The Kent District Library is pleased to offer the Book Club in a Bag program, which allows book groups to check out a bag of everything they’ll need for their book discussion! Each canvas bag contains 12 copies of a book and a printed list of discussion questions and author information.
Each bag is available for an extended check-out period (Six weeks suggested; please see staff member when checking out) and is reservable in advance by contacting Ali Kuchta at 616-784-2016×2179 or e-mailing akuchta@kdl.org. Bags can be picked up and returned at any KDL branch. Requests are limited to KDL cardholders only.
Current titles are listed below, or view the complete title list. You can also search for “KDL Book Club in a Bag” in the online catalog.
Happy Reading!
Diane Ackerman
Documents the heroic true story of Warsaw Zoo keepers and resistance activists Jan and Antonina Zabinski who, in the aftermath of Germany’s invasion of Poland, saved the lives of hundreds of Jewish citizens by smuggling them into empty cages and their home villa.
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Uwem Akpan
Each story in this jubilantly acclaimed collection pays testament to the wisdom and resilience of children, even in the face of the most agonizing circumstances.
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Peter Annin
Destined to be the definitive story for the general public as well as policymakers, The Great Lakes Water Wars is a balanced, comprehensive look behind the scenes at the conflicts and compromises that are the past — and future — of this globally significant resource.
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Paul Auster
Retired life insurance salesman Nathan Glass moves to Brooklyn to find anonymity and solitude through his declining years, but a chance meeting with Tom Wood, his long-lost nephew, forces him to come to terms with his past.
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Lynn Austin
The call for defense workers during World War II unites four women—Virginia, Helen, Rosa, and Jean—at Seneca Shipyards in Michigan, and as they encourage, shape, and influence one another, they learn valuable lessons about life, love, and faith.
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Muriel Barbery
The lives of fifty-four-year-old concierge Rene Michel and extremely bright, suicidal twelve-year-old Paloma Josse are transformed by the arrival of a new tenant, Kakuro Ozu.
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Maeve Binchy
Fresh from cooking school, Tom Feather and Cathy Scarlet are hot additions to the Dublin scene with their new catering company, but some people in the city, including their families, are not so keen on the idea of their success.
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Chris Bohjalian
Withdrawing into her photography and a job at a homeless shelter after being attacked while riding her bike, student Laurel Estabrook encounters Bobbie Crocker, a man with a history of mental illness and a box of secret photos, but when Bobbie dies suddenly, Laurel is certain that the photos hide a dark family secret and embarks on an obsessive, potentially dangerous search for the truth.
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Kevin Boyle
NEW!
Follows the 1925 murder trial of African-American doctor Ossian Sweet, who was accused of murdering a white person during a mob attack on his home, and includes a history of the Sweet family and a portrait of his attorney, Clarence Darrow.
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Alan Bradley
NEW!
Eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison, begins her adventure when a dead bird is found on the doorstep of her family’s mansion in the summer of 1950, thus propelling her into a mystery that involves an investigation into a man’s murder where her father is the main suspect.
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Alan Brennert
Dreaming of far-off lands away from her loving 1890s Honolulu home, seven-year-old Rachel is forcibly removed from her family when she contracts leprosy and is placed in a settlement, where she loses a series of new friends before new medical discoveries enable her reentry into the world.
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Geraldine Brooks
NEW!
In a story inspired by the father character in “Little Women” and drawn from the journals and letters of Louisa
May Alcott’s father, a man leaves behind his family to serve in the Civil War and finds his beliefs challenged by his experiences.
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Geraldine Brooks
Offered a coveted job to analyze and conserve a priceless Sarajevo Haggadah, Australian rare-book expert Hanna Heath discovers a series of tiny artifacts in the volume’s ancient binding that reveal its historically significant origins. By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March.
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Bill Bryson
A wry account tracing an adventurous and arduous trek past the Appalachian Trail’s natural pleasures, human eccentrics, and offbeat comforts.
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Todd Burpo,Lynn Vincent
NEW!
Presents the story of the 4-year old son of a Nebraska pastor who during emergency surgery slips from consciousness and enters heaven.
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Liam Callanan
During World War II, Louis Belk, a young American bomb disposal sergeant, is sent on a mission to Anchorage, Alaska, to find and disarm the balloon bombs launched by the Japanese against North America, a search that leads him to encounters with a variety of haunting individuals and sends him on a lifelong quest to understand the meaning of faith, friendship, trust, and love.
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Willa Cather
The reminiscences of a New York lawyer, Jim Burden, about his boyhood in Nebraska, particularly a young Bohemian girl named Ántonia Shimerda, are set against the backdrop of the American assimilation immigrants.
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Mindy Starns Clark,Leslie Gould
NEW!
A burning desire to learn about her biological family leads nurse-midwife Lexie Jaeger to the heart of Pennsylvania Amish country, where she meets Marta Bayer, a mysterious lay-midwife who desperately needs help after an Amish client and her baby die.
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Mindy Starns Clark
Sienna Collins leans on her faith and the wisdom of the Amish when she learns that she is being investigated by the federal government and then her ex-boyfriend turns up dead.
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Chris Cleave
Presents a tale of a precarious friendship between an illegal Nigerian refugee and a recent widow from suburban London, a story told from the alternating and disparate perspectives of both women.
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Suzanne Collins
In a future North America, where the rulers of Panem maintain control through a televised survival competition pitting young people against one another, sixteen-year-old Katniss’s skills are put to the test when she voluntarily takes her younger sister’s place.
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Anna-Lisa Cox
A close-up study of Covert, Michigan, describes how this small town, beginning in the 1860s, created a unique, fully integrated community that emphasized complete equality, a sharing of power and wealth between blacks and whites, and racial intermarriage, drawing on diaries, oral history, and period records to describe how residents made this town work in the face of the era’s pervasive racism.
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Lynne Cox
Describes the author’s encounter with a baby gray whale that had become separated from its mother off the southern California coast, and relates her efforts to reunite it with its mother.
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Sandra Dallas
Her life turned upside-down when a Japanese internment camp is opened in their small Colorado town, Rennie witnesses the way her community places suspicion on the newcomers when a young girl is murdered, an event that prompts Rennie’s own perspective change and the discovery of dangerous secrets.
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Debra Dean
In a novel that moves back and forth between the Soviet Union during World War II and modern-day America, Marina, an elderly Russian woman, recalls vivid images of her youth during the height of the siege of Leningrad when, as a tour guide at the Hermitage, she and other staff members removed the museum’s priceless artworks for safekeeping.
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Jerry Dennis
A history of the Great Lakes as told by the biologists, fishermen, sailors, and others who have experienced them firsthand traces the author’s experiences as a local resident and schooner crewperson.
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Anita Diamant
In a story based on the Book of Genesis, Jacob’s only daughter, Dinah, shares her unique perspective on the origins of many of our modern religious practices and sexual politics, eager to impart the lessons in endurance and humanity she has learned from her father’s wives.
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Vanessa Diffenbaugh
NEW!
Discovering the symbolic meanings of flowers while languishing in the foster-care system, 18-year-old Victoria is hired by a florist when her talent for helping others is discovered, a situation that leads to a romantic prospect and the confrontation of a painful secret from her past.
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Emma Donoghue
A 5-year-old narrates a riveting story about his life growing up in a single room where his mother aims to protect him from the man who has held her prisoner for seven years since she was a teenager.
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Clyde Edgerton
NEW!
In 1963, Dwayne Hallston discovers James Brown and wants to perform just like him. Meanwhile, Dwayne’s forbidden black friend Larry, aspiring to play piano like Thelonius Monk, apprentices to a jazz musician called the Bleeder. A mutual passion for musichelp Dwayne and Larry as they try to achieve their dreams.
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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.
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Diet Eman
A true story of love stronger than Nazi persecution. Things We Couldn’t Say is the true story of Diet Eman, a young Dutch woman, who, with her fiancé, Hein Sietsma, risked everything to rescue imperiled Jews in Nazi-occupied Holland during World War II.
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Leif Enger
Eleven-year-old asthmatic Reuben Land chronicles the Land family’s odyssey in search of Reuben’s older brother, Davy, who has escaped from jail before he can stand trial for the killing of two marauders who came to their Minnesota farm to harm the family.
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Leif Enger
In 1915 Minnesota, Monte Becket, a novelist, joins Glendon Hale, an outlaw intent on reconciling with his family, whom he had abandoned more than two decades earlier, but on their journey Becket leaves his own family behind and Glendon Hale is pursued by Charles Siringo, a relentless former Pinkerton agent.
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Jim Fergus
Based on actual historical events, this novel follows the indomitable May Dodd as she travels to the Cheyenne, becomes the bride of Little Wolf, chief of that tribe, and struggles with living in and being loyal to two different worlds.
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Ken Follett
Set in twelfth-century England, this epic of kings and peasants juxtaposes the building of a magnificent church with the violence and treachery that often characterized the Middle Ages.
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Jamie Ford
When artifacts from Japanese families sent to internment camps during World War II are uncovered in Seattle, Henry Lee embarks on a quest that leads to memories of growing up Chinese in a city rife with anti-Japanese sentiment.
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Karen Joy Fowler
As six Californians get together to form a book club to discuss the novels of Jane Austen, their lives are turned upside down by troubled marriages, illicit affairs, changing relationships, and love.
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Alexandra Fuller
An intimate memoir of growing up in Africa during the Rhodesian civil war of 1971 to 1979 describes the author’s life on farms in southern Rhodesia, Milawi, and Zambia, detailing her hardscrabble existence with an alcoholic mother, frequently absent father, and three lost siblings, as well as her fierce love for Africa.
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Neil Gaiman,Dave McKean
NEW!
In this ingenious and captivating reimagining of Rudyard Kipling’s classic adventure The Jungle Book, Neil Gaiman tells the unforgettable story of Nobody Owens, a living, breathing boy whose home is a graveyard, raised by a guardian who belongs neither to the mortal world nor the realm of the dead. Among the mausoleums and headstones of his home, Bod experiences things most mortals can barely imagine. But real, flesh-and-blood danger waits just outside the cemetery walls: the man who murdered the infant Bod’s family will not rest until he finds Nobody Owens and finishes the job he began many years ago.
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Gabriel García Márquez
Set on the Caribbean coast of South America, this love story brings together Fermina Daza, her distinguished husband, and a man who has secretly loved her for more than fifty years.
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Ann H. Gabhart
NEW!
As her family suffers from the Great Depression, Kate Merritt tries to shoulder the emotional load, and finds that an abandoned little girl named Lorena Birdsong might be just what her family needs.
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Lisa Genova
Feeling at the top of her game when she is suddenly diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s Disease, Harvard psychologist Alice Howland struggles to find meaning and purpose in her everyday life as her concept of self gradually slips away.
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Elizabeth Gilbert
Traces the author’s decision to quit her job and travel the world for a year after suffering a midlife crisis and divorce, an endeavor that took her to three places in her quest to explore her own nature, experience fulfillment, and learn the art of spiritual balance.
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Sara Gruen
Ninety-something-year-old Jacob Jankowski remembers his time in the circus as a young man during the Great Depression, and his friendship with Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, and Rosie, the elephant, who gave them hope.
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Mark Haddon
After stumbling upon his neighbor’s dog, Wellington, impaled on a garden fork and being blamed for the killing, fifteen-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone, an autistic savant obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, decides to track down the real killer and turns to his detective hero to help him with the investigation, which brings him face to face with a family crisis.
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Jennifer Haigh
Unaware of the long-standing grievances harbored by their divorced parents, three adult siblings embark on a tumultuous summer when the oldest, a successful Manhattan doctor, investigates his sister’s chromosomal disorder against his mother’s wishes.
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Ron Hall and Denver Moore
The co-author relates how he was held under plantation-style slavery until he fled in the 1960s and suffered homelessness for an additional eighteen years before the wife of the other co-author, an art dealer accustomed to privilege, intervened.
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Diane Hammond
Having devotedly cared for a lone elephant at a dilapidated zoo for more than forty years, Samson hopes to be able to retire when he hires promising assistant Neva, who forces Samson to acknowledge that the elephant also needs the company of her own kind.
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Kristin Hannah
NEW!
Reunited when their beloved father falls ill, sisters Meredith and Nina find themselves under the shadow of their disapproving mother, whose painful history is hidden behind her rendition of a Russian fairy tale told to the sisters in childhood.
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Marjorie Hart
A memoir of a New York City summer during the waning days of World War II recounts how the University of Iowa coed author and her best friend became the first women to work on the sales floor at Tiffany & Co., a job during which they basked in period culture, from USO dances and the Stork Club to nickel subway rides and the Eisenhower parade.
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Kent Haruf
From the unsettled lives of a small-town teacher struggling to raise two boys alone in the face of their mother’s retreat from life, a pregnant teenage girl with nowhere to go, and two elderly bachelor farmers emerges a new vision of life and family as their diverse destinies intertwine.
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Homer H. Hickam, Jr.
The author traces the boyhood enthusiasm for rockets that eventually led to a career at NASA, describing how he built model rockets in the family garage in West Virginia, inspired by the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik.
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Laura Hillenbrand
NEW!
On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared—Lt. Louis Zamperini. Captured by the Japanese and driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor.
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The author recounts the story of her life, from her traditional Muslim childhood in Somalia and escape from a forced marriage to her efforts to promote women’s rights while surviving numerous threats to her safety.
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Beth Hoffman
Relegated to the care of an eccentric great-aunt after her mentally unbalanced mother’s accidental death, 12-year-old CeeCee is quickly surrounded by the strong women and cultural elements of her new Savannah community.
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Nancy Horan
Fact and fiction blend in a historical novel that chronicles the relationship between seminal architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney, from their meeting, when they were each married to another, to the clandestine affair that shocked Chicago society.
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Khaled Hosseini
Traces the unlikely friendship of Amir, a wealthy Afghanistani youth, and a servant’s son, in a tale that spans the final days of the nation’s monarchy through the atrocities of the present day.
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Khaled Hosseini
Two women born a generation apart witness the destruction of their home and family in war-torn Kabul, losses incurred over the course of thirty years that test the limits of their strength and courage.
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Rhoda Janzen
A poet describes how, after her husband left her for a relationship with a man and she subsequently was seriously injured in a car crash, she returned home to her close-knit Mennonite family and came to terms with her failed marriage and her choices in life.
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Edward P. Jones
When a plantation proprietor and former slave — now possessing slaves of his own — dies, his household falls apart in the wake of a slave rebellion and corrupt underpaid patrollers who enable free black people to be sold into slavery.
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Hillary Jordan
In 1946, Laura McAllan tries to adjust after moving with her husband and two children to an isolated cotton farm in the Mississipi Delta.
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Stephanie Kallos
Margaret Hughes, a septuagenarian living in Seattle, takes in a series of boarders who help her cope with her illness, and whose lives become unexpectedly connected to each other.
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Tracy Kidder
A thought-provoking portrait of world-renowned infectious disease expert Dr. Paul Farmer follows the efforts of this unconventional Harvard genius to understand the world’s great health, economic, and social problems and to bring healing to humankind.
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Barbara Kingsolver
Follows the author’s family’s efforts to live on locally- and home-grown foods, an endeavor through which they learned lighthearted truths about food production and the connection between health and diet.
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Barbara Kingsolver
Harrison William Shepherd, a highly observant writer, is caught between two worlds—in Mexico, working for communists Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky, and later in America, where he is caught up in the patriotism of World War II.
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Jon Krakauer
Traces the events that surrounded the 1984 murder of a woman and her child by fundamentalist Mormons Ron and Dan Lafferty, exploring the belief systems and traditions, including polygamy, that mark the faith’s most extreme factions and what their practices reflect about the nature of religion in America.
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Nicole Krauss
Sixty years after a book’s publication, its author remembers his lost love and missing son, while a teenage girl, named for one of the book’s characters, seeks her namesake, as well as a cure for her widowed mother’s loneliness.
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Jhumpa Lahiri
Exploring the secrets and complexities lying at the heart of family life and relationships, a collection of eight stories includes the title work, about a young mother in a new city whose father tends her garden while hiding a secret love affair, as well as “Hema and Kaushik,” “Only Goodness,” and “A Choice of Accommodations,” among others.
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Lori Lansens
One of the world’s oldest living craniopagus conjoined twins at the approach of her thirtieth birthday, bookish Rose Darlen attempts to pen her autobiography while remembering the joys and challenges of her life with sister Ruby, with whom she shares friendships in their small hometown.
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Erik Larson
A compelling account of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 brings together the divergent stories of two very different men who played a key role in shaping the history of the event — visionary architect Daniel H. Burnham, who coordinated its construction, and Dr. Henry H. Holmes, an insatiable and charming serial killer who lured women to their deaths.
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Stieg Larsson
Forty years after the disappearance of Harriet Vanger from the secluded island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger family, her octogenarian uncle hires journalist Mikael Blomqvist and Lisbeth Salander, an unconventional young hacker, to investigate.
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Harper Lee
The explosion of racial hate and violence in a small Alabama town is viewed by a little girl whose father defends a black man accused of rape.
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Judith Levine
An award-winning journalist traces a year during which she and her partner struggled with a pledge to avoid consumer spending practices in spite of their American conditioning, an effort that had a profound impact on their careers, family relationships, and personal identities.
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Kelly Long
Shy Sarah King seeks solace and direction from God when she falls for the community’s new veterinarian, Grant Williams, and finds herself choosing between loving a man who is not Amish or staying with her devoted family.
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Michael Lowenthal
During World War I, after an impulsive night with an infected soldier, Frieda Mintz, a seventeen-year-old Jewish girl, is sent to a makeshift detention center for medical treatment with other “charity girls” in similar circumstances.
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Jim Lynch
Over the course of a single summer, thirteen-year-old Miles O’Malley, a young boy with a fascination for the sea, copes with the trials of growing up, his infatuation with the girl next door, bickering parents, and his fear that his life and his beloved Puget Sound are slipping away from him.
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Gregory Maguire
Set in an Oz where a morose Wizard battles suicidal thoughts, the story of the green-skinned Elphaba, otherwise known as the Wicked Witch of the West, profiles her as an animal rights activist striving to avenge her dear sister’s death.
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Yann Martel
Possessing encyclopedia-like intelligence, unusual zookeeper’s son Pi Patel sets sail for America, but when the ship sinks, he escapes on a life boat and is lost at sea with a dwindling number of animals until only he and a hungry Bengal tiger remain.
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Alexander McCall Smith
Working in Gaborone, Botswana, sleuth Precious Ramotswe investigates several local mysteries, including a search for a missing boy and the case of the clinic doctor with different personalities for different days of the week.
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Cormac McCarthy
In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity.
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Ian McEwan
In 1935 England, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses an event involving her sister Cecilia and her childhood friend Robbie Turner, and she becomes the victim of her own imagination, which leads her on a lifelong search for truth and absolution.
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Paula McLain
NEW!
Follows the life of Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, as she navigates 1920s Paris. By the author of A Ticket to Ride.
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Siri Mitchell
NEW!
On the eve of World War I, three Italian immigrants—Julietta, Annamaria and Luciana—dream of love, but each harbors a secret from their families and from each other that could destroy their hopes of finding happiness.
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Sy Montgomery
An ardent nature lover describes her unique friendship with a pig named Christopher Hogwood, a once sickly piglet who helped her develop a new relationship with neighbors in her small-town community that gave her an anchor to family and home.
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Laura Moriarty
The author of The Center of Everything presents a tale about the complicated interactions between mothers and daughters who unwittingly inflict harm on one another in spite of their best intentions.
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Greg Mortenson
A follow-up to “Three Cups of Tea” continues the author’s story of his humanitarian efforts to bring education into disadvantaged Middle East regions, describing such events as the 2005 earthquake and a tense eight-day abduction by the Taliban.
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Greg Mortenson
Traces how the author, having been rescued and resuscitated by Himalayan villagers after a failed attempt to climb K2, worked to build schools that would particularly benefit the young girls who were forbidden an education by Taliban restrictions, an endeavor for which his life has been repeatedly threatened.
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Kate Morton
NEW!
Abandoned on a 1913 voyage to Australia, Nell is raised by a dock master and his wife who do not tell her until she grows up that she is not their child, a situation that causes her to return to England and eventually hand down her quest for answers to her granddaughter.
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Vicki Myron,Bret Witter
Traces the author’s discovery of a half-frozen kitten in the drop-box of her small-community Iowa library and the feline’s development into an affable library mascot whose intuitive nature prompted hundreds of abiding friendships.
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Sena Jeter Naslund
A fictional tale inspired by the life of Marie Antoinette presents the story of a teenage empress’s daughter who is forced to leave her family home to marry the future king of France and who rebels against the formality and rigid protocol of court life.
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Irène Némirovsky
Published more than sixty years following the author’s death at Auschwitz, a remarkable story of life under the Nazi occupation includes two parts — “A Storm in June,” set amid the chaotic 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion, and “Dolce,” set in a German-occupied provincial village rife with jealousy, resentment, resistance, and collaboration.
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Bich Minh Nguyen
A coming-of-age memoir by a Vietnamese American recounts her struggles for an American identity in the pre-politically correct climate of the Midwest and her passion for American food in the face of her family’s Buddhist lifestyle.
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David Nicholls
Dexter and Emma try to maintain the connection they shared on the eve of their college graduation with letters or meetings every year on the day they met, but conflicting personalities, careers, and misconceptions hinder their efforts.
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Audrey Niffenegger
Caught in an impossible-to-resolve situation that spans the boundaries of temporal reality, this tale of a plucky librarian who is accidentally cast back in time focuses on the romantic complications of time travel.
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Linda Olsson
A lyrical study of friendship, love, and loss chronicles the evolving relationship between Veronika, a young New Zealand writer struggling with a recent tragedy and trying to finish her novel, and Astrid, an older, reclusive neighbor who offers comfort in the form of companionship and home-cooked meals, in a debut novel set against the backdrop of small-town Sweden.
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Christa Parrish
Twenty-seven-year-old Sarah Graham travels to a tiny hamlet in New York following the death of her estranged father to claim her inheritance, only to learn that his will stipulates a six-month stay before she can collect the money.
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Ann Patchett
NEW!
A researcher at a pharmaceutical company, Marina Singh journeys into the heart of the Amazonian delta to check on a field team that has been silent for two years—a dangerous assignment that forces Marina to confront the ghosts of her past.
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Stef Penney
As winter tightens its grip on the isolated settlement of Canada’s Dove River in 1867, a man is brutally murdered and a 17-year-old boy disappears. Tracks leaving the dead man’s cabin head north toward the forest and the tundra beyond.
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Marisha Pessl
Having moved from one academic outpost to another throughout her childhood at the side of her aphorism-prone father, Blue van Meer attends the elite St. Gallway School in her senior year, where she falls in with a charismatic group of friends before the deaths of a teacher and student awaken her analytical instincts.
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Jodi Picoult
Conceived to provide a bone marrow match for her leukemia-stricken sister, teenage Kate begins to question her moral obligations in light of countless medical procedures and decides to fight for the right to make decisions about her own body.
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Jodi Picoult
In the aftermath of a horrific small-town school shooting, lawyer Jordan McAfee finds himself defending a youth who desperately needs someone on his side, while intrepid detective Patrick DuCharme works with a primary witness in the daughter of the superior court judge assigned to the case.
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Tom Rademacher
A collection of columns written by Tom Rademacher and published in The Grand Rapids Press between 1988 and 2009
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Marge Piercy
Coming of age in a post-Civil War New York City tenement flat, Jewish-Russian Freydeh juggles multiple jobs to earn passage for her beloved family, an endeavor that is compromised when she learns that her younger sister is adrift somewhere in the city. .
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Harriet Reisen
A vivid, energetic account of the life of Louisa May Alcott that explores Alcott’s life in the context of her works, all of which are to some extent autobiographical.
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Kristina Riggle
NEW!
Sometimes you find happiness where, and when, you least expect it.
For Mirabelle Zielinski’s children, happiness always seems to be just out of reach. Her polished oldest daughter, Katya, clings to a stale marriage with a workaholic husband and three spoiled children. Her son, Ivan, so creative, is a down-in-the-dumps songwriter with the worst taste in women. And the “baby,” impulsive Irina, who lives life on a whim, is now reluctantly pregnant and hitched to a man who is twice her age. On the weekend of their parents’ anniversary party, lies will be revealed, hearts will be broken…but love will also be found. And the biggest shock may come from Mirabelle herself, because she has a secret that will change everything.
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Cokie Roberts
An inspirational but personal look into the trials and tribulations of historical women who helped shape our nation into what it has become exhibits the many facets of their lives and how they supported some of the founders of our country, profiling such key figures as Abigail Adams, Eliza Pinkney, Dolley Payne Madison, Deborah Read Franklin, and Catherine Littlefield Greene.
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Deborah Rodriguez
The founder of the Kabul Beauty School describes the lives of women in the patriarchal society of Afghanistan from the perspective of the school and its students, offering profiles of such women as a newlywed who must fake her own virginity, a child bride sold into marriage to pay her family’s debts, and the wife of a Taliban member who pursues her training despite her husband’s abuse.
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Tatiana de Rosnay
On the anniversary of the roundup of Jews by the French police in Paris, Julia is asked to write an article on this dark episode and embarks on an investigation that leads her to long-hidden family secrets and to the ordeal of Sarah.
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Carlos Ruiz Zafón
A boy named Daniel selects a novel from a library of rare books, enjoying it so much that he searches for the rest of the author’s works, only to discover that someone is destroying every book the author has ever written.
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Mary Doria Russell
In September 1943, fourteen-year-old Claudette Blum and her father flee across the Alps into Italy with thousands of other Jewish refugees seeking safety, only to find an open battleground among the Nazis, the Allied forces, resistance fighters, Jews in hiding, and ordinary Italians struggling to survive the harsh realities of World War II.
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Tim Russert
The acclaimed journalist offers a heartwarming memoir of life with his father, describing growing up in the 1950s in working-class Buffalo with his extraordinary father, a proud WWII veteran, as well as the influence of his Catholic upbringing, his passion for sports, and the importance of hard work, responsibility, and patriotism.
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Louis Sachar
NEW!
As further evidence of his family’s bad fortune which they attribute to a curse on a distant relative, Stanley Yelnats is sent to a hellish correctional camp in the Texas desert where he finds his first real friend, a treasure, and a new sense of himself. As further evidence of his family’s bad fortune, Stanley Yelnats is sent to a hellish correctional camp in the Texas desert where he finds his first real friend, a treasure, and a new sense of himself.
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Bernhard Schlink
At the age of fifteen, Michael Berg falls in love with a woman who disappears, and while observing a trial as a law student years later, he is shocked to discover the same woman as the defendant in a horrible crime.
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Gary D. Schmidt
Fourteen-year-old Henry, wishing to honor his brother Franklin’s dying wish, sets out to hike Maine’s Mount NEW!
Katahdin with his best friend and dog, but fate adds another companion—the Cambodian refugee accused of fatally injuring Franklin.
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Gary D. Schmidt
During the 1967 school year, on Wednesday afternoons when all his classmates go to either Catechism or Hebrew school, seventh-grader Holling Hoodhood stays in Mrs. Baker’s classroom where they read the plays of William Shakespeare and Holling learns much of value about the world he lives in.
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Lisa See
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A continuation of “Shanghai Girls” finds a devastated Joy fleeing to China to search for her real father while her mother, Pearl, desperately pursues her, a dual quest marked by their encounters with the nation’s intolerant Communist culture.
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Lisa See
Forced to leave Shanghai when their father sells them to California suitors, sisters May and Pearl struggle to adapt to life in 1930s Los Angeles while still bound to old customs, as they face discrimination and confront a life-altering secret..
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Lisa See
An evocative story of friendship set against the backdrop of a nineteenth-century China in which women suffered from foot binding, isolation, and illiteracy follows an elderly woman and her companion as they communicate their hopes, dreams, joys, and tragedies through a unique secret language.
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Asne Seierstad
Capturing the harsh realities of life in modern-day Afghanistan and plight of Afghan women, the Norwegian journalist provides a portrait of a committed Muslim man, a bookseller, and his family living in post-Taliban Kabul, Afghanistan.
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Diane Setterfield
Having spent six decades creating a series of alternate lives designed to bring her fame and fortune while hiding the truth about her tragic past, reclusive and enigmatic Vida Winter finds herself torn by young Margaret Lea’s simple request for the truth about her own birth.
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Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows
In 1946, writer Juliet Ashton finds inspiration for her next book in her correspondence with a native of Guernsey, who tells her about the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a book club born as an alibi during German occupation.
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Helen Simonson
Forced to confront the realities of life in the 21st century when he falls in love with widowed Pakistani descendant Mrs. Ali, a retired Major Pettigrew finds the relationship challenged by local prejudices that view Mrs. Ali, a Cambridge native, as a perpetual foreigner.
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Rebecca Skloot
Documents the story of how scientists took cells from an unsuspecting descendant of freed slaves and created a human cell line that has been kept alive indefinitely, enabling discoveries in such areas as cancer research, in vitro fertilization and gene mapping.
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Garth Stein
Evaluating his life on the eve of his death, atypical canine Enzo considers the sacrifices his master, Denny Swift, has made in his pursuit of becoming a professional race car driver, and the dog’s own efforts to preserve the Swift family.
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Kathryn Stockett
Limited and persecuted by racial divides in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, three women, including an African-American maid, her sassy and chronically unemployed friend, and a recently graduated white woman, team up for a clandestine project against a backdrop of the budding civil rights era.
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Elizabeth Strout
The world of Olive Kitteridge, a retired school teacher in a small coastal town in Maine, is revealed in stories that explore her diverse roles in many lives, including a lounge singer haunted by a past love, her stoic husband, and her own resentful son.
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Adriana Trigiani
Ambitious teen Nella Castelluca, the daughter of a hard-working family from a small Italian village in Pennsylvania, aspires to live in genteel society far from the rigors of farm life, a dream that is compromised when a poet she loves disappears under scandalous circumstances and then returns just before Nella’s marriage to another man.
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Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
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Delivers the story of a fearless young woman who became a dress-making entrepreneur in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, thus saving her family and bringing hope to the lives of dozens of women in her war-torn nation.
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Thrity Umrigar
A new novel by the author of Bombay Time vividly captures the delicate balance of class and gender in contemporary India as witnessed through the lives of two compelling women — Sera Dubash, an upper middle-class parsi housewife, and Bhima, an illiterate domestic hardened by a life of loss and despair.
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Abraham Verghese
Twin brothers born from a secret love affair between an Indian nun and a British surgeon in Addis Ababa, Marion and Shiva Stone come of age in Ethiopia, where their love for the same woman drives them apart.
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Jeannette Walls
The second child of a scholarly, alcoholic father and an eccentric artist mother discusses her family’s nomadic upbringing from the Arizona desert, to Las Vegas, to an Appalachian mining town, during which her siblings and she fended for themselves while their parents outmaneuvered bill collectors and the authorities.
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Jeannette Walls
Presents a novel based on the life of the author’s grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, who learned to break horses in childhood, journeyed five hundred miles as a teen to become a teacher, and ran a vast ranch in Arizona with her husband while raising two children.
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Dorothy Wickenden
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A full-length account based on an admired “New Yorker” article traces the experiences of classmates Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood, who in 1916 left their affluent New York lives to teach school on the Western frontier.
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Jacqueline Winspear
In her first case, private detective Maisie Dobbs must investigate the reappearance of a dead man who turns up at a cooperative farm called the Retreat that caters to men who are recovering their health after World War I.
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Daniel Woodrell
Ree Dolly’s father, an addict facing a drug charge who has put their house up as bond, has gone missing and Ree, who is caring for her two younger brothers and a mentally-ill mother, knows she must find him to save her family.
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David Wroblewski
A tale reminiscent of “Hamlet” that also celebrates the alliance between humans and dogs follows speech-disabled Wisconsin youth Edgar, who bonds with three yearling canines and struggles to prove that his sinister uncle is responsible for his father’s death.
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William P. Young
Four years after his daughter is abducted and evidence of her murder is found in an abandoned shack, Mackenzie Allen Philips returns to the shack in response to a note claiming to be from God, and has a life-changing experience.
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Markus Zusak
Living with a foster family in Germany during World War II, a young girl struggles to survive her day-to-day trials through stealing anything she can get her hands on, but when she discovers the beauty of literature, she realizes that she has been blessed with a gift that must be shared with others, including the Jewish man hiding in the basement.
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