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Written by Chinua Achebe
• Things Fall Apart Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe's first novel, was published in 1958. Worldwide, there are eight million copies in print in fifty different languages. This stunning work, which John Updike calls "a great book, that bespeaks a great, brave, kind human spirit,"... Read More Written by Lorraine Adams • Harbor 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 Written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie • Half of a Yellow Sun 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 Written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie • Purple Hibiscus 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 Written by Chris Adrian • Gob's Grief 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 Written by Martin Amis • The Information 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 Written by Niccolo Ammaniti Translated by Jonathan Hunt • I'm Not Scared 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 Written by Gail Anderson-Dargatz • The Cure for Death by Lightning 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 Written by Gail Anderson-Dargatz • A Recipe for Bees 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 Written by Natalie Angier • Woman In this extraordinarily wide-ranging exploration, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times science writer Natalie Angier lifts the veil of secrecy from that most enigmatic of evolutionary masterpieces, the female body, exploring the essence of what it means to be a woman. Witty... Read More Written by Tina Mcelroy Ansa • Hand I Fan With Written by Karen Armstrong • The Great Transformation 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 Written by Karen Armstrong • The Spiral Staircase Karen Armstrong, the writer who has introduced thousands of readers to the world’s great religions, now tells the story of one of the most difficult periods of her own life. At the age of seventeen, driven by a strong yearning to... Read More Written by Nick Arvin • Articles of War 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 Written by Nadeem Aslam • Maps for Lost Lovers 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 Written by Margaret Atwood • Alias Grace 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 Written by Margaret Atwood • The Blind Assassin 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 Written by Margaret Atwood • Bodily Harm 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 Written by Margaret Atwood • Cat's Eye 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 Written by Margaret Atwood • The Edible Woman 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 Written by Margaret Atwood • The Handmaid's Tale 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 Written by Margaret Atwood • Lady Oracle 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 Written by Margaret Atwood • Life Before Man "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 Written by Margaret Atwood • Moral Disorder and Other Stories 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 Written by Margaret Atwood • Oryx and Crake 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 Written by Margaret Atwood • The Robber Bride 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 Written by Margaret Atwood • Surfacing After learning that her widowed father has mysteriously disappeared, a young artist returns to the rural cabin in which she was raised. She is joined by her friends, a young married couple, and her estranged lover, all of whom who hope... Read More Written by John Banville • The Sea 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 Written by Julian Barnes • Arthur and George 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 Written by Charles Baxter • The Feast of Love 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 Written by Charles Baxter • The Feast of Love (MTI) 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 Written by Charles Baxter • Saul and Patsy 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 Written by Ann Beattie • My Life, Starring Dara Falcon 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 Written by John Berendt • Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil 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 Written by John Berger • To the Wedding In To the Wedding John Berger offers us a sharply modern situation set in the traditionally pastoral and idyllic background of rural Europe. Beautiful, vibrant Ninon falls in love and becomes engaged to a young Italian, Gino, but soon before their... Read More Written by Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy Gansler • Class Action 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 Written by Julia Blackburn • Daisy Bates in the Desert 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 Written by Amy Bloom • Love Invents Us 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 Written by Judy Blunt • Breaking Clean 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 Written by Chris Bohjalian • Before You Know Kindness Written by Chris Bohjalian • The Buffalo Soldier 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 Written by Chris Bohjalian • The Double Bind 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 Written by Chris Bohjalian • The Law of Similars 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 Written by Chris Bohjalian • Midwives 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 Written by Chris Bohjalian • Trans-Sister Radio Set in the village of Bartlett, Vermont, Trans-Sister Radio tells the story of four people who are drawn into a complicated tangle of relationships--relationships that will profoundly change each of them. When Allison, grade-school teacher and divorced mother of a teenage... Read More Written by William Boyd • Any Human Heart 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 Written by Rick Bragg • All Over but the Shoutin' 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 Written by Rick Bragg • Ava's Man “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 Written by H.W. Brands • The First American 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 Written by Rosemary Bray • Unafraid of the Dark How much hardship can you heap on a child before she gives up? Reading Rosemary Bray's memoir, Unafraid of the Dark, you might be tempted to answer: however much you do, she simply won't. The bigger answer, the one that can be... Read More Written by Kevin Brockmeier • The Brief History of the Dead 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 Written by Anita Brookner • Altered States 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 Written by Anita Brookner • Hotel Du Lac 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 Written by Geraldine Brooks • Foreign Correspondence 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 Written by Carrie Brown • The Rope Walk The Rope Walk is a luminous coming-of-age story that unfolds over a crucial summer in the life of young New England girl. At her tenth birthday party, Alice meets two people unlike any she's ever known: Theo, a mixed-race New York... Read More Written by Dan Brown • The Da Vinci Code 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 Written by Joan Jacobs Brumberg • The Body Project 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 Written by Bill Buford • Heat 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 Written by A.S. Byatt • Babel Tower 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 Written by A.S. Byatt • The Biographer's Tale 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 Written by A.S. Byatt • Possession 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 Written by A.S. Byatt • A Whistling Woman Frederica Potter is leading the life of an independent single mother during a time of great social change in Britain in the late 1960s. Television is still an intimidating and powerful new phenomenon; psychoanalysis and genetics present new challenges to students... Read More Written by Thomas Cahill • Desire of the Everlasting Hills "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 Written by Thomas Cahill • The Gifts of the Jews 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 Written by Thomas Cahill • How the Irish Saved Civilization "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 Written by Thomas Cahill • Mysteries of the Middle Ages 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 Written by Thomas Cahill • Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea “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 Written by Bebe Moore Campbell • 72 Hour Hold 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 Written by Albert Camus • The First Man 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 Written by Philip Caputo • Acts of Faith 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 Written by Philip Caputo • The Voyage Written by Peter Carey • Jack Maggs 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 Written by Peter Carey • My Life as a Fake 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 Written by Peter Carey • Theft Michael “Butcher” Boones was once a famous as a painter in Australia could be. Now he is just a down-and-out “dogsbody” [p. 11] having suffered a humiliating divorce, a precipitous decline in his artistic reputation, and a stint in jail for... Read More Written by Peter Carey • True History of the Kelly Gang True History of the Kelly Gang is Peter Carey's marvelous imaginative reconstruction of Ned Kelly's life story. Based partly on historical documents and on the remarkable writing found in Kelly's Jerilderie letter, the novel closely follows the known facts of a... Read More Written by Anne Carson • Autobiography of Red 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 Written by Anne Carson • The Beauty of the Husband 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 Written by Anne Carson • Men in the Off Hours 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 Written by Anne Carson • Plainwater 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 Written by Stephen L. Carter • The Emperor of Ocean Park 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 Written by Willa Cather • My Antonia 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 Written by Willa Cather • The Professor's House 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 Written by Raymond Chandler • The Long Goodbye 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 Written by Pang-Mei Chang • Bound Feet & Western Dress Written by Monique Charlesworth • The Children's War 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 Written by Barbara Chase-Riboud • Hottentot Venus 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 Written by Da Chen • Colors of the Mountain 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 Written by Pauline W. Chen • Final Exam 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 Written by Tinling Choong • Firewife 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 Written by Kate Christensen • The Epicure's Lament 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 Written by Kate Christensen • The Great Man 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 Written by Sandra Cisneros • Caramelo 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 Written by Sandra Cisneros Translated by Liliana Valenzuela • Caramelo 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 Written by Sandra Cisneros • The House on Mango Street 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 Written by Nancy Clark • The Hills at Home 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 Written by Robert Clark • Love Among the Ruins 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 Written by Rich Cohen • The Avengers 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 Written by Rich Cohen • Tough Jews Tough Jews is not only a cultural history of the Jewish gangsters who thrived in New York in the first few decades of the twentieth-century, but also the story of the gangsters' effect on the imaginations of young Jewish kids living... Read More Written by Robert Cohen • Inspired Sleep 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 Written by Dalton Conley • Honky 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 Written by Jill Ker Conway • The Road from Coorain 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 Written by Jill Ker Conway • True North Conway begins this second volume with her departure from Australia and her ambivalent feelings toward the character and traditions of her native country. She settles temporarily in the United States and enters Radcliffe College as a graduate student in history, finding... Read More Written by Ellen Cooney • A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies 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 Written by J. California Cooper • Family 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 Written by J. California Cooper • The Future Has a Past 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 Written by J. California Cooper • In Search of Satisfaction 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 Written by J. California Cooper • The Matter Is Life 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 Written by J. California Cooper • A Piece of Mine 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 Written by J. California Cooper • Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime 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 Written by J. California Cooper • The Wake of the Wind In a South devastated by the Civil War, African Americans and whites alike faced the awesome task of adjusting to a new social and economic order. The Wake of the Wind focuses on Lifee, a beautiful, educated former house slave, and... Read More Written by Gil Courtemanche • A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali Written by Amanda Craig • In a Dark Wood 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 Written by Liza Dalby • The Tale of Murasaki In eleventh-century Japan, Murasaki Shikibu gave her readers The Tale of Genji, what many have called the world's first novel. Today, Liza Dalby gives her readers The Tale of Murasaki, a brilliant, vividly imagined "diary" of Murasaki. Through this device, Dalby... Read More Written by Edwidge Danticat • Breath, Eyes, Memory 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 Written by Edwidge Danticat • The Dew Breaker 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 Written by John Darnton • The Darwin Conspiracy 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 Written by Siobhan Darrow • Flirting with Danger 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 Written by Robyn Davidson • Tracks Robyn Davidson, a young woman who had "never changed a light-bulb, sewn a dress, mended a sock, changed a tyre, or used a screwdriver" [p. 93], took a train to Alice Springs in central Australia with six dollars in her pocket... Read More Written by Louis de Bernières • Birds Without Wings 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 Written by Louis de Bernières • Corelli's Mandolin 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 Written by Seamus Deane • Reading in the Dark 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 Written by Pete Dexter • Train In Los Angeles, 1953, Brookside is the most luxurious golf course in town. The grass is green, the golfers are white, and the caddies are black. Lionel Walk—called Train—is a seventeen-year-old caddie who has an extraordinary talent for the game. His... Read More Written by Andrea Di Robilant • A Venetian Affair “You revealed all the mysteries of life to me. You gave thunder to my soul. You made my spirit delicate and noble” [p. 153]. These are the words of Giustiniana Wynne, a young Anglo-Venetian beauty, to her secret lover Andrea Memmo... Read More Written by Debra Dickerson • An American Story 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 Written by Joan Didion • The Year of Magical Thinking A spare, lucid, and remarkably moving examination of the year following her husband’s sudden death just before their fortieth anniversary, this is the story of Didion’s search for answers, for relief, and above all for the chance to change the course... Read More Written by Deborah Digges • The Stardust Lounge At thirteen, Deborah Digges’s son Stephen was an angry, troubled boy who went roaming after midnight with gangs, tagging buildings with spray paint, and stealing cars–including his mother’s. He had always been a restless, intelligent child, but he was growing up... Read More Written by Chitra Divakaruni • Arranged Marriage 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 Written by Chitra Divakaruni • The Mistress of Spices 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 Written by Chitra Divakaruni • Queen of Dreams 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 Written by Chitra Divakaruni • Sister of My Heart 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 Written by Chitra Divakaruni • The Unknown Errors of Our Lives Frequently torn between memories of the traditions and families they have left behind in India and the new, modern lives they are creating in America, Divakaruni's strong central characters are poised on emotional precipices as they confront pivotal decisions: Mrs. Dutta... Read More Written by Chitra Divakaruni • The Vine of Desire The Vine of Desire picks up where Divakaruni’s bestselling novel, Sister of My Heart, left off, continuing the saga of Anju and Sudha, the now-grown cousins and best friends from Calcutta, India. After their joint arranged marriages in Calcutta, the spirited... Read More Written by Keith Donohue • The Stolen Child The double story of Henry Day begins in 1949, when he is kidnapped at age seven by a band of wild childlike beings who live in an ancient, secret community in the forest. The changelings rename their captive Aniday and he... |