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Recommended Reading

An analysis of the pop-culture phenomenon surrounding the Harry Potter series, written by the founder of “The Leaky Cauldron” website, evaluates how the books inspired international camaraderie and a generation of new readers.

Presents a tale involving the unexpected intersection of three lives, including a woman whose life had been shattered thirty years earlier, an ex-detective on a crowded train, and a teenage girl who is called upon to test her preparedness.

A collection of short fiction presents eleven stories that capture important moments in the course of a life and in the lives intertwined with it, in a volume that ranges from the 1930s to the 1980s.

“Leaving their homelands for America, Elin, Kirsten, and Sofia begin a long, difficult journey, where they endure the ocean voyage in steerage and detention on Ellis Island—a journey where each woman will come to understand her secret longings and the meaning of home.

When Joe Spooner brings an old buddy back home with him from the battlefields of World War II, Evie finds herself in a complicated situation that becomes even more dangerous when their family’s guest suddenly drowns as dark family secrets are revealed.

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.

The history of polygamy in the Mormon Church intertwines the story of Ann Eliza Young, the nineteenth wife of Brigham Young, and a modern mystery in which a polygamous man has been found murdered and one of his wives is accused of the crime.

Traces the harrowing experiences of diving companions David Shaw and Don Shirley, whose 2005 underwater recovery endeavor in Africa’s dangerous Bushman’s Hole crater resulted in one of their deaths and the near escape of the other.

Sixteen short stories exploring a variety of dysfunctional families and love in all its forms in contemporary Mexico alternate with pieces that give voice to street children, beggars, rape victims, drug dealers, gang members, and others whose views are silenced.

The author describes her childhood in Africa during the Rhodesian civil war of 1971 to 1979, relating her life on farms in southern Rhodesia, Milawi, and Zambia with an alcoholic mother and frequently absent father.

Counseling the rulers of a world beset by enemies and natural disasters, oracle Gull is forced to choose between her calling and an effort to protect the last surviving members of her mother’s people in a flight from the doomed City of Pirates.

Allie Hudson is trying to do something right, so why is it turning out so wrong? When she was younger, Beck Williams?the love of her life?was there to help, but there is no one to help now that she is on the run with young Davy Lopez. A child advocate, she is appalled when the judge decides to return Davy to his prostitute mother and drug-addict father, so she takes Davy to her summer home in rural Michigan. When they are attacked, she runs to Beck after all. A naturalist living among the wild mustangs in the Colorado mountains, he is overjoyed to see Allie and wants to resume their old relationship, but she has lost her ability to trust after her deceased policeman husband proved to be crooked. Still dealing with the repercussions from speaking out against his corrupt department, she isn’t sure if the assailants want her or Davy.

Attempting to rekindle a romance with a worldly Englishman as part of a cover-up for her assignment with the CIA, Lulu Sawyer finds the delicate balance between her public and covert worlds disintegrating when she attempts to aid two Middle Eastern women.

A volume of seventeenth-century embroidery patterns that also contains faint diary entries brings together the lives of two women of vastly different eras—Cat Tregenna, an embroideress kidnapped by Muslim pirates in 1625 and taken to Morocco as a slave, and Julia Lovat, a modern-day woman out to determine the authenticity of Cat’s story.

The co-host of “What Not to Wear” shares his expertise on everything from the importance of tailoring and making the perfect omelet to party planning, table manners, and thank-you notes, with advice on how to become fabulous in every aspect of one’s life.

A forty-six-year-old mother of three, doctor’s wife, runner, and writer describes her fight against breast cancer, relating how she spent a year in treatment in her struggle to get back to the life she loved.

The progeny of some of our most prominent presidents has been the subject of numerous biographies and historical studies, but no other presidential family rose to the achievement level of the Adams family. Although that is certainly true of the Lincoln family, the history of his family after Lincoln’s assassination provides both historical and dramatic interest. Abraham and Mary Lincoln had four sons, but only Robert, the oldest, survived into adulthood and produced his own children. Lachman follows the fate of Lincoln’s immediate family and their descendants in an informative survey.

An American “New York Times” reporter known for her lighthearted dispatches on her adopted home in London shares whimsical observations about Tony Blair’s New Labor government and its interrelation with old-world and modern cultural values.

In exchange for a bad debt, an Anglo-Dutch trader takes on Florens, a young slave girl, who feels abandoned by her slave mother and who searches for love—first from an older servant woman at her master’s new home, and then from a handsome free blacksmith, in a novel set in late seventeenth-century America.

A stylish and creative introduction to cooking with nutritional superfoods features eighty healthful and delicious recipes that emphasize whole grains, natural sweeteners, healthy oils, and phytonutrient-packed ingredients, featuring such dishes as Sweet Potato Spoonbread, Baked Black Tea Spring Rolls, Red Indian Carrot Soup, and Mesquite Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Disappointed to learn that his sweetheart will not be joining him for a first holiday season in a rural Irish community, doctor Barry Laverty busies himself by caring for his patients and struggling to outmaneuver the manipulations of a newly arrived quack physician.