KDL Recommends

After Earth is demolished to make way for a new hyperspatial expressway, Arthur Dent begins to hitch-hike through space.

Chronicles the joys and sorrows of the four March sisters as they grow into young women in nineteenth-century New England.

Wealthy Mr. Darcy and spirited Elizabeth Bennett dislike each other at first sight, and each must contend with their pride and prejudices while Elizabeth’s mother plots economically advantageous marriages for all her daughters.

When three people are killed by a great white shark in three different incidents, the police chief of a Long Island resort town is forced to take action.

Two girls meet one summer and become best friends until one girl falls passionately in love. An exploration of choices, of friendship, love, families and having a friend too dangerous to forgive and too essential to forget.

Against a background of English moors in the 18th century, the lives of two families become intertwined through marriage, passion, and the dominating force of a man called Heathcliff.

Modern times come to a conservative Southern town in 1906 when the proprietor of the general store elopes with a woman half his age, and worse yet, a Yankee.

Child-hero Ender Wiggin must fight a desperate battle against a deadly alien race if mankind is to survive.

When a young girl falls down a rabbit hole, she discovers a strange and interesting world with fantastical, mad characters as she tries to find her way back home.

In 1939 New York City, Joe Kavalier, a refugee from Hitler’s Prague, joins forces with his Brooklyn-born cousin, Sammy Clay, to create comic-book superheroes inspired by their own fantasies, fears, and dreams.

One of the classic detective novels that established the genre, The Big Sleep follows Philip Marlowe into an underworld of booze, violence, pornography, and sex, as he searches for the blackmailer of a millionaire’s daughter.

On a three-day journey through the snowbound Balkan hills, Hercule Poirot must weed through an array of international suspects to find the passenger who murdered a gangster on the Orient Express.

The Soviets’ new ballistic-missile submarine is attempting to defect to the United States, but the Soviet Atlantic fleet has been ordered to find and destroy her at all costs. Can Red October reach the U.S. safely?

After John Blackthorne shipwrecks in Japan, he makes himself useful to a feudal lord in a power struggle with another and becomes a samurai.

Living in Rome with his daughter, Jack McCall finds his grief following his wife’s suicide interrupted by the arrival of his sister-in-law and two friends seeking his help in tracking down a classmate who went underground as a Vietnam protestor.

Interweaves the events of Tom Wingo’s summer in New York and his relationship to Susan Lowenstein, his sister Savannah’s beautiful psychiatrist and the complex history of the South Carolinian Wingo family, from World War II, through Vietnam.

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.

Imprisoned unjustly for supposedly having helped the exiled Napoleon, Edmond Danté escapes after 15 years, finds funds in the cavern of Monte Cristo, and punishes his enemies.

At the great Cornwall estate of Manderley, Maxim de Winter and his frightened new wife try to live with the haunting legacy of Maxim’s first wife, the beautiful and cold Rebecca, who died in a sailing accident.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Tita, the youngest of three daughters, is expected to serve her mother for the rest of her life, but in order to show her love to Pedro, who is engaged to her sister, Tita cooks for him.

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.

Out of work and out of money, Stephanie Plum becomes a bounty hunter. Her first assignment is to track down a former vice cop on the run for murder.

The daily chronicle of a 30-something single English woman who is convinced her life would be perfect if she could lose weight, stop smoking and develop “Inner Poise.”

Jay Gatsby still adores Daisy Buchanan although she has married someone else, and he risks everything to lure her back.

Mrs. Threadgoode’s tale of two high-spirited women of the 1930s, Idgie and Ruth, helps Evelyn, a 1980s woman in a sad slump of middle age, to begin to rejuvenate her own life.

British Intelligence must thwart Die Nadel, the only spy Hitler trusts, from reaching Hitler to tell about the 1944 invasion of France.

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.

After Inman escapes from a war hospital in 1864 and starts walking to Cold Mountain, Ada struggles to save her mountain farm with the help of Ruby, an illiterate but efficient farmer.

Hurtled back through time more than two hundred years to Scotland in 1743, Claire Randall finds herself caught in the midst of an unfamiliar world torn apart by violence, pestilence, and revolution and haunted by her growing feelings for James Fraser, a young soldier.

Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza consummate their passion at the beginning of the 20th century after having waited over 50 years.

The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death, and the tragicomedy of humankind.

The classic study of human nature which depicts the degeneration of a group of schoolboys marooned on a desert island.

A classic fairy tale romance retells the tale of a drunken swordsman and a gentle giant who come to the aid of Westley, a handsome farm boy, and Buttercup, a princess in dire need of rescue from the evil schemers surrounding her.

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.

After returning from internment and trying to get his land back, Kabuo Miyomoto is arrested and tried for the murder of Carl Heine.

Sookie Stackhouse is a cocktail waitress in small-town Louisiana, but she keeps to herself and doesn’t date much because of her “disability” to read minds. When she meets Bill, Sookie can’t hear a word he’s thinking. He’s the type of guy she’s waited for all of her life, but he has a disability, too—he’s a vampire with a bad reputation. When one of Sookie’s coworkers is killed, she fears she’s next.

Presents the contemporary classic depicting the struggles of a United States airman attempting to survive the lunacy and depravity of a World War II airbase.

Santiago is a Cuban fisherman who encounters a giant marlin in the Gulf Stream and the battle for his catch becomes one of survival against a band of marauding sharks.

The story of a group of Americans and English on a sojourn from Paris to Paloma, evokes in poignant detail, life among the expatriates on Paris’s Left Bank, during the 1920s and conveys in brutally realistic descriptions the power and danger of bullfighting in Spain.

Set on the desert planet Arrakis, this is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, who would become the mysterious man known as Muad’Dib, avenge the traitorous plot against his noble family, and bring to fruition humankind’s most ancient and unattainable dream.

An eco-terrorist in Florida strikes at a polluter by kidnapping his wife. In the process, Twilly Spree discovers a conspiracy by state politicians to turn a wildlife sanctuary into a golf course. He also discovers that the polluter’s wife fancies him.

Traces the unlikely friendship of a wealthy Afghan youth and a servant’s son, in a tale that spans the final days of Afghanistan’s monarchy through the atrocities of the present day.

T. S. Garp, a man with high ambitions for an artistic career and with obsessive devotion to his wife and children, and Jenny Fields, his famous feminist mother, find their lives surrounded by an assortment of people including teachers, whores, and radicals.

Jack Torrance sees his stint as winter caretaker of a Colorado hotel as a way back from failure, his wife sees it as a chance to preserve their family, and their five-year-old son sees the evil waiting just for them.

A tale of the end of civilization, savage evil, annihilation and great courage stemming from an accident in an Army research lab doing biological warfare.

Hallie Nodine fights for justice in Nicaragua while her sister, Codi, returns to Arizona to confront her dying father, as myths, dreams, and flashbacks blend to examine life’s commitments.

Taylor Greer hits the road wanting only to get as far away from Kentucky as possible, ending up in Arizona with a 3-year-old Cherokee girl she has inherited from a woman in a bar.

The family of a fierce evangelical Baptist missionary—Nathan Price, his wife, and his four daughters—begins to unravel after they embark on a 1959 mission to the Belgian Congo, where they find their lives forever transformed over the course of three decades by the political and social upheaval of Africa.

Wildlife biologist Deanna is caught off guard by an intrusive young hunter, while bookish city wife Lusa finds herself facing a difficult identity choice, and elderly neighbors find attraction at the height of a long-standing feud.

After the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, a married surgeon, Tomas, becomes a window washer while trying to reconcile himself to decisions that he and his wife must make about their relationship.

Dominick Birdsey, a forty-year-old housepainter living in Three Rivers, Connecticut, finds his subdued life greatly disturbed when his identical twin brother Thomas, a paranoid schizophrenic, commits a shocking act of self-mutilation.

Overweight and sensitive Dolores Price grows from painful childhood, through excruciating adolescence, to lonely adulthood, experiencing the heartache of being a misfit in a confusing world.

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.

Scout’s father defends a black man accused of raping a white woman in a small Alabama town during the 1930s.

After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship in the Pacific, one solitary lifeboat remains, carrying a hyena, a zebra, a female orangutan, a Bengal tiger, and a 16-year-old Indian boy names Pi. His story is a dazzling work of imagination, a triumph of storytelling, and a tale that will as one character puts it, make you believe in God.

Frances Mayes entered a wondrous new world when she began restoring an abandoned villa in the spectacular Tuscan countryside. In Under the Tuscan Sun, she brings the lyrical voice of a poet, the eye of a seasoned traveler, and the discerning palate of a cook and food writer to invite readers to explore the pleasures of Italian life and to feast at her table.

Working in Gaborone, Botswana, 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.

Cut off from the life of ranching he has come to love by his grandfather’s death, John Grady Cole flees to Mexico, where he and his two companions embark on a rugged and cruelly idyllic adventure.

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.

This is the chronicle of three generations of ranchers contending with the bitterness, frailty, and secrets that penetrate their family. It is the story of only daughter Meggie and her lifelong relationship with the haunted priest Father Ralph de Bricassart—a joining of two hearts and souls that dangerously oversteps sacred boundaries of ethics and dogma.

Presents a humorous novel about a woman who unexpectedly finds love but who just might be losing her mind.

Lonesome Dove is the story of a cattle drive from Texas to Montana—and much more. It is a drive that represents for everybody involved not only a daring, even a foolhardy, adventure, but a part of the American Dream—the attempt to carve out of the last remaining wilderness a new life.

When seventeen-year-old Bella leaves Phoenix to live with her father in Forks, Washington, she meets an exquisitely handsome boy at school for whom she feels an overwhelming attraction and who she comes to realize is not wholly human.

Scarlett O’Hara faces and survives the Civil War and Reconstruction and marries Rhett Butler for his money because her true love has married someone else.

A humorous, speculative novel fills in the lost years of Jesus’ life, told from the perspective of Biff, his childhood best friend.

A novel that studies the moral disintegration of a man whose obsessive desire to possess his step-daughter destroys the lives of those around him.

Passionately in love, Clare and Henry vow to hold onto each other and their marriage as they struggle with the effects of Chrono-Displacement Disorder, a condition that casts Henry involuntarily into the world of time travel.

When terrorists seize hostages at an embassy party, an unlikely assortment of people is thrown together, including American opera star Roxanne Coss, and Mr. Hosokawa, a Japanese CEO and her biggest fan.

The author of Coming Home recounts the passions, tragedies, and secrets of Penelope Keeling as she tries to decide the fate of a valuable painting her father symbolically based on her unconventional life.

Don Vito Corleone controls a major mafia family in the 1940s, but when one of his sons is murdered, he fights to dominate all of the other families as well.

Here is the story of an intransigent young architect, Howard Roark, of his violent battle against a mindless status quo, and of his explosive love affair with a beautiful woman who worships him yet struggles to defeat him. In order to build his kind of buildings according to his own standards, Roark must fight against every variant of human corruption.

Confessions from a vampire of his first two hundred years as one of the living dead.

Champion hitchhiker Sissy Hankshaw, braless and free, makes her way across the confused and paranoid America of the 1970s, gathering knowledge and experience, friends and suitors, and all sorts of unusual acquaintances.

Rescued from the outrageous neglect of his aunt and uncle, a young boy with a great destiny proves his worth while attending Hogwarts School for Wizards and Witches.

Milo Roby tries to hold his family together while working at the Empire Grill in the once-successful logging town of Empire Falls, Maine, with his partner, Mrs. Whiting, who is the heir to a faded logging and textile legacy.

An aviator whose plane is forced down in the Sahara Desert encounters a little prince from a small planet who relates his adventures in seeking the secret of what is important in life.

After leaving prep school Holden Caulfield spends three days on his own in New York City.

Two children of the Glass family appear in separate stories laid in twentieth-century New York.

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.

When her husband, a pilot, dies in an airplane crash off the Irish coast, Kathryn Lyons finds herself in the media spotlight as rumors abound of her husband’s shocking secret past.

A young girl in a shabby neighborhood lives with dreams in an innocent time before the war.

Susan and her engineer husband live rough lives in mining camps during the late 19th century, and their marriage cannot survive.

Vividly depicts the colorful, sometimes disreputable, inhabitants of a run-down area in Monterey, California.

This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California’s Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.

While going through the possessions of a deceased guest who owed them money, the mistress of the inn and her son find a treasure map that leads them to a notorious pirate’s fortune.

Presents the tale of a bizarre Carpathian count who drinks human blood to stay alive, and the Englishman who knows his secret.

Encompassing two generations and a rich blend of Chinese and American history, the story of four struggling, strong women also reveals their daughter’s memories and feelings.

A transfer student from a small town in California, Richard Papen is determined to affect the ways of his Hampden College peers, and he begins his intense studies under the tutelage of eccentric Julian Morrow.

Frodo the hobbit and his companions set out to deliver the One Ring of Power to the dark land of Mordor in order to destroy the ring in the forge of its creation.

Bilbo Baggins, a respectable, well-to-do hobbit, lives comfortably in his hobbit-hole until the day the wandering wizard Gandalf chooses him to take part in an adventure from which he may never return.

A new translation of the classic nineteenth-century Russian novel in which a young woman is destroyed when she attempts to live outside the moral law of her society.

A fat New Orleans misanthrope who constantly rebukes society, Ignatius Reilly, gets a job at his mother’s urging but ends up leading a workers’ revolt.

Rusty Sabich, a prosecuting attorney investigating the murder of Carolyn Polhemus, his former lover and a prominent member of his boss’s staff, finds himself accused of the crime.

Huckleberry Finn, an abused outcast, rafts with Jim, a runaway slave, down the Mississippi River, where they have a variety of experiences.

A travel writer who hates to travel, and to whom “things just happen,” becomes involved with an unusual woman following the desertion of his wife.

The author questions the condition of modern man in this novel depicting a science fiction writer’s struggle to find peace and sanity in the world.

A young writer decides to interview the children of a scientist primarily responsible for the creation of the atomic bomb.

Smart, sharp, plus-sized pop culture reporter, Cannie Shapiro, finds her boyfriend has chronicled their sex-life in a national women’s magazine.

When Siddi inadvertently reveals some revealing things about her Southern childhood in a newspaper interview, her mother, Vivi, virtually disowns her. Vivi’s lifelong friends, the Ya-Ya’s, set in motion a plan to bring the mother and daughter back together using a scrapbook of childhood memories that they ask Vivi to put together.

Sherman McCoy, a young investment banker in Manhattan, finds himself arrested following a freak accident and becomes involved with prosecutors, politicians, the press, and assorted hustlers.