FICTION TITLES
❒ Ahab's Wife: Or, The Star-gazer: A Novel by Sena Jeter Naslund—A rich epic, drawn from the classic Moby Dick, chronicles the life of Una Spenser, wife of the immortal Captain Ahab, from her Kentucky childhood, through her adventures disguised as a whaling ship cabin boy, to her various marriages.
❒ The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein—Meet Enzo, the unforgettable canine narrator of this bittersweet and transformative story of family, love, loyalty, and hope. Enzo is a philosopher with a nearly human soul, and he's gained a wealth of knowledge from hours spent in front of the TV.
❒ The Astral by Kate Christensen—The Astral is a huge, rose-colored apartment building in the rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint. For decades, it has been the happy home (or so he thought) of the poet Harry Quick and his wife, Luz, who raised two children in their rambling top-floor apartment. However, the aging Astral's glory is beginning to fade- and as the building crumbles around him, a series of events forces Harry to face the reality of his own fractured family
❒ Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar: Stories of work by Richard Ford—This vital and compelling collection of stories about work, compiled by novelist and short-story writer Richard Ford, explores how Americans are employed; how people find work and leave it; and how it excites, ennobles, occasionally debilitates, and often defines them.
❒ Book of Lies by Mary Horlock — A teenage girl’s Mean Girls-like experience pushes her to murder her best friend in a scandal that mirrors her uncle’s previously unknown story from the days of Guernsey’s Nazi occupation during World War II. Told through the voices of 15-year-old Cat Rozier and her long-dead Uncle Charlie, The Book of Lies lucidly illuminates the interior lives of a scorned modern girl and a defiant, faded man.
❒ The Broken Teaglass by Emily Arsenault—While flirting with each other to ease the boredom of working as dictionary updaters, Billy Webb and Mona Minot discover that someone has been lacing their dictionary files with clues to an unsolved murder.
❒ Don’t Breathe a Word by Jennifer McMahon—Two young lovers find themselves ensnared in a seemingly supernatural web that ties them to a young girl’s disappearance 15 years earlier in this dark and twisty tale from the New York Times-bestselling author of Island of Lost Girls and Promise Not to Tell.
❒ Ed King by David Guterson—In this modern retelling of Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, Walter Cousins sleeps with the sexy, not-quite-legal British au pair who’s taking care of his children for the summer. She gets pregnant and leaves their baby on a doorstep, but not before turning the tables on Walter and setting in motion a tragedy of epic proportions.
❒ Everything We Ever Wanted by Sara Shepard—A recently widowed mother of two, Sylvie Bates-McAllister finds her life upended by a late-night phone call from the headmaster of the prestigious private school founded by her grandfather where her adopted son Scott teaches. Allegations of Scott's involvement in a hazing scandal cause a ripple effect, throwing the entire family into chaos.
❒ Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim—Four English women find their lives changed when they rent San Salvatore, a medieval castle on the Italian Riviera.
❒ Five Smooth Stones by Ann Fairbairn—From his birth in the Depression to his interracial marriage to Sara and participation as a civil rights leader, David Champlin demonstrates courage and integrity, and he sacrifices everything in his devotion to larger causes at the cost of his own happiness.
❒ Follow the River by James Alexander Thom—After being captured in an Indian raid during 1755, Mary Draper Ingles follows the Ohio River for 1,000 miles to return home to Virginia by herself.
❒ The Good Daughters by Joyce Maynard—The lives and fortunes of two New Hampshire families, the Planks and the Dickersons, are entwined through the youngest daughters of each family, who were born on the same day in the same hospital.
❒ The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald—Jay Gatsby still adores Daisy Buchanan although she has married someone else, and he risks everything to lure her back
❒ The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch—While the sea continues to offer him discoveries from its mysterious depths, such as a giant squid, a teenaged boy struggles to deal with the difficulties that come with the equally mysterious process of growing up.
❒ Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende—Spanning four decades, Island Beneath the Sea is the moving story of the intertwined lives of Zarité and Valmorain, and of one woman’s determination to find love amid loss, to offer humanity though her own has been battered, and to forge her own identity in the cruelest of circumstances.
❒ Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte—In early nineteenth-century England, an orphaned young woman accepts employment as a governess and soon finds herself in love with her employer who has a terrible secret.
❒ The London Train by Tessa Hadley—Embracing change and facing loss, in a story evocative of Alice Munro’s Runaway and Julia Glass’ I See You Everywhere, New Yorker writer Tessa Hadley’s powerful characters illuminate the furthest reaches of love, hope, and determination.
❒ Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan—Descending on a family beach house won in a bet years earlier, three generations of women gradually impart difficult respective secrets including a pregnancy, a terrible crush and a deeply held resentment for past misdeeds
❒ Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Stout—In a small coastal town in Maine, Olive Kitteridge is the complex and often unpredictable town crier, a person who sees into the hearts of others, discerning their triumphs and tragedies, while not always seeing herself. It is through her profound insight into the human condition that these penetrating tales are told.
❒ Recapitulation by Wallace Stegner—In this moving sequel to Big Rock Candy Mountain, Bruce Mason returns to Salt Lake City for a family funeral and instead encounters the ghosts of his past.
❒ Room by Emma Donoghue—To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world, but to Ma it's the prison where she has been held captive for seven years, in this shocking, riveting, exhilarating story of unconquerable love in harrowing circumstances, and of the bond between a mother and her child.
❒ A Sudden Country by Karen Fisher—His life turned upside down by the deaths of his children from smallpox and desertion of his Nez Perce wife, Hudson's Bay Company trader James MacLaren joins a group of settlers headed west to Oregon in 1847.
❒ This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman—When their fifteen-year-old son Jake forwards a sexually explicit video of a thirteen-year-old girl to his friends, which then goes viral, the Bergmots find their social and professional lives in jeopardy and decide to fight back, resulting in disastrous consequences.
❒ Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum—Combining a passionate, doomed love story, a vivid evocation of life during World War II, and a poignant mother/daughter drama, Those Who Save Us is a profound exploration of what people endure to survive and the legacy of shame.
❒ The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht—Weaving a brilliant latticework of family legend, loss, and love, Obreht, the youngest of The New Yorker's 20 best American fiction writers under 40, spins a timeless novel about a young doctor who confronts the inexplicable circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather's recent death.
❒ Waiting for Robert Capa by Susana Fortes—Moving between Paris before World War II and Spain in the midst of Civil War, Fortes’s latest historical novel traces the rocky romance between the real-life talented, striking Polish refugee and activist Gerta Pohorylle and fellow Jewish émigré André Friedmann, otherwise known as Robert Capa.
❒ The Wife’s Tale by Lori Lansens—When her husband doesn’t come home on the eve of their 25th wedding anniversary, Mary wonders if the weight she’s put on or her aversion to adventure has chased him off. With few clues, she boards a plane for the first time in her life, venturing to California in search of her husband. What she discovers is as shocking as it is delightful: a new vibrant energy and an entirely different kind of hunger.
NON-FICTION TITLES
❒ The Big Burn by Timothy Egan—In The Worst Hard Time, Egan puts the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl at the center of a rich history. Now he performs the same alchemy with The Big Burn, detailing the largest-ever forest fire in America.
❒ Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World by Dan Koeppel—Growing out of a Popular Science feature article, this work combines a pop-science journey around the globe with a fascinating tale of an iconic American business enterprise that takes readers into the high-tech labs where new bananas are literally being built in test tubes.
❒ A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr—When lawyer initiates a civil suit against two of the nation's largest corporations who stand accused of the deaths of children in Massachusetts , he finds himself locked in an epic struggle that costs him his home, his reputation, and nearly his sanity.
❒ Elegy for Iris by John Bayley—A melodious, hugely affecting tribute to the late Dame Iris Murdoch, one of the greatest writers of her time, written by her devoted husband of 42 years
❒ The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee—The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificently written "biography" of cancer--from its origins to the epic battle to cure, control, and conquer it. Riveting and magisterial, the book provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments and offers a bold new perspective on the way the human body has been observed and understood for millennia.
❒ The Good Daughrter by Jasmin Darznik—Relates how the author's discovery of a photograph of her mother wearing a wedding veil and with a man she had never seen before revealed her family's true origins in Iran, her mother's history of abuse and neglect, and a sister that the author never knew she had.
❒ The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America by Russell Shorto—In a landmark work of history, Shorto presents astonishing information on the founding of our nation and reveals in riveting detail the crucial role of the Dutch in making America what it is today.
❒ Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen—Based on careful research at the Smithsonian Institution, this volume issues a bold, direct challenge to the errors, misrepresentations, and omissions of the leading American history textbooks.
❒ Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home by Rhoda Janzen—In the spirit of Anne Lamott and Nora Ephron comes Janzen's hilarious and moving memoir about a woman who returns home to her close-knit Mennonite family after a personal crisis.
❒ Nothing: A portrait of insomnia by Blake Butler—Blake Butler pens a thrillingly wide-ranging and provocative book about insomnia—from its role in history, art, and science through its unexpected consequences on his personal imagination, creative process, and perspective on reality.
❒ Nothing to Do But Stay: My Pioneer Mother by Carrie Young—In eight enjoyable anecdotal essays, Young describes the challenges and rewards of 20th-century pioneering life in North Dakota.
❒ Tisha by Robert Specht—The author tells the story as told to him of Anne Hobbs, a woman who went to Alaska in the 1920's to teach, but who had trouble due to her kindness to the Indians there.
❒ The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson—With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells the story of the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, from 1915 to 1970, through the lives of three unique individuals.
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