Kent District Library - Information. Ideas. Excitement!

Recommended Reading

Chronicles the lives of two boys — one who is forgotten by history, and one who becomes the creator of the world’s most famous detective — as they pursue their separate destinies until they meet in a remarkable alliance.

Reduced to living in a remote country house and serving as caretaker for his volatile and child-like brother Hugh, Michael “Butcher” Boone, a once-famous painter, finds his life changed by the arrival of an enigmatic young woman named Marlene.

In a world in which Alaska, rather than Israel, has become the homeland for the Jews following World War II, Detective Meyer Landsman and his half-Tlingit partner Berko investigate the death of a heroin-addled chess prodigy.

Two half-brothers born to a powerful general, one to the general’s wife and one to his mistress, know nothing of each other’s existence. One is driven to glorify his father, the other wants revenge.

Inspired by Mark Twain’s classic tales, a debut novel explores the mysterious life and strange death of Huckleberry Finn’s infamous father, describing Finn’s fearsome father, the Judge; his brother, the sickly, sycophantic Will; Bliss, a reclusive, blind moonshiner; his mistress Mary, a former slave; and young Huck.

Convinced that he is destined for great wealth, power, and influence, Edward Glyver will do anything to reclaim a prize that is rightfully his, including a showdown with his rival, poet-criminal Phoebus Rainsford Daunt.

Discovering a dead body at a lake near the Canadian border, twelve-year-old Mees Kipp brings the man back to life and realizes that she possesses an extraordinary gift that irrevocably shapes the lives of Mees, her two friends, and their community.

Returning to her South African home to attend the death of her violent father, Eva van Rensburg is forced to confront a terrible childhood secret, in a tale set against a backdrop of the region’s troubled history.

Hired as the personal chef to the governor of New Mexico, Greenie Duquette leaves behind her Greenwich Village pastry business and her husband to head west with her four-year-old son, prompting a period of upheaval and reflection for herself.

After losing his job and the respect of his family, Russian avant-garde artist Anatoly Sukhanov confronts his past in a series of dreams that reveals the sacrifices he has made to gain material wealth in twentieth-century Moscow.

Introduced to the Dead Fathers Club of murdered men by the ghost of his late father, eleven-year-old Philip Noble learns that his uncle, who has designs on Philip’s mother, murdered Philip’s father in order to get his hands on the family pub.

The lives of Skip Sands, a spy-in-training engaged in psychological operations against the Vietcong, and brothers Bill and James Houston, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war, intertwine in a novel of America during the Vietnam War.

At the approach of her thirtieth birthday, Rose Darlen, one of the world’s oldest living craniopagus conjoined twins, attempts to pen her autobiography while remembering the joys and challenges of her life with sister Ruby.

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.

In a remote Siberian town torn apart by civil war and inhabited by a small Christian sect, Anna Petrovna, a beautiful photographer, becomes involved in the fate of Samarin, an escapee from Russia’s northernmost prison camp.

A fictional tale of 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.

A story of life in France under the Nazi occupation includes two parts — “Storm in June,” set amid the chaotic 1940 exodus from Paris, and “Dolce,” set in a German-occupied village rife with resentment, resistance, and collaboration.

Twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter, suffering from a rare brain disorder that causes him to believe his sister to be an impostor, endeavors to discover the cause of the motor vehicle accident that resulted in his head injury.

In the wake of the 2003 Academy Awards a group of friends and family gathers in the Hollywood hills for ten transformative days of love, memories, gossip, movies, and more, including Max, an Oscar-winning writer/director whose career is waning; his lover Elena; his ex-wife, film star Zoe Cunningham; their daughter Isabel; and others.