Fiction titles…
❒ Blood and Beauty by Sarah Dunant / A tale inspired by the lives of Borgia siblings Lucretia and Cesare traces the family's rise in the aftermath of Rodrigo Borgia's rise to the papacy, during which war, a terrifying sexual plague, and the family's notorious reputation forge an intimate bond between brother and sister.
❒ Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather / The archbishop in Santa Fe aids in the growth and development of the Southwest.
❒ Defending Jacob by William Landay / Andy Barber has been an assistant district attorney in his suburban Massachusetts county for more than twenty years. He is respected in his community, tenacious in the courtroom, and happy at home with his wife, Laurie, and son, Jacob. But when a shocking crime shatters their New England town, Andy is blindsided by what happens next. His fourteen-year-old son is charged with the murder of a fellow student.
❒ English Creek by Ivan Doig / The events of summer, 1939, in Two Counties, Montana--the herding of sheep onto the summer range and the rodeo, picnic, and square dance on the Fourth of July counterpoint the coming of age of Jick McCaskell.
❒ Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome by Alexander Kluge / In the wake of a great and devastating war, the various governments of the human race attempt to reconstruct cultures and economies, but they are only partially successful, and the results are more like a distorted parody.
❒ Letters from Yellowstone by Diane Smith / In 1898, a young Cornell medical student joins a field study in Yellowstone National Park and describes in a series of letters her relationships with fellow naturalists who had expected a male colleague, her experiences, and her encounters with a colorful assortment of characters.
❒ Margot by Jillian Cantor / In a reimagining of the life of Anne Frank's sister Margot, Margie Franklin, working as a secretary at a Jewish law firm in Philadelphia, finds her carefully constructed life falling apart when her sister becomes a global icon.
❒ Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides / Calliope's friendship with a classmate and her sense of identity are compromised by the adolescent discovery that she is a hermaphrodite, a situation with roots in her grandparent's desperate struggle for survival in the 1920s.
❒ Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker by Jennifer Chiaverini / Presents a fictionalized account of the friendship between Mary Todd Lincoln and her dressmaker Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave.
❒ Swimming in the Moon by Pamela Schoenewaldt / When she and her mother are sent to America in 1904, trading their servitude in a count's villa for Cleveland's immigrant neighborhoods, Lucia blossoms and her mother wins fame in vaudeville until their past catches up with them.
❒ Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon / When ex-NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fourth-richest black man in America, announces plans to construct his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby neglected stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise.
❒ Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt / It is 1987, and only one person has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus -- her uncle,the renowned painter Finn Weiss. Shy at school and distant from her older sister, June can only be herself in Finn's company; he is her godfather, confidant, and best friend. So when he dies, far too young, of a mysterious illness her mother can barely speak about, June's world is turned upside down. But Finn's death brings a surprise acquaintance into June's life -- someone who will help her to heal, and to question what she thinks she knows about Finn, her family, and even her own heart.
❒ The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho / A fable about undauntingly following one's dreams, listening to one's heart, and reading life's omens features dialogue between a boy and an unnamed being.
❒ The Bartender’s Tale by Ivan Doig / Running a venerable bar in 1960 Montana while raising his twelve-year-old son, single father Tom Harry finds his world upended by the arrival of a woman from his past and her beatnik daughter, who claims Tom as her father.
❒ The Dinner by Herman Koch / Meeting at an Amsterdam restaurant for dinner, two couples move from small talk to the wrenching shared challenge of their teenage sons' act of violence that has triggered a police investigation and revealed the extent to which each family will go to protect those they love.
❒ The Fault in Our Stars by John Green / Sixteen-year-old Hazel, a stage IV thyroid cancer patient, has accepted her terminal diagnosis until a chance meeting with a boy at cancer support group forces her to reexamine her perspective on love, loss, and life.
❒ The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer / An unforgettable story of three brothers, of history and love, of marriage tested by disaster, of a Jewish family's struggle against annihilation, and of the dangerous power of art in a time of war.
❒ The Light Between Oceans: a novel by M. L. Stedman / A novel set on a remote Australian island, where a childless couple live quietly running a lighthouse, until a boat carrying a baby washes ashore.
❒ The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards / In a tale spanning twenty-five years, a doctor delivers his newborn twins during a snowstorm and, rashly deciding to protect his wife from their baby daughter's affliction with Down Syndrome, turns her over to a nurse, who secretly raises the child.
❒ The Night Circus: a novel by Erin Morgenstern / A fierce competition is underway, a contest between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood to compete in "a game," in which each must use their powers of illusion to best the other. Unbeknownst to them, this game is a duel to the death, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will.
❒ The Other Typist by Suzanne Rindell / Working as a typist for the NYC Police Department in 1923, Rose Baker documents confessions of harrowing crimes and struggles with changing gender roles while clinging to her Victorian ideals and searching for nurturing companionship before becoming obsessed with a glamorous newcomer and her world of bobbed hair, smoking and speakeasies.
❒ The Princess Hoppy, or The Tale of the Labrador by Jacques Roubaud / A postmodern fairy tale might best describe Jacques Roubaud's delightful book The Princess Hoppy, or The Tale of Labrador. How else to describe a novel that reads like an Arthurian romance as rewritten by Lewis Carroll, with enough math puzzles to keep the game reader busy with a calculator for months? the tale concerns a princess, her faithful dog (who happens to be a wiz at math), four royal uncles always plotting, four royal aunts always potting, a lovesick hedgehog named Bartleby, two camels named North Dakota and South Dakota, four ducks who double as boats (thus called doats), and an amphibious blue whale named Barbara to name only a few.
❒ The Red Tent by Anita Diamant / The story of Dinah, a tragic character from the Bible whose great love, a prince, is killed by her brother, leaving her alone and pregnant. The novel traces her life from childhood to death, in the process examining sexual and religious practices of the day, and what it meant to be a woman.
❒ The Rent Collector by Camron Wright / Sang Ly struggles to survive by picking through garbage in Cambodia's largest municipal dump. Under threat of eviction by an embittered old drunk who is charged with collecting rents from the poor of Stung Meanchey, Sang Ly embarks on a desperate journey to save her ailing son from a life of ignorance and poverty.
❒ The Round House by Louise Erdich / When his mother, a tribal enrollment specialist living on a reservation in North Dakota, slips into an abyss of depression after being brutally attacked, fourteen-year-old Joe Coutz sets out with his three friends to find the person that destroyed his family.
❒ The Seventeen Second Miracle by Jason Wright / High school teacher Cole Conner tells three of his students the story of his father, Rex, whose lapse in lifeguard duties as a teen resulted in tragedy, but the event did not stop him from continuing to work for the greater good.
❒ The Stockholm Octavo by Karen Engelmann / In 1791 Stockholm, self-satisfied bureaucrat Emil Larsson is informed by a fortune teller that in order to find love and connection, he must first find eight individuals who can help him realize his vision--a search that becomes dangerous when he must pull his country back from rebellion and chaos.
❒ The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield / When her health begins failing, the mysterious author Vida Winter decides to let Margaret Lea, a biographer, write the truth about her life, but Margaret needs to verify the facts since Vida has a history of telling outlandish tales.
❒ The Tin Horse: a novel by Janice Steinberg / A multi-generational story about twin sisters, one of whom disappears without a trace in 1939, is set in the historically Jewish neighborhood of Boyle Heights, California, and modern-day Los Angeles.
❒ The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce / Harold Fry is convinced that he must deliver a letter to an old love in order to save her, meeting various characters along the way and reminiscing about the events of his past and people he has known, as he tries to find peace and acceptance
❒ Une Semaine De Bonte: A Surrealistic Novel in Collage by Max Ernst / The great surrealist's collage masterpiece was printed in 1934 in a limited edition of five now-priceless pamphlets. This single-volume edition contains all of the original publication's 182 bizarre, darkly humorous scenes of dreams and fantasies.
❒ Where the River Ends by Charles Martin / He was a fishing guide and struggling artist from a south George trailer park. She was the beautiful only child of South Carolina's most powerful senator. Yet once Doss Michaels and Abigail Grace Coleman met by accident, they each felt they'd found their true soul mate. Ten years into their marriage, when Abbie faces a life-threatening illness, Doss battles it with her every step of the way. And when she makes a list of ten things she hopes to accomplish before she loses the fight for good, Doss is there, too, supporting her and making everything possible.
Non Fiction titles…
❒ American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard / A history of North America's eleven rival cultural regions challenges popular perceptions about the red state-blue state conflict, tracing lingering tensions stemming from disparate intranational values that have shaped every major event in history.
❒ Refuge: an Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams / The author describes her Mormon upbringing, juxtaposing these reminiscences with discussions ofthe flooding of a wildlife bird sanctuary and its effect on that ecosystem, and her family's legacy ofcancer.
❒ One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty / The Pulitzer Prize-winning author sketches her early life and discusses growing up in the South.
❒ Prague Winter: Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948 by Madeleine Albright / The former Secretary of State paints a portrait of her early life from 1937 to 1948 during which she witnessed the Nazi invasion of her native Prague, the Holocaust, the defeat of fascism, the rise of communism, and the onset of the Cold War.
❒ The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe / Recounts how the author and his mother read and discussed books during her chemotherapy treatments, describing how the activity involved a wide range of literary genres, furthered their appreciation for literature, and strengthened their bond.
❒ Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel Brown Traces / The story of an American rowing team from the University of Washington that defeated elite rivals at Hitler's 1936 Berlin Olympics, sharing the experiences of their enigmatic coach, a visionary boat builder, and a homeless teen rower.
❒ Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie / Presents a reconstruction of the eighteenth-century empress's life that covers her efforts to engage Russia in the cultural life of Europe, her creation of the Hermitage, and her numerous scandal-free romantic affairs.
❒ Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand / Relates the story of a U.S. airman who survived when his bomber crashed into the sea during World War II, spent forty-seven days adrift in the ocean before being rescued by the Japanese Navy, and was held as a prisoner until the end of the war.
❒ Unstoppable by Nick Vujicic / Reveals how the author learned to deal with adverse circumstances in such areas as relationships, careers, health, and bullying through the experiences he has endured having been born without arms or legs.
❒ My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor / A brain scientists recounts her experiences after suffering a stroke at the age of thirty-seven, describing her discovery of differences in the left and right side of the brain and the steps she took over a period of eight years to recover her health.
❒ Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s history-making race around the world by Matthew Goodman / Documents the 1889 competition between feminist journalist Nellie Bly and "Cosmopolitan" reporter Elizabeth Bishop to beat Jules Verne's record and each other in a round-the-globe race. (Not available until March 2014)
❒ Killing Lincoln by Bill O’Reilly / Describes the events surrounding the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the hunt to track down John Wilkes Booth and his accomplices.
❒ A Midwife’s Tale: The life of Martha Ballard, based on her diary 1785-1812 by Laurel Ulrich / Presents the life of Martha Ballard, a midwife in Maine during the eighteenth century, by drawing on the detailed diary she kept for twenty-seven years of her life.
❒ 1491 by Charles Mann / An analysis of America prior to 1492 describes how the research of archaeologists and anthropologists has transformed myths about the Americas, revealing that the cultures were far older and more advanced than previously known.
❒ Wesley the Owl: The remarkable love story of an own and his girl by Stacey O’Brien / In this touching memoir, biologist and owl expert Stacey O'Brien introduces Wesley the Owl, a once-abandoned baby owl who was rescued by Stacey. Together, they've built a remarkable friendship over the past nineteen years.
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