life in... Read More Morvern Callar Written by Alan Warner MotherKind Written by Jayne Anne Phillips At thirty-one, Kate Tateman is accustomed to a life of solitude and freedom, writing and travel. When the novel opens, she has bought a house with Matt, a doctor who is going through a divorce. Kate is pregnant with Matt's child... Read More Motherless Brooklyn Written by Jonathan Lethem In a wonderfully original twist on the classic hard-boiled detective novel, Lethem presents a narrator with Tourette's Syndrome and gives his unusual hero a way with words that at first intrigues and then totally captivates the reader. Even among the orphan... Read More Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch Written by Dai Sijie For this second novel, Dai Sijie has invented a most fantastic, yet profoundly enlightening, quest set in modern China. Mr. Muo is a forty-year-old scholar and devotee of Freud who leaves France and returns to his native China to free his... Read More Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician Written by Daniel Wallace A novel that is both an investigation of magic and magical itself, Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician asks readers to walk a tightrope between truth and illusion, reality and imagination. There is no safety net, and the occasional fall turns... Read More The Murder Room Written by P. D. James The privately owned Dupayne Museum, dedicated to the history of England between the world wars, is going to close unless all three trustees agree to keep it in business. When the sole dissenting trustee, psychiatrist Neville Dupayne, is found burned alive... Read More Musicophilia Written by Oliver Sacks Music soothes us and stimulates us, moves us to dance with abandon or settle down in quiet contemplation. It is part of every culture and touches people from infancy to old age. Our multifarious psychological, emotional, and physical responses to music... Read More My Antonia Written by Willa Cather Perhaps the most popular of Cather's novels, My Antonia is at once the intimate portrait of an American heroine, an elegy for a vanished frontier, and the story of an unconsummated love affair. Jim Burden, the narrator, meets Antonia Shimerda as a child on... Read More My Ears Are Bent Written by Joseph Mitchell Joseph Mitchell never stopped seeing himself as a reporter. His writing has the virtues of all great journalism: self-effacement, close observation, a reverence for facts, and a masterful use of detail. Factor in his supple, muscular sentences, as functional in appearance... Read More My Life as a Fake Written by Peter Carey Bob McCorkle, an uneducated, working-class bard, takes the Australian literary world by storm. Published in a trendy literary journal, his poetry displays an artistry, fire, and erudition rarely encountered, and the fact, revealed by his sister, that McCorkle tragically died at... Read More My Life, Starring Dara Falcon Written by Ann Beattie Jean is a young woman whose parents died in a plane crash when she was six. Raised by a timid aunt whose yearly gambling vacations wiped out Jean's inheritance--the money paid to victims' families by the airline--Jean meets Bob Warner in college... Read More My Own Country Written by Abraham Verghese In My Own Country, Abraham Verghese, a young Indian doctor born and educated in Ethiopia, tells of the four years he spent in a Tennessee town as a specialist in infectious diseases. His story begins in 1985, when he arrives in... Read More Mysteries of the Middle Ages Written by Thomas Cahill It's been more than a decade since the tremendously successful publication of How the Irish Saved Civilization, the first book in Thomas Cahill's illuminating series. Mysteries of the Middle Ages owes much to that volume on medieval Irish history, in many... Read More The Navigator of New York Written by Wayne Johnston Netherland Written by Joseph O'Neill Netherland is the mesmerizing story of a European man living in New York City after 9/11, with two troubled loves—that for his wife, and that for his adopted country. Told in a lyrical voice, the story of his journey involves an... Read More Never Let Me Go Written by Kazuo Ishiguro A thirty-one-year-old woman named Kathy narrates this haunting tale, drawing the reader gradually into her recollections of her life at Hailsham, the idyllic boarding school where she grew up. She and her best friends, Ruth and Tommy, were encouraged by their... Read More New England White Written by Stephen L. Carter Lemaster Carlyle, the president of a prestigious university, and his wife, Julia, a deputy dean at the university's divinity school, are driving home from a fund-raising dinner when a dangerous curve on a snowy road sends them careening into a ditch... Read More Niccolo Rising Written by Dorothy Dunnett Bruges, 1460. Street smart, brilliant at figures, adept at the subtleties of diplomacy and the well-timed untruth, Dunnett's hero rises from wastrel to prodigy in a breathless adventure that wins him the hand of the most powerful woman in Bruges--and the... Read More Nigger Written by Randall Kennedy In Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy grapples with a key term in the lexicon of race relations. He traces the history of the word nigger, showing that it has been primarily employed... Read More Night Falls Fast Written by Kay Redfield Jamison Kay Redfield Jamison is one of the world's leading authorities on the subject of mood disorders and suicide. As she revealed in her bestselling memoir, An Unquiet Mind, she has suffered for much of her life with manic depression, and at... Read More No Country for Old Men Written by Cormac McCarthy When Llewellyn Moss stumbles upon a grisly murder scene in the desert while hunting antelope near the Rio Grande river, he finds himself at a crossroads. Walk away and return to his job as a welder or take the $2 million... Read More No Country for Old Men (Movie Tie In Edition) Written by Cormac McCarthy When Llewellyn Moss stumbles upon a grisly murder scene in the desert while hunting antelope near the Rio Grande river, he finds himself at a crossroads. Walk away and return to his job as a welder or take the $2 million... Read More No Great Mischief Written by Alistair MacLeod In 1779, 55-year-old Calum Ruadh, or the red Calum MacDonald, left the Scottish Highlands with his second wife, their twelve children, and their faithful dog. He arrived on Cape Breton a widower and staked his claim to land in the New... Read More The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (Movie Tie-in Edition) Written by Alexander Mccall Smith When Precious Ramotswe decides to use the money her beloved father left her to open the first ever Ladies’ Detective Agency in Botswana, everyone is skeptical. “Can women be detectives?” asks the bank’s lawyer. Mma Ramotswe herself feels unsure of her... Read More The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Written by Alexander Mccall Smith When Precious Ramotswe decides to use the money her beloved father left her to open the first ever Ladies’ Detective Agency in Botswana, everyone is skeptical. “Can women be detectives?” asks the bank’s lawyer. Mma Ramotswe herself feels unsure of her... Read More Nobody's Fool Written by Richard Russo Richard Russo, in his own words: Q: Some critics have described the characters in your latest novel as losers. What would you say to them? A: It depends on what you mean. Is their luck going to change? No. Are they going to become... Read More Norwegian Wood Written by Haruki Murakami Set in Tokyo in the late sixties, Norwegian Wood explores the life of Toru Watanabe, a solitary and anguished young student, as he struggles to find himself, to recover from the suicide of his best friend, and to choose between the... Read More Not a Day Goes By Written by E. Lynn Harris John Basil Henderson has moved from gridiron to a gig as a broadcaster with ESPN, to a partnership in XJI (X Jocks, Inc.), one of the fastest-growing sports management agencies in the country. He has a New York City penthouse, a... Read More Nothing to Be Frightened Of Written by Julian Barnes Montaigne suggested that we keep the thought of death always before us. And Julian Barnes, in this elegant, probing, unflinchingly honest meditation on death and the fear of death, seems to have followed Montaigne's advice, albeit involuntarily. Barnes's fear of death... Read More Ocean of Words Written by Ha Jin The central characters in the stories of Ocean of Words are men serving in the People's Army on the northern border with Russia in the 1970s, as China and Russia are poised for war. Whether dealing with personal crises or guarding... Read More Old School Written by Tobias Wolff Old School takes place at a prestigious private school for boys in the academic year of 1960—1961. The narrator, a scholarship boy whose mother has died, is determined to keep his classmates from knowing anything about his family or his background... Read More On Chesil Beach Written by Ian McEwan Unfolding with the mesmerizing, deeply human storytelling that has made Ian McEwan one of the most beloved authors of his generation, On Chesil Beach captures one night and two lifetimes, wound into a stunning turning point. In taut yet poignantly written... Read More On Green Dolphin Street Written by Sebastian Faulks Forty-year-old Mary van der Linden is a British diplomat’s wife living in Washington, D.C., entertaining at Embassy parties, happily absorbed with love for her husband Charlie and her two children. Charlie is bored and unhappy in his job and dangerously dependent... Read More One Last Look Written by Susanna Moore Written in the form of diary entries and spanning the years 1836—1843, One Last Look tells the story of Lady Eleanor, her sister Harriet, and her brother Henry, as they plunge into the utterly un-British world of India. Henry, the newly... Read More One Step Behind Written by Henning Mankell Things are not going well for Inspector Kurt Wallander. Driving east from Ystad, Sweden, early one morning, he falls asleep at the wheel and narrowly avoids a head-on collision with a truck. His fatigue has become constant. A visit to the... Read More Only Twice I've Wished for Heaven Written by Dawn Turner Trice Tempestt Rosa Saville is a smart, adventurous 11-year-old when her family moves from the familiar streets of Chicago's South Side to Lakeland, a luxurious gated haven for the city's leading black professionals. For her father, a teacher at Lakeland's much-touted "academy,"... Read More Open Secrets Written by Alice Munro The central characters in the stories are all women: an emotionally adventurous librarian; a young woman kidnapped by Albanian tribesmen in the 1920s; a farmer's wife who yearns for gentility; a young born-again Christian whose unresolved feelings of love and anger... Read More Oryx and Crake Written by Margaret Atwood The narrator of Atwood’s riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He... Read More The Other Written by David Guterson Neil Countryman, the son of a carpenter, is a high school English teacher, a happily married father of two, and an aspiring writer. As a teenager, he hiked the uncharted wilderness of the North Cascades with his friend, John William Barry... Read More Our Guys Written by Bernard Lefkowitz Glen Ridge, New Jersey: In March 1989, thirteen teenage boys lured a retarded girl into a basement where four of them gang-raped her while several others looked on. The boys were the most popular athletes in high school. And although rumors of the rape began quickly... Read More Our Lady of the Forest Written by David Guterson Ann Holmes seems an unlikely candidate for revelation. A sixteen-year-old runaway, she is an itinerant mushroom picker who lives in a tent in a damp, depressed lumber town in Washington State. But on a November afternoon, in the foggy woods of... Read More Our Story Begins Written by Tobias Wolff Our Story Begins brings together ten dazzling new stories and twenty-one classics by Tobias Wolff. Written over the course of thirty years, the stories portray soldiers and academics fraught with doubts about their place in the world; husbands and wives struggling... Read More Out Written by Natsuo Kirino In the dreary, exhausting hours of the nightshift at a boxed-lunch factory, four women have formed a friendship of sorts. They work side by side and chat briefly each night, always carefully guarding their troubling thoughts and personal worries. When Yayoi... Read More The Outside World Written by Tova Mirvis Naomi and Joel Miller, who live a liberal Orthodox life in the suburbs of New Jersey, are unsettled when their son, Bryan, returns from a year at a yeshiva in Israel wearing a black hat and insisting that they call him... Read More Palace Council Written by Stephen L. Carter When Eddie Wesley, a young writer living in Harlem, publishes his first short story in The Saturday Evening Post, he becomes an overnight celebrity. He is soon attending Harlem's most exclusive gatherings, including the engagement party for Aurelia Treene and Kevin... Read More Palace of Desire Written by Naguib Mahfouz The Palace of Illusions Written by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Through the tumultuous life of Panchaali, daughter of King Drupad and wife to five husbands who seek to reclaim their birthright, bestselling novelist Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni gives voice to a bold and sensuous retelling of captivating stories from the Mahabharat. Woven... Read More Palace Walk Written by Naguib Mahfouz A Palestine Affair Written by Jonathan Wilson When Mark Bloomberg, a disillusioned London painter, arrives in Palestine, he and his American wife Joyce accidentally witness the murder of a prominent Orthodox Jew in their garden. Joyce, an ardent Zionist, is drawn into an affair with the British policeman... Read More A Partisan's Daughter Written by Louis de Bernières From the acclaimed author of Corelli's Mandolin and Birds Without Wings comes an intimate new novel, a love story at once raw and sweetly funny, wry and heartbreakingly sad. He's Chris: bored, lonely, and trapped in a loveless, sexless marriage. In his... Read More Pawn in Frankincense Written by Dorothy Dunnett Fourth in the legendary Lymond Chronicles Lymond cuts a desperate path across the Ottoman Empire of Suleiman the Magnificent in search of a kidnapped child, although finding that child may place the Scots adventurer irrevocably in the power of his enemies. What ensues... Read More Peace Written by Richard Bausch Set in Italy in the harsh winter of 1944, Peace tells the story of three American soldiers—Asch, Joyner, and Marson—who struggle to stay alive in the country near Cassino, through brutal weather, uncertain of their mission, their location, or their moral... Read More Pearl Written by Mary Gordon It is Christmas night, 1998, when Maria Meyers receives a bizarre phone call from the State Department: her daughter, Pearl, studying abroad in Dublin, has chained herself to the flagpole outside the American embassy and has not eaten in six weeks... Read More Perfume Written by Patrick Suskind The novel's protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, begins and ends his life at the Cimetière des Innocents. But in the meantime, a most unusual—and unbelievable—life unfolds. Born with no odor of his own, Grenouille soon develops a sense of smell capable of almost... Read More Personal History Written by Katharine Graham This is the story of a woman's life framed against, and actively involved in, Washington's changing political culture over four decades. It is also the story of The Washington Post, an ailing newspaper acquired by Katharine Graham's father at public auction... Read More The Piano Tuner Written by Daniel Mason When Edgar Drake is summoned to the British War Office and asked to tune an eccentric major’s 1840 Erard grand piano in the jungles of Burma, he is both confused and intrigued. The year is 1886, and the British Empire is... Read More A Piece of Mine Written by J. California Cooper From her first collection of short stories, A Piece of Mine, to the recently published The Future Has a Past, J. California Cooper has introduced an appealing and diverse cast of characters struggling to make the right choices and find happiness... Read More Plainsong Written by Kent Haruf In the small town of Holt, Tom Guthrie, a high school teacher, fights to keep his life together and to raise his two boys after their depressed mother first retreats into her bedroom, and then moves away to her sister's house... Read More Plainwater Written by Anne Carson The poetry and prose collected in Plainwater--a present-day interview with a seventh-century B.C. poet, miniature lectures on topics as varied as orchids and Franz Kafka's doomed sister Ottla, an extended exploration of "the anthropology of water" that includes a set of... Read More Platform Written by Michel Houellebecq Michel Renault is a civil servant, forty years old and numb to the world. When his father is murdered Michel’s response is a contemptuous sneer. He has no lover, no close friends, and almost no real interest in either his own... Read More The Plot Against America Written by Philip Roth Roth’s richly imagined novel begins in 1940, with the landslide election of Lindbergh, who blamed the Jews for pushing America toward war with Nazi Germany. Lindbergh’s admiration of Hitler and his openly anti-Semitic speeches cause increasing turmoil in the Roth household... Read More Possession Written by A.S. Byatt Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, two rather unfulfilled young literary scholars, unexpectedly become figures of romance as they discover a surprising link between the two poets on whom they are authorities. Byatt deftly plays with literary genres--Romantic quest, campus satire, detective... Read More The Post-War Dream Written by Mitch Cullin Sixty-eight-year-old Hollis and his wife, Debra, have settled into their golden years in a gated community outside of Tucson, Arizona. Although they are devoted to each other, events that took place decades earlier, when Hollis fought in the Korean War, have... Read More Posterity Written by Dorie McCullough Lawson The letter-writers in this collection are household names: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, William Carlos Williams, Anne Bradstreet, Nelson Rockefeller, Frederick Law Olmsted…on and on, the list reads like a who’s who of America’s political and cultural past. But in addition to... Read More Practicing Written by Glenn Kurtz In Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music, Glenn Kurtz takes us on a journey of hope, loss, and surprising return to music. Telling the story of his career as a classical guitarist—from his first lessons at the age of eight to... Read More Precious (Push Movie Tie-in Edition) Written by Sapphire "Don't nobody want me. Don't nobody need me. I know who I am... Ugly black grease to be wipe away, punish, kilt, changed, finded a job for"[p. 31]. This is the voice of Precious Jones, a viciously abused Harlem girl. At... Read More Pride of Carthage Written by David Anthony Durham Sickened by Rome’s insatiable appetite for world domination and fueled by his late father’s determination to bring the Italian empire to its knees, Hannibal Barca of Carthage recruits a multinational war machine and initiates one of the most audacious assaults in... Read More The Primal Teen Written by Barbara Strauch Barbara Strauch does an absolutely compelling job of helping us understand our children–and ourselves The Primal Teen is the first book to provide a solid, scientific explanation of the mysterious, infuriating, and downright weird behavior of teenagers. Written by the health and... Read More The Prince of Frogtown Written by Rick Bragg In The Prince of Frogtown, Rick Bragg explores the life of his father, a man who occupied only a few pages in his previous books "but lived between every line" [p. 13]. The largely absent Charles Bragg occupied only a few... Read More A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies Written by Ellen Cooney Charlotte Heath has finally recovered from the mysterious illness that kept her bedridden for nearly a year. She sets out on a horse-drawn sleigh to surprise her husband Hays by joining him at a family wake. But Charlotte is the one... Read More The Professor's House Written by Willa Cather The Professor's House was published in 1925, only seven years after My Antonia, but it is set in an America that is at least a half-century removed from its frontier past, an America that sells off its heritage while buying up... Read More Property Written by Valerie Martin The time is the 1840s; the place is the American South; a voice is speaking to us, with wry wit and distaste, of the appalling scene she is witnessing through a spy glass. “It never ends,” Manon Gaudet tells us [p... Read More Purple Hibiscus Written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Set in Enugu, Nigeria, on the eve of a military coup, Purple Hibiscus tells the story of fifteen-year-old Kambili and her painful awakening from an abusive home life to the beginnings of personal freedom. Kambili and her brother Jaja grow up... Read More The Pursuit of Alice Thrift Written by Elinor Lipman Alice Thrift, a brilliant, Harvard-educated intern at a Boston hospital, is well aware of her shortcomings: “I wasn’t one of those attractive doctors with a stethoscope draped around her shoulders and a red silk blouse under her lab coat. I was... Read More Push Written by Sapphire "Don't nobody want me. Don't nobody need me. I know who I am... Ugly black grease to be wipe away, punish, kilt, changed, finded a job for"[p. 31]. This is the voice of Precious Jones, a viciously abused Harlem girl. At... Read More Queen of Dreams Written by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Rakhi, a young painter and single mother, is struggling to come to terms with her relationship with ex-husband Sonny, a hip Bay Area DJ, and with her dream-teller mother, who has rarely spoken about her past or her native India. Rakhi has... Read More Queens' Play Written by Dorothy Dunnett Second in the legendary Lymond Chronicles. Once an accused traitor, now a valued--if reluctant--agent of Scottish diplomacy, Lymond is sent to France, where a very young Mary Queen of Scots is sorely in need of his protection. For although the child is... Read More Race of Scorpions Written by Dorothy Dunnett At the age of 21, Nicholas finds himself in limbo. His beloved wife has died, his stepchildren have locked him out of the family business, and his private army is the target of multiple conspiracies. And both contenders for the throne... Read More The Rain Before It Falls Written by Jonathan Coe The Rain Before It Falls is a complex and richly layered novel. It is filled with stories within stories, and the novel itself consists largely of written reproductions of spoken narrations, which are themselves elaborate descriptions of photographs. In The Rain... Read More Rapture Written by Susan Minot In Susan Minot's provocative new novel, Rapture, the tumultuous rise and fall of a romantic relationship provides the context for the exploration of the chasm between the experience of the mind and the experience of the body. Ex-lovers Kay Bailey and... Read More The Reader Written by Bernhard Schlink Michael Berg is fifteen and suffering from hepatitis. When he gets sick in the street one day on his way home from school, a woman brings him into her apartment and helps him to wash up. Later, he visits the woman... Read More The Reader (Movie Tie-in Edition) Written by Bernhard Schlink Michael Berg is fifteen and suffering from hepatitis. When he gets sick in the street one day on his way home from school, a woman brings him into her apartment and helps him to wash up. Later, he visits the woman... Read More Reading in the Dark Written by Seamus Deane Reading in the Dark's unnamed narrator looks back on his childhood and adolescence in the 1940s and 50s in the Bogside neighborhood of Derry, a troubled town on the border of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Members of the boy's family... Read More A Recipe for Bees Written by Gail Anderson-Dargatz At eighteen, Augusta leaves her family farm and her widowed father to marry Karl Olsen, a taciturn thirty-year-old farmer. On their forty-eighth anniversary, as they wait for news about their son-in-law's critical surgery, Augusta is swept by memories of the past... Read More Red Azalea Written by Anchee Min In Red Azalea, Anchee Min remembers with clarity and poignancy growing up during China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). She experienced abject poverty, brutal physical hardship, first love, and loss, all during this extraordinary and terrifying period of China’s history. Despite... Read More Red Water Written by Judith Freeman Set in the harsh high-desert landscape of Utah in the 1870s, Red Water tells the story of John D. Lee, a Mormon elder and frontiersman, a man who wed nineteen women and was involved in the killing of more than one... Read More A Regular Guy Written by Mona Simpson Tom Owens is an ex-hippie entrepreneur whose biotechnology firm, Genesis, has made him a multi-millionaire while still a young man. Jane is the daughter he has never met because when she was conceived he was synthesizing the protein that was to... Read More Remainder Written by Tom McCarthy When the unnamed narrator of Remainder is given eight and a half million pounds in a settlement for an accident that left him in a coma for several months, he is at first uncertain how to spend the money. The conventional... Read More Remembering Babylon Written by David Malouf In the case of Remembering Babylon, the myth is that of the settling of Australia and of the fateful contact between white Europeans and black aborigines. That contact--and all its tragic repercussions and missed possibilities--is represented by the sudden appearance, in... Read More Resistance Written by Owen Sheers In a remote and rugged Welsh valley in 1944, in the wake of a German invasion, all the men have disappeared overnight, apparently to join the underground resistance. Their abandoned wives, a tiny group of farm women, are soon trapped in... Read More Reunion Written by Alan Lightman Charles is a middle-aged college English professor who is obsessed with the passions of others, but who lives a modest, routine life. On a whim, Charles decides to attend his college reunion, where he meets with a cast of former classmates... Read More Revolutionary Road Written by Richard Yates Nearly fifty years have passed since Richard Yates published Revolutionary Road, a morally probing and brilliantly crafted novel that remains as unsettling today as when it first appeared. Set largely in the pleasant confines of suburban Connecticut and the office-drone world... Read More Revolutionary Road (Movie Tie-in Edition) Written by Richard Yates Nearly fifty years have passed since Richard Yates published Revolutionary Road, a morally probing and brilliantly crafted novel that remains as unsettling today as when it first appeared. Set largely in the pleasant confines of suburban Connecticut and the office-drone world... Read More The Right Attitude to Rain Written by Alexander Mccall Smith Isabel’s insatiable interest is roused when she observes a couple emerge from their illegally parked and very expensive car on an Edinburgh street. The man’s face is contorted with Bell’s palsy, while the much younger woman is a fresh-faced beauty. Moments... Read More The Ringed Castle Written by Dorothy Dunnett Fifth in the legendary Lymond Chronicles Between Mary Tudor's England and the Russia of Ivan the Terrible lies a vast distance indeed, but forces within the Tudor court impel Lymond to Muscovy, where he becomes advisor and general to the half-mad Tsar... Read More The River of Doubt Written by Candice Millard “If it is necessary for me to leave my bones in South America, I am quite ready to do so.” Those words, written by Theodore Roosevelt before he embarked on the most challenging expedition of his life, nearly became prophecy. Determined... Read More The Road from Coorain Written by Jill Ker Conway Conway recounts the successive phases of her early life: her childhood on a remote sheep station, her teenage years in suburban Sydney, her education at the University of Sydney, and her decision to become a historian and to leave Australia for... Read More The Road (Movie Tie-in Edition 2008) Written by Cormac McCarthy Set in the smoking ashes of a postapocalyptic America, Cormac McCarthy's The Road tells the story of a man and his son's journey toward the sea and an uncertain salvation. The world they pass through is a ghastly vision of scorched... Read More The Road Written by Cormac McCarthy Set in the smoking ashes of a postapocalyptic America, Cormac McCarthy's The Road tells the story of a man and his son's journey toward the sea and an uncertain salvation. The world they pass through is a ghastly vision of scorched... Read More The Robber Bride Written by Margaret Atwood Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride is inspired by "The Robber Bridegroom," a wonderfully grisly tale from the Brothers Grimm in which an evil groom lures three maidens into his lair and devours them, one by one. But in her version, Atwood... Read More The Rope Walk Written by Carrie Brown The Rope Walk is a luminous coming-of-age story that unfolds over a crucial summer in the life of a young New England girl. At her tenth birthday party, Alice meets two people unlike any she's ever known: Theo, a mixed-race New... Read More The Rule of Saint Benedict Written by St. Benedict St. Benedict, the sixth-century father of Western monasticism, set down what quickly became the most famous and enduring guide for those in search of spiritual fulfillment through life in community. Though still consulted by monks, priests, and nuns today, The Rule... Read More Rules of the Wild Written by Francesca Marciano Rules of the Wild tells the dramatic tale of Esmé, a young Italian woman torn between two cultures and two lovers. After the death of her beloved father, feeling estranged from her own roots in the hyper-civilized society of Naples, Esmé... Read More Runaway Written by Alice Munro The runaway of the title story is a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband. In “Passion,” a country girl working at a resort hotel emerges into the larger world and discovers in... Read More Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea Written by Thomas Cahill “Whatever we experience in our day, whatever we hope to learn, whatever we most desire, whatever we set out to find, we see that the Greeks have been there before us, and we meet them on their way back.” [p. 264]... Read More Samaritan Written by Richard Price After his lucrative television writing career comes to an abrupt end, ex-high school teacher Ray Mitchell returns to the New Jersey city of his birth—to rethink his life, reconnect with his teenage daughter, and to spread the wealth on the housing... Read More Sap Rising Written by Christine Lincoln Lincoln captures and renders eloquently crucial emotional moments in the lives of each of her characters: Ebbie, the young woman desperately wanting to want the life she is expected to lead, yet compelled by her own inner spirit to escape it... Read More Saturday Written by Ian McEwan Henry Perowne, a successful neurosurgeon, awakens in the dark early hours of a Saturday morning in February 2003 to see a jet crossing the London sky in a trail of fire. In the wake of the terrorist attacks on Manhattan, the... Read More Saul and Patsy Written by Charles Baxter Patsy Carlson and Saul Bernstein, both easterners, have settled down in Five Oaks, Michigan, where Saul is a high school teacher and Patsy works in a bank. Soon they have a baby named Mary Esther, whose arrival interrupts the fine, comfortable... Read More Scales of Gold Written by Dorothy Dunnett The year 1464 finds Nicholas back in Venice. Plagued by enemies bent on dissolving his assets and smearing his character, he sets sail for Africa, legendary location of the Fountain of Youth, home to a descendant of Sheba and Solomon, and... Read More Schoolgirls Written by Peggy Orenstein The Sea Written by John Banville In this hypnotic tour de force of mood, language, and psychological revelation, the Irish novelist tells the story of a bereaved man desperately sorting through the strands of his memory—the memories of his recent loss and those of the losses that... Read More The Second Death of Unica Aveyano Written by Ernesto Mestre-Reed It is April 2000, the week before Elián González will be taken from his Miami relatives back to Cuba. Única Aveyano, recently diagnosed with cancer, has just made up her mind to climb to the rooftop of her nursing home. She... Read More Secondhand World Written by Katherine Min Isadora Myung Hee Sohn—Isa—has just spent ninety-five days in a pediatric burn unit in Albany, New York, recovering from the fire that burned her house and killed her parents. Moving back in time, Secondhand World casts a devastating spell, revealing the... Read More The Secret Between Us Written by Barbara Delinsky The Secret History Written by Donna Tartt The Secret of Lost Things Written by Sheridan Hay Eighteen years old and completely alone, Rosemary arrives in New York from Tasmania with little other than her love of books and an eagerness to explore the city. Taking a job at a vast, chaotic emporium of used and rare books... Read More The Senator's Wife Written by Sue Miller Meri is thirty-seven, newly married, and newly pregnant, standing on the cusp of her life as a wife and mother, and recognizing with some terror the gap between reality and expectation. Delia, her neighbor in the adjoining New England town house... Read More The Shadow Man Written by Mary Gordon "My father died when I was seven years old. I've always thought that was the most important thing anyone could know about me," writes Mary Gordon, and for many years the beloved, romantic image of her father continued to define her... Read More Sheer Abandon Written by Penny Vincenzi Shiksa Goddess Written by Wendy Wasserstein Based in part on a To Do list she composed when she turned forty, the essays in Shiksa Goddess range from the state of the arts to the state of the author’s eating habits, from a spoof on New York real... Read More The Short History of a Prince Written by Jane Hamilton The moving story of the torments of sexuality and the redemptive power of family and friendship, The Short History of a Prince is the story of Walter McCloud, a boy with dreams unlike most. Introduced as a child to the genius... Read More Shot in the Heart Written by Mikal Gilmore Gary Gilmore, the infamous murderer immortalized by Norman Mailer in The Executioner's Song, campaigned for his own death and was executed by firing squad in 1977. Writer Mikal Gilmore is his younger brother. In Shot in the Heart, he tells the... Read More The Sirens of Baghdad Written by Yasmina Khadra Translated by John Cullen The Sirens of Baghdad is the story of one young man's descent into hell—his journey from innocence to despair, from a peaceful life in a sleepy village to a rage for vengeance in the most violent city in the world. The... Read More Sister of My Heart Written by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni In Sister of My Heart, Divakaruni tells the moving story of two cousins, Sudha and Anju Chatterjee. Born twelve hours apart in the same house, the women consider themselves twins, and from a very early age get everything they need from... Read More The Sister Written by Poppy Adams Sleeping at the Starlite Motel Written by Bailey White Bailey White shares her native south Georgia with her readers through a series of unforgettable incidents and characters. There are her cousin Ralph, a model of industrious decorum who goes off on a downward spiral of debauchery after eating an unaccustomed... Read More Slow Emergencies Written by Nancy Huston Lin Lhomond and her husband, Derek, a philosophy professor at a small New England college, revel in their first child, Angela. Changing Angela's diapers, walking the carriage in the park, and playing endless games of peek-a-boo become magical moments for Lin... Read More Snow Written by Orhan Pamuk After twelve years of political exile in Germany, the Turkish poet Ka returns to his native Istanbul for his mother’s funeral. There he is asked by a friend at a newspaper to travel to the remote Anatolian town of Kars to... Read More Snow Falling on Cedars Written by David Guterson The place is the fictional island of San Piedro off the coast of Washington, a community of "five thousand damp souls" [p. 5] who support themselves through salmon fishing and berry farming. The time is 1954, eight years after the end... Read More So Long at the Fair Written by Christina Schwarz Christina Schwarz, author of the New York Times bestseller and Oprah's Book Club pick Drowning Ruth, once again turns her storytelling eye to the evocative landscape of Wisconsin, where life is not as simple—or as innocent—as it seems. Beautifully tracing the... Read More "Socialism Is Great!" Written by Lijia Zhang One of the very few memoirs to explore life in China during the turbulent 1980s, a fascinating era in China when it began to change and become what it is today, “Socialism Is Great!” tells the story of one woman's struggle... Read More more titles>> [ Back to top ] |
 |
|
|
 |
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson NATIONAL BESTSELLER
"Wildly suspenseful...an intelligent, ingeniously plotted, utterly engrossing thriller."
|
